The Turn to a University — Cavanaugh and Burns

1905–1922 · modernization

The twentieth century opened with the college still small — the Catholic Encyclopedia's 1911 entry counts "over one thousand students" — and with its reinvention already under way. John W. Cavanaugh, president from 1905 to 1919, modernized the educational standards and raised the institution toward the national pattern, in the institutional history's judgment the champion of the movement toward a research university. Women stand in the degree record from early in his successors' era: the university awarded its first degree to a woman in 1917, in the graduate programs, and its first bachelor's degree to a woman in 1922.

James A. Burns, president from 1919 to 1922, made the revolution structural. Burns — born at Michigan City on 13 February 1867, a chemistry professor at Notre Dame from 1893, superior of Holy Cross College in Washington from 1900 to 1919, and a co-founder of the Catholic Educational Association in 1904 — was the university's first president holding a doctorate, and he arrived, in Father Hope's history's account, to divide the university into four distinct colleges: Arts and Letters, Science, Engineering, and Law, each with its own dean; the College of Commerce, then in its infancy, was added by 1921. In 1919 he closed the preparatory department outright to make room for college students, raised lay professors' salaries, and added no buildings — instead he laid foundations: the university's first endowment and a board of lay advisors to oversee it, and a campaign to raise $750,000 which, if raised, secured $250,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation and $75,000 from the Carnegie Foundation. In 1922 he declined a second term, took the title of president-emeritus, and directed the endowment drive for years afterward; Matthew Walsh succeeded him and spent the new stability on a building campaign. Burns died on 9 September 1940; the university's Religious Bulletin of 12 September 1940 records the contemporary verdict: "To him Notre Dame owes much of its present greatness."

1. Arthur J. Hope, Notre Dame — One Hundred Years (1943), ch. XXIV, University Archives
2. Notre Dame Religious Bulletin, 12 September 1940
3. New Catholic Encyclopedia, "Burns, James Aloysius"; Catholic Encyclopedia (1911), "University of Notre Dame"