The President, the President, the President, and the Plague
Politics and pestilence at everyone's favorite Catholic university
I've spent a lot of time with Notre Dame alumni, and I am one myself, so I'll be the first to say it: sometimes we have an inflated view of the importance and prestige of our university. I am very happy with the education I received there and the friends I made there, certainly, but sometimes we can act like the entirety of Catholicism and the country and the world can turn on what happens at one university in northwest Indiana. And that's just not the case, most of the time.
But every once in a while, it is the case. Take September 26 of this year: that's the day that President Donald Trump caught COVID, a disease that would eventually lead to his hospitalization. He caught the virus after months of mismanaging the raging pandemic in his country, for which he was pilloried by the press and political opponents. And he caught it during the precedent-melting Rose Garden victory lap party to celebrate the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice that will be confirmed a week before a presidential election. The superspreader event led to dozens of infections, mostly of the President's political allies; if it wasn't the dumbest day in American history, it was certainly near the top of the list.
September 26 was also the day that the President of Notre Dame caught COVID, after months of mismanaging the raging pandemic at his university, for which he was pilloried in the press. And he caught it at the same Rose Garden event. The dumbest day in American history and the dumbest day in Notre Dame history were the same day, for exactly the same reason.
In order to understand how we got here, we need to take a look at Notre Dame's president, Holy Cross priest John Jenkins, and how he's handling the biggest, longest controversy of his fifteen-year presidency. This is a guy who has tackled a lot of controversies as president; some have made national news, many have made local news, all have been covered by ND's independent student newspaper The Observer, whose 'Viewpoint' letters-to-the-editor section remains one of the finest national archives of American Catholic outrage. Jenkins announced in May that Notre Dame would be one of the first high-profile universities to open for in-person fall classes during the pandemic, and that decision has blown up in his face multiple times since.
I've been watching this all from a distance, but I happened to be a student during Jenkins' second-biggest, second-longest controversy, when he invited newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama to give the commencement address to my graduating class in 2009. Through a shitshow of protests, arrests, and low-flying aircraft, Jenkins used this controversy to articulate his approach to politics and problem-solving, and 2009 is instructive because Jenkins seems to have taken his 2009 approach to solve 2020's problems. And, as it turns out, a 2009 approach, when applied to 2020 problems, is pretty much worthless.
CHAPTER ONE - FETALMANIA
On March 20, 2009, John Jenkins announced that Barack Obama would be giving the upcoming commencement address; the backlash started the same day and continued, unabated, for two months, driven by Catholics who felt that a prominent Catholic university shouldn’t be giving an honorary degree to a politician supportive of abortion rights. The Observer received a total of 884 Viewpoint letters on the topic in a month, an unprecedented flood of umbrage, statements of support, and snippy responses. Groups purchased billboards along the Indiana toll road. Dozens of different petitions, both in support of and in protest of Jenkins’ decision, bounced around online. Obama was the ninth US president to receive an honorary degree from the university, and the seventh to speak at commencement, and he definitely wasn’t the first Democratic politician with a pro-choice record to speak at the university. But he had just been inaugurated president, he was riding a massive wave of popular support after a landslide election victory, and there was a ton of media attention on his first wave of commencement addresses as president.
The backlash to Obama’s coming to Notre Dame was not uniform; different groups had different responses, and they varied in intensity and civility. There were graduating students who were opposed to Obama coming; most of them organized a group called NDResponse, which hosted prayer services and demonstrations on campus over the next two months. NDResponse also committed to praying one million rosaries “for the conversion of the heart of President Obama”, and eventually counter-programmed a prayer service on the quad for students who wanted to sit out graduation; about 20 of the 2,000 graduating seniors did.
NDResponse’s mission was not to disrupt their classmates’ commencement or convince Jenkins to rescind his invitation to Obama; rather, it was, in the words of one of the student organizers, “to create the dialogue, to challenge people to really think about the issue or issues surrounding the invitation to President Obama.” While I think “issue or issues” is perhaps a stupid thing to say when it’s very obvious what the one issue is that you’re talking about, nobody on campus really had any problems with NDReponse. All of their actions were peaceful, civil, and designed not to disrupt any of the commencement events, and the campus community largely appreciated the group’s commitment to dialogue and debate, as well as their efforts to not be assholes. Jenkins sent a two-page letter to the graduating class shortly before commencement praising the entire student body for handling the debate around Obama so civilly and ”discuss[ing] this issue with each other while being observed, interviewed, and evaluated by people who are interested in this story. You engaged each other with passion, intelligence and respect. And I saw no sign that your differences led to division. You inspire me. We need the wider society to be more like you; it is good that we are sending you into that world on Sunday.” Jenkins’ letter is one of many examples of how much he values civil and honest debate, possibly to a fault. And it was nice to get that letter from him in 2009 praising the student body’s civility, but when you look at the less civil protestors, we weren’t really clearing a very high bar.
For two months, Jenkins and the entire campus community were also besieged by people who had no interest in civil and honest debate, and who were really committed to being assholes. Every day brought more Observer letters from grumpy old alumni, using turns of phrase like “your decision...is a slap in the face to Catholics and pro-life supporters who toil endlessly and donate hard-earned money to fight the pro-abortion movement in this country” or “I have just thrown in the trash four Notre Dame T-shirts, a Notre Dame hat, sweatshirt, and flag…[Obama] has issued an executive order that forces every American to pay for the murder of the unborn of the world [this presumably refers to Obama’s rescinding of the Mexico City Policy, which actually resulted in a net decrease in the number of abortions performed in the relevant countries].” More importantly, every day brought more letters from bishops across the country, 49 of whom took it upon themselves to write letters in to Jenkins denouncing his decision, even though most of them had no relationship to the university whatsoever. My personal favorite is from Thomas Doran, the now-deceased bishop of Rockford: “I would ask that you rescind this unfortunate decision and so avoid dishonoring the practicing Catholics of the United States, including those of this Diocese. Failing that, please have the decency to change the name of the University to something like ‘The Fighting Irish College’ or ‘Northwestern Indiana Humanist University’.” The university did not change its name, presumably because Doran was being an asshole for no good reason, or possibly because we didn’t want to invite confusion with Northwestern University in Evanston.
None of that, though, compares to the most, uh, visually striking responses from the anti-abortion movement's most toxic activists. Former G.O.T.H.S. subject Randall Terry moved up to Indiana, recruited his friend former G.O.T.H.S. subject Alan Keyes, and hired a full-time staff to organize protest activities and planned arrests on campus in the weeks leading up to commencement. A separate but similar group, the Center for Bioethical Reform, organized trucks with graphic billboards of mangled fetal remains to circle around campus for weeks and, most notably, hired a low-flying aircraft to trail a banner of fetal remains while it circled around campus for weeks. In short, the last two months of school were kind of a fucking mess, and this is the only thing anyone was talking about.
Commencement itself, though, actually went pretty smoothly. Remember, this was Obama in May 2009, when everyone, especially young people, thought he was amazing and would fix everything forever. I was thrilled to see him, as was pretty much everyone else in the basketball arena that day. But Obama legitimately almost got upstaged by Jenkins’ speech introducing him. Jenkins - who, as any Notre Dame student will tell you, is not a great public speaker! - gave a rousing and impassioned defense of his decision to invite Obama to speak at the university. The first big applause break came when Jenkins noted that “most of the debate has centered on Notre Dame’s decision to invite and honor the President. Less attention has been focused on the President’s decision to accept.”Jenkins went on, stating forcefully that:
“President Obama has come to Notre Dame, though he knows well that we are fully supportive of Church teaching on the sanctity of human life, and we oppose his policies on abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Others might have avoided this venue for that reason. But President Obama is not someone who stops talking to those who differ with him. Mr. President: This is a principle we share.”
This line also got an applause break; we loved it. We had faith in Notre Dame to engage with the politicians who came to visit us, to spark civil and honest debate where both parties leave changed for the better. And we, this new generation of Americans entering the world, were certainly going to leave changed by the promise that Obama represented, as Jenkins reminded us:
“He has set ambitious goals across a sweeping agenda — extending health care coverage to millions who don’t have it, improving education especially for those who most need it, promoting renewable energy for the sake of our economy, our security, and our climate. He has declared the goal of a world without nuclear weapons and has begun arms reduction talks with the Russians. He has pledged to accelerate America’s fight against poverty, to reform immigration to make it more humane, and to advance America’s merciful work in fighting disease in the poorest places on earth.”
Applause! Obama was definitely going to do all of those things! And Obama’s speech, which of course was well-written and well-delivered, ended up being one of the most important speeches he ever gave during his presidency on abortion policy. And, as he had done in previous speeches and debates on the topic, and like Jenkins in his speech, he emphasized the importance of listening to opposing viewpoints and finding common ground:
“When we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe -- that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground. That’s when we begin to say, "Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this heart-wrenching decision for any woman is not made casually, it has both moral and spiritual dimensions." So let us work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions, let’s reduce unintended pregnancies. Let’s make adoption more available. Let’s provide care and support for women who do carry their children to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded not only in sound science, but also in clear ethics, as well as respect for the equality of women. Those are things we can do.”
That also got multiple applause breaks. Even the student leader of NDResponse, in an interview with the local news, said he thought that the speech was very good in how it handled the issues without explicitly contradicting church teaching. Obviously, Obama couldn’t just stand up and say “I’m right and you’re all wrong on abortion and there shouldn’t be any controversy on that”, he had to thread a rhetorical needle here, and because he’s very good at writing and giving speeches, he was successful:
“Now, understand -- understand, Class of 2009, I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it -- indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory -- the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature. Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words. It’s a way of life that has always been the Notre Dame tradition.”
May 17, 2009 was a very good day to be a graduating senior at Notre Dame. We got to see an exciting new political figure speak directly to us, and inspire us for the new political age to come. And then we got to all go home and see the controversy get covered on The Daily Show the next day.
But let’s take another look at Jenkins’ and Obama’s speeches, with the benefit of all of this hindsight we have in 2020. Jenkins, as he expressed in his letter to the students and his address at commencement, highly values civil debate in the political realm. This was one of the first events that crystallized his views to the larger community, and his love of civil debate would remain obvious as his career went on: he would invite more high-profile politicians from both parties to speak and receive honors from the university, including in 2016 when Joe Biden and John Boehner jointly received the prestigious Laetare Medal, specifically to celebrate bipartisan collaboration in an era where it seemed to be fading away. Notably, Jenkins has not involved Donald Trump to speak as president, although he has invited other members of his administration that, presumably, better represented Jenkins’ ideals of debate and engagement. Jenkins loves debate so much that he’s literally a member of the Commission for Presidential Debates, the body that hosts and governs the general election debate; the first presidential debate was supposed to be at Notre Dame this year, before the pandemic upended those plans.
Who was Jenkins debating in 2009? Well, the most vocal opposition to Jenkins back then came from right-wing anti-abortion activists and bishops. In the years since 2009, these groups have not come around to Jenkins’ way of thinking; even though he welcomed their criticisms, they still have no real interest in what he has to say. Instead, as embodied by new leaders like former G.O.T.H.S. subjects Abby Johnson or John-Henry Westen or Taylor Marshall, the anti-abortion movement has become increasingly unhinged, and has relied more and more on blatant disinformation and open hatred. Abby Johnson wouldn’t be interested in civil debate with Jenkins, she would call him a racial slur on Twitter and openly wish for his death. Taylor Marshall wouldn’t be interested in civil debate with Jenkins, he would declare Jenkins a secret gay Freemason in multiple unwatchable three-hour YouTube videos.
The bishops who disagreed with Jenkins have also not learned anything from the message that Jenkins and Obama delivered in 2009. One critical bishop was former G.OT.H.S. subject Alexander Sample, who, as he stated in 2019, believes that the only thing Catholics should consider as they vote is overturning Roe v Wade. Sample helped vote down updates to the USCCB’s voter guide, and most recently told Catholic Black Lives Matter activists to stop protesting because he found them annoying. Another critical bishop was Timothy Dolan, who, earlier this year, hung out with Donald Trump on a campaign call where Trump declared himself the greatest president in the history of the Catholic Church.
Jenkins continued to reach out to the anti-abortion movement, and the anti-abortion movement continued to ignore him. He also began attending the March for Life in Washington annually, which, in the 2010s, did not become committed to the ideals of finding common ground. Instead, they booked Donald Trump for their 2020 keynote, where he said, very coherently, that “When it comes to abortion, Democrats is a — and you know this, you’ve seen what’s happened — Democrats have embraced the most radical and extreme positions taken and seen in this country for years, and decades — and you can even say “for centuries.”" These people are not interested in debate or common ground. They became less interested in debate and common ground as the 2010s went on. They only care about power, and as nice as Jenkins’ speech felt in 2009, it portends his failure to recognize exactly who his ideological opponents were.
What about Obama? What about all of those things we were excited he was going to do, those promises Jenkins outlined in his speech? Some of them didn’t happen at all, and some of that isn’t Obama’s fault (and some of it definitely is). The good things that Obama did accomplish - expanding Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act, signing a nuclear deal with Iran - were not policy victories that inspired Republicans to find a way to work with him through reasoned debate. Republicans tried to completely repeal the ACA, and when they couldn’t do that legislatively, they took it to the Supreme Court. They tore up the Iran deal as quickly as they could. They certainly never said “well, we disagreed with him on abortion policy, but he tried to handle abortion in the respectful and nuanced way it deserved”; instead, they painted him as a baby killer, urged Christian voters to elect Republicans to reverse the baby killing, and then also may have bought into a conspiracy theory in which Obama was helping run a Satanic child sacrifice ring. Oh, and they elected the man who popularized the racist birther movement as their next president, a man who has no interest in debate or civics, or really anything except his own wealth and power and fame.
So, while Jenkins’ opponents became less interested in “common ground” as the 2010s went on, Obama’s opponents were far worse. John Roberts, John Boehner, Mike Pence, Bill Barr, and Paul Ryan are among the Republican politicians who have received awards or spoken at the university during Jenkins’ tenure as president. Have those men learned valuable lessons about bipartisanship from their time at Jenkins’ Notre Dame? Did John Roberts learn the value in listening to other points of view, or did he go on to gut the Voting Rights Act to make it easier for Republicans to win elections? Is Bill Barr now more receptive to new ideas, or is he sending secret police into Portland to disappear protestors? Has Mike Pence taken his honorary degree and worked towards the common good, or is he still a toady for his fascist president? I don’t fault Obama for starting his presidency without fully realizing how virulent his political opposition would be. But I highlight all of this to show that Jenkins’ and Obama’s speeches are relics of a different time, and if you were to give them in 2020, you shouldn’t be taken seriously in politics.
Still, I really loved both of those speeches when I was a graduating senior in 2009. I really thought respectful, civil, honest debate, debate where we recognized each others’ differences and looked for compromises and common ground, was something we needed to regain, because I thought that was how politics worked, because I was twenty-one and an idiot. The problem is that Jenkins hasn’t outgrown this view, and when he applied it to his next landmark controversy at Notre Dame, it failed miserably. So let’s jump ahead eleven years.
CHAPTER TWO - ABSOLUTE PRIORITIES
The decision to re-open the university for the fall 2020 semester came with thousands of smaller decisions on how everything would run. Notre Dame decided that classes would have to be in-person for graduate and undergraduate students. They decided that certain student activities couldn’t really continue with an infectious respiratory disease going around; for example, there wouldn’t be choirs at the campus masses. Football would be back, but students would be the only ones in the stands, keeping the stadium under 20% capacity. Campus dining became 100% take-out. Everyone on campus would be required to wear masks at all times, distance appropriately in class, and to observe quarantine procedures if directed to isolate. Free testing would be set up for the campus community at Notre Dame Stadium, everyone would be required to submit a test result before returning to campus, and aggregated test results would be posted publicly. Aggressive contact tracing procedures were set up, to the point where seats were assigned and mapped in every section of every in-person class, in order to track every possible instance of exposure to the virus. Grad student apartments got commandeered for quarantine units, because the university fully expected to have at least some cases on campus. They knew it was coming and decided that the risk was worth it, although the disease was so new that nobody, anywhere, was really able to assess that risk fully back in May. As one student noted, this did not fill people with confidence that the university was working with everyone's best interests at heart:
“Recently the University has acknowledged that there will be some cases of COVID-19 this semester. They aren’t preparing for a possible outcome, they’re preparing for an inevitable outcome. Students, faculty and staff are going to be risking their lives this semester; how can they place their trust in this institution that acknowledges by bringing everyone back to campus there will be some cases and potential casualties? How many people have to fall ill or die before our safety becomes important to the university? One? Ten? Fifty? A hundred? How many lives must be lost, or damaged beyond repair, before the University sends everyone back? Is even one life lost an “acceptable” loss? Whose life? Which student, which professor? Whose deaths will the University be responsible for by bringing us back, which lives are less valuable than an in-person environment this semester? My life should matter more than this. My classmates’ lives should matter more than this. The lives of our faculty and staff should matter more than this. Our friends, our families back home should matter more than this.”
To Miguel Hoch, the author of that letter to the student paper, no loss was acceptable, not if it was preventable. Notre Dame's counter-argument, of course, was that they were taking all of these steps to minimize as many of those risks and losses as they could. But, as Hoch noted, Notre Dame had also made critical decisions not to do things as they were preparing for the semester. The university made no adjustments to campus housing; while other universities had forced all-single rooms in order to reduce the risk of outbreaks, Notre Dame - who requires undergraduate students to live on campus for six semesters - kept the dorms at full capacity, which means that in the middle of a global public health crisis, freshmen would be sharing a 9’ x 14’ room with a stranger. Notre Dame also did not accommodate students who wanted to attend class remotely; students who weren’t comfortable returning to campus, for their own health reasons or for potential health risks to their families, would have to take a leave of absence. The university also wasn’t especially forgiving on their leaves of absence - students who did end up taking these leaves of absence, with few exceptions that the university later granted begrudgingly, would have to re-apply to the university. Notre Dame was making everyone wear masks and get tests, but in many ways, they were treating fall 2020 like a regular semester.
So what was the university’s rationale for making this decision on May 18, before anyone had a clear idea of how the pandemic was going? Jenkins spelled everything out in an op-ed for the New York Times titled “We’re Re-Opening Notre Dame. It’s Worth the Risk.”, and I have to imagine that when he wrote the letter, he was not thinking “this is going to get thrown in my face literally thousands of times the second things start going wrong”. He wrote:
“Our decision to return to on-campus classes for the fall semester was guided by three principles that arise from our core university goals. First, we strive to protect the health of our students, faculty, staff and their loved ones. Second, we endeavor to offer an education of the whole person — body, mind and spirit — and we believe that residential life and personal interactions with faculty members and among students are critical to such an education. Finally, we seek to advance human understanding through research, scholarship and creative expression. If we gave the first principle absolute priority, our decision about reopening would be easy. We would keep everyone away until an effective vaccine was universally available.”
Maybe something about that quote isn’t sitting right with you - did Jenkins write that striving “to protect the health of our students, faculty, staff, and their loved ones” was not getting “absolute priority”? Well, yes he did, and this was the explanation he gave:
“However, were we to take that course, we would risk failing to provide the next generation of leaders the education they need and to do the research and scholarship so valuable to our society. How ought these competing risks be weighed? No science, simply as science, can answer that question. It is a moral question in which principles to which we are committed are in tension...We are in our society regularly willing to take on ourselves or impose on others risks — even lethal risks — for the good of society...Notre Dame’s recent announcement about reopening is the attempt to find the courageous mean as we face the threat of the virus and seek to continue our mission of education and inquiry.”
A more cynical observer might think that Notre Dame was just rushing to open the university up to collect room and board fees at a university where students are required to live on campus for six semesters. An even more cynical observer would note that there's even more money to be made in the university's television contract for the upcoming football season, which couldn't proceed unless students came back to campus. But Jenkins is a man who values getting everyone in a room together to debate and find common ground, and you can’t do that if you’re afraid to literally get in a room with other people. As he put it, this was really about the university's courage and its moral obligation to be there for its students, in person.
Now, providing education to “the next generation of leaders” is an important moral question, absolutely. But, when facing a global virus that, at this point, was only six months old, with countless unknowns, including on its long-term impact to the body, a moral question like “how do we minimize our chances of killing off the next generation of leaders?” should have perhaps taken higher priority. And it took less than two weeks for everything to play out.
Ten days before classes began, the app that students were supposed to use daily to track their symptoms crashed due to high traffic. Jenkins fucked up four days before classes even began, when he took photos with students on campus (outdoors) without masking up or observing the distancing measures that he said were required. He apologized right away. On August 7th, three days before class began, the first positive test was reported on campus. Take a look at the chart below where the green line represents the running total of COVID cases at the university - the chart uses school colors because if Notre Dame is anything, it's good at branding - and see if you can spot where things went south:
On August 17th - seven calendar days after classes started - total cases were at 58. Overnight, there were 80 more positive tests, bringing the overall positive test rate to a nightmare-level 19%. While the university had plans to quarantine students and trace cases, their infrastructure was never meant to handle this many cases at once, and everything got overwhelmed very quickly. Students in quarantine rooms didn’t get any food and had to order their own on Doordash. Students who were worried about exposure called the campus COVID hotline and got no response. Dozens of cases were added each day afterwards, and the university made the decision to switch all classes to remote-only for two weeks and give the entire campus, essentially, a “shelter in place” order to help flatten the curve. Security guards were posted at the quarantine apartments to keep people from leaving. An online form was set up so students could snitch on their classmates and turn them in for suspension or possible expulsion for not masking up or appropriately distancing.
As I said, a cynic might have read the reopening plan as a gamble to collect the rooming and football revenue, while Jenkins would argue that the plan was to satisfy the moral obligation to educate students in person. Well, in-person education got suspended while football practice continued and the university kept collecting checks, all while cases kept ticking up. Perhaps that reveals something about Notre Dame’s real priorities. Regardless of what those priorities were, the university quickly became a cautionary tale across higher education. As the editorial staff at the National Catholic Reporter put it:
“After promising that the university would ‘institute extensive protocols for testing; contact tracing and quarantining,’ Jenkins said: ‘We believe the good of educating students and continuing vital research is very much worth the remaining risk.’ Inherent at the heart of the strategy was a gamble, with the highest of stakes. As we said a few weeks ago, Catholic schools should be modeling pro-life values that put people's health, safety and lives first as they discuss whether and how to reopen. While we do not pretend to have all the answers for how institutions of higher learning should act in this unprecedented time, especially when financial challenges may threaten some schools' very existence, we continue to worry about putting teachers, staff and students on the pandemic's front lines. The some 260 Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S might well look at Notre Dame's example, along with the others now re-closing their campuses, and proceed with due caution.”
Against all odds, the shelter-in-place approach seemed to work; the university is back to a seven-day average 2% positive rate, as overall testing has shot up, surveillance testing finally started at scale, and students began observing pandemic protocols more strictly. In a video address to the student body, Jenkins called it “one of the great Notre Dame comebacks in history.”.
How did the outbreak happen, and whose fault was it? Tracers tied the sudden burst in cases back to two off-campus parties the first weekend of the year, which, like most college parties, involved students drinking and being stupid, as opposed to appropriately distancing or wearing masks. So, maybe it’s the students’ fault for being stupid and treating this year at Notre Dame like any other year, as opposed to treating it like a plague year.
But maybe the students were treating this year at Notre Dame like any other year because Notre Dame told them they had to come back to campus, just like any other year. They had to go to class in-person, just like any other year. They had to live in a full capacity dorm, just like any other year. Surveillance testing of asymptomatic students hadn't yet scaled up so most students weren't getting tested at all, just like any other year. And they had to pay full room and board, just like any other year. Maybe if students weren't treating this like a plague year, they were just following the lead of John Jenkins and the university administration. Stephanie McKay, an alumna and public health professional, wrote in to the Observer the next day, and while she provided plenty of data and citations to show why re-opening a university at full capacity was an insane idea in the middle of a pandemic, she saved most of her moral outrage for the end of the letter:
“I am indignant and upset on behalf of all students, staff and the broader South Bend community. These students must suffer due to the myopic planning and greed of the Notre Dame administration who seemed to care nothing more than to line the coffers of the University under the false pretenses of perpetuating a religious education. Indeed, the veneer of Catholic Social Teaching that Father Jenkins has used to justify the decision to reopen – the call for students to sacrifice, to accept “even lethal risks — for the good of society” is perhaps the most shameful aspect of this whole situation.In May, Father Jenkins said that “science [alone] cannot provide the answer” of whether to reopen. But science provides the vocabulary we use to describe reality. And the reality is that in the context of asymptomatic spread and exponential growth, the University’s plan is inadequate. Cases will continue to rise, and contra the invocation of Catholic Social Teaching, the most vulnerable in the community will be the ones who disproportionately suffer. One can only hope that the University repents for its sins and does what is right.”
Harsh words, but that’s just one alum, writing in to the student paper. However, the editorial staff of that same paper did not pull punches on August 21:
“The University administration has largely blamed the COVID-19 outbreak on students attending off-campus parties. While this isn’t entirely misplaced, it has been used to deflect responsibility from the very administrations that insisted they were prepared for us to return to campus. Clearly, they were not. Flaws in testing, contact tracing and isolation and quarantine accommodations have since proven inefficient. At Notre Dame, the almost two-week gap between the return to campus and the implementation of surveillance testing, scheduled to begin today, represents a gross oversight on the part of the administration and has put the health and safety of the tri-campus and South Bend communities in serious danger. Experts warned this was likely, but University President Fr. John Jenkins insisted it was worth the risk.”
As always, the most important moral questions I can ask are “who had the power to change something?” and “did they?”. The university leadership, beginning with the president, had the power to prevent absolutely all of this. They chose not to, and they chose to risk the lives of these students, because - as they wrote in a national publication that is online forever and you can Google it in five seconds! - there were other things more important to them than student safety. There are students who deserve some blame for not taking things seriously enough early on, but there are far more powerful people to blame for letting things get to this point to begin with.
Still, everyone sheltered in place, the case load went down, students came out of quarantine, in-person class eventually resumed, the football team beat Florida State, and the positive test rate remains relatively low at Notre Dame today. Students stopped partying off campus, they stood far apart in the stadium, everyone had learned their lesson. Well, everyone had learned their lesson except for one person, and unfortunately, the one person was John Jenkins.
CHAPTER THREE - PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE RAGE AND GRIM RESIGNATION
Notre Dame is still, if not absolutely locked down, in a state of perpetual heightened alert. The number of students allowed to congregate at the same time keeps getting adjusted based on the testing rate. Students are being threatened with suspension or expulsion if someone else snitch-tags them for not wearing a mask. Visitors to dorms, even if they are other on-campus students, are restricted based on testing. Leaving or entering the relatively insular campus gets you a ton of extra scrutiny. These could all very well be the steps needed to slow the spread of the virus, but they make for a challenging and often frustrating semester, and they - understandably - led to some pretty intense backlash when Jenkins was caught, on an out-of-state trip, failing to social distance or wear a mask.
So, that website the university set up to report classmates who weren't masking up or distancing? Well, it really blew up after this photo surfaced of Jenkins (center, priest collar), the guy who, again, told all his students not to leave campus and not to get too close to people and not to go maskless; it didn't help that all of this happened the same day that ND was supposed to play a football game, but couldn't, because of the high case count on the team. In the photo, Jenkins is even sitting next to someone - G. Marcus Cole, the dean of Notre Dame's law school - who's wearing a fucking mask! So it’s not like it slipped his mind!
This boiled over pretty quickly. Students put together a petition calling for Jenkins' resignation, which didn't really go anywhere once it reached the student government. More importantly, Jenkins survived a no-confidence motion from his faculty senate by only one vote. There was a great deal of emotion around Jenkins' perceived hypocrisy, best summed up by this Observer staff editorial titled "Frankly, this is Embarrassing":
"Jenkins’ actions should be considered nothing less than hypocritical. Notre Dame students are prohibited from gathering in large groups or removing their masks in public regardless of their surveillance test results. Students, faculty and staff are also discouraged from leaving campus or gathering in large groups off-campus, which is exactly what Jenkins did Saturday in D.C...Jenkins leaving South Bend to flagrantly disobey his own rules while the community he is supposed to lead is suffering creates a sense of separation between himself and everyone else. A “do as I say, not as I do” mentality is not one a University president should have in a time of crisis. As students begin to feel the unprecedented emotional and mental strain of a semester with no break and faculty continue to make sacrifices by remaining in one place, Jenkins’ jaunt to D.C. becomes all the more frustrating."
The explanation from Jenkins wasn't great, as he initially didn't really apologize, but expressed some regret and embarrassment for being caught, and tried to justify his actions by saying he had received a negative rapid antigen test upon entering the venue; as we’ll see in a minute, the test, known for its low accuracy rate, was very obviously returning false negatives. Incredibly, as the story grew and made national news, Jenkins and his colleagues tried out this absolutely boneheaded explanation with the New York Times: "The decision not to wear a mask...stemmed not from politics but from a desire to politely blend in, as a guest at a cocktail party might remove a tie upon realizing everyone else was dressed in business casual."
Fellas, you ever wear a mask during a global pandemic and notice that other people aren't and figure you must have just imagined the whole pandemic thing? That sentence - written by academics who are supposed to be smart - is maybe the dumbest shit I've ever read for any G.O.T.H.S. piece, and I had to read Taylor Marshall's YA novel about dragons.
Anyways, we all know where this is going: Jenkins fucking caught COVID. It doesn’t seem like his case was especially sever, and he appears to have made a full recovery, but he was still the main character in a national story about a university president who forced his school to open too early, who oversaw a horrifying on his campus, who had to crack down on travel and student gatherings, and who couldn't follow his own rules and ended up catching COVID. Sports Illustrated was kind enough to give the school an innovative new honor:
“For Notre Dame fans waiting for decades for the school to get back to No. 1, we have an exciting update. Go ahead and wake up the echoes, because the Fighting Irish finally made it this week. They are the national leader in COVID-19 angst...The school has gone to extraordinary lengths to play football this season...When a general student outbreak in August led Jenkins to shut down all in-person classes for two weeks and stop on-campus extracurricular activities, football kept going after a brief pause. When the football spike dovetailed with Jenkins’ maskless White House junket, Touchdown Jesus should have changed his pose to a surrender cobra.”
Number one baybee! Light up the big #1 sign on the top of Grace Hall! Another Observer staff editorial tried to convey the passive-aggressive rage and grim resignation of the campus community:
"To students, we want to emphasize that our own actions shouldn’t have to reflect the problematic and even embarrassing actions of some of our leaders. The semester is only halfway over, and while our reputation as a university is currently in the mud, we can mount “one of the great comebacks in Notre Dame history” by simply getting by — no more and no less. Finishing this semester itself would be an incredible accomplishment, and to do so we need to continue what we’ve been doing regardless of poor examples set by some leadership."
This is where it's gotten to: the students telling each other to just grind it out, literally get through the semester alive and count it as a win, while their president very publicly is an idiot. And also, while Jenkins' own COVID case was the pickle on the giant crap sandwich that he put Notre Dame through this semester, I haven't yet gotten into the actual event where he caught the virus.
CHAPTER FOUR - FETALMANIA, AGAIN
Jenkins didn’t just catch COVID at a bar, he was at the now-infamous superspreader event in the White House Rose Garden where Donald Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett as the first-ever G.O.T.H.S. subject to be nominated to the Supreme Court. Republicans were there because they were thrilled to get another Federalist Society member on the Court, and social conservatives were there because they were thrilled to get another person on the court that wants to overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s obvious why Jenkins was there: Barrett’s still on the faculty at Notre Dame’s law school, and it honestly would have been weird if Jenkins didn’t attend. But that doesn’t change the fact that Jenkins, whose whole political playbook is finding common ground with all parties, appeared to be happily attending a naked and precedent-shattering power grab as Republicans rushed to jam another justice onto the court the literal week before a presidential election.
Now, the reaction to Barrett’s nomination from the Notre Dame faculty was certainly mixed. As one professor put it in an open letter that ran in the Observer:
“I respectfully request that you withdraw your nomination to be a U.S. Supreme Court judge...Unfortunately, though you are qualified and admired by many, your nomination has increased and not decreased divisions at this critical moment in our nation’s history. I am therefore asking you to voluntarily withdraw. I recognize that this is a difficult decision for you to make, but I am confident that you will make the right choice given that you, like us, are seeing how your nomination is being used for partisan political purposes and is creating more divisions. While we all have our own views on the upcoming election, we have seen how President Donald Trump has used your nomination and associated Notre Dame with your nomination during a debate in which he displayed in some of the strongest ways his intolerance, prejudice and authoritarian tendencies. We know that you do not want to be associated with these traits, and we suspect that you, like us, are upset that you are being used in this fashion.”
An even more high-profile open letter, signed by 88 Notre Dame professors, ran in the blog Teacher-Scholar-Activist:
“Your nomination comes at a treacherous moment in the United States. Our politics are consumed by polarization, mistrust, and fevered conspiracy theories. Our country is shaken by pandemic and economic suffering. There is violence in the streets of American cities. The politics of your nomination, as you surely understand, will further inflame our civic wounds, undermine confidence in the court, and deepen the divide among ordinary citizens, especially if you are seated by a Republican Senate weeks before the election of a Democratic president and congress. You have the opportunity to offer an alternative to all that by demanding that your nomination be suspended until after the election. We implore you to take that step. We’re asking a lot, we know. Should Vice-President Biden be elected, your seat on the court will almost certainly be lost. That would be painful, surely. Yet there is much to be gained in risking your seat. You would earn the respect of fair-minded people everywhere. You would provide a model of civic selflessness. And you might well inspire Americans of different beliefs toward a renewed commitment to the common good.”
As of this writing, Barrett has not decided to withdraw her nomination, does not appear interested in being a “model of civic selflessness”, and by the time you read this, she might be on the Court already. The arguments above are certainly valid, and they don’t even get into the horrifying things that Barrett has already written as a professor and circuit court judge. As another alum put it in the Observer:
“There was a smiling Jenkins in the Rose Garden, giving the imprimatur of the University to the nomination of a judge who, by her own admission, would do away with the Affordable Care Act, reasonable restrictions on the sale of military-style weapons designed solely to kill human beings and protections for immigrants and those who seek asylum...why fly to Washington and attend what was effectively a GOP campaign event, giving the unmistakable impression that the University wholeheartedly endorses this judge’s nomination and views? And now that Jenkins has returned to campus with the virus, his presence and irresponsible behavior is national news, bringing further embarrassment to Notre Dame.”
To be fair, Jenkins is kind of in a no-win situation: a Notre Dame law school graduate and professor sitting on the Supreme Court is an unprecedented accomplishment and honor for the university, and an incredible achievement for someone who values political engagement as much as Jenkins does. But that professor is also a far-right ideologue who appears to possess nothing resembling human empathy, based on her writing and judicial decisions; her nomination, by a president that I’m pretty sure Jenkins doesn’t like, represents the height of political cynicism and anti-democratic power that Jenkins sincerely opposes. It feels almost Shakespearean that Jenkins would end up in this situation, and I would love to know more about his thought process through all of this, but it’s all been overshadowed by him being such a huge fucking idiot that he didn’t wear a mask at a superspreader event, caught COVID at the same event that ended up hospitalizing Donald Trump, and once again drew national attention to the shitty handling of the pandemic at his university. Since the White House did not do contact tracing for the Rose Garden event, we don’t know if Jenkins caught COVID there or brought it with him and spread it to others, and the most likely scenario is that there were multiple carriers at the event anyways. But I like to imagine that Jenkins’ dedication to political engagement, in the extremely fucked year of 2020, inevitably led to him removing his mask out of "a desire to politely blend in" and catching a dangerous disease from the literal President of the United States.
EPILOGUE
Why did the last few months at Notre Dame happen the way that they did? Well, I think it’s helpful to go back to 2009 Jenkins, a man who did not “stop talking to those who differ from him”. Jenkins tries to solve problems by getting in the same room with the people who disagree with him - from the people who think his decisions as university president are misguided to the people who think he’s actively working to destroy Catholicism - hearing them out, and finding common ground to build compromise solutions. Jenkins has taken meaningful steps towards the Catholics and politicians who disagree with him, to foster debate and constructive solutions. The response from those Catholics and politicians was to throw a party celebrating their forcing another lifetime justice on the Supreme Court, which turned into a superspreader event because they couldn’t be bothered to care about a virus that killed hundreds of thousands that, as the President of the United States noted in a press conference, lived “mostly in blue states”.
Jenkins’ approach to problem solving may sound nice to him, but the people he’s trying to work with certainly don’t give a shit about it. And while I can forgive him for thinking that he was on to something in 2009 - Barack Obama thought it as well, and I certainly thought it - there’s no real reason to keep thinking this way in 2020. Because Jenkins has also taken his “common ground” approach with the one party even less likely to adopt it than anti-abortion activists or Republicans: an infectious respiratory disease. I don’t think Jenkins re-opened the university because he was trying to hurt anyone, and I don’t think he was motivated by greed, although I’m sure he was under tremendous pressure to keep the football and tuition checks coming in. I honestly think he thought he could get along with the virus. Not literally, of course, but in the sense that if everyone at Notre Dame just acknowledged the virus and respectfully recognized its differences, his students could find a way to co-exist with it. And the virus didn’t share that point of view, because it is a virus, and because, as he did with politics, Jenkins chose an idealistic approach and didn’t fully recognize who his opponent was.
Unlike most G.O.T.H.S. subjects, John Jenkins is not a villain. I liked the guy when I was a student there, and I don't dislike him now. I don't think he's a secret Trump fan, and I don't think he acted maliciously, but he fucked up badly, and I think it’s because he tried to apply a 2009 solution to a 2020 crisis. He still subscribes to a politics that absolutely does not work in today's world and that cannot adequately address the urgent and interlocking crises we face in this country. He pre-supposes that everyone in the political realm truly wants what’s best for the country, and is not working to hoard their own wealth and power as the underclass around them dies off. So more than anything, Jenkins seems naive for a man with his level of access and power, and I suppose that isn’t a mortal sin. His tendency to seek “common ground” can be admirable in academia, and it can be admirable in the priesthood, but when you get engaged with politics, when you work with people and decisions that can cause the masses to bleed and starve and die, and your opponents are perfectly happy to let the masses bleed and starve and die, you damn sure better want something more than meeting in the middle. Because if that’s all you look for, you’re going to pay a real cost.
Here is that cost: I'm writing this epilogue on October 19. Notre Dame’s fall semester lasts from August 10 to November 20, so we are only about ⅔ through it right now. As of today, there were 912 COVID cases during Notre Dame's fall 2020 semester. 816 of those cases were undergraduates, representing over ten percent of the 8,000 total undergraduate students, who were charged tuition and room and board for the privilege of living in a golden-domed plague tent. The large majority of these cases are listed as "recovered". Maybe in a year, they will have no lasting or chronic health problems whatsoever, maybe their lungs won’t be scarred or their brains won’t be fogged or their hearts won’t be weakened. But I don't know, because nobody, ever, has been a COVID patient, or a COVID survivor, for that long; the virus is just too new. The Notre Dame community, of which I was once part, suffered countless unnecessary hardships because of multiple failures of leadership. This could all be behind them, or it could get unimaginably worse. No one knows. Jenkins, for his part, has scheduled the start of the spring semester for February 3rd.
Grift of the Holy Spirit is a series by Tony Ginocchio detailing stories of the weirdest, dumbest, and saddest members of the Catholic church. You can subscribe via Substack to get notified of future installments.
Sources used for this piece include:
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