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Arts and Letters Reaches New Heights With Roche as Dean
Roche’s own decision to come here from Ohio State, where he was on the faculty from 1984–96, had a lot to do with Notre Dame’s commitment to undergraduate education, an area whose further enhancement has also been at the heart of the College’s endeavors under his leadership.
Thanks in part to a $10 million gift from Arts and Letters alumnus and University Trustee John Glynn and his wife, Barbara, the joint undergraduate honors program created in 1983 by Arts and Letters and the College of Science has grown significantly. Now known as the Glynn Family Honors Program, it admits 100 students per year, up from 40 in the mid-’90s.
There are also honors opportunities offered by Arts and Letters departments, as almost all have designed special tracks within their majors for students who want to dig even deeper into their chosen fields. Both Glynn Scholars and departmental honors students produce senior theses in close collaboration with faculty members.
Every Arts and Letters student in good academic standing can apply for research funding from the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), which is administered by ISLA. When Roche became dean, UROP had just completed its fourth year, awarding 11 grants totaling $4,400.
In each of the last two years, the program has made approximately 120 awards for more than $200,000.
“It’s become such a part of the rhetoric of the student body that the 2007 senior class gift was directed to UROP,” Roche says, “which shows that students are aware of it as a difference-maker in their lives.”
Programs like these have allowed Notre Dame to continue to be a residential liberal arts college focused on undergraduates while emerging as a dynamic research university, two complementary functions that contribute to a triadic identity Roche found “simply extraordinary” even before he decided to leave Ohio State.
The third piece of Notre Dame’s identity? Being a Catholic institution of international standing, a quality that anyone who has spent time talking with him knows he holds dear.
“You’re always going to have a variety of voices at a university,” Roche says. “But what you have here is a freedom to talk about issues that might be viewed as taboo at other universities. Or, if not viewed as taboo, viewed somewhat superciliously as not appropriate for an academic environment.” There’s hardly a pause before he adds, with unmistakable sarcasm: “Because after all, they’re not intellectual.”
Roche feels that now more than ever, the College’s departments are attentive to the ways scholarship in their disciplines overlaps with Notre Dame’s Catholic mission, a mission he says thrives only in an atmosphere of inquiry.
“In a certain sense, the holistic education of the traditional liberal arts college can be realized more fully at an institution that has no inhibitions about addressing religious and ultimate questions.”
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