Leftist students at the University of Notre Dame titling their group “End Hate at ND” put forth a list of radical demands including the reduction of reading materials produced by whites as well as the end of the university policy barring students of the opposite sex to enter the living areas of all-female or all-male residence halls after midnight on weekdays and 2:00 a.m. on weekends.
As Ellie Gardey reported for The College Fix, the list of demands had paragraphs attacking the reading of white scholars and the policy known as “parietals,” which forbids the mixing of sexes late at night. One paragraph read:
Decolonize Academia: Cultural competence is key in building empathy for marginalized folks. No course or program of study should have a view limited to white, western, and/or male voices. We demand that people who are of Color, Indigenous, Black, queer or not male are represented in the authorship of at least half course and major required readings. Diversifying the canon helps eliminate the violence of only privileging white scholarship.
Another paragraph read:
Parietals effectively erase the presence of queer folks on Notre Dame’s campus. They help enforce heteronormativity and gender norms that propagate homophobia in the form of microaggressions, slurs, and a spirit of exclusion.
As Gardey noted, the group describes itself as “an initiative for organizing civil action against racist, xenophobic, sexist, trans-exclusionary, & queer-phobic structures at Notre Dame.”
The Observer reported that roughly 30 protesters gathered in Stanford Hall from 2 a.m. to approximately 5 a.m. partially to target the parietal policy. After NDPD officers arrived on the scene and asked the students to relocate to a 24-hour space, 20 protesters left, but the rest remained until after 4 a.m., when they finally dispersed.
The protesters held another protest on November 21. Gardey wrote, “One protester stood on a bench adjacent to the sculpture and read from the Communist Manifesto. Other students who do not agree with their peers’ demands to end parietals prayed the rosary 50 yards away for Notre Dame’s Catholic identity.”
Gardey reported that one of the members of the protest group, Anne Jarrett, who has served as the director of gender relations in student government, had posted on social media in March 2019: “The only thing this has taught me is that men are gross and they don’t deserve opinions and I categorically do not want to f*** them.” She also posted, “Catholic marriage isn’t about love, it was conceived to make licit the illicit act of sex for the purpose of procreation (evangelization) and that’s why concepts like martial debt and all acts which do not end in intravaginal ejaculation are sins aren’t surprising.”
Last January, the University of Notre Dame decided to cover murals on the wall of the Main Building, including the image of Christopher Columbus, after hundreds of students, employees and Notre Dame alumni wrote a letter to the campus newspaper that read:
It is time for the murals to go. The 12 Luigi Gregori murals have adorned the main hall of Main Building for over 130 years, greeting millions of campus residents and visitors with a highly problematic vision of Western triumphalism, Catholic militarism and an overly romantic notion of American expansion. Christopher Columbus, as admitted by the University published pamphlet and widely acknowledged by modern scholarship, was an owner and distributor of humans as slaves. Columbus’ fortune, fame and wealth came from the destruction, mutilation and transaction of Native American and African persons.
First, to any Native American student, staff member, faculty member or visitor who enters Main Building, the murals offer the most debasing form of insult … Second, to any student, staff, faculty or guest who identifies with an historically oppressed group, the presence of the murals in 21st century America mocks every attempt to make campus more inclusive, more diverse and more culturally sensitive … Third, art history is replete with racial biases and problematic tensions. Such tensions belong in museums where they can be studied, not alongside Notre Dame’s most honored award recipients and former presidents … Fourth, and finally, the theological message of the murals is one the University should utterly disavow and repudiate.