The text of an e-mail I sent to Fr. Jenkins over night last night at the e-mail address provided in the original post follows: To: cosmer@nd.edu Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 2:01:07 AM Subject: A couple of questions and observations Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., President University of Notre Dame du Lac Notre Dame, IN 46556 Dear Fr. Jenkins: Allow me to start by saying that I can not quite imagine being in the position you hold. Each constituency of the university has its own interests, needs, and desires to which it expects you and the administration to respond and the administration really has far less authority in terms of the operation of the primary academic business of the university than the chief executive of any mid-size or large corporation or the executive officer of the vast majority of the institutions of government. I do not envy you the responsibility of leading Notre Dame, especially in light of some of your predecessors' actions which effectively ceded inordinate authority to the faculty. During your first year or year and a couple of months as president you addressed two seemingly unrelated issues which I now suspect are quite thoroughly interrelated. Both issues received a somewhat cool reception from the faculty and while you have pursued both it has not been with the same hope for a brighter future that you inspired in initially addressing these issues which had not been addressed, at least publicly, by the university's officers in recent years. The first of these issues is the performance of The Vagina Monologues as well as the presence of the previously named "Queer" Film Festival on campus. The second is the rapidly declining proportion of Catholics on the faculty. While the results of the process you set in motion to discuss the appropriateness of The Vagina Monologues and the "Queer" Film Festival on campus were disappointing in my view given the great hope which accompanied the opening of that discussion, my greatest disappointment was the extent to which the faculty chafed at the suggestion that even functions of the university with minimal or no formal academic nexus ought be protected by "academic freedom" and ought not in any way be governed by the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. How did we reach a point where the faculty of Notre Dame is so bound and determined to deny your authority as well as that of the Catholic hierarchy and Church teaching in such matters? With regard to the Catholicity of the faculty there will be so many retirements among the Catholics who joined the faculty around our years on campus and slightly earlier over the next ten years that your initiatives to increase or maintain hiring of Catholics to more than 50% in every department, while by far the best effort that has been made to address this issue in decades, will not (at 50 - 51%) bring the proportion of Catholic faculty back above 50% once it drops below that point for many decades, perhaps not for the remainder of this new century! 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% of hires with a reticent faculty or by upending the entire American tenure and hiring structure, a course that would certainly be fraught with myriad academic and legal obstacles with tragic consequences for Notre Dame. As many parents 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 (as well as earlier) when the C.S.C's dominated campus life, and progressively less nurtured from the '60's through today with a faculty that has 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. It is my hope and my prayer that 50% plus is a number you have consciously chosen to use for public consumption while instructing those working on your recruitment effort to set there sites far higher. If indeed Notre Dame is willing to settle for little or no more than 50% Catholic faculty hiring at this particular point in time the faculty's protestations at the suggestion that Church doctrine ought have some influence over the setting and circumstances surrounding events such as The Vagina Monologues and the "Queer" Film Festival will only be the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps in that instance it is time to put an end to the pretense and advertise to the world that Notre Dame no longer considers itself a Catholic university. The resultant contradictions would be mind boggling! Please, Father, get about the business of truly restoring the Catholicity of Our Lady's School! God Bless You, John Ryan Class of 1979 John L. Ryan domer_10305@yahoo.com 708-945-8247 (cell)