The Building Rises — Science, Law, and the Laetare Medal

1865–1893 · the college becomes a university in fact

The enlarged college of 1865 stood six stories high, 160 feet long by eighty wide, raised on the site of the 1844 building in a single summer and surmounted by a colossal statue of Our Lady; it was dedicated on 31 May 1866 by Archbishop Spalding of Baltimore with five bishops present, before what the jubilee history calls the largest concourse of people ever gathered at Notre Dame. Under President Patrick Dillon the commercial course was developed and the scientific course established as distinct from the classical — the first Bachelor of Science was Dr. John Cassidy of South Bend, in 1865 — and early medical study began under Father Neyron, a former Napoleonic surgeon who had been captured at Waterloo. The Alumni Association was perfected on 27 June 1868. The university reckoned its Silver Jubilee from the charter of 1844 and celebrated it in 1869, the institution, in the history's candid phrase, having earlier "scarcely felt itself sufficiently upon its feet" to celebrate.

The academic build-out of the following decades is documented department by department. Science: a library of barely 2,000 volumes in 1860 and a museum of specimens and the great herbarium presented in 1855 grew, after Father Carrier's seven-month Paris mission of 1866 brought back twenty large boxes — a six-inch telescope the gift of Napoleon III, 200 volumes from the French government, ornaments from the Emperor, the Empress, and the Prince Imperial — into a scientific course fully under way by September 1867, a United Scientific Association in the spring of 1868, Carrier's botanical gardens, and by the early 1870s a thorough course of civil engineering and a partial course in medicine; departments of applied electricity, biology, and mechanical engineering stood by 1895, with Father John A. Zahm risen to head the science work. Law: the trustees took their first steps in 1868, the law department was formally established in January 1869 and classes opened on 1 February 1869, and under Dean William Hoynes from 1883 the school's course lengthened to three years and its standing rose — the Chicago Law Journal wrote in October 1886 that "not one of its graduates, during that time, has failed to pass a creditable examination for the Bar in any of the States." The university's art went to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. Science Hall's cornerstone was laid 20 June 1883; St. Edward's Hall rose in 1882 for the Minims, the boys under twelve under the sisters' special charge. The Laetare Medal, American Catholic letters' and arts' standing honor, was established under President Walsh and first conferred in 1883 on the historian John Gilmary Shea. And Professor James F. Edwards built in the Bishops' Memorial Hall a cruciform gallery of portraits, busts, mitres, croziers, and autograph documents of every bishop who had held a diocese within the United States, with the Catholic Archives of America manuscript collection attached — Shea wrote to Edwards that he possessed "more material for a real history of the church in this country" than any other collector.

1. A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)
2. University of Notre Dame Archives, faculty and department records