The University of Notre Dame plans to install as director of a university-wide institute a scholar who has described laws prohibiting abortion as “violence,” “sexual abuse” and “trauma” and has linked efforts to end abortion to white supremacy.

“Abortion access is freedom-enhancing, in the truest sense of the word,” states a column in Salon co-authored by Susan Ostermann, an associate professor of global affairs at Notre Dame, in May 2022, shortly after a draft decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade was leaked.

Ostermann was announced last week as the new director of the university’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, starting July 1.

A biographical sketch on the Notre Dame website describes Ostermann as a consultant for Population Council, a nonprofit organization founded by John D. Rockefeller III in 1952 that, among other things, supports access to abortion and contraception.

The Liu Institute, founded in 2010, promotes research and public events pertaining to Asia in order to “bring together classroom learning, scholarly inquiry, and social impact,” according to the university’s Keough School of Global Affairs.

The Liu Institute says on its website that it is “committed to examining and supporting work on the theme ‘Justice and Asia’ from a wide range of perspectives: social, political, economic, cultural, historical, and linguistic, among others,” adding: “The concept of justice resonates strongly with Catholic social teaching, as well as with the values of Asian philosophical and religious traditions. Justice is universally understood and innately experienced.”

The Catholic Church teaches that abortion is “a crime against human life” that violates what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “the inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual” and that it should be prohibited by civil law (2272, 2273).

A Notre Dame graduate who monitors the university’s commitment to Catholicism called the announcement that Ostermann will take over the Liu Institute a “scandal.”

“This appointment is a discredit to those responsible and, through them, to the University,” said Bill Dempsey, chairman and founding president of the Sycamore Trust, which describes itself as “an independent organization of alumni and friends of Notre Dame who are fighting for the university’s Catholic identity.”

“Professor Ostermann is a public advocate of an action the Church has through the ages taught is gravely evil. It teaches that as a moral truth, just as it does the equal dignity of all persons irrespective of race,” Dempsey said by email.

Ostermann could not reached for comment Monday. A spokesman for Notre Dame did not respond to requests for comment prior to publication.

Ostermann co-wrote several pro-legal-abortion columns with Tamara Kay, a former professor of global affairs and sociology at Notre Dame who now teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Ostermann and Kay are co-editors of an academic journal called Studies in Comparative International Development.

In July 2022, they argued in The Indianapolis Star against proposed legislation in Indiana to ban abortion, which eventually was enacted. “If abortion restrictions pass, Indiana will become an anti-freedom, forced-birth state,” Ostermann and Kay wrote.

Also in July 2022, Ostermann and Kay co-wrote a column in Salon linking opposition to abortion (and gun control) with white supremacy, arguing that an abortion opponent in the 1850s who successfully promoted laws outlawing the practice did so because he was worried that Anglo-Saxon women in America were aborting their babies while “inferior races” of “immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany and other largely Catholic countries” were producing many more children. (Under this argument, “whiteness” pertains not necessarily to skin color, but rather to a theory that one race is superior to others.)

Dempsey told the Register that supporting abortion at a Catholic college ought to be as unacceptable as supporting race theories that elevate one skin color over another.

“Notre Dame would not elevate to a position of prestige and influence a professor who espouses white supremacy. Why, then, one who espouses abortion?” Dempsey said. “This is doubtless how the princes of secular academe would act, since the cultural elite condemns discrimination but tolerates abortion. So here Notre Dame is acting as a secular rather than a Catholic school, and it is a scandal, especially to its students.”

In December 2022, after Ostermann and Kay wrote a column for the Chicago Tribune arguing that early-stage embryos aren’t babies and calling pro-life pregnancy centers “anti-abortion rights propaganda sites,” Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, who was at the time the president of Notre Dame, wrote a letter to the editor saying that “their essay does not reflect the views and values of the University of Notre Dame in its tone, arguments or assertions.”

The Liu Institute is one of 17 university institutes at Notre Dame, according to the university provost’s website. Other institutes at Notre Dame encourage scholarship in areas such as religion, ethics, health care, global development, Irish studies, and European studies.

A university institute is typically founded with an endowment gift from a donor exceeding $15 million, with at least 50% in hand, and has an operating budget exceeding $500,000 a year, according to guidelines produced by Notre Dame in December 2019. A university institute may hire non-tenure-track faculty with permission of the university’s provost. Such an institute normally reports to the provost, the vice president for research, or a dean, according to the document.

Ostermann, a political scientist, earned a doctorate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a law degree from Stanford Law School.

Her scholarship has not focused on abortion. Among her academic works are writings on housing, female genital mutilation, inter-caste marriage in India, and regulatory compliance in South Asia.