We write to express our disagreement and dissatisfaction with your Feb. 7, 2025, editorial, "Invite Trump to Speak at Commencement." By way of introduction, we are an ad hoc group of graduates from the class of 1968, all of whom majored in the general program of liberal studies or PLS, as was known in our day. We have been meeting regularly by Zoom every Thursday evening since the beginning of COVID, and our backgrounds are quite diverse including lawyers, a physician, businessmen, artists, a school teacher, union organizer, a broadcaster and a USDA Forest Service manager. We are as diverse nationally as are our career paths since Notre Dame. We now live in California, Oregon, Idaho, Illinois, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, New York and New Jersey. Our ranks include Vietnam veterans, conscientious objectors, as well as war and draft resistors.
Two things we still share in common, however, are our deep affection for Notre Dame and a mutual commitment to the pursuit of truth and integrity instilled in us by the Great Books Seminars and the wonderful professors we were fortunate to have learned from in our days at Notre Dame.
As such, we feel compelled to speak out about what we perceive as the wrongheadedness of your editorial. While we agree with many of its sentiments, we fear you have confused the issues. First and foremost, commencement speeches are not debates, policy statements or personal aggrandizements. The selection of the speaker and the awarding of an honorary Notre Dame degree should reflect the values of the University and the message it desires to charge its graduates. An invitation to a commencement speaker is not an issue of academic freedom, as if the University were denying campus access to a speaker with whom it disagrees. If this were the case we could not agree more with your position, and the lawyers among us would be the first to come to the aid of the speaker's defense. President Trump can very well come to campus in our opinion if he has something to say, but he should not be invited to be the speaker at commencement.
We believe Fr. Jenkins got it quite right in refusing to invite President Trump in 2017 on the grounds of “moral decency” and that Mr. Trump's behavior since then reinforces that conclusion in spades. Space does not permit us, nor is it necessary, to list the various publicly known facts in support of that proposition. But to address your editorial's correct concern about Notre Dame's commitment to the civic fabric of the nation, we would stress to you instead that the civic fabric of the nation is built largely upon respect for the rule of law, something Mr. Trump continually and flagrantly flouts. Not only has Mr. Trump continued his lack of moral decency, but more importantly he has repudiated every ounce of respect and concern for the rule of law — something far more serious to the civic fabric of our constitutional republic than individual morality. Your attempt to maneuver your editorial around Fr. Jenkins' sound reasoning by saying Mr. Trump was "an anomaly" in 2017, but is not now after "a decisive victory" this time around is, respectfully, inaccurate and disingenuous. 49% of the electorate is hardly a landslide.
Finally, the Editorial Board also relies on a distorted notion of tradition when it contends an invitation to Trump is compelled by a "storied tradition that has exemplified commitment to our civic duty." The practice of inviting a newly elected president to our commencement has hardly been routine over the last sixty years, with several presidents never being invited. We urge the Board to recognize there is no "civic duty" to invite Trump, and that the current administration, just like Fr. Jenkins, should not provide a platform for someone who continues to demonstrate that he has no personal commitment to truth, the rule of law or the same civic duty as Notre Dame.
"God, Country, Notre Dame" was intended to memorialize the Notre Dame students who died in World War I. Those 56 Notre Dame veterans lying in Flanders' Fields deserve better.
Thomas A. Durkin
class of 1968
Richard Havel
class of 1968
James Chapman
class of 1968
Paul Higgins
class of 1968
Stephen Weeg
class of 1968
Thomas Fitzharris
class of 1968
Thomas Gogan
class of 1968
Richard Faherty
Clifton, New Jersey
James Schaefer
class of 1968
Daniel Doyle
class of 1968
Ned Buchbinder
class of 1968
Tim Andrews
class of 1968
Joseph (Jay) A. Schwartz III
class of 1968
Michael McCullough
class of 1968
Mar. 2
