<p>I have a nice women-at-Notre Dame story. I had a friend who grew up in the same city I did (which was, in general, a very Catholic, Rust Belt kind of place). She graduated from Notre Dame, not St. Mary’s, in 1978. At the time Notre Dame admitted women to its engineering programs because St. Mary’s did not offer an engineering degree.</p>
<p>Anyway, one vacation her senior year of college she was hanging out at a sports-bar in our city that was sort of the Catholic high school jock alumni bar, and a nice-looking guy started to chat her up. Which was great, except he told her he went to Notre Dame, and she knew perfectly well he didn’t. (A: she knew everyone from our city there; B: she was pretty sure she knew every boy that cute there.) Of course, he never bothered to ask where she went to school, since the probable answer was community college, a local small Catholic college, or nowhere. She kept flirting with him, while asking him more and more specific questions about his life and friends at Notre Dame, until she finally told him that she went to Notre Dame and he didn’t, and he ought to explain himself. He was . . . the all-Ivy starting quarterback for Yale, a molecular biology major on his way to medical school. Except, in our city, in that bar, hardly anyone knew what Yale or molecular biology were. If you wanted to impress girls there, merely attending Notre Dame – he couldn’t claim to play football there – was much better than being a bona fide Ivy League football star.</p>