There will be so many retirements among the Catholic faculty at Notre Dame over the next ten years that Fr. Jenkins initiatives to increase or maintain hiring to more than 50% in every department, while by far the best effort that has been made to address this issue in decades, would not bring the proportion of Catholic faculty back above 50% once it drops below that point for more than 67 years! I'm not a rocket scientist, but if there is any importance to maintaining the Catholic identity of Our Lady's School as opposed to going the route of Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, and a thousand other American universities in surrendering all religious identity, then the recent traditional framework of academic hiring and staffing in the United States will have to be scrapped, either by pushing & cajoling for a Catholic proportion far greater than 50% with a reticent faculty or by upending the entire American tenure and hiring structure, a course that would certainly be frought with myriad academic and legal obstacles with tragic consequences for Notre Dame. As many who currently have children attending or considering Notre Dame have commented and I indeed have observed myself on a number of visits to campus for both very public and private occasions in recent years there does continue to be the strong bottom - up presence of strong Catholic students and practicing Catholic students from strong Catholic families in the community. This element of the community was greatly nurtured from the '20's through the '50's (and indeed earlier as well) when the CSC's dominated, and progressively less nurtured from the '60's through today with a faculty that had a majority of at least nominal or cultural Catholics. You might say, given the strong opposition of the present faculty to efforts to overtly hire more Catholics, that at this point the Catholicity of the student body (in attitudes even more than in numbers) is indeed a by-product of the students' homes, parishes, and high schools and perhaps in spite of the adverse informal influence of the faculty. Certainly, this is not likely to be sustained into the future if Catholics on the faculty become a minority and the faculty as a whole becomes even more entrenched in its opposition to Notre Dame's identity as a Catholic university. For Our Lady & Her School, John Ryan Class of 1979 domer_10305@yahoo.com