Why Robert Alfred Dowd is on this page

The Reverend Robert Alfred Dowd Jr., C.S.C. (born 1965) is an American Catholic priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross and political scientist who has served as the eighteenth president of the University of Notre Dame since 1 June 2024. He was inaugurated at the Purcell Pavilion of the Joyce Center on 13 September 2024, succeeding the Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., after his election by the Board of Trustees in December 2023.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky to Robert Alfred Dowd Sr. and Norma Dowd Krentz, Dowd moved with his family at the age of two to Michigan City, Indiana, and was educated at Marquette Catholic High School. He earned a B.A. in psychology and economics from Notre Dame in 1987 and an M.Div. from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley in 1993. He made his final profession with the Congregation of Holy Cross on 28 August 1993 and was ordained to the priesthood on 9 April 1994. He later took an M.A. in African Studies at UCLA (1998) and a Ph.D. in political science (2003).

At Notre Dame he held a succession of senior roles before his presidency — vice president and Associate Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives, Assistant Provost for Internationalization, Director of the Ford Program in Human Development Studies and Solidarity, and director of the university’s Millennial Development Initiative in the Mpigi District of Uganda. His 2015 book Christianity, Islam, and Liberal Democracy: Lessons from Sub-Saharan Africa (Oxford University Press) argued that religious tolerance in Nigeria and elsewhere flows from religious plurality rather than in spite of it; the book was widely reviewed and described as ‘groundbreaking’.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Robert A. Dowd.
• Wikidata Q106917152.

Heritage notes

Family root: diaspora-likely.

The directory threads Robert Alfred Dowd back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.