University of Notre Dame

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Notre Dame began on the 26th of November 1842, when a priest named Edward Sorin arrived at a patch of northern Indiana land with eight brothers from France and Ireland and started a school inside an old log chapel. Sorin had two students. That was it. What he built from those beginnings is now one of the most storied universities in the United States, with 1,261 acres of campus, an endowment exceeding sixteen billion dollars, and a football team whose name is known in nearly every corner of the country. But the story of Notre Dame is not simply a story of growth. It is a story of what a Catholic institution decided it wanted to be, and how hard it had to fight, and sometimes against itself, to become it. How did a small frontier school become a research university? What role did football really play? And what does it mean that the phrase "win one for the Gipper" was spoken first not in a film, but in a locker room before a game in 1928?

• 2. A Frontier Beginning

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  Stephen Badin, the first priest ordained in the United States, had come to northern Indiana at the invitation of Potawatomi chief Leopold Pokagon to minister to the tribe. Badin bought 524 acres in 1830, land that would eventually become the university's campus. A decade later, bishop Celestin Guynemer de la Hailandiere of the Diocese of Vincennes offered that land to Edward Sorin on one condition: build a college within two years.

  Sorin met the deadline. He erected buildings quickly, including the Old College, the first church, and an early main building. Notre Dame started as a primary and secondary school. In 1844, the Indiana General Assembly granted its official college charter under the full name University of Notre Dame du Lac, meaning University of Our Lady of the Lake. That same year, the Sisters of the Holy Cross founded the female-only Saint Mary's College nearby, as Notre Dame itself remained all-male.

  The first degrees were awarded in 1849. Growth brought growing pains. Under William Corby's administration in the 1860s and 1870s, enrollment climbed past 500, the law school opened with a two-year course of study, and construction began on the church that would eventually become the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Then, in April 1879, fire destroyed the Main Building along with its library of thousands of volumes. The school closed immediately. Rebuilding began on the 17th of May and the replacement was completed before the fall semester. It is the same building that stands today.

• 3. Building Academic Ambition

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  Thomas E. Walsh, who served as president from 1881 to 1893, set his sights on something the frontier college had lacked: scholastic reputation. Many students had arrived only for the business courses and left without a degree. Walsh launched a "Belles Lettres" program and invited writer Maurice Francis Egan and other lay intellectuals to campus. Washington Hall went up in 1881 as a theater. The Science Hall, built in 1883, housed both laboratories and classrooms.

  John Zahm, who served as the Holy Cross Provincial for the United States from 1898 to 1906, pushed harder than anyone before him toward a research university model. He expanded the library, added to the campus art gallery, and amassed what became a famous Dante collection. His ambition worried the congregation. They did not renew his term, believing he had expanded too quickly and accumulated serious debt. Zahm's vision clashed directly with that of president Andrew Morrissey, who preferred keeping Notre Dame a smaller boarding school.

  The push for research found a champion in John W. Cavanaugh, who attracted eminent scholars, established a chair in journalism, introduced chemical engineering courses, and worked to increase the number of bachelor's and master's degrees awarded. Notre Dame awarded its first degree to a woman in 1917, though female undergraduates would remain uncommon until 1972. James A. Burns, president from 1919, completed the shift by adopting the elective system and moving away from the traditional classical curriculum in just three years. By 1921, with the addition of the College of Commerce, Notre Dame had grown from a small college into a university with five colleges and a law school.

• 4. The Football Factor

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  Michigan brought the game of football to Notre Dame in 1887, when the Michigan team played against a group of students. Few who watched that first game could have predicted what the sport would come to mean to the institution.

  Knute Rockne became head coach in 1918 and built something that has not been matched. He holds the highest winning percentage in NCAA Division I football history at .881. Under him, the Irish won three national championships, had five undefeated seasons, and won the Rose Bowl Game in 1925. His offense ran the Notre Dame Box formation; his defense deployed a 7-2-2 scheme. The players he developed included George Gipp and the group of four backs a sportswriter called the "Four Horsemen."

  The team's success carried meaning far beyond wins and losses. Catholics across the country rallied around the Fighting Irish, listening to games on the radio, particularly when Notre Dame faced teams from institutions associated with the Protestant establishment, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Army. The university's profile as a flagship Catholic institution also made it a target. In 1924, a confrontation erupted between Notre Dame students and the Ku Klux Klan, which had chosen South Bend for a week-long gathering. Students blocked Klansmen from leaving their trains at the South Bend station and removed their regalia. Thousands of students massed downtown days later, and president Matthew Walsh had to intervene personally to prevent further clashes. Rockne then spoke at a campus rally urging students to refrain from violence. Historians have credited the hostility shown by the student body with contributing to the decline of the KKK in Indiana.

  In 1928, with Gipp long dead, Rockne told his players that Gipp's last words had been a request to "win one for the Gipper." The speech moved the team to beat Army. Twelve years later, that locker room moment became the dramatic climax of the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American, with Pat O'Brien playing Rockne and Ronald Reagan playing Gipp. The football program today generates average annual revenue of around $120 million and holds a TV contract with NBC worth an estimated $15 million per year.

• 5. The Hesburgh Transformation

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  Theodore Hesburgh became president in 1952 and held the position for 35 years, longer than any predecessor. The numbers from his tenure trace an institution that effectively remade itself. The annual operating budget grew by a factor of 18, from $9.7 million to $176.6 million. The endowment multiplied by a factor of 40, from $9 million to $350 million. Research funding increased by a factor of 20, rising from $735,000 to $15 million. Enrollment climbed from 4,979 to 9,600 students; the faculty more than doubled from 389 to 950.

  Hesburgh made Notre Dame coeducational. Women had received degrees since 1917, but almost all were religious sisters enrolled in graduate programs. In the mid-1960s, Notre Dame and Saint Mary's College developed a co-exchange program so students could take courses not offered at their home institution. Merging fully with Saint Mary's was considered and rejected, partly because of differences in faculty qualifications and pay. Two residence halls were converted for female students, and in 1971, Mary Ann Proctor became the first female undergraduate, a transfer from Saint Mary's. The following year, Mary Davey Bliley became the first woman to graduate with a bachelor's degree, earning it in marketing.

  In 1978, a historic district covering 116 acres and including 21 contributing buildings was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. By the time Hesburgh left office, Notre Dame had become what he had intended: not just a school with a notable football team, but a recognized academic institution with a national scholarly reputation.

• 6. Research and Intellectual Life

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  Albert Zahm, brother of John Augustine Zahm, built an early wind tunnel at Notre Dame to compare the lift-to-drag ratio of aeronautical models. Jerome Green became the first American to send a wireless message. Julius Nieuwland performed foundational chemistry work on basic reactions that were later used in creating neoprene. These figures set an early tone of scientific inquiry.

  The rise of dictatorships in Europe in the 1930s brought another kind of contribution. President John O'Hara brought many Catholic intellectuals fleeing Europe to Notre Dame. Waldemar Gurian, a German Catholic intellectual of Jewish descent, arrived from Germany and in 1939 founded The Review of Politics, which became part of an international Catholic intellectual revival. Ivan Mestovic, a renowned Croatian sculptor, brought his work to campus; his sculptures can be seen inside the Basilica of the Sacred Heart today. Yves Simon brought French scholarship in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition in the 1940s; his teacher Jacques Maritain visited the campus regularly.

  The Medieval Institute, affiliated with the College of Arts and Letters, is today the largest center for medieval studies in North America. Notre Dame holds more National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships than any other university, with 65. In fiscal 2019, research funding reached an all-time high of $180.6 million, a 27 percent increase over the previous year, with projects spanning vector-borne diseases, particle physics, nanotechnology, cancer, and hypersonics. The Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, founded in 1986 with donations from Joan B. Kroc, the surviving spouse of McDonald's owner Ray Kroc, focuses on the causes of violent conflict and conditions for sustainable peace.

• 7. A Campus and Its Traditions

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  The 1,250 acres of campus sit south of the Indiana Toll Road and contain around 170 buildings arranged around two lakes and seven quadrangles. In the 2015-2016 academic year, more than 1.8 million visitors came to the campus, almost half from outside St. Joseph County, making Notre Dame one of the major tourist destinations in northern Indiana.

  The Hesburgh Library, completed in 1963, is a 14-story building. Its front is covered by the Word of Life stone mural by Millard Sheets, a depiction of Jesus with arms raised that students dubbed "Touchdown Jesus" because of its resemblance to the referee signal for a touchdown and its proximity to the stadium. The Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, built in 1896, is a replica of the original in Lourdes and serves as a site for prayer and meditation. The Basilica of the Sacred Heart is built in French Revival style, with stained glass windows imported from France and interior paintings by Luigi Gregori, an Italian painter Sorin had invited to be an artist in residence.

  The Band of the Fighting Irish was formed in 1846 and is the oldest university band in continuous existence. Its fight song, the Notre Dame "Victory March," has been identified by Northern Illinois professor William Studwell as the most played and most famous college fight song. The National Music Council honored it as a "Landmark of American Music" during the United States Bicentennial. The song has appeared in three films: Knute Rockne, All American, Airplane!, and Rudy. On football game days, the band's drumline begins traditional activities at midnight with the Drummers' Circle, setting off a sequence of festivities that continues until the final note of the alma mater at the end of the game.

• 8. Alumni and Legacy

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  Eric F. Wieschaus, a graduate of Notre Dame's College of Science, won the 1995 Nobel Prize in medicine. Philip Majerus, another science alumnus, discovered the cardioprotective effects of aspirin. Condoleezza Rice, a former United States Secretary of State, is among the political alumni. Astronaut Jim Wetherbee and businessman Edward J. DeBartolo Jr. also graduated from Notre Dame. Two alumni have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom: Alan Page and DeBartolo. Two have received the Congressional Gold Medal: Thomas Anthony Dooley and DeBartolo.

  In professional sports, Notre Dame graduates include quarterbacks Joe Theismann and Joe Montana, running back Jerome Bettis, and basketball players Austin Carr and Adrian Dantley, both of whom are in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Olympic fencing gold medalist Mariel Zagunis and two-time bronze medalist Nick Itkin are among more recent alumni. Talk show hosts Regis Philbin and Phil Donahue are among the media alumni.

  The university counts more than 130,000 alumni and 275 alumni clubs worldwide. A school record of 53.2 percent of alumni donating was set in 2006. Notre Dame's most recent capital campaign, completed in 2014, raised $2.014 billion against a goal of $767 million. It was the largest campaign in the history of Catholic higher education and the largest by any university without a medical school at the time. In 2026, the university announced it would cover full tuition for undergraduate students from families earning under $150,000 annually, beginning in the 2026-2027 academic year.