University Goals

Goal I: Ensure that our Catholic character informs all our endeavors.

Universities first arose in the Catholic culture of 13th-century Europe, and have existed continuously since. Notre Dame stands within and carries on that tradition.

As a Catholic university in the Holy Cross tradition, Notre Dame strives to combine a living faith that is seeking understanding with an uncompromising commitment to the search for truth through teaching and inquiry. It believes commitments to faith and reason are not only compatible, but complementary. As Pope John Paul II wrote: “Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world in which both can flourish.”

Our Catholic mission gives us a rich understanding of education that demands attention to the development of the whole person—“the cultivation of the heart as well as the mind,” as the University’s founder, Rev. Edward Sorin, C.S.C., put it. Thus we strive to build a community that inspires the pursuit of truth and teaches respect, love, and service so that our learning serves the Church and the world, particularly for those who are most in need.

Goal II: Offer an unsurpassed undergraduate education that nurtures the formation of mind, body, and spirit.

“Education is the art of bringing a young person to completeness,” said Fr. Basil Moreau, the founder of the Holy Cross order who sent Fr. Sorin to the United States. Moreau established for Notre Dame and for all Holy Cross schools the ideal of educating the whole person. Then and now, these institutions devote themselves to the intellectual, spiritual, and moral education of students, striving to lead them into truth.

This forms the hallmark of a Notre Dame undergraduate education—rigorous intellectual training with the cultivation of moral character and spiritual formation offered in a community distinguished by faith.

Our undergraduate program is anchored in excellent teaching, a traditional strength and defining characteristic of Notre Dame. Quality teaching—the nature of the personal exchange between professor and student—will encourage students to become fellow inquirers with the faculty, giving them the ability to form their own views, test their own theories, and stand their own ground in debate. It also includes—as is appropriate at a research university— a growing number of research opportunities for undergraduates, from senior theses written under the direction of a faculty member to creative projects and scientific or technical competition. All of these programs aim to create producers, as well as consumers of knowledge.

Our University curriculum is grounded in a liberal arts core while students achieve depth of learning in a chosen major. We are also committed to enhancing the education of our students through opportunities for study abroad and community-based learning.

In addition to the teaching and guidance offered by professors in the classroom, a vital part of the education at Notre Dame is provided by life in residence halls and engagement in student activities, voluntary service, and social life. The Division of Student Affairs fosters a rich community life, encourages student development through programming and its support of student groups, and nurtures the physical and emotional well-being of our students through a variety of student services.

Diversity in all its forms is valued on our campus, and we strive to create a community where all belong and the gifts of each enhance everyone.

Ultimately, the Notre Dame undergraduate experience will be magnified by the power of community, people with shared ideals and engaged in a vigorous conversation, and the recognition that education at a Catholic university confers an obligation to become knowledgeable, capable, charitable—to draw on all the intellectual, spiritual, moral resources of the University to lead a rich human life inspired by the Gospel that will help unify, enlighten, and heal.

Goal III: Provide superb graduate and professional programs that deliver disciplinary excellence, foster multidisciplinary connections, and advance knowledge in the search for truth.

Graduate and professional students play an essential role in the life of a research university. Their advanced training enables them to shape the university and the world in multiple ways: through distinguished careers based on the highest ethical and professional standards, through the research they conduct while students at Notre Dame; and through the undergraduate students they teach, supervise, and mentor in and out of Notre Dame’s classrooms.

The fundamental responsibility of the university toward its graduate and professional students is to offer them training of the highest caliber. Yet we are called to also provide for graduate and professional students appropriate forms of community structure. This begins even before students arrive on campus with university-sponsored graduate housing opportunities and includes, importantly, the strongest possible financial aid and stipend packages. Once graduate and professional students arrive at Notre Dame, the obligation to foster a communal life falls upon the relevant departments, colleges and schools, but also to the graduate school and the Division of Student Affairs. Graduate students themselves, through elected representatives, are essential to building this communal culture.

The university has a deep commitment to diversity and inclusion for graduate and professional students, just as it does for all members of the University community. With a high percentage of graduate students coming from outside the United States, and from a wide variety of religious and cultural backgrounds, the presence of graduate students enhances the university’s capacity to create a genuinely global educational community.

Goal IV: Advance human understanding through scholarship and research that seeks to heal, unify, and enlighten.

The dividing line between teaching and research is never a sharp one. Good teaching is a conversation with students that is always open to novel insights; and good researchers are always ready to learn from others, whether those others are colleagues or students. Students and faculty are both engaged in inquiry whose culminating experience is discovery, a learning where no one else has previously charted a course. Teaching and research, then, are together integral parts of the core mission of any great university—the pursuit of knowledge and understanding.

A commitment to research has always been part of Notre Dame’s driving vision. Rev. John Zahm, C.S.C., believed that Notre Dame’s destiny was to be a great university like the prominent German universities of his time. Fr. Burns, who became president of Notre Dame in 1919, established college deans and department chairs and hired the best faculty he could find. He wrote to a friend about a Notre Dame faculty member who was dedicated to research, saying: “My ambition is to have this kind of work going on in every department.” Fr. Hesburgh accelerated the growth in scholarship by, among many things, establishing a great research library and increasing research funding by a factor of 20. When he began his presidency in 1987, Fr. Malloy said in his inaugural address: “We must enthusiastically embrace our potential as a research institution, and we must define those areas of scholarly pursuit where we at Notre Dame are especially qualified to make a lasting contribution.” Under the leadership of Fr. Jenkins, the University redoubled its efforts to become a great research university and today is among the fastest-growing research universities in the nation.

With the invitation in 2023 to join the Association of American Universities (AAU), a consortium of leading public and private U.S. research universities, Notre Dame’s reputation as a superb research university is well-established. As the only religiously-affiliated member of the AAU, we believe we can make a unique contribution among research universities. We are poised for even greater success, through research that contributes to our understanding of ourselves and our world and discoveries that enhance human well-being. We believe we can be excellent in all research we undertake and truly distinguished in select areas.

By pushing forward into the unknown and harnessing discoveries for service to the world, we seek to deepen our understanding of God and creation and serve humanity.