At the end of a momentous week for the United States and the University in January 2025, Notre Dame President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, CSC, ’87, celebrated Mass at St. Joseph’s parish in Washington, D.C.
U.S. President Donald Trump had been inaugurated three days earlier, an occasion that fell on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the feast of Blessed Basil Moreau, founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross. That night, Notre Dame would play for a football national championship, too.
Dowd noted each milestone in his homily at the Capitol Hill church where more than 100 people — including members of Congress and congressional staffers — turned out at noon on a Thursday. He appealed to their aspirations to servant leadership, citing the example of Notre Dame’s founder, Rev. Edward Sorin, the French-born priest whom Moreau dispatched to Indiana in 1841. Sorin would become a proud American patriot, throwing annual campus Fourth of July celebrations.
“He wanted Notre Dame to be a university that would promote an appreciation for the hard-won liberty enjoyed in this nation,” Dowd said, “and to be a university that would build bridges toward a more perfect union and the common good.”
That aspiration continues to animate the University, which over the past 25 years has established a permanent foothold in the nation’s capital to advance that mission. Notre Dame’s presence there has several facets.
Since the late 1990s, the College of Arts & Letters’ Washington Program has offered students opportunities for coursework and internships while living in D.C. The Keough School of Global Affairs also hosts initiatives from its office near DuPont Circle, including forums with academic and policy experts, internships and career networking for undergraduates, and an immersion course for graduate students.
The Washington office of the University’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications moved last May from a shared space with Keough to new quarters on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol Hill. That location symbolizes how Notre Dame positions itself in the capital: at the heart of things, open to perspectives from every direction. Such openness across the political spectrum, to say nothing of Sorin’s grand ambitions for his adopted country, may sound quaint or even irrelevant in today’s hyperpolarized Washington. Notre Dame’s federal relations staff orchestrates a sort of shuttle diplomacy between the poles.
Laura Parker McAleer ’98, Notre Dame’s associate vice president for federal and Washington relations since 2019, has prioritized making the office a place for all perspectives to be heard. “It’s not how conservative or liberal you are that’s the challenge right now,” she says. “It’s the fact that people won’t respect and won’t be purposeful in listening to an alternate point of view.”
McAleer’s staff has a name for their efforts to bring multiple points of view into dialogue: “We call it the Noah’s Ark School when we do convenings, to try to host different viewpoints,” she says.
Notre Dame’s senior leadership makes regular visits, demonstrating another form of shuttle diplomacy embodied in brisk walks between meetings at the legislative office buildings flanking the Capitol. Last year, Dowd spent time with more than 70 U.S. senators and representatives.
“I can’t think of another school that engages in as enduring and bipartisan a way as our leadership has,” McAleer says.
Dowd’s predecessors, most famously Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, have likewise had the ear of policymakers and power brokers, a long history of relationships that has helped protect Notre Dame’s interests in the capital. Those connections run even deeper now, with McAleer and her colleagues bringing a wealth of experience in the federal government to their work.
A former U.S. Navy Reserve intelligence officer, McAleer spent two decades as a legislative and executive branch adviser and analyst before taking over at Notre Dame’s Washington office as a staff of one. She replaced John Sturm ’69, who had been the University’s sole permanent representative in D.C. since inaugurating the position in 2012.
Since 2019, the staff has grown to its current eight members — all women, most Notre Dame graduates, each adding their own years of Washington experience. Their professional backgrounds span the political poles, adding credibility to the promise of providing a space for open dialogue across diverse perspectives. As known and trusted colleagues from the corridors of power, the staff members also expand the network of relationships that define Notre Dame’s standing in Washington.
Such personal connections remain the coin of the realm in national politics, a currency reserve that the University has drawn on heavily during a year of unprecedented federal challenges to higher education. Funding for research — a central focus in the Washington office — has been diminished or withdrawn, and new regulations have targeted diversity initiatives, international student visas, even course content. Notre Dame’s reputation in Washington has not insulated it from those policies, but respect for Notre Dame among the political class has been affirmed all along the fast-changing landscape.
“You don’t want to create these relationships at a point of crisis,” McAleer says. “The way we’ve been building trust and relationships in an enduring way, we were as well-positioned as you could be going into this ecosystem that we’re in right now, this turbulence.”
Not everything over the past bumpy year has worked out in Notre Dame’s favor. The federal relations staff advocated for a religious exemption to the endowment tax increase on select universities included in the summer’s budget reconciliation bill. Without such a provision, Notre Dame’s tax burden on its net investment gains could swell from an average of $12 million over the past five years to as much as $100 million annually.
An exemption passed in the House of Representatives, but the Senate parliamentarian excised it from the final legislation that Trump signed in July because it failed to meet the technical criteria for a reconciliation bill. “We didn’t lose over principle,” McAleer says. “This was a process issue.”
An effort to create a religious exemption in standalone legislation continues, led by supporters in Congress who remain committed to the principle. “We were trying to give them a little bit more space before we went back to them,” McAleer says, “and they’ve come to us and have even more energy and resolve than we saw before.”
The complex, often slow-moving political process that shapes the fate of any bill makes the outcome uncertain, but the bipartisan support Notre Dame has cultivated validates the bridge-building Dowd cites among the founding principles of the University. His homily last year in Washington noted the challenges of living up to that standard in a tumultuous political era.
“We know it’s not easy to be a servant leader in today’s world,” he said. “It would be easy to become frustrated and disappointed. We may be tempted to become cynical and self-absorbed.”
Highlighting Sorin’s “Gospel-grounded dream,” Dowd offered a spiritual affirmation of the highest ideals of public service that resonated with many in the pews.
“It was this beautiful convening,” McAleer says. “I had folks afterward say, ‘This is exactly what I didn’t know I needed.’”
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.