The 85-year-old Rockne Memorial building has a new look on top, with a half-acre “green roof” added in August. The plants placed in trays on the rooftop are a mix of different species of sedum that bloom in the spring, summer and fall.
Living roofs have sustainability benefits. Adding a vegetative system extends roof life by protecting the surface from UV rays, thermal shock and standard weathering. It saves energy by adding insulation to help maintain winter heat and summer cooling in the building and reduces stormwater runoff by capturing rain in the soil system.
The Rock joins seven other buildings on campus that also sprout green roofs: the Morris Inn; Alumni, Corbett and Duncan halls and O’Neill Hall of Music; the Joyce Center; and Eck Hall of Law. In total, Notre Dame counts 154,910 square feet — about 3.5 acres — of rooftop green space.
Two Notre Dame student-athletes earned medals at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
Senior swimmer Chris Guiliano won a gold medal for the United States on the 4×100-meter freestyle relay team and a silver medal with the 4×200-meter freestyle team. And junior fencer Eszter Muhari, competing for her home country of Hungary, earned the bronze medal in women’s individual épée. The 2023 NCAA individual épée champion, Muhari didn’t compete for Notre Dame last year because she was training for the Olympics.
The two medalists were among 16 Notre Dame student-athletes and alumni who competed at the games, with the group combining for a school-record 10 total medals. (See “Domers in the News” for more details.)
The Notre Dame Rocketry Team soared to victory as the overall winner of NASA’s 2024 Student Launch initiative in Huntsville, Alabama. It was the team’s first top finish in its 13-year history.
“Notre Dame succeeded at every milestone, exhibiting discipline and a commitment to quality that ultimately ended in a spectacular competition flight,” said retired NASA astronaut Doug Hurley, who announced the win on the Marshall Space Flight Center’s YouTube channel.
Notre Dame was one of 49 universities competing in Student Launch, a nine-month long challenge to design, build, test and launch a high-powered rocket. Notre Dame’s rocket stood 9 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed 43 pounds.
This year, NASA challenged student teams to design and build a payload that simulated the functions of a crew capsule. As required, the Notre Dame payload jettisoned from the rocket on descent, and the device successfully landed its four simulated passengers safely.
From head coach Frank Longman standing on the sidelines in 1909 to halfback and future Heisman winner Johnny Lattner ’54 simulating a head-first “death dive” in 1952 to an aerial view of a packed Notre Dame Stadium at sunset during a 2017 night game, the University Archives is the repository of thousands of images chronicling the history of Notre Dame football.
More than 150 such images are included in Fighting Irish Football: The Notre Dame Tradition in Photographs, a book published in August by Notre Dame Press. The photos were selected and the volume was written by Charles Lamb, a former assistant director and senior archivist for photographic and audiovisual collections at the archives, and Elizabeth Hogan ’99, senior archivist for graphic materials.
The book captures the history of Notre Dame football — and of sports photography — from its beginnings through today, with chapters covering coaches, players, fans, games and venues.
The view of campus soon will look dramatically different at the Notre Dame exit of the Indiana Toll Road.
Buckingham Companies, based in Indianapolis, will build a $180 million housing project — dubbed the Northern Edge — with more than 370 multifamily units, 100 townhomes and some 75 senior-living apartments on University property at the northeast corner of Indiana 933 and Douglas Road.
That parcel is where University Village, Notre Dame’s apartment complex for married and parenting students, stood from 1962 until it was demolished in 2018.
Ground is expected to be broken on Phase 1 — the multifamily apartments — by the end of this year. Completion of the first phase is expected in 2027 and the entire project could be finished by late 2028, Inside Indiana Business reported.
The University suspended the men’s swimming team for at least the 2024-25 academic year after internal and external investigations revealed a widespread gambling issue among student-athletes that violated NCAA rules.
Pete Bevacqua ’93, the James E. Rohr director of athletics, announced the suspension in a written statement, saying the gambling violations were found to be part of “a deeply embedded team culture dismissive of Notre Dame’s standards for student-athletes.”
Bevacqua’s August 15 announcement allowed team members wishing to transfer — including incoming first-year students — to do so before fall classes began. The women’s swim team and both diving teams were unaffected by the disciplinary action.
Head coach Chris Lindauer and his staff were not disciplined. The reviews found that “the staff was not aware of gambling or the scope and extent of other troubling behaviors because team members effectively concealed such behaviors from the coaches and staff through concerted efforts.”
The suspension comes amid the most successful stretch in program history. Notre Dame swimming and diving took 10th place at the 2024 NCAA Championships last March in Indianapolis, its best finish. Senior swimmer and Olympic double-medalist Chris Guiliano is not believed to have participated in the betting ring, according to news reports.
A century ago this fall, the Notre Dame football team — led by the famous Four Horsemen backfield — rode to an undefeated season and a victory at the Rose Bowl to claim a consensus national championship. A few months earlier, Notre Dame students had brawled with members of the Ku Klux Klan on the streets of South Bend. Anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant animosity was rampant.
An exhibit examining that era, “Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924,” is on display through January 31, 2025, in the Rare Books & Special Collections Room of the Hesburgh Library.
The exhibit features photos, correspondence, publications and other artifacts. It tells the story of how Notre Dame, emerging into the national spotlight, capitalized on new technologies, support networks and acceptance by major mainstream American institutions to embrace its new prominence and counter exclusionary politics.
The former South Bend Tribune building, now owned by Notre Dame, is poised to become the University’s Downtown South Bend Tech and Talent Hub. The University recently received a $30 million grant from the Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment to help with the project.
Tribune staff moved out of the 103-year-old building in 2019 to smaller quarters, and the University acquired it in 2023. Once renovated, it will provide space for collaboration with industry on applied research in areas such as data analytics, artificial intelligence and advanced computing. The hub will host community events in the adjacent former newspaper printing facility through a partnership with South Bend City Church, as well as leadership and ethics training programs in collaboration with Holy Cross College.
The project compliments the city’s effort to create a new 20-year development plan for downtown South Bend, which anticipates a variety of mixed-used apartment projects and the construction of a 10-story medical office tower.
The College of Science in July answered a long-standing question: Why do many Notre Dame squirrels have white tails?
“There has been a population of these white-tailed fox squirrels in the nearby neighborhoods and the cemetery for a few years, and it looks like it’s reached campus through interbreeding and gene flow,” Joanna Larson, assistant curator of the University’s Museum of Biodiversity, explained via a College of Science Instagram post.
White tails are a genetic trait that is likely recessive, so a squirrel must receive the white-tail version of the gene from both parents. The pale fur is an example of leucism — an abnormal condition of reduced pigmentation that causes white patches, spots or blotches on skin or fur.
Notre Dame recently bid farewell to one of its most loyal longtime fans: Keith Penrod. Born with cerebral palsy and unable to walk, Penrod was a constant presence at Fighting Irish football, basketball and hockey games and practices from the 1980s through the early 2000s. He died June 17 at age 71.
Penrod graduated from LaVille High School in Lakeville, Indiana, where he earned 10 varsity letters as a student manager for the basketball, football, baseball and track teams.
He got around over the years in a wheelchair and an electric golf cart. Men’s basketball coach Digger Phelps made him a regular member of his squad, inviting him to pregame talks and allowing him to sit next to the bench. “You just saw a spirit in Keith and how he truly loved Notre Dame,” Phelps said in a 2001 interview. “He would come to practice every day, and then you’d see him at night on a busy road in his wheelchair. He was an inspiration for all of us.”
Known around the athletics office as “Notre Dame’s No. 1 fan,” Penrod was awarded an honorary Notre Dame monogram in 2006. His remains were interred in Cedar Grove Cemetery.