Notre Dame Appoints Professional-abortion Inhabitants-control Advocate to Directorship

Seemingly intent on shedding all vestiges of its Catholic heritage, the University of Notre Dame recently promoted a fervently pro-abortion professor to a leadership position.

Doctor’s Appointment

On January 8, Mary Gallagher, dean of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, announced that Associate Professor of Global Affairs Susan Ostermann, Ph.D. had been appointed director of the university’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies effective July 1. Notre Dame provost John McGreevy approved the promotion.

Ostermann’s appointment immediately raised eyebrows among traditionalist faculty members and outside observers. Notre Dame claims to be a Catholic — and therefore pro-life — university, yet Ostermann has been a very public advocate for unrestricted abortion and a harsh critic of pro-life organizations.

According to the National Catholic Register:

Ostermann and Tamara Kay, a former professor of global affairs and sociology at Notre Dame who now teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, in July 2022 argued in The Indianapolis Star against proposed legislation in Indiana to ban abortion, saying “Indiana will become an anti-freedom, forced-birth state” if the bill were enacted, which it later was.

Also in July 2022, Ostermann and Kay co-authored a column in Salon linking opposition to abortion with white supremacy, arguing that an abortion opponent in the 1850s who successfully promoted laws outlawing the practice did so because he feared Anglo-Saxon women in America were aborting while immigrants from “inferior races” were having lots of children.

In December 2022, Ostermann and Kay wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune arguing that early-stage embryos aren’t babies and calling pregnancy centers “anti-abortion rights propaganda sites.”

That led Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, who was at the time the president of Notre Dame and still sits on the university’s Board of Fellows, to write a public letter saying that “their essay does not reflect the views and values of the University of Notre Dame in its tone, arguments, or assertions.”

Population-control Freak

“There can be no dispute that Ostermann stands in stark contrast to fundamental Catholic moral teaching on the sacredness of human life,” Notre Dame Professor Emeritus of History Father Wilson Miscamble declared in a Wednesday First Things article. “And yet, somehow Gallagher and McGreevy deem her worthy to head an institute at Notre Dame.”

Miscamble continued:

Her appointment to head our Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies is made more of a travesty by her serving as a consultant to the Population Council, a Rockefeller-founded agency dedicated toward population control. This association alone should have ruled Ostermann out of consideration for any leadership position at Notre Dame given the damage this agency has done in numerous countries. The decimation of the Chinese population stands as but the worst example.

Cloisters Rockefeller

Notre Dame has long been heavily influenced by the Rockefeller Foundation’s generous donations. “Starting in the early 1960s with the University of Notre Dame and its president, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, the Rockefeller family essentially used its vast fortune to buy the compliance of Catholic higher education,” JP reported in 2011. That “compliance” came in the form of capitulation to the population-control agenda, primarily via abortion and contraception, both of which are forbidden by Rome.

Thus, Ostermann’s promotion should not come as a great shock.

Indeed, Notre Dame has been quite busy ridding itself of the Catholic character it still claims to embody. It presented awards to former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden despite their pro-abortion records. “It has also hosted drag shows on campus, celebrated June as ‘pride month,’ and promoted many other pro-LGBT initiatives,” noted LifeSiteNews. Last February, McGreevy declared that hiring “women and underrepresented minorities” as faculty was “equally important” to hiring Catholics. Nine months later, Notre Dame was forced to scrap plans to water down its requirements that employees uphold “the Catholic mission of the university.”

Fatherly Advice

Miscamble isn’t alone among Notre Dame faculty objecting to Ostermann’s promotion. He alleged that “a number of distinguished senior faculty have made representations to the administration to have Ostermann’s appointment rescinded. These requests have been denied.”

Outside the university, Bill Dempsey, founding president of the Sycamore Trust, which advocates for Notre Dame’s remaining true to its Catholic heritage, told the Register that Ostermann’s appointment is “transparently infirm” because of the message it communicates. He elucidated:

Notre Dame would not promote a white supremacist or a Holocaust denier no matter how qualified in their fields, not because people would think the university shared their views, but because people would think the university did not regard the issues as very important. So here the signal is that the current administration, while espousing a pro-life stance, considers it of lesser importance.

That Ostermann is likely to ascend to her post in July was made clear by a statement Notre Dame issued to the Register in which it praised the professor as “a highly regarded political scientist and legal scholar” who “demonstrates the rigorous, interdisciplinary expertise required to lead the Liu Institute.” Furthermore, university president Father Robert Dowd, in whose hands the matter now rests, “seems reluctant to overrule the provost and dean,” wrote Miscamble.

As a result, Miscamble is asking the Board of Fellows, which is tasked with maintaining the school’s Catholic character, to “intervene to support Fr. Dowd in rescinding this appointment.”

But given the board’s manifest failure to keep Notre Dame from straying thus far, Miscamble may have a difficult time convincing them to suddenly take their job seriously.