University of Notre Dame Australia
The University of Notre Dame Australia is a national Roman Catholic private university with campuses in and in Western Australia and Sydney in New South Wales. The university also has eight clinical schools as part of its school of medicine located across Sydney and Melbourne and also in regional New South Wales and Victoria.
Notre Dame is not part of the Western Australia Tertiary Institutions Service Centre or the New South Wales Universities Admissions Centre and students apply directly to the university through its admissions process.
The university crest is an open Bible. The waves below the open Bible represent the Fremantle area, where the university was founded, and Australia, a nation surrounded by water.
In the 2019 Student Experience Survey, the University of Notre Dame Australia recorded the second highest student satisfaction rating out of all Australian universities, and the highest student satisfaction rating out of all Western Australian based universities, with an overall satisfaction rating of 88.
History
In 1945, Father Patrick Duffy, an American navy chaplain, met Cardinal Norman Thomas Gilroy, Archbishop of Sydney, to discuss the possibility of the University of Notre Dame and the Congregation of Holy Cross being involved in the establishment of the first private Catholic university in Australia.At the time, there were roughly 1.5 million Catholics living in Australia and an established network of Catholic primary and secondary schools. Cardinal Gilroy believed that there was a strong appetite for a Catholic university and that it would enable the education of an "elite Catholic laity that had been the glory of the church in the United States".
The project was pursued for a number of years and property was purchased in Sydney on behalf of Holy Cross in 1948, but ultimately the charter to establish the university was never acquired and the endeavour was abandoned in 1953.
In the mid-1980s, concerns were raised that state universities were not able to properly train lay teachers to work in Catholic primary and secondary schools in Western Australia. The idea of a private Catholic university again surfaced, this time on the opposite side of the Australian continent.
Peter Tannock, who headed the Catholic Education Office of Western Australia, discussed these concerns with William Foley, Archbishop of Perth. They enlisted the help of Denis Horgan, a local Catholic businessman and founder of Leeuwin Estate, who they hoped would provide financial assistance in establishing the university.
Horgan was supportive of the idea, as long as the institution would provide more than teacher education. A small planning committee with Tannock, Horgan, Foley and Michael Quinlan, a Catholic physician, was established and developed the plan for a Catholic university with a number of sites in Western Australia that would provide medical and nursing education among other fields.
The university was created through the University of Notre Dame Australia Act 1989 in the Parliament of Western Australia. The act was given assent on 9 January 1990, the university was inaugurated on 2 July 1991 and classes commenced in February 1992. The first college, the College of Education, had 35 postgraduate students in its first year and the University of Notre Dame sent 25 study abroad students to spend a semester at the Fremantle campus.
The Broome campus, originally known as the Kimberley Centre, was opened in 1994 in service of the church and Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley region. In 2006, the Sydney campus was formally opened with an initial enrollment of 450 students.
Campuses
Notre Dame has campuses located in Fremantle and Broome in Western Australia. The university's Sydney campus is spread across two sites – one based in Broadway and the other in adjacent to St Vincent's Hospital.The Fremantle campus is located in the historic West End of the city, a designated heritage precinct famous for its late Georgian and Victorian-style architecture. The university has rejuvenated much of the West End and has worked to restore the traditional architecture of the precinct, occupying 50 properties since its establishment in 1992 and restoring many buildings. Due to the presence of Notre Dame, Fremantle is commonly referred to as a "university town" much like older university towns in Europe and is the only one of its kind in Australia.
The School of Medicine Sydney has eight clinical schools in Sydney, Melbourne and in rural locations across the east coast.
The Sydney Clinical School is located across St Vincent's & Mater Clinical School at St Vincent's Hospital, Auburn Clinical School at Auburn Hospital and Hawkesbury Clinical School at Hawkesbury Health Service. The Melbourne Clinical School is located at the Werribee Mercy Hospital.
The rural clinical schools are located at the Lithgow Clinical School at Lithgow Hospital, the Ballarat Clinical School at St John of God Hospital Ballarat, the Riverina Regional Training Hub and the Wagga Wagga Clinical School at Calvary Health Care Riverina.
Organisation and administration
The university has three campuses offering courses in the following schools:- School of Arts and Sciences
- School of Business
- School of Education
- School of Health Sciences
- School of Law
- School of Medicine
- School of Nursing and Midwifery ; School of Nursing
- School of Philosophy and Theology
- School of Physiotherapy
The governance structure of Notre Dame is determined largely by its enabling act of parliament and its statutes. These specify the source, role and functions of its trustees, board of directors and board of governors and the principal officers and academic leaders of the university.
Academics
All undergraduate students must undertake courses in theology, philosophy and ethics. This is known as the core curriculum in Fremantle, and the LOGOS program in Sydney.Notre Dame's medicine students study a core course, bioethics, whilst students on the Broome campus study Aboriginal people and spirituality as part of their degree.
Rankings
The Australian Government's Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching 2018 Student Experience Survey results place Notre Dame as one of the top universities in Australia.| Category | Western Australia | New South Wales | National |
| Overall Quality of Educational Experience | 1st | 2nd | 2nd |
| Teaching Quality | 1st | 2nd | 3rd |
| Skills Development | 1st | 1st | 2nd |
| Learner Engagement | 1st | 1st | 2nd |
| Student Support | 1st | 2nd | 3rd |
| Category | Western Australia | New South Wales | National |
| Overall Quality of Educational Experience | 1st | 3rd | 3rd |
| Teaching Quality | 1st | 2nd | 2nd |
| Skills Development | 1st | 1st | 1st |
| Learner Engagement | 1st | 1st | 1st |
| Student Support | 1st | 1st | 2nd |
Research
Notre Dame has three institutes for scholarship and research located across its campuses.- The Institute for Health Research
- Nulungu Research Institute
- The Institute for Ethics and Society
The university is one of the partners in the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort Study, one of the largest cohorts of pregnancy, childhood, adolescence and early adulthood to be carried out anywhere in the world.
Student life
The Sydney and Fremantle campuses both have representative student associations, created to represent all the students at each campus. The Sydney campus is home to the Student Association of the University of Notre Dame Australia, while the Fremantle Ccmpus hosts the Notre Dame Student Association. These organisations are currently not recognised in the university statues, making them student associations and not guilds.Mass is celebrated each weekday and on Sunday evening at the Fremantle campus, weekdays on the Sydney campus, and on Wednesdays at the Broome campus.
The student population across Australia at Notre Dame campuses numbers 12,394 as of February 2018, 6,544 of these being in Fremantle, 5,685 in Sydney and 165 in Broome.