University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame (or simply Notre Dame, is a private Catholic research university located in Notre Dame, an unincorporated community northeast of the city of South Bend, in St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States — as are Holy Cross College and Saint Mary's College.
It was founded by Father Edward Sorin, CSC, who was also the school's first president. It was established as an all-male institution on November 26, 1842, on land donated by the Bishop of Vincennes. The university first enrolled women undergraduates in 1972. Today, about 47 percent of the student body is female. Notre Dame's Catholic character is evident in the many Holy Cross priests serving the school (most notably the president of the university), its explicit commitment to the Christian faith, numerous ministries funded by the school, as well as in architecture around campus, especially the Main Building's gold dome topped by a golden statue of St. Mary, a famous replica of the Lourdes grotto, the 134-foot-tall mosaic of Christ on the side of the Hesburgh Library (entitled "The Word of Life," but affectionately called 'Touchdown Jesus' because of his upraised arms and proximity to the stadium), and the ornate Basilica of the Sacred Heart, along with numerous chapels, statuary and religious iconography.
The university today is organized into five colleges and one professional school, the oldest of which, the College of Arts and Letters, began awarding degrees in 1849. The undergraduate program was ranked 19th among national universities by U.S. News & World Report for 2010-2011. Notre Dame has a comprehensive graduate program with 32 master's and 25 doctoral degree programs. Additionally, the university's library system is one of the 100 largest in the United States.
More than 80% of the university's 8,000 undergraduates live on campus in one of 29 single-sex residence halls, each of which fields teams for more than a dozen intramural sports. Notre Dame's approximately 120,000 alumni are located around the world.
Outside academia, Notre Dame is best known for its sports programs, especially its football team. The teams are members of the NCAA Division I, and are known collectively as the Fighting Irish, a name it adopted in the 1920s. The football team, an Independent, has accumulated eleven national championships, seven Heisman Trophy winners, and sixty-two members in the College Football Hall of Fame. Other ND teams have accumulated 14 national championships, chiefly in the Big East Conference.
Notre Dame's campus is located in Notre Dame, Indiana, an unincorporated community in north Indiana, just north of South Bend and four miles from the Michigan state line.[42] Development of the campus began in the spring of 1843 when Father Sorin and some of his congregation built the "Old College", a building used for dormitories, a bakery, and a classroom. A year later, after an architect arrived, a small "Main Building" was built allowing for the launch of the college. Today the campus lies on 1,250 acres just south of the Indiana Toll Road and includes 138 buildings located on quads throughout the campus.
A number of the buildings that Father Sorin built still stand on the campus, while others have been replaced. The Old College building has become one of two seminaries on campus run by the Congregation of Holy Cross. The current Basilica of the Sacred Heart is located on the spot of Sorin's original church, which became too small for the growing college and the Main Building, after a fire destroyed parts of it, has become home to Notre Dame's administration. There are two lakes located on campus, and near the lakes is the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, which was built in 1896 as a replica of the original in Lourdes, France.
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