University of Notre Dame Shuts Down the Fund to Protect Human Life
By Tim Drake
Both The Irish Rover and The Sycamore Trust are reporting that the
University of Notre Dame has shut down the four-year-old Notre Dame Fund
to Protect Human Life. The decision appears to have been made so that
direction of the Fund could be placed under control of a University
department rather than an independent committee. The Trust describes the
change as a “subversion of the Fund.”
“I’m generally appalled with what has happened,” said Daniel
McInerny, one of the original associate directors for the Fund. “Notre
Dame should be congratulating the Fund rather than changing its
financial structure.”
According to the report, the Fund was established more than four
years ago through an agreement between the University and a major donor.
Pursuant to the donor’s wishes, the Fund was to be directed by an
independent committee, made up of members who were long-time University
pro-life leaders.
Among the Fund’s activities were: The summer Vita Institute and the
Evangelium Vita Medal, subsidizing the cost of buses and defraying the
cost for faculty members to attend the March for Life, Bread of Life
Dinners, and stipends for students attending pro-life conferences.
The Trust reports that the University proposed abolishing the
committee and has placed the Fund under the jurisdiction of the Dean of
the College of Arts and Letters in the Center for Ethics and Culture.
According to the Trust, the donor refused to concede to the changes, so
the University administration repudiated its agreement, making it
impossible for donors to give to the original fund, and the University
set up its own fund.
The University responded by stating that, in accordance with
University policy, it’s correcting a “mistake,” explaining that the Fund
was directed by a committee that was incorrectly given autonomy to
administer the Fund free from any oversight by a University department.
“Instead of receiving support and encouragement from the university
administration…the Fund was targeted by it,” said Father Wilson
Miscamble in a statement. “The action…does not speak well of its
commitment to prolife efforts on campus. It certainly will reinforce the
feeling on the part of many of our alumni that Notre Dame’s support for
the prolife cause is lukewarm.”
Concludes the Sycamore Trust in its report:
The short of it is that the
University has renounced a promise and issued a death sentence to a fund
that has done great things for the pro-life cause. The assigned reason
is the retroactive invocation of a policy that had been bypassed four
years earlier in an agreement executed for the university by its
experienced Vice President – a purely theoretical alleged “mistake” with
no adverse consequences whatever.
Editor’s note. This first appeared in the Catholic Education Daily, an online publication of The Cardinal Newman Society.
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