Several dozen former Howard Hall residents turned out on a sunny Saturday in April for a minireunion and tour of their former dorm. They walked the halls, visited their old rooms, hugged each other in the walkway under the Howard arch and shared memories of their own days in the century-old building. Howard was permanently retired as a residence hall in May.
Current residents placed the hall’s famous teeter-totter, used for years during an annual, 24-hour charity fundraiser, on the dorm’s lawn.
“I was super sad to hear about the closing. It was my home for four years,” said Mary Pat Pearson ’97, who drove from Chicago to attend. Howard, which this past academic year housed 148 residents, was a men’s dorm until it was converted to a women’s residence in 1987.
Read memories from former Howard residents.
Howard underclassmen will move into Grojean Hall, a new women’s dorm south of the Rockne Memorial building, in August. Howard’s Duck mascot is now history, but the new dorm also has an avian connection: Residents will be the Grojean Penguins.
The University hasn’t announced plans regarding Howard’s future.
The 9-percent acceptance rate for Class of 2030 regular decision undergraduate applicants holds steady as the University’s record low for a second year. That rate has fallen from 16.5 percent over the past six years.
Notre Dame received applications from 36,102 students, 701 more than last year, the Undergraduate Admissions office announced in March. This year’s pool included applicants from 50 states, the District of Columbia, five U.S. territories and 183 other countries.
In Kind Love: The Life and Legacy of Brother Columba O’Neill, CSC, a documentary film about the humble shoemaker who became known as the “Miracle Man of Notre Dame,” premiered in 2025 and is now available on YouTube.
Born in 1848, O’Neill joined the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1874 and spent many of the next 50 years working on campus before his death in 1923. He made thousands of images of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and badges of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which he gave to students and others with instructions to pray a novena. Cures associated with O’Neill were reported around South Bend and beyond.
The Catholic Church is now investigating O’Neill’s cause for sainthood. The film was produced by NewGroup Media, a local production company, with financial backing from the Midwest Province of the Congregation of Holy Cross.
A major renovation of Notre Dame’s stately South Dining Hall will prepare it for its centennial celebration in 2027. Food service will continue through completion of the project, with some schedule alterations to allow for the work.
As the renovation of the hall’s central section proceeded during the spring, the venue set up temporary food stations in its west wing while students ate in the east. The project will create new and expanded serving areas, state-of-the-art kitchens, accessible restrooms and a centralized dishroom. It will also include full restoration of the two dining rooms and the creation of a new public entrance on the south side of the building.
South Dining Hall was designed by Gothic Revival architect Ralph Adams Cram and remained the sole student dining hall until North Dining Hall opened in 1957.
Faculty and staff turned out in force on South Quad in April to welcome more than 1,700 prospective students and members of their families as part of The Rally: Admitted Student Days.
The goal of the annual event, launched in 2024, is to welcome potential future students, answer their questions about the University and help them feel at home. The 2026 gathering had a pep rally feel, with Father Pete McCormick, CSC, ’06M.Div., ’15MBA, serving as DJ, appearances by the marching band, cheerleaders and Leprechaun, free cookies and Fighting Irish swag — green rally towels and glittery pompoms.
The Rally has become Notre Dame’s largest yield event for admitted students. To accommodate those who can’t make it to campus, the University also hosts more than 25 “Rally on the Road” events in the U.S. and abroad, as well as virtual rallies online.
In April, Joyelle McSweeney, the University’s William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English and department chair, received the Windham-Campbell Prize for her poetry.
McSweeney was one of eight writers to win the annual global literary award, administered by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which recognizes exemplary work in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. Winners receive $175,000 to focus on their work. The prize’s selection committee cited McSweeney’s “complex, powerful, and contemplative ecopoetic writing, exploring nature, trauma, style, and resilience through the ‘necropastoral,’ whilst subverting our understanding of contemporary language.”
“Poetry, for me, is a quest to find out why we have to live this way, what the gods might have in store for us, how we can get back what we lost, and what we can give to each other,” says McSweeney, who led Notre Dame’s Creative Writing Program for four years. Her nine books include Death Styles, a 2024 poetry collection.
Notre Dame is sticking to its roots as a pedestrian-friendly university. Electric bikes are no longer permitted on the central part of campus, roughly defined as what is enclosed by Holy Cross, Wilson and Leahy drives and Bulla Road. The change took effect July 1.
A spring email from Keri Kei Shibata ’16MBA, assistant vice president for campus safety and chief of the University’s Police Department, described the change as “rooted in our commitment to preserving the pedestrian character of our campus and, more importantly, protecting our community from the very real fire and collision hazards these vehicles present.” The decision was made after a thorough review of ongoing safety challenges, she wrote.
In 2023, the University banned electric scooters, skateboards, hoverboards and other personal electric vehicles due to the number of accidents and related injuries reported. The policy permitted e-bikes operated without electric power. That exception is now nixed. Five bike racks on the campus perimeter are now the only places where one may park an e-bike.
Notre Dame has created an optional online filter for pornography and other explicit content on its Wi-Fi network. In an April email announcement to students, Father Pete McCormick, CSC, ’06M.Div., ’15MBA, assistant vice president for Campus Ministry, focused on the importance of human dignity. “It cannot go unsaid that the devastating reality behind so much of the explicit content we are exposed to online involves countless human beings whose lives have been harmed and are forever scarred,” McCormick wrote.
“As you determine whether or not to install the filter on your own personal devices,” he continued, “I encourage you to consider why it might be a useful tool in your formation as you continue to grow into the person you hope to become both on and offline. Ask yourself: Where do I want to focus my attention? How do I want my desires to be shaped? And, perhaps most importantly, how can I honor the dignity of others even in the unseen spaces of the internet?”
Requests for a campuswide pornography filter have been made by individual students as well as by Students for Child-Oriented Policy, a University-sponsored club that advocates for children and against the harms of pornography and substance abuse.
Beginning in August, Notre Dame undergraduates whose annual family income is less than $150,000 will pay zero tuition. The announcement in March represents a significant enhancement to the University’s Pathways to Notre Dame financial aid program.
The policy assures that families in that income group will receive need-based financial aid that covers the cost of tuition. Families with incomes between $150,000 and $200,000 will receive need-based aid that covers half the cost of tuition, while those whose income is less than $60,000 will receive need-based aid that covers tuition, fees, housing and food.
University President Father Robert Dowd, CSC, ’87 said the changes reflect a long-standing commitment to ensure that a Notre Dame education is affordable for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds. “In order to be the community of learning we are called to be, cost must never be a barrier,” he said. “We are committed to making every effort to welcome talented young people from a variety of backgrounds to a Notre Dame community that will help them to develop their gifts.”
Under the policy, Notre Dame will continue to meet 100 percent of demonstrated need for all admitted students, domestic and international.
Demolished in 2024, Fisher Hall is history, but its signature event, the Fisher Regatta, lives on. Now billed as The Regatta hosted by Coyle Hall, the charity boat race proceeded as usual in April on Saint Mary’s Lake, featuring its customary, wacky variety of creative, flimsy, handcrafted vessels.
Though it has been an annual spectacle since 1987, the Regatta’s student planners mischievously bill it each year as the “25th annual” race. It raises funds for St. Adalbert Catholic School in South Bend.
The 2026 competition drew 30 boats ranging from soda bottles bound together with duct tape to repurposed pool floaties and more elaborate vessels, The Observer reported. In the women’s competition, a team from Saint Mary’s College placed first with a boat made of insulation foam and fiberglass. The Knights of Columbus claimed the men’s championship.
The former Fisher Hall community has lived in Zahm Hall for the past two years, but in August will move into the new Coyle Hall on South Quad. The race is expected to continue. Ya gotta Regatta.
