Skip to content
New Book

OLD NOTRE DAME

On this site, explore bonus material for Philip Hicks’s OLD NOTRE DAME: Paul Fenlon, Sorin Hall & Me, a book about the professor who spent 60 years in a Notre Dame dormitory and lived to tell the tale— to his youngest friend.


“An aged, retired English professor, and confirmed bachelor, doggedly clings to life in a men’s residence hall at Notre Dame during the campus tumult of the 1960s and 1970’s. During his struggles, the professor is befriended by a young undergraduate who is fascinated by a relic living in his midst. The fascination blossoms into a beautiful and profound friendship, and, decades later, the once young undergraduate writes the story of a breed of educator that is now gone.” –Bill ND’75 (5-star Amazon review) *****

“A Sorin Hall legend has been transformed from a faint memory to one of Notre Dame’s historic figures.”  –S. B. Devlin (5-star Amazon review)

What others say about OldND

“Phil Hicks, now a history professor at St. Mary’s College, was a student in Sorin when I first moved in. I admired the friendship he and a few other students developed with Paul Fenlon. As this wonderful book displays, Phil and Paul became confidants and sources of mutual support. The fruit of this relationship is this warm account of those years, steeped in the history of the university ….”

–FROM THE FOREWORD BY REV. EDWARD A. MALLOY, CSC, PRESIDENT EMERITUS, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME