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1842–2026 · the institution in its place
The university and the city grew up a mile and a half apart and never apart. South Bend's merchants financed the college's first building — Samuel Byerley's credit stands in the founding record — its senator carried the charter, its fire engine saved the church and printing office in 1879, and its citizens met "without regard to creed" to mourn the fire the Saturday after. The documented modern course runs through the university's commissioned studies, which kept Notre Dame the county's largest employer across fiscal 2002 through 2014 on the figures those studies attribute; no independent measure of the present rank was reached in this record, and none is asserted. The engagement era is datable in the institution's own filings: the Center for the Homeless in 1988, the Robinson Community Learning Center in February 2001, Innovation Park in 2009, Eddy Street Commons from late 2009, and the Turbomachinery Laboratory's move into Ignition Park in 2016. The one great civic fight — the city's 1971 attempt to annex the university ground, defeated six to three — stands whole in this project's government record and at pointer size here.
The present state, verified in November 2026 at the strength of this project's dated record: the campus stands at 1,265 acres; fall 2025 enrollment was 13,204 students in total, 8,950 of them undergraduates; the endowment stood at $20.09 billion at the close of fiscal 2025, the latest published figure; and sponsored research reached $246,105,468 in fiscal 2026, the highest in the institution's history. President Dowd stands in office, and Provost John McGreevy was elected in May 2026 to a second term beginning 1 July 2027. The land Sorin described to Moreau in November 1842 as "about 640 acres" in his first impression — 524 acres in the documented grant — now carries a university of thirteen thousand students, and the lakes he found under snow are still at the center of it.
- University of Notre Dame, Quick Facts; Common Data Set 2025–26
- A Brief History of the University of Notre Dame du Lac (1895)