IT WAS ONCE A CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL: Why I’m Done with Notre Dame.

I retired from the University of Notre Dame at the end of 2025. More accurately, I left. After twenty years on the faculty, I could no longer do Notre Dame. So I’ve bailed, without being sure what will come next.

My leaving Notre Dame might seem unusual. I’ve only just turned sixty-five. I am active in research, publishing some of the best work of my career. I loved teaching Notre Dame undergraduates. I held a Kenan endowed chair, which provided a nice research fund. I earned an enviable salary. Almost any faculty member similarly situated would continue working five, ten, or fifteen more years.

And I was an ideal fit, the kind of academic ­Notre Dame should want on staff: an accomplished scholar who won awards as a classroom teacher and student mentor. Over the years, I brought in $15 million in external research grants. I was dissertation chair for the best-placed PhD graduate in Notre Dame’s history, now a full professor at Yale. I was an enthusiastic proponent of the university’s Catholic mission. I was devoted to my discipline, sociology, but also engaged ideas in philosophy, history, theology, and political theory.

But after two decades, I left. Not happily, not with a sense of fulfillment or closure, but disappointed and vexed. Why? And what might my ­experience reveal about the bigger picture?

When I came to Notre Dame, I believed the university was serious about its Catholic mission. I tried to make my contribution, I think with some success. But I also saw much of the institution absorbed by other interests that, in my view, were often irrelevant to or at odds with the Catholic mission. Most demoralizing was the leadership’s lack of vision and courage.

Members of the managerial class care more about their reputation within that class than about the success of what they manage.