Marie Lynn Miranda, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost of the University of Notre Dame, spent her first full week on the job moving into her office and holding meetings, including a Zoom meeting she led with department chairs in the Martin Media Center.
Among the prized possessions Miranda unpacked for her office is the master’s degree in engineering that her father earned from Notre Dame. In a letter Miranda wrote to faculty and staff her first day, July 1, she wrote about her father, whom she called “Papa Con”:
“In a recent conversation with one of my brothers, we talked about what it might be like to walk around Notre Dame’s campus with Papa Con. We imagined him visiting his old digs in the engineering building and stopping to pray at the Grotto. I concluded by telling my brother that in the end the walk would conclude the same way all our conversations with our father did when we visited him at his office at the University of Detroit (where he was a professor). He would: ask us a math question; if we answered correctly, declare that we deserved some red Jell-O cubes; and break into singing De Colores as we walked to the cafeteria. I wish you all could have known my father – I feel I know this place through him.”
Read the full letter here.
