In the fall of 2010, a shock wave went through the community of
the University of Notre Dame. A junior, Declan Sullivan, was killed
when the tower, an elevated scissor lift, upon which he was
standing to videotape a football practice fell over due to a strong
wind. The university administration commissioned a six-month
investigation the results of which were released on April 18.
Among other things, the investigation recommended that specific
personnel be charged with obtaining timely information on
meteorological conditions, that such information be shared with
various personnel, and that various personnel be required to make
decisions based upon the information.
Because these same lessons were not applied in a different
context 11 days later, other towers at the University are falling.
On April 29, at the spring meeting of the Board of Trustees,
Roxanne Martino, was elected to the Board. In announcing her
election, the University’s press release
stated:
Martino joined Aurora Investment Management in 1990 and
now leads the Chicago firm, which manages more than $8 billion in
funds of hedge funds designed to meet various investment mandates,
including multi-strategy formats. She previously worked for seven
years as a senior manager with Coopers & Lybrand and for more
than six years at Grosvenor Capital Management, where she was a
general partner.
Martino earned a bachelor’s degree in business from Notre
Dame and a master’s of business administration degree from the
University of Chicago. She has served as a member and chair of the
advisory council for Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, is a
member of the Executive Education advisory board at Notre Dame, and
serves on the investment subcommittee of the board of directors of
Catholic Relief Services.
Ms. Martino’s position as trustee was short-lived. She
resigned on June 8. (Given her reasons for resigning, one would
think that the other two roles with the University and her role
with Catholic Relief Services identified in the press release
announcing her election as trustee would also be
terminated.)
What happened between April 29 and June 8? On May 11, the
Cardinal Newman Society, a nonprofit organization devoted to
renewing and strengthening the Catholic identity of Catholic
colleges,
disclosed that Ms. Martino had given large sums of money on a
regular basis for eight years or so to pro-abortion groups such as
Emily’s List. A storm arose and is blowing down the twin towers of
the Chairman of the Board, Richard Notebaert, and the President,
Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. (a Holy Cross Father).
Nine days later, on May 20, Project Sycamore, an organization
devoted to maintaining Notre Dame’s Catholic identity, reported that
Ms. Martino had been donating to Emily’s List since 1998. On the
same day, an alumnus and columnist, William McGurn, supplied
Notebaert’s defense of the election of Martino, quoting his email
to other trustees:
First, it’s inaccurate to characterize Roxanne Martino as
pro-choice. Ms. Martino (along with her husband, Rocco) is a Notre
Dame graduate, and she is fully supportive of Church teaching on
the sanctity of life.
She has through the years contributed to organizations
that provide a wide range of important services and support to
women. She did not realize, however, that several of these
organizations also take a pro-choice position. This is not her
personal position, and she will now review all of her contributions
to ensure that she does not again inadvertently support these kinds
of activities in the future.
On June
1 and again on June
3, McGurn published additional reports. In the June 1st report,
he quoted an email from Father Jenkins to concerned alumni that
quoted nearly verbatim Chairman Notabaert’s email. In his
June 3rd report, McGurn observed that Ms. Martino had given money
to yet another pro-abortion organization, Illinois Personal
Pac.
In a
column (dated June 10), George Weigel quoted an email from
Chairman Notebaert to McGurn: Martino is precisely “the sort of
person we want on our board”: someone who is “a Notre Dame
graduate, loving parent, dedicated to national and international
service, a highly regarded professional in her field, and committed
to all Catholic teachings.”
In the University’s June 8 press release announcing Ms.
Martino’s resignation, Ms. Martino is quoted as saying:
I dearly love my alma mater and remain fully committed to all
aspects of Catholic teaching and to the mission of Notre Dame. I
had looked forward to contributing in this new role, but the
current controversy just doesn’t allow me to be effective.
I beg your pardon, Ms. Martino. It is not the controversy that
doesn’t allow you to be effective, it is your underlying behavior
that doesn’t allow you to be an effective trustee of a Catholic
institution.
And Chairman Notebaert is quoted in the press release as
saying:
Ms. Martino has served Notre Dame in many ways over the years
and is highly regarded as someone who is absolutely dedicated in
every way to the Catholic mission of this University.… She has
lived her life and faith in an exemplary way, including the counsel
and support she has provided to Notre Dame, many other Catholic
institutions and Thresholds, an organization that provides programs
for thousands of people with severe mental illness.
In recommending to the full Board the election of Ms. Martino as
a trustee, Chairman Notebaert and Father Jenkins did not apply the
recommendations made in the investigation of Declan Sullivan’s
death. Either they did not obtain information about Ms. Martino’s
donations or, although they obtained the information, they did not
share it with the Board members. And when the storm arose, they
compounded their breach of duty by flailing around and making the
stupidest of arguments: Ms. Martino supports Church teaching on the
sanctity of life and she did not know the organizations were
pro-abortion.
One would expect that the chairman of a board of trustees
and president of a university would act as towers to the students,
providing a vision over the field of life. But these two men have
fallen — at least twice now. In 2009, they honored pro-abortion
President Obama at the commencement. They compounded this error by
allowing the arrest of 88 people on that occasion, including an
elderly priest, in clerical garb, kneeling, reciting the prayers of
the rosary. (Rather impossible to determine if he was demonstrating
but for the fact he was out of place.) And now they have striven to
bring a pro-abortion supporter to the University they believed to
be someone highly capable of being entrusted with its Catholic
mission now and well into the future.
One would also expect that the faculty of a
Catholic institution would be protective of the
institution’s Catholic mission. But not the faculty of the
University of Notre Dame. Three times in recent years now, the
faculty has dissed Catholicism and its efforts to protect human
life:
• On April 16, 2008, one day before Pope Benedict’s
address on April 17 at the Catholic University of America to
presidents of Catholic universities (an event Father Jenkins
attended), the University Faculty Senate issued a “Faculty Response
to University Initiative on Hiring Faculty.” It resolved
“The University should not compromise its academic aspirations in
its efforts to maintain its Catholic identity” and no numerical
goal in hiring Catholic faculty should be permitted. The faculty is
willing to “compromise aspirations” (affirmative action) in order
to achieve gender, racial, and ethnic diversity, but not Catholic
identity, among the faculty. (If then South Bend-Fort Wayne Bishop
D’Arcy’s characterization of the invitation to President Obama in
2009 as the university’s choice of “prestige over truth” is
correct, and it is, then the election of Ms. Martino reflected the
university’s choice of “gender and diversity over
truth.”)
• In 2009, the faculty senate roundly supported the
decision to honor President Obama.
• On March 1, 2011, the faculty senate, by a vote of 22 to
8, disapproved of a
resolution that would have supported two of the pro-life
initiatives undertaken by Father Jenkins after he had dishonored
himself and the University with the honor given Obama: his
appearances at the 2010 and 2011 Marches for Life in Washington,
D.C., and the establishment of a Task Force on Supporting the
Choice for Life.
Notre Dame has a saying that “their blood is in the
bricks,” meaning that the founders and early faculty’s lifeblood
was spent to start and sustain the place as a Catholic institution.
(My forebears attended the school beginning in the 1860s.) If the
current faculty cannot bring themselves to support Notre Dame’s
Catholic mission, they should do the honorable thing and
leave.
Last fall, Notre Dame did everything it could to prevent
the perception that it had acted in reckless disregard of the
physical safety of one of its students, especially in order to
promote football. Can it permit itself to be perceived to act in
reckless disregard of its fiduciary duty to students, parents,
benefactors and alumni/ae to maintain its raison d’être,
its exceptionalism, as a Catholic institution?
Postscript for readers who are not
Catholic. Do you have a dog in this fight?
Yes, on two bases. First, the American people are well-served by
having institutions of every sort — educational, charitable,
medical, etc. — run by organizations of every sort, including
religious denominations. If Notre Dame becomes yet another formerly
religious elite college (with a veneer of Catholicism), that is, if
the bell tolls for Notre Dame, do not “send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (John Donne)
Second, the American people, young and old, need to see
promises being kept across generations. Their hope is founded not
in change, but in continuity. The founders and benefactors and
administrators of our institutions make commitments and set
expectations. These commitments and expectations must be kept. This
is why the Bass family brought a suit against Yale and the
Robertson family brought a suit against Princeton. When Notre Dame
changed hands from the Congregation of the Holy Cross to lay
trustees in 1967, solemn commitments were made to continue the
University as a Catholic institution. The lay trustees, and the
members of the Holy Cross Order who are also trustees, have vows.
Paraphrasing Robert Frost, “The secular woods may be lovely, dark
and deep. But Notre Dame has promises to keep.”
