The Link Trail, a pedestrian and bicycling pathway connecting Notre Dame and downtown South Bend, opened in November. The wide, well-lit, concrete pathway runs 1.5 miles along Notre Dame and South Bend avenues and down Hill Street before turning west on LaSalle Avenue and continuing to the Morris Performing Arts Center.
Construction of the trail was a partnership between the University, the city of South Bend and Visit South Bend Mishawaka, an arm of the South Bend Regional Chamber of Commerce. To mark its opening, the city hosted an event that featured dozens of students walking the Link from campus to downtown.
John Kraniak ’71 recently donated to the University Archives a Victor 78 rpm original phonograph record of the “Notre Dame Victory March” and “Hike, Notre Dame” recorded by the Notre Dame Band and the Glee Club in 1925.
Kraniak acquired the record in the 1970s through a mail auction of mostly jazz recordings. He collects records to play on a Saturday-morning jazz radio program he hosts at WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin.
The University Archives has created a high-quality digital copy of the phonograph record.
The University in November opened a Mach 10 quiet wind tunnel, a first-of-its-kind facility designed to augment the Defense Department’s capacity to test the U.S. military’s hypersonic capabilities.
Hosted by the White Field Research Laboratory, the 3,000-square-foot lab may simulate, turbulence-free, hypersonic flight at speeds up to 10 times that of sound, DefenseScoop.com reported. Hypersonic missiles travel at speeds of Mach 5 or higher, making them difficult for air defense systems to intercept. The U.S. Navy funded the tunnel’s fabrication.
“Hypersonic flight represents unique challenges and opportunities, and these facilities are vital to our test and evaluation efforts, enabling us to stipulate and study the extreme conditions that hypersonic vehicles will encounter,” Admiral Christopher Grady ’84, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden made a brief visit to campus on October 5 to attend the wedding of John Scanlon ’17 and Julia Reed in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.
Scanlon serves on the first lady’s staff. Reed is deputy director of Oval Office operations and is the daughter of longtime Biden aide Bruce Reed. A small crowd of students and others lined campus roads that afternoon but did not get a glimpse of the Bidens entering or exiting the church, The Observer reported.
Notre Dame Right to Life recently launched the Be Not Afraid Project, an initiative designed to foster a culture of love and support for pregnant and parenting students at Notre Dame, Saint Mary’s College and Holy Cross College.
The effort began last spring when the group provided support and encouragement to a pregnant student who gave birth in July to a baby girl. The initiative is designed to provide all necessary assistance to students who are expecting or are already parents. The project operates in cooperation with Campus Ministry, the University’s Family Resource Center and Student Government.
Students and employees seeking to borrow tools, a bike-repair kit, a Pokagon Band of Potawatomi flag, art supplies, umbrellas or various other items now have a place to go: the Library of Things in the Hesburgh Library.
“The Library of Things follows a recent trend in libraries to check out items in addition to books. In our case, the ‘things’ take the form of handy tool and craft kits, as well as games and other fun activities,” circulation services coordinator Eli Randolph says. The loan period for most such items is one to three days.
Condoleezza Rice ’75M.A. realizes Americans are tired after almost 80 years of the United States’ international leadership. “Haven’t we defeated the Soviet Union? Didn’t we unify Germany? Didn’t we then defeat al-Qaida? Couldn’t somebody else do it?” she asked rhetorically during an October appearance at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center.
Such questions inspired her to write an article for the September issue of Foreign Affairs magazine about the perils of isolationism. “What I really want to say to Americans is that great powers don’t mind their own business. They try to shape the world. And if we don’t shape it, the great powers that will shape it are authoritarians like China and Russia. And we won’t like that world,” she said.
Rice served as U.S. Secretary of State under President George W. Bush and is now director of the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank based at Stanford University. Watch her “fireside chat” with the University’s president here.
Grammy- and Oscar-winning musician Jon Batiste gave an electrifying concert in the Purcell Pavilion during the September inaugural ceremonies for Father Robert A. Dowd, CSC, ’87, Notre Dame’s new president.
The musician and his band wowed the crowd featuring Batiste’s vocals and his prowess on piano and other instruments. The show ended with Notre Dame’s New Orleans Brass Band joining Batiste to dance through the aisles during an extended rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Batiste led the parade as pied piper on the melodica, a handheld mouth organ with a keyboard, and paused often for high-fives and selfies with fans.
After the concert, the audience exited the building to discover an 11-minute light show in the sky south of Notre Dame Stadium. As the opening notes of the Rudy soundtrack began, some 400 drones rose to create familiar images in the night air: the number 1842, the Golden Dome, the University seal, the Leprechaun, a graduate tossing her cap and candles flickering in the Grotto.
A crowd gathered on the Library Lawn for two consecutive evenings in late October to listen to speakers as part of “Fr. TED Talks: Ideas from the Catholic Social Tradition That We Find Inspiring.” The event featured eight speakers who explored the question posed by the 2024-25 Notre Dame Forum: What do we owe each other?
University President Father Robert A. Dowd, CSC, ’87 reflected on the crises of civility and sustainability facing the world. He encouraged audience members to develop their awareness of the problems, take time for thought and spiritual reflection, and align their actions with their intentions.
Dowd cited two of his heroes, Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., noting that both worked to create a more civil, humane and just society. “So how do we do this? Show kindness and compassion, making sure that we’re not engaged in self-righteous behavior that demonizes others,” Dowd said. “Collaborate. Be willing to work together and even find common cause with those with whom you don’t agree. Take the long view. Don’t be hoodwinked by short-term objectives.”
Recordings of the talks are available here.
To step up its research capacity, Notre Dame has completed a 200,000-square-foot addition to McCourtney Hall, the science and engineering facility that opened in 2016. The second three-story building connects to the original to augment what’s known as the East Campus Research Complex. The new structure, with a focus on the future of health, will leave about 30 percent of its space unassigned for future hires or expanded collaborations between experimental, field and computational scientists.