The University of Notre Dame has been on a decades-long warpath of undermining its Catholic mission at the altar of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology. But that drive could be on a collision course with the Trump administration’s threat to revoke federal funding from DEI schools.
Just before the Jan. 20 inauguration of President Donald Trump, Notre Dame Provost John McGreevy sent a faculty-wide email stating that the hiring priorities of the school were to increase “the number of women and underrepresented minorities” and that those DEI goals were “equally important” to hiring Catholic faculty. That is one of the latest examples of the school’s dedication to the ideology dating back to at least the 1970s, as detailed in a new report from The Claremont Institute.
“They change Catholicism to be DEI, and while most places are moving in one direction on DEI, Notre Dame is moving in the other direction,” report author Scott Yenor, senior director of state coalitions at The Claremont Institute and political science professor at Boise State University, told The Federalist. “Few conservative or traditional aspects of campus life have grown as quickly or with as much administrative enthusiasm as the DEI efforts have grown in the past several years.”
Yenor said the “worst thing in the report” was McGreevy’s email, especially since the timing was just days before Trump was set to be sworn in after being elected on a mandate to end things like DEI. He said it signaled a “note of defiance.”
“One important goal is to hire Catholic faculty and other faculty deeply committed to our mission to ensure continuity with our past and our future as the world’s leading global Catholic research university,” McGreevy’s email stated. “A second overlapping and equally important goal is to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities on our faculty so that we become the diverse and inclusive intellectual community our mission urges us to be.”
The report and Yenor noted that Notre Dame is a trusted institution for Christians and remains one of the few Catholic schools that actually has a commitment to hiring Catholic Faculty. But, as the report states, the school’s reputation is “threatened by DEI practices that compromise Catholic doctrine and replace superb instruction with social engineering.”
Conflating DEI and Catholic Social Teaching
The College of Arts and Letters, for example, says that the “commitment to diversity and inclusion at Notre Dame is inextricably tied to our Catholic mission, which calls us to respect the dignity of every person, to work toward the common good, and to stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable and marginalized members of our community.”
Yenor explained the logic of how the school justifies its interweaving of Catholicism with DEI:
Since Notre Dame “as a Catholic university” is “committed to defending the dignity of every human person, to promoting a just society in which every person can flourish, and to attending particularly to the needs of the most vulnerable,” it must “address [the] racism, inequality, and discrimination” manifest in various forms of disparity. “True inclusivity” is a “credible witness,” this new version of Catholic theology contends, and therefore a natural extension of the Catholic mission.
This line of logic, however, is not shared by others, including Catholic philosopher Ed Feser, who said DEI “is a grave perversion of the good cause it claims to represent, and it is utterly incompatible with Catholic social teaching,” as the report noted.
In ideology and in implementation, DEI fundamentally undermines Western society and the social order built primarily by Christianity in order to advance the idea that Notre Dame, the United States, and more broadly all of Western civilization is “inescapably white supremacist or homophobic.”
Notre Dame’s DEI policies are all “carefully constructed not to disappoint the most extreme diversity advocates, while maintaining the façade of orthodoxy,” the report states, noting that the push over time will further “corrupt” the ability of the school to pursue Catholic teaching.
The school’s struggle sessions to advance diversity have been going on for decades, and the university is one of the best examples of how an organization can commit institutional suicide in fealty to DEI ideology: Notre Dame’s lack of diversity is driven almost entirely by the fact that the vast majority of Catholics in America are either white or Hispanic, yet its response is to kneecap its Catholic mission in order to advance unrealistic diversity goals.
As the report notes, the student body of Notre Dame was 3.4 percent black in 2021, and the school was looking to close the “gap between aspirations and reality” because that low percentage was unacceptable to the DEI proponents on campus.
“Notre Dame holds itself responsible for that gap, apparently due to institutional racism or unconscious bias,” the report states. “The fact that Notre Dame blames only itself for the lack of any remaining underrepresented minorities reveals a surrender to the more radical, dangerous ideology within DEI.”
In many ways, Notre Dame cannot do anything about the lack of certain racial minorities on campus. Only about 2 percent of American Catholics are black, and about 4 percent are Asian. The percentage of faculty who are black has been between 1.8 percent and 2.4 percent since 2009.
However, in the decades of trying (and failing) to bring more people of more races on campus, for the sole purpose of bringing more people or more races on campus, the school has radically undermined its goal to hire Catholic faculty. In the late 1970s, Catholics made up 85 percent of the faculty, but by 2008, they were only 53 percent.
That is in stark contrast to the 80 percent Catholic student body (a significant portion of which is conservative).
“If Notre Dame’s going to maintain its Catholic identity, it kind of needs to be okay with the fact that there aren’t going to be as many blacks on campus, because not that many blacks are Catholic; that’s just a fact,” Yenor told The Federalist. “There’s just an unwillingness to live with that fact.”
To rectify this self-diagnosed issue, the school has done the exact same sort of cultural seppuku other institutions have, as a brief snapshot of the school’s dedication to the ideology shows, according to the report.
Spending $6 million on DEI salaries alone, the school employs roughly 30 DEI administrators. It also had 167 DEI events in 2024 alone. Like clockwork, there was a DEI hiring spree after the 2020 George Floyd riots, along with a slew of task forces and related offices established.
Campus Ministry puts on racially segregated retreats for first-year students who are black, Asian, and Latino. The school’s Klau Center runs a “Building an Anti-Racist Vocabulary” program “to restructure how people think in terms of systems of oppression,” the report states.
Notre Dame has also “set up an anonymous reporting system” for “microaggressions,” which are often used to weaponize institutional power against free speech, and it has a Gender Relations Center, opened in 2004, which launched LGBT activism on campus.
According to Yenor, events and other DEI programming are not well attended by the student body.
Making an Example of Notre Dame
Notre Dame could risk losing federal funding if it does not rectify its dedication to DEI.
Last month, Trump signed an executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which directed the attorney general and Office of Management and Budget to find examples of “illegal DEI discrimination” at “institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.”
Notre Dame’s over $20 billion endowment makes it a prime target, and the Department of Education could open investigations into its apparent contravention of civil rights law.
Last week, the Trump administration also sent a “Dear Colleague” letter explicitly threatening the end to federal funding to schools that maintain DEI programs, telling The Federalist that it will fight schools that attempt to ignore the guidance.
Perhaps, in order to return Notre Dame to its position as a prestigious Catholic university with a genuinely Catholic mission, revoking its federal funding over DEI will be necessary.
Notre Dame did not return a request for comment from The Federalist.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
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