Depression, War, and the Postwar Surge

1928–1952 · the middle presidents

Charles O'Donnell, president from 1928 to 1934, and Matthew Walsh before him had both served as chaplains in the First World War, in which more than 2,200 Notre Dame students and alumni served; O'Donnell's doughboy helmet hangs as a light fixture in the Basilica's War Memorial entrance, beneath the inscription "God, Country, Notre Dame." O'Donnell led the university through the Great Depression, and his successor John O'Hara (1934–1939) began a building campaign with three residence halls on a new North Quad. The Second World War then turned the campus into what the university's own history calls a virtual military base. Notre Dame reached out to Admiral Chester Nimitz, and the Navy's V-7 program that trained about 12,000 naval officers was established on campus; from July 1943 the university also hosted a V-12 Navy College Training Program, and across the V-7, V-12, and NROTC programs the institutional history counts more than 25,000 reserve naval officers passing through Notre Dame between 1941 and 1946 — later generations of the university, its history notes, credit the Navy with keeping the institution afloat through an existential challenge. It was through the V-12 program that the university's first Black student arrived: Frazier L. Thompson, of Philadelphia, began attending in 1944, became the first African-American student to compete in Notre Dame athletics and win a monogram, and graduated with the class of 1947 as the university's first Black graduate; the university created a scholarship in his name in 1997.

John J. Cavanaugh, president from 1946 to 1952, governed the surge that followed: the university, in the institutional history's accounting, quadrupled in student census across the era, graduate enrollment growing fivefold under his deliberate stress on advanced studies and research. He established the system of advisory councils that continues in the university's governance; the Medieval Institute was formally founded in 1946 under Father Philip S. Moore, dean of the Graduate School, out of a program in medieval studies reaching back to 1933 — the first program at Notre Dame to award doctoral degrees — and under Astrik Gabriel, its director from 1952, it undertook the microfilming of Milan's Ambrosiana manuscripts from 1962; the Lobund institute for germ-free animal research dates to the same administration, and the campus gained Nieuwland Science Hall, Fisher Hall, the Morris Inn, and the Hall of Liberal Arts, afterward O'Shaughnessy Hall, on a gift from I. A. O'Shaughnessy that was at the time the largest ever made to an American Catholic university.

1. University of Notre Dame, campus history, "Wars come to campus"
2. Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, timeline and history; Notre Dame Magazine, obituary of Astrik L. Gabriel
3. ThinkND, "Black Domers: Pioneers"; Multicultural Student Programs and Services, Frazier Thompson Scholars