On a campus of more than 1,250 acres — with more than 13,000 students and about 8,300 employees — Notre Dame must tackle some massive tasks to keep itself running smoothly. Some of these jobs require hundreds of workers, tons of materials and staggering man-hours of physical labor. By the numbers, here are some of the duties that Notre Dame people handle in a big way.
Dining halls
Food variety in the dining halls is a common topic of debate among students. One argument in the University’s favor: a meticulous dining database that records 9,445 ingredients and other supplies and 6,094 recipes — 2,322 of which are specifically for use in the dining halls and organized into a menu on a 28-day rotation.
Those numbers don’t reflect the breadth of innovation in the dining halls, says Greg Larson, Campus Dining’s senior executive chef. Each year, numerous dishes are introduced or invented by the 300-plus employees on the dining team. Roughly a dozen new meal offerings appear annually based on student suggestions.
North Dining Hall can seat up to 1,200 people, while South Dining Hall seats 800. Together they serve roughly 1,800 students for breakfast, 3,000 for lunch and 3,600 for dinner each day, adding up to some 2.2 million meals served every year.
Behind the buffet lines, a plethora of industrial machinery keeps the dining halls on schedule. North’s four Baxter ovens may each hold up to 56 hotel pans, which contain up to 2 gallons of food apiece, for as many as 448 gallons cooking at once. The kitchen has an 80-gallon kettle, three 40-gallon braziers and 18 feet of griddle space. Larson says chefs, cooks and food preparers still fight for room to get the job done.
Cheryl Bauer, the supply chain and sustainability director for Campus Dining, says her team gathers ingredients from all over the world, such as shrimp from Indonesia and tilapia from East Africa, and works with multiple suppliers to keep up with demand.
Food suppliers deliver 356,700 cases of dry goods and meats in a typical year. On average, five trucks a day make deliveries to North and South dining halls.
The University donates unserved food to Cultivate Food Rescue, a local nonprofit that packages it into the individual meals it delivers to schools, shelters and other community venues. In the most recent fiscal year, Notre Dame food donations helped Cultivate to provide nearly 51,000 meals.
The Hesburgh Libraries
When the 14-story University library opened in 1963, it housed about 500,000 books. That number grew to 1 million by 1970 and surpassed 1.5 million in 1986. Today Notre Dame’s general collection totals more than 5.1 million books, 2.1 million electronic books and 225,000 periodicals — and counting. An estimated 1.15 million items are stored off-site, available for use when requested.
Libraries over the past 15 years have made a big shift toward e-books and e-journals. “At Notre Dame, we purchase that way in response to user demand,” says Erika Hosselkus, an associate dean for distinctive and academic collections at the Hesburgh Libraries. Disciplines in the humanities still see widespread demand for print books. In other fields, particularly the hard sciences, faculty and students more typically request resources in electronic form, she explains.
One benefit of e-resources is their accessibility to patrons anywhere, even off campus. And many e-publications may be used by multiple patrons at the same time, Hosselkus says.
The Hesburgh Libraries have four physical locations: the main collection in the Hesburgh Library building, the Architecture Library in Walsh Family Hall of Architecture, Mahaffey Business Library in Mendoza College of Business and the Music Library in O’Neill Hall of Music. (With 36,000 volumes, architecture has the largest collection among branch locations.)
All told, library space across the University totals nearly 500,000 square feet. Hesburgh Library alone has more than 440,000 square feet of space. The first floor is about the size of a football field. The basement level has more than 22,000 shelves in the form of compact library shelving — a storage system on wheels and tracks that allows aisles to be opened as needed. The system offers roughly 2.5 times the storage capacity of traditional shelving.
Library employees number 87 staff members, 51 faculty librarians and one postdoc. In a typical academic year, the system teaches more than 1,000 classes and provides 16,750 reference consultations. It loans approximately 88,000 books, DVDs and other physical items, 225,000 e-books and facilitates more than 1.6 million journal-article downloads. Another 11,000 interlibrary loans help to meet student, staff and faculty requests.
Grounds and landscaping
The University’s spring bloom isn’t random. It’s the result of campus landscapers’ careful work to place bulbs the prior autumn. Each year, they plant more than 30,000 tulips and 5,000 additional bulbs: daffodils, hyacinths and others. They add another 15,000 annuals to provide summer color.
Landscape beds inside Notre Dame Stadium showcase some 1,200 bright yellow chrysanthemums each autumn. Another 1,000 mums cheer up spots all around campus.
As the University grows, so does its landscaping and snow-removal workload. A crew of 35 landscaping services workers handles most of campus, while another 11 athletic services employees tend to the athletic fields.
Workers place 250 to 300 cubic yards of mulch around campus each year, most of it during a one-day, all-hands-on-deck mulching blitz just before commencement, says Beau Barnett, director of grounds and landscape.
Notre Dame’s 42 acres of landscape beds need regular weeding. That averages about 1.58 acres per worker. The grounds crew relies on five large lawn mowers to cut 400 acres of grass. (They don’t handle the two campus golf courses.)
The crew manages watering, too: A system of 108 irrigation controllers has an average of 15 zones per controller and 30 sprinkler heads per zone: more than 48,000 irrigation heads in all.
When the growing season ends and winter arrives, the grounds crew shifts its attention to snow removal. Notre Dame clears its 71 miles of campus sidewalks with 12 snow removal vehicles, each with brooms on the front and salt dispensers on the back. Larger vehicles plow the nearly 15 miles of campus roads and 94 acres of parking lots.
The workers operate in four shifts, almost around the clock under normal conditions and longer during a weather event, Barnett says. Last year — during a moderate winter — Notre Dame experienced 26 snow events that required plowing, sidewalk clearing and salt application to mitigate icy conditions. “If it snows on Christmas, we’re here. If it snows on New Year’s Day, we’re here,” Barnett says. “We’re all really excited when snow season starts, and by February, we’re like, ‘OK, this is enough of this.’”
Then they’re ready for spring. The bulbs flower and the annual cycle begins anew.
Recycling
Notre Dame’s robust campus recycling program processes cardboard, glass, metal, paper and rigid plastics, mostly via the 590 large, bright-blue tote bins where students and employees are encouraged to place such recyclables. Campus collection and recycling has been steadily increasing, accounting for 858,460 pounds of materials during the most recent fiscal year — a 46 percent increase over the previous year.
“That’s a testament to a lot of the work that Building Services has done, alongside many of the operational partners on campus,” says John Kalemkerian ’22, the operations and analysis program manager for the Office of Sustainability.
Building Services employees oversee placement and emptying of the bins, and trucks carry the contents to a recycling center in Elkhart, Indiana, where they are sorted and sold to materials purchasing firms.
Football weekend cleanup
Every football Saturday, the campus population triples in size as Irish fans and their rivals arrive to fill the 77,622 seats in the Stadium. The crowds make their presence known, but what goes largely unseen is the mess they leave behind — a 55-ton task for campus workers.
Recycling for the first five game days of the 2025 season — numbers for the last two home games were not available at press time — averaged 14.4 tons per game, a 101-percent increase from 2024 to 2025. The jump is partly the result of Notre Dame’s launching in-stadium sales of beer and hard seltzer in aluminum cans.
Postgame cleanup involves nine industrial compactors, five for trash and four for recycling, each weighing eight tons at capacity. Two dozen six-yard-long Dumpsters gather trash around the Stadium and tailgate lots. All were filled after the last home game against the Syracuse Orange.
Chris Hatfield ’83, the senior director of building services, leads a team of 60 workers on football Saturdays, not nearly enough to handle the aftermath. So, the University hires two independent contracting firms that bus in dozens of workers from Chicago to help with the postgame cleanup.
These crews typically work until late in the evening, then return at dawn to tidy the parking lots. “Everything’s picked up and you can’t even tell there was a football game here by noon the next day,” Hatfield says.
All told, it takes more than 150 people at least three days to clean the Stadium after a game. It’s a “three-pass operation,” Hatfield explains. Pickers first traverse the stands for recyclables, then make a second pass for trash. Leaf blowers are last up, zigzagging across the sections to push small debris, such as popcorn, to the bottom for a final sweep.
After the last home game, the student section requires a fourth pass. Those rows must be power-washed to remove the residue of the thousands of marshmallows students sneak in to throw at each other and onto the field — a longstanding Senior Day tradition.
Gameday waste represents just 5 percent of total annual trash and recycling collection on campus. That grand total ran 5,926 tons in fiscal 2025, exceeding the weight of the 2 million bricks that comprise the original bowl of Notre Dame Stadium.
St. Michael’s Laundry
Every day is laundry day for Shannen McKaskle and her crew at St. Michael’s Laundry: an average of 9,000 pounds of clothing, uniforms, sheets, table linens, towels, mopheads, rags and other items every 24 hours.
The laundry operates in a spacious, light-filled hive of activity on the north edge of campus where employees handle laundry at workstations, and large, color-coded sling bags — each containing up to 500 pounds — move along an overhead rail system.
St. Michael’s has 40 full-time employees, 13 washing machines and 34 dryers. Four extra-large washers hold up to 250 pounds at a time. The building opened in 1991, replacing the former laundry that stood near the Grotto and burned down in 1989.
Decades ago, laundering student clothing and linens was a major part of St. Michael’s business. That’s no longer the case, as all dorms have long had their own self-service laundry facilities, making demand for laundry service less common. “Students have to drop it off and pick it up. It’s very few — maybe 20 students a week,” says McKaskle, the laundry director.
The laundry’s services also are available to the public. Three local hotels are major customers: the Morris Inn, the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel downtown and the Embassy Suites on Angela Boulevard. Four laundry trucks each make two trips to the hotels per day.
In addition to washing and drying, the facility handles ironing, folding, tailoring, uniform and linen rental, and dry cleaning. Demand for dry cleaning has declined and is now the smallest part of St. Michael’s business.
The laundry also serves 18 varsity athletics teams, including the football team, as well as the Congregation of Holy Cross and residence hall rectors. Each spring, it handles about 2,500 commencement gowns and stoles.
St. Michael’s operates from 2 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays, and some hours on weekends, just to serve athletics teams. Says McKaskle, “Football season is the busiest time of year.”
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine. Gray Nocjar, a junior electrical engineering major with minors in energy studies and journalism, was the magazine’s fall intern.