The faculty members I spoke with described a cadre of administrators, faculty, alumni, and students that view Notre Dame as the last great Catholic institution in the country. These diehards urgently seek to preserve what they believe to be the university’s identity when it comes to issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, the faculty members say, and so they’ve trained their sights on Kay. Her experience has already had a chilling effect on other faculty members.
Ostermann, Kay’s writing partner, tells me she expected they would receive some pushback once they began publishing after theleak. “We’re both in a policy school, and we’re supposed to engage with and to write about highly political issues,” she says. While she has received hate mail, she says it’s been a fraction of the harassment Kay has experienced. “Whatever risks I take are about me, but she’s in a different position because she’s a mother,” Ostermann says.
The brilliance of a bad-faith harassment campaign is that it renders the subject unable to distinguish between a real threat and an offensive email the sender forgets as soon as they write it. Kay says most of her students and colleagues have shown her support; for every threat, there’s been an email thanking her for not cowering to the forces that would rather she be silent on abortion rights.
Notre Dame has become an extension of a medieval church ruled by delusional, old white men.