Notre Dame

Because of transportation scheduling, instead of dropping my brother and his girlfriend back off in Kalamazoo, we made a further detour to South Bend, Indiana for them to catch a train there. On our way south from Glen Arbor, we first made a stop at the Point Betsie Lighthouse. It was closed, but we weren’t trying to take a tour anyway, so we got a few photos and moved on. We reached South Bend in the late afternoon, with some time to look around Notre Dame.

 

Point Betsie Lighthouse

Notre Dame was founded in 1842 and covers 1,261 acres in Notre Dame, IN outside of South Bend. As of fall 2020, they had a total enrollment of 12,700 students, split 8,700 and 4,000 between undergraduates and graduate students. The school was not officially coed until 1972, though women had received (mostly religious) degrees from Notre Dame since 1917. Their sports teams compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) except for football (unaffiliated) and men’s ice hockey (Big Ten).

The major landmarks on the Notre Dame campus are probably the football stadium, the Basilica, and Touchdown Jesus (actually called the Word of Life). We did not go into the football stadium, the Basilica was closed on the afternoon we were there, and we did get to see Touchdown Jesus. After walking around for a while (and passing by the ChemE building), we went into the Duncan Student Center, next to the stadium. This was a really nice building with dining options, study spaces, a climbing wall, and a track and gym. I’m still kind of mad at Michigan for closing their climbing wall right before I started there and planning to build a new one after I left. We had an early dinner, then had to drop my brother and his girlfriend off at the train.

 

Basilica

Because we wanted to see the inside of the Basilica, we returned to Notre Dame the next morning before leaving Indiana to head back to Ann Arbor. It was an impressive building, filled with statuary, murals, stained glass windows, and an organ. Since we were on campus, we also stopped by the Snite Museum of Art. The museum was pretty typical of a university art museum – not huge, but they had a decent variety of paintings, sculptures, painted plates, gilded cups, etc. ranging from 16th century European oil paintings of earls and counts to modern art.

 

Touchdown Jesus

Notre Dame has a pleasant campus, though it seemed rather abandoned, even for summer (graduation was the week before, so the undergrads might not have returned for summer activities yet and the grad students were probably locked in the basement). Everything was also fairly well contained, with grassy quads, tree-lined paths, and few road crossings to get run over at. There was what looked like a nice commercial block with restaurants, shopping, and lodging just south of campus, though we didn’t walk there. Otherwise, the surrounding area seemed to lack the natural areas and hiking trails of Ithaca and the larger variety of restaurants, stores, theaters, etc. of a bigger city like Ann Arbor. I’m not sure I would have wanted to go to college there, but campus was nice for a visit.

The ChemE building