ND WATCH WEBSITE EXTRACTS
The passages that follow are taken from the ND Watch web site, with emphasIs added and any added material in brackets.
[On Hiring and Homosexuals]
Probably the most important way to address gender problems (and problems of ageism, racism and homophobia) at Notre Dame is to hire more women, minority, gay and lesbian faculty. The best way to do that is by taking an active role in your own department's hiring procedures, from the constitution of the search committee to the final selection of the candidate.
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In academic 1996-97, after more than a year of meetings, protests, polite requests, recommendations, and fierce resolutions by every faculty and student governing group (including the Academic Council) on the Notre Dame campus, the plea to the administration to rewrite the University's official anti-discrimination clause to include "sexual preference" went unheeded.... In an "An Open Letter to the Notre Dame Community", Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C., President of the University, explained: "After considerable reflection, we have decided not to add sexual orientation to our legal nondiscrimination clause.
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Because of ND's reputation for homophobia, a number of fine scholars have turned down invitations to interview here — stating homophobic policies as the reason. Your department will have to be very pro-active to recruit gay and lesbian scholars and artists, at least in the foreseeable future — that is, until the university changes its policies. You can ask your department to draft and vote on its own informal departmental antidiscrimination statement — one that includes protection for women, minorities, religion and sexual orientation. This is especially important as the university's anti-discrimination statement does not include sexual orientation.
The search committee: Volunteer for a search committee....As a member of the search committee, take it upon yourself to contact the heads of special minority, women's, and gay and lesbian caucuses that operate inside your national association. Take the trouble to make sure that your job announcement is well-circulated to these caucuses by listserves, newsletters, and by asking the heads of these caucuses to personally encourage applications from their own membership.
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The author of " The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology," the first book recommended under the heading "Books on Notre Dame,"
wrote: “I intended the audience to be people who are still wounded by Catholic condemnations of homosexuality.... [T]he arguments...
are incoherent.”
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“If Dr. Tom Dooley were a student or faculty member today, he might not feel welcome. You see, Tom Dooley was gay – not just by orientation but actively so. And Notre Dame refuses to...include sexual orientation in their non-discrimination policies because...
it would violate the ‘Catholic character’ of the university.”
[On Gender Studies]
Notre Dame's Program in Gender Studies was founded in the late 1980s.... Though feminism and women's studies have traditionally been its central focuses, it has also emphasized gay/lesbian/queer studies, and many of its courses encourage students to take a critical feminist approach to the study of masculinity as well....[T]he Gender Studies office... has been a haven for what one might call "gender and sexual dissidents" on campus, and so the Program attracts some of the university's brightest and most interesting students to its classes
Its... issues and concerns require that the program address(through academic means like fora and roundtables) political issues that are central at Notre Dame — like the treatment of women students and faculty; the treatment of gays lesbians and other sexual minorities; campus gender relations; childcare; sexual and reproductive health; rape, and so on. Given the official position of Roman Catholicism on many of these issues, the program must draw largely on secular and alternative Catholic positions. As a result, institutional support for the program is at best variable. Faculty choosing to serve on the Executive committee or subcommittees must see themselves as advocates.
[On Gay Faculty and Organizations]
For the most part, those few [gay and lesbian faculty] who are out have been well treated and well-supported by their departments but there are so many who can't trust that they would be treated the same.
In the last few years there have been several cases of good T & R jobs being rejected by queer scholars, who don't want to risk moving their lives into a hostile environment... or bringing their scholarship to a university that has little interest in or respect for queer studies.
In 1995, the administration threw the ad-hoc student organization, GLNDSMC (Gay and Lesbians at Notre Dame and St.Marys) off campus They had been caught "illegally" advertising their meetings in the official campus newspaper. A year of student and faculty protests followed, and then another year went by while the university "studied the matter". Then it created it own, official, gay student group, the Standing Committee on Gay and Lesbian Student Needs, which it supervises closely. In 2001, the application by a student gay and lesbian group to be officially recognized by the university was once again denied by Student Affairs. The reason given was that the Standing Committee on Gay and Lesbian Student Needs sufficiently meets the needs of the gay and lesbian students. The gay and lesbian students continue to assert, year after year, that it does not.
Notre Dame is not the most feminist-friendly or gay-friendly place. Often speakers are brought to campus who lecture about gay students who have been "saved". When Sue Freidrich and her film, "Hide and Seek" came to campus (with a poster that announced her as a "lesbian filmmaker"), a right-wing student newspaper parodied the poster with a full page ad for a "neo-Nazi" filmmaker. The student-run Women's Rights Center was all but closed down two years ago for having a Planned Parenthood brochure in their library, which suggested to women with unwanted pregnancies that they consider an abortion, among six other options. In 1994 the university announced to the press that there were no instances of AIDS on campus. They were quite wrong. With support from Romance Languages and Gender Studies, Carlos Jerez-Ferran offered a course on gay and lesbian literature, called "Out-Spoken Readings in Literature." Carlos says, "I chose that title because I thought some students would be afraid of taking the course if the word "homosexuality" appeared on their transcript. Later I designed evaluations of my own and asked how many would have taken the course if its content had been explicitly figured in the title. 60% said they wouldn't have taken it."
On the good side, many fabulous queer scholars have been welcomed here: Eve Sedgwick, Lilian Faderman, Yvonne Rainer, Judith Butler, George Chauncy, David Halperin, Katie King, Joan Scott, Andrew Sullivan, Judith Bennett, Wendy Brown, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Michael Camille, among them. The mother of Matthew Shepherd was on campus last semester talking about gay rights.
There is also an active gay alumni association, GALA, that is very supportive of gay students. Nobody bothers us (at least I've never heard of it) about what books we teach or what films we show in our courses, though there could easily be some self-censoring going on. The Gender Studies Program has always been a haven for GLBT students and faculty, and is eager to crosslist and support courses that deal with queer issues
One of these days, things are going to change on this campus. WATCH should be part of it but hasn't yet figured out how. If you've got any ideas, please get in touch.
[On the Pernicious Effect of Priests
and Conservative Catholics]
A sixth factor contributing to the sexist atmosphere at Notre Dame is the fact that some of the Roman Catholics here have aligned themselves with fundamentalist segments of the Church and have not really accepted the strong social-justice emphasis of Roman Catholicism.
Seventh, given its founding by priests, Notre Dame retains a clerical social character, rather than a family-based social character. Clerical attitudes are often manifested in subtle and not so subtle forms of sexism or misogyny. The fact that women cannot be Roman Catholic priests results in the exclusion of women from certain kinds of positions and particular kinds of power at Notre Dame.
[On The Pernicious Effect of Football]
Finally, the strong emphasis on athletics at Notre Dame — in particular, football — may be correlated with sexism or misogyny. Surveys indicate that at universities where either sports or fraternities play a large role, there tend to be more rapes and more sexism.
[On Reproductive Health]
ND doesn't cover birth control, abortion, or any fertility treatments that subvent "normal" reproductive functions. The plans will cover a diagnosis of fertility problems, and will also cover treatments to "repair" dysfunctions in your reproductive system, but no IVF or any other proactive treatments. There is supposedly a committee of priests who go over every medical claim to make sure that no contraceptive or fertility treatment slips through the cracks. If you need to have your prescription for the Pill refilled or get refitted for a diaphragm, make sure your doctor puts in a code for a regular office visit and not for a consultation on birth control, otherwise the office visit won't be covered. If your doctor won't work with you on this, you need to find another doctor. This is an environment which is particularly hostile to (even the very idea of) abortion. You'll probably want to be extremely discreet if you choose to have one.
Note: This paragraph does not appear in the February 2009 version.
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