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The University of Notre Dame du Lac (or simply Notre Dame /ˌnoʊtərˈdeɪm/ noh-tər-daym) is a Catholic research university located near South Bend, Indiana, in the United States. In French, Notre Dame du Lac means "Our Lady of the Lake" and refers to the university's patron saint, the Virgin Mary.
The school was founded by Father Edward Sorin, CSC, who was also its first president. Today, many Holy Cross priests continue to work for the university, including as its president. It was established as an all-male institution on November 26, 1842, on land donated by the Bishop of Vincennes. The university first enrolled women undergraduates in 1972. As of 2013 about 48 percent of the student body was female. Notre Dame's Catholic character is reflected in its explicit commitment to the Catholic faith, numerous ministries funded by the school, and the architecture around campus.
The university today is organized into five colleges and one professional school, and its graduate program has 15 master's and 26 doctoral degree programs. Over 80% of the university's 8,000 undergraduates live on campus in one of 29 single-sex residence halls, each of which fields teams for more than a dozen intramural sports, and the university counts approximately 120,000 alumni.
The university is globally recognized for its Notre Dame School of Architecture, a faculty that teaches (pre-modernist) traditional and classical architecture and urban planning (e.g. following the principles of New Urbanism and New Classical Architecture). It also awards the renowned annual Driehaus Architecture Prize.
The university's athletic teams are members of the NCAA Division I and are known collectively as the Fighting Irish. The football team, an Independent, has accumulated eleven consensus national championships, seven Heisman Trophy winners, and 62 members in the College Football Hall of Fame. Other ND teams, chiefly in the Atlantic Coast Conference, have accumulated 16 national championships.
The first degrees from the college were awarded in 1849. The university was expanded with new buildings to accommodate more students and faculty. With each new president, new academic programs were offered and new buildings built to accommodate them. The original Main Building built by Sorin just after he arrived was replaced by a larger "Main Building" in 1865, which housed the university's administration, classrooms, and dormitories. Beginning in 1873, a library collection was started by Father Lemonnier. By 1879 it had grown to ten thousand volumes that were housed in the Main Building.
This Main Building, and the library collection, was destroyed by a fire in April 1879, and rebuilt before the next school year. The library collection was also rebuilt and stayed housed in the new Main Building for years afterwards. Around the time of the fire, a Music Hall was opened. Eventually becoming known as Washington Hall, it hosted plays and musical acts put on by the school. By 1880, a science program was established at the university, and a Science Hall was built in 1883. The hall housed multiple classrooms and science labs needed for early research at the university. By 1890, individual residence halls were built to house the increasing number of students. William J. Hoynes (1846–1919) was dean of the law school 1883-1919, and when its new building was opened shortly after his death it was renamed in his honor.
John Zahm C.S.C. (1851–1921) became the Holy Cross Provincial for the United States (1896–1906), with overall supervision of the university. He tried to transform Notre Dame into a great university, erecting buildings and added to the campus art gallery and library, and amassing what became a famous Dante collection. His term was not renewed because of fears he had expanded Notre Dame too quickly and had run the Holy Cross order into serious debt.
In 1919 Father James Burns became president of Notre Dame, and in three years he produced an academic revolution that brought the school up to national standards by adopting the elective system and starting the abandonment of the traditional scholastic and classical emphasis. By contrast, the Jesuit colleges, bastions of academic conservatism, were reluctant to move to a system of electives. Their graduates were shut out of Harvard Law School for that reason