The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, August 23rd. It is the sixth of what’s intended to be a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays. That intention, like everything, is subject to change.
Last week’s essay: On Pat Hughes and Kindess
During my senior year at Notre Dame, a classmate of mine wrote an op-ed in The Observer criticizing the school for the disparity in its disciplinary approach between male and female students. It outlined the problem clearly: At Notre Dame, women faced stricter rules inside their dorms than men faced in theirs, and this difference, done in the name of “safety,” led many women on campus into potentially dangerous social situations by forcing them from the comfort and security of their communities if they wanted to go to a party. It wasn’t a problem of which I was unaware, but it brought that problem into clear focus, and as I thought on it, I was disappointed in Notre Dame.
I’ve found myself disappointed in Notre Dame again this week, as it’s struggled to contain a coronavirus outbreak on its campus hardly days after welcoming students back in an aggressive bid for normalcy. While hundreds of individual contributions to the university’s attempt to resume classes in-person were doubtlessly made in good faith, and thousands of hours of diligent work went into crafting an approach to attempt to limit outbreaks, the approach did not succeed. A few hundred students tested positive for the virus, an outbreak the university was quick to publicly pin on students attending off-campus parties. When the positive tests began to skyrocket, the university paused in-person classes, forcing students paying upwards of $70,000 for this year of education into a collective house arrest, crammed into their dorm rooms—many of which lack air conditioning—for online classes as highs peak in the upper 90’s in coming days.
The university had a plan. It was a good plan, even. Detailed. Intense. Massive in its scope. But it did not go far enough. Surveillance testing was limited to the football program. There seems to have been no definite protocol of what to do when faced with specific levels of case counts in scenarios in which outbreaks occurred, like the one that came to pass. Perhaps most crucially, if off-campus parties were really the source of the outbreak, the school was either naïve or simply failed to keep its students from engaging in risky behavior. The university failed to do what it had signaled itself capable of doing: It failed to keep its students safe.
Worse, once the situation was underway, the immediate reaction was not one of responsibility. It was not one of care. It was one of blame and excuse-making, one that came with the implication that not only was this outbreak definitively the fault of a segment of the student body, but that the students in question were especially at fault for attending a party off-campus, as though the virus is incapable of crossing Angela Boulevard or Twyckenham Drive. Now, the university’s leadership has made the university susceptible to appearing as though it engaged in a bait-and-switch, inviting students (and their families, should students be sent home) into harm’s way for the sake of collecting tuition checks. Do I think this was the intention? No. But I can’t say with certainty it wasn’t an acknowledged and accepted possibility, and there’s no way to know if it was, and that’s a problem.
It should, of course, be noted that leading a university in the years of the coronavirus is not a job to be envied. It is a task with few good options, with enormous uncertainty, and with treacherous stakes. I would also like to note that on the whole, I approve of Fr. John Jenkins’ performance as the university’s president. From my limited vantage point, I believe him to be a good man, and in sparse personal interactions, I have always found him to be kind, and that’s important. It should be further noted that I love Notre Dame. It is an institution I hold dear to my heart. Which is why it hurts so much when it disappoints.
Just as it was disappointing this week, and disappointing that week of senior year, and disappointing in 2014 when the football team failed to beat Northwestern in South Bend, it was disappointing in recent years when the university began punishing students who moved off-campus by not allowing them to participate in events surrounding their former dorms. It was disappointing in 2016 when, with America facing a choice between the two most unfavorably-viewed presidential candidates in the history of that branch of polling, Fr. Jenkins sat silently while the Commission on Presidential Debates—of which he is a part—refused to adjust debate qualification criteria and allow more voices on the stage. It was disappointing in the fall of 2015 when, at the university’s opening mass, a member of the administration appeared to blame a deceased student for her own suicide, stating that she died because she was unwilling to ask for help. It was disappointing earlier this summer to read the litany of stories of insufficiently-addressed racism on campus compiled by the Black Student Association. It was disappointing countless times as an undergraduate when I was forced to deal with the Student Activities Office or the Office of Community Standards, two incompetent, power-seeking bureaucracies ostensibly existing for the sake of bettering student life on campus.
Like all institutions to which we become attached, whether they be universities, churches, political parties, celebrities, media outlets, or anything else, Notre Dame has brought me disappointment. This is to be expected. Institutions will disappoint you, because people will disappoint you, and institutions are shaped by people.
This is an important distinction—that institutions are distinct from the people that participate in them. While it’s easy to say that “Notre Dame’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak has disappointed me,” it’s more accurate to say that “Notre Dame’s current administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak has disappointed me.” Notre Dame didn’t do anything wrong. Notre Dame is not a person. It is an institution, and it is much broader than its administration.
Notre Dame—like a church, or a country, or a baseball team—is more than just the people who wear its name in their press releases. It’s more than its president, or its vice presidents, or its deans. It’s bigger than the twelve-hundred-acre tract of land it occupies in the fertile woodland of northern Indiana. It’s bigger than its gold helmets. It’s bigger than its golden dome.
And so, it is not true that Notre Dame has disappointed me. What is true is that people with whom I share Notre Dame have disappointed me. Just as I, likely, have disappointed them, and would disappoint others were I in their shoes.
My choir director in college, a lively guy by the name of Dan Stowe, used to talk a lot about stewardship. He’d say that we occupied this historic choir for a sliver of its 100-year-and-counting lifespan, and it was our job to be its caretakers for that slice of time. The same is true for the university’s administration. Ultimately, though, stewards are people, and people are imperfect, and their imperfection can sully an institution. At times, this can kill an institution, or warp it so dramatically that it’s unrecognizable from the thing you once loved. Thankfully, this is not the case with Notre Dame (though I’m sure some codgy alumni would tell you it’s so because Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke on campus once or twice). Notre Dame is not unrecognizable. But it’s sullied. It’s obscured. And the imperfections of its administration have had the perverse effect of conflating the institution with its stewards.
This is a conflation we must work to undo. Our institutions are at stake. Public trust in our system of government is dismal. Our universities are afire with bad press. Our churches are tarnished, battered, and torn asunder from God by the hands of human pride. We must not allow these damages to cause us to blame institutions for mankind’s mistakes. Doing so only compounds the injuries.
Similarly, we need to recognize ourselves as stewards of these institutions. We play a role in their futures, and as people who love them, it’s on us to take care of them—to shape them and better them and clean their dirtied walls. Our neighborhoods are more than HOA’s. Our schools are more than their teachers. Our country is bigger than its government.
In recent days, the positive coronavirus test rate at Notre Dame has dipped noticeably. It’s a positive development, and the possibility exists that these weeks will turn out to have been more a sobering shock to all with skin in the game than the doomful beginning of a calamity. Of course, uncertainty remains. But whatever the direction in which coronavirus cases go, we must be careful to not pin failure on Notre Dame, or assign it the success. Notre Dame is not solely its administration. Failure and success are in the hands of its human beings. They’re in the hands of its stewards.
Next week’s essay: On Philando Castile, the Milwaukee Bucks, and Comfort Zones
