Enduring Commitments

As Notre Dame strives to address major contemporary challenges, we have no more important resource than our faculty and the graduate and professional students who come here to learn from and collaborate with them. Together, Notre Dame faculty and students go beyond expanding the boundaries of what we can do through research and ask also what we should do, convinced that our ability to seek God, study the world, and serve humanity is magnified many times over by the knowledge and discovery that come with scholarly excellence.

Several principles have proven integral to our pursuit of Goal III and will remain in place as we move forward.

• In line with its distinctive Catholic mission, Notre Dame explicitly seeks to hire tenured and tenure-track faculty who view their scholarly pursuits as a means of working for the common good. Although faculty hiring is rightly conducted at the departmental level, we provide centralized support to identify individuals with whom this charge resonates.
• Beyond the intrinsic value of improving the gender and ethnic diversity of our faculty, we must also do so to effectively serve an increasingly diverse student body as well as ensure the University has access to the most comprehensive range of scholarly talent available. That is why we will continue to provide departments with incentives that encourage the recruitment of diverse faculty while assessing our climate on campus and monitoring policies and practices that can aid in retention.
• The Catholic intellectual tradition has a strong connection to the liberal arts in general and the humanities in particular, meaning excellence in those disciplines is and always will be central to Notre Dame’s academic enterprise.
• With our research endeavors broadening to regularly include multiple departments at Notre Dame and/or faculty from other institutions, our internal structures, processes, and practices must be attentive to such expansion in contexts ranging from the assignment of space to tenure and promotion reviews.