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Notre Dame doesn’t need male undergrads, it needs new leadership | READER COMMENTARY

For The Baltimore Sun
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On Sept. 12, 2022, the Notre Dame of Maryland University Board of Trustees voted to make the undergraduate program co-educational beginning in the fall of next year. File. (Barbara Haddock Taylor/Baltimore Sun).

On Sept. 12, 2022, the Notre Dame of Maryland University Board of Trustees voted to make the undergraduate program co-educational beginning in the fall of next year. File. (Barbara Haddock Taylor/Baltimore Sun). (Barbara Haddock Taylor / Baltimore Sun)

How very unsurprising that the recent letter to the editor by Mark Fenster regarding Notre Dame of Maryland University, “Going coed an overdue change for Notre Dame of Maryland” (Sept. 22), was written by a man who will never have the experience of navigating the world of education as a woman. Surely, some drastic changes are indeed long overdue at the university, but it is not the one that flushes the school’s mission and 125-year-long history down the toilet.

It appears to have taken many a moon of actively tanking the school’s marketing budget and allowing its original buildings to fall into disarray to convince the NDMU Board of Trustees that the foundation upon which the graduate school rests is a lost cause. Strangely though, there seems to be no problem paying for the advertising and wage to hire its first coach of a prestigious men’s sport. How does men’s basketball fit into that Carnegie classification, Faculty Senate President Fenster?

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What’s actually needed is for Dr. Marylou Yam, president of Notre Dame of Maryland University, and her enabling board, to apologize for their lack of transparency and then resign to usher in a return to fully funding the school’s marketing budget. Beyond that, and also urgent are immediate repairs of the most historic buildings on the campus, and strong re-commitment to modernizing the university’s curriculum with a focus on preparing women for leadership in the modern day.

Those are your changes that are long overdue!

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— Nina Carmen Monroe, Fayetteville, North Carolina

The writer is a member of the Notre Dame of Maryland University Class of 2003.

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