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VOLUME 59, ISSUE 57 | FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2025 | NDSMCOBSERVER.COM
Mass held for Fr. Hesburgh Fr. Monk Malloy presided over the 10th anniversary Mass
Forbes names ND ‘Best Large Employer’
By AVABELLA MITRANO By ISABEL TORRES
News Writer
The University held a Mass on Wednesday to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the passing of former University President Fr. Theodore M. Hesburgh. Fr. Edward Malloy, Hesburgh’s successor, celebrated the Mass. Malloy began with a story detailing Hesburgh’s final moments, describing Hesburgh as a man committed to prayer life, as he went to Mass every day except the day before his death. “[Hesburgh] said Mass won’t be necessary because [he’s] going to die tomorrow … when I went to go chat with him, he said, ‘I’m thinking about eternity, and that I’m ready,’” Malloy said. At Hesburgh’s funeral, students lined up on a very cold day to watch Hesburgh be driven from the Basilica of the Sacred Heart to Holy Cross Cemetery. There were
News Writer
AVABELLA MITRANO | The Observer
Fr. Monk Malloy presides over the commemorative Mass for Fr.Theodore M. Hesburgh, detailing Hesburgh’s work for civil rights and Notre Dame.
a multitude of speakers, Malloy said. “It was a powerful impression of the energy of that day … I think there were many elements in Ted’s history that helped explain how he became a wonderful
leader,” Malloy said. Malloy explained that Hesburgh had a very strong Catholic family and was originally from Syracuse, New York. see HESBURGH PAGE 4
New Yorker journalist speaks on immigration By BRIGID IANNELLI News Writer
Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis,” which details the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded at the U.S.-Mexico border, spoke Wednesday at the Hesburgh Center for International Studies. The lecture, titled “Getting Beyond the Border: How Immigration Became a Political Crisis,” was hosted by Notre Dame’s Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights. Mary Gallagher, the Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs, introduced Blitzer. “Migration, with its implications for human dignity and human development, is an important theme at the Keough School,” Gallagher said. “It’s also an issue that’s critical for us as students, scholars and citizens.” Blitzer began his lecture with
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an anecdote, detailing an urgent phone call that Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, received from a top deputy in Customs and Border Protection during the spring of 2014. The deputy claimed that the situation in South Texas was out of control, as many families were arriving in droves from Central America. “All of them were seeking asylum, which was their legal right, and something the government, by law, had to take seriously. These people were in dire need,” Blitzer said. Johnson and his wife quickly traveled to McAllen, Texas to visit border patrol stations and temporary detention facilities. “What they found shocked them ... children were everywhere,” Blitzer said. Johnson then placed a call to the White House, saying, in an intentionally matter-of-fact tone that Blitzer noted, that the situation was “too big to downplay.” “In Washington, the bottom
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line was always the same: What were the optics?” Blitzer said. “In short, how do we keep the border from instantly dominating our politics?” Framing his lecture through the life of Cecilia Muñoz, who was on the receiving end of Johnson’s phone call, Blitzer then gave a comprehensive political history of immigration policy in the United States. He began with the mid-1980s, when Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which legalized nearly three million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. He then described how, in the 1990s, Bill Clinton cut public services for green card holders and intensified enforcement operations against immigrants living in the U.S., comparing it to the Trump administration’s recent policies on immigration. “That political moment was a lot like the current one,” he said. see JOURNALIST PAGE 4
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The University of Notre Dame was recently named America’s Best Large Employer of 2025 by business magazine Forbes. To qualif y for the award, employers had to have at least 5,000 employees. Forbes’ assessment included a range of employee survey questions, including one that asked employees how likely they would be to recommend their employer to individuals looking for job opportunities. To determine their winner, Forbes surveyed employees from a variety of companies and institutions across the United States. Through their surveys, they found that Notre Dame consistently
ranked highly in areas of work environment, opportunities for advancement, training opportunities and salaries. Angela Hubbard, who has been a building services custodian at the University for 34 years, highlighted Notre Dame’s improvements in openness to feedback. “They made it better by letting us speak up and listening to what the employees had to say,” Hubbard said. “They try to do more things for us now.” She maintained that the University’s initiatives to incorporate every employee into large-scale improvements were well received by employees. In her time working at see FORBES PAGE 4
SMC announces governance project Saint Mary’s College president Katie Conboy announced a new shared governance and decision-making project to the student body via email Wednesday morning. Named the “Shared Governance Task Force,” the committee will be composed of two Board of Trustee members, two administrators, two faculty members, two staff members and two Saint Mary’s students. The names of these individuals were not released in the email. Conboy wrote that the task force’s responsibilities will include developing and proposing a model of shared governance and communications that will reflect the College’s mission statement and values. “We will be looking for community engagement along the way, not only here at the start of the project, but also periodically as we progress,” Conboy wrote. The creation of this project
will be in collaboration with David Maxwell, a consultant and senior fellow for the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB). Maxwell will conduct a webinar on Wednesday, March 5 at 3 p.m. via Zoom to discuss the details of the project. The link to this webinar was shared with the student body shortly after Conboy’s email. Over the course of the next several months, the task force and Maxwell will be expected to produce three statements: one of shared governance, one of principles, which will define the culture of decisionmaking, and one of threshold conditions for effective shared governance. They will also create a decision matrix and a communications strategy for the College. Conboy shared that she will provide updates on the status of the project throughout its duration.
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