An archive-based account of the developmental years of the University of Notre Dame. During these years, university leaders strove to find the additional resources needed to transform their succesful boarding school into an ethically diverse modern Catholic university.

This volume traces the major events under three presidencies at the University of Notre Dame: periods of successful academic improvement, intruding prewar partisanism and academic freedom crisis under the rule of John O'Hara, J. Hugh O'Donnell and John J. Cavanaugh respectively.