For a Bronx native-recently-turned-Hoosier, the University of Notre Dame could not have wrapped a better Christmas gift than when it agreed to play Rutgers at the Pinstripe Bowl in Yankee Stadium Saturday.
Notre Dame is a Bronx team; a Queens team, too. It is a team for all boroughs, in fact. A century ago, Notre Dame came to New York to beat Army with the introduction of the forward pass. That’s a historic marker, but it doesn’t explain why legions of subway alumni still cheer for the Irish.
It’s because Notre Dame is as much an inspiration for New Yorkers as it is a team. Nowhere do aspirations burn brighter than in New York, especially among its immigrants. For the son of Irish immigrants, including a mother born in Northern Ireland and reviled by neighbors there because of her Catholicism, Notre Dame loomed large, not because of that mysterious game played by lads in shoulder pads, but because it was a center of learning where one’s religion was embraced, and not viewed with suspicion.
With the end of the Bloomberg administration in sight, I left New York and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly for Notre Dame and its president Rev. John Jenkins, C.S.C., after having served for more than a decade in the familial embrace of the NYPD. Any separation anxieties soon evaporated, however, because Notre Dame, like the NYPD, is on a mission. That’s palpable — from the conduct of its students and faculty to the university president. All have signed on to do good in the world.
I recently listened to about a dozen Notre Dame alumni employed by one of the nation’s biggest investment firms. They talked about the importance of on-the-job ethics, trust, accountability and stewardship; all of which, they said, had been ingrained in them at Notre Dame.
Earlier, at a dinner on campus, I listened to students talk about their young lives. A sophomore talked about hyper-inflation and scarcity in her native Zimbabwe “at a time when you would get into a store and see tea bags and bubble gum on the shelves and nothing else.”
She said her family emerged “with a sense of humor and a realization that there are more important things in life than material things.” She plans to return to Africa upon graduation.
A junior at Notre Dame, born to a migrant farm-worker family in Mexico, said he hadn’t pursued a college degree in order “to be served by others,” but “to help the lives of others who haven’t been as fortunate as I have been.”
A Notebaert fellow at Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute is conducting original research for her doctorate on lives of 10th-century Benedictine nuns. Her research goals, she said, “need not end at the walls of the academy, but [can] contribute to the very building up of our church.”
There’s much debate these days about the value of a college education. What price do you put on producing highly qualified graduates who are taught to apply what they know to do good in the world?
Eighty percent of Notre Dame’s pre-med students are accepted to medical schools. They’ll be new doctors soon, instilled with values about selflessness and service. The university is producing college-educated military officers and other future leaders. In addition to learning from some of the world’s greatest minds in nuclear physics, these students are challenged to think about the ethical considerations in the development and deployment of drones and other unmanned weapons systems.
In an agnostic age, Notre Dame remains faithful. While distinctly Catholic (there are 60 chapels on campus, including one in every residence hall), “Our Lady’s university” welcomes students and faculty of all faiths.
It doesn’t only welcome the faithful, it celebrates faith. It’s like New York in that respect.
Notre Dame successfully lured a preeminent scholar away from an academic powerhouse in California, not because he yearned for South Bend winters, but because in addition to its robust support for research, Notre Dame made an intellectual who believed in God feel instinctively welcome in ways the secular academy just doesn’t bother with these days. His faith is celebrated here and not treated as something intellectually suspect.
Notre Dame’s international reach and collaboration with scholars overseas makes it New Yorkesque, too. As for Yankee Stadium, then, it makes all the sense in the world that it is Notre Dame’s home away from home. Go, Irish!
Paul Browne, a former NYPD deputy commissioner, is vice president for public affairs and communications at the University of Notre Dame.