Stewardship

Foster the University’s mission through superb stewardship of its human, physical, and financial resources

Goal IV: Foster the University’s mission through superb stewardship of its human, physical, and financial resources

Context

The well-known Gospel passage of the parable of the talents preaches the lessons of stewardship, the duty to not only preserve what we have been given, but also multiply those talents for the benefit of all. Nothing is more important to achieving the aims of Notre Dame than faithful stewardship of the University’s resources—human, physical, and financial.

Our goal is to become a great Catholic research university. For that to happen, we must make Notre Dame a place that attracts, develops, and sustains superbly talented faculty, administrators, and staff. It also means continuing to invest in state-of-the-art facilities and infrastructure that allow these individuals to do their best work.

Like any investment, those mentioned here require appropriate levels of funding, funding that has to come from sources other than our students and their families. It is thus our benefactors who time and again answer the call and support our goal of being a source for good, and these loyal friends of the University rightfully expect to see their gifts grow.

Fortunately, we have a proud record of excellent stewardship, highlighted by a long string of balanced budgets, a triple-A bond rating, and endowment returns that consistently exceed market benchmarks.

In addition, Notre Dame staff foster an outstanding culture of service in support of students, faculty, visitors, and their fellow employees. Their many contributions range from providing for the community’s safety and security to partnering directly with faculty to advance academic excellence.

This service and stewardship is an expression of our Catholic character and is indispensable to providing an unsurpassed undergraduate education and superior graduate programs. It also acts as assurance to the Notre Dame family that we are making the most of every gift and talent we have been blessed with and the physical assets we have inherited, just as Fr. Sorin sought to do.

“I deem it one of our first duties,” he wrote in 1871, reflecting on the generosity of Notre Dame’s benefactors, “to receive, in faith and humility, each of those precious blessings and gifts as a sacred deposit … which must fructify in our hands.”