Posted on 09/16/2009 7:46:25 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
"Since most Catholic colleges won’t do their job, bring the faith to secular schools."
There are about 225 Catholic colleges and universities listed in The Official Catholic Directory. More than a hundred others have gone out of business over the last generation. I am confident that scores more will disappear — close their doors, merge, or officially declare themselves to be secular — over the next couple of decades. And even among today’s 225 institutions, most are no more than nominally Catholic. That will not change in the coming years.
This remarkable institutional meltdown is mightily affecting the Church. At precisely the time of life when young people are shedding their childlike faith and need to develop a mature, more critical, but more profound adult commitment, they leave home and encounter a brave new world of ideas and experiences untethered to Catholicism.
The meltdown also affects America. The intellectual formation of the nation’s 65 million Catholics has a profound influence on our culture and our politics. It is therefore worth asking: What happened to America’s Catholic colleges and universities? And what’s next?
Is it a simple case of supply contracting to match a shrinking demand? Not really. In this case, there has been a more complex, and largely reverse, dialectic. The reason is that demand for this particular good — a genuine Catholic education — must be stimulated by suppliers, in league with other Catholic authority figures. Unlike food and clothing and health care, this product satisfies no natural need. Nor does it respond to some culturally contingent requirement, as do cell phones or a bachelor’s degree from some — any — accredited institution. A genuine Catholic education is more like an orchid: Both its beauty and people’s appreciation of it must be assiduously cultivated. So when the supply of Catholic education plummeted in the late 1960s, so did demand. Many suppliers went out of business. That further decreased demand, so more suppliers quit. Four decades of this, and production of genuine Catholic education is a now a fringe, boutique enterprise.
It didn’t have to happen. America’s Catholic higher-education complex should have taken off when the baby boomers came of age. There were already hundreds of schools, and the mid-1960s brought a teeming cohort of potential patrons. Moreover, unlike most of their parents, these boomers were destined for college. Tragically, instead of reaping the reward of this bounty, the colleges began to shed their Catholic character — for a mix of reasons, good, misguided but understandable, and just plain bad.
One good reason has to do with the fact that dozens of these colleges were little more than finishing schools for better-off Catholic girls. Given that many of the top colleges, Catholic and not, were still male-only, and that these girls were mostly destined by cultural fate to be homemakers, the decent liberal education they received was perhaps suited to them. But when women began to look at college the way men do, and when they became admissible at all the best schools, it was lights out for the finishing schools. Some tried to adapt to the new ethos; few succeeded.
A misguided but understandable reason was money. In the late 1960s, many Catholic schools rapidly secularized for fear that the government money they thought they needed (in the form of scholarships and other grants) would be denied to “sectarian” institutions. The Supreme Court laid this fear to rest in decisions announced in the mid-1970s, but by then the schools were pretty far gone. Another misguided reason was faulty theology. Jesuit colleges in particular were captured by an alleged “spirit of Vatican II.” This wind blew them to the belief that a true Catholic education was one immersed in the nitty-gritty of contemporary thought and praxis. But since the contemporary world was largely pagan, so was the effect upon the colleges.
A just plain bad reason was rejection of the Catholic faith. Catholic intellectuals (among other Catholics) rebelled against the truths of Catholicism beginning in the 1960s. Many declared themselves no longer Catholic; others settled into permanent dissent. The ones in charge of colleges took their institutions with them.
The vast majority of America’s Catholic colleges and universities today are small, academically undistinguished, and struggling to make ends meet. They subsist — barely — on tuition income. They no longer have a market to themselves. Instead they compete with the whole array of private colleges and cheaper — much cheaper — public ones. They are losing ground. Today few college-age Catholics wish to be formed intellectually according to the truths of the faith. Few wish to be intellectually formed at all. They attend college for the same reason most kids do: to get a degree that will help them get a better job. How many 18-year-olds really understand the great intrinsic (that is, non-instrumental) value of a liberal education? How many grasp the sublime value of a distinctively Catholic liberal education?
Today’s young people are not much to blame. They see that Wall Street philosophy firms are not paying much these days (or any days), and they do not want to be unemployed poets. Of course the benefits of a genuine Catholic education lie elsewhere than in the job market, but they are largely invisible and long-term. Furthermore, acquiring a real education of any sort is very hard work. Who would be such a chump as to pay a premium for the privilege? When all you can get at a “Catholic” school is some pious platitudes wrapped around the same product that is discounted elsewhere, a savvy shopper makes the easy call.
The truth is and has always been that demand for Catholic education has to be stimulated from the top down. The challenge is that people who scarcely grasp a product’s benefits must be persuaded to buy it at a high price. This is not impossible. The history of advertising shows that people can be persuaded to pay for products they had not wanted and that do them no real good. (Remember Pet Rocks?) In the case of Catholic education, people — kids and their parents and potential donors — have to be persuaded by credible spokesmen that the Catholic faith, which they should hold dear, requires a major investment for its transmission and flourishing. This sales job calls for exertion and authoritative testimony to a subtle but unsurpassably valuable payoff.
It is not going to happen. Some of yesterday’s promotional tools are (thankfully) no longer in use. Young women are not “finished” any more; the best colleges no longer discriminate against Catholic applicants; bishops no longer preach against, much less forbid attendance at, non-Catholic colleges. (Justly so, given the sorry state of today’s “Catholic” colleges.) Lamentable but no less consequential is the waning of “feeder” parochial high schools, and the whole cultural devaluation of religious education for anyone who is not going into specifically religious work. And, as I said, the competition from cheaper public institutions is fierce.
The flagship Catholic institutions could arrest (up to a point) this decline in demand. Notre Dame and Georgetown could flourish today as bastions of a genuinely Catholic education. Their large, loyal, and generous alumni base protects them financially. They do not compete with public universities, at least not nearly as intensely and precariously as do the vast majority of Catholic institutions. If these leadership schools preached the gospel of Catholic education in and out of season, they could stimulate demand for it all the way down the academic food chain. High-school seniors denied admission to Notre Dame would still want what Notre Dame has to offer, and would likely seek it at another Catholic institution.
But the leadership schools have not stepped up to the plate. For the full story about Notre Dame, you should read my colleague Charlie Rice’s candid and powerful new book, What Happened to Notre Dame? Rice has taught at Notre Dame for almost 40 years and has long been an affectionate but acute critic of the school’s secular drift. His key point is expressed succinctly by Notre Dame philosophy professor Alfred Freddoso. In his introduction to Rice’s book, Freddoso writes that Notre Dame “is a university as universities go these days, and it is in some obvious sense Catholic. What it is not — and has not been since I have been here — is a Catholic university, i.e., an institution of higher learning where the Catholic faith pervades and enriches, and is itself enriched by, the intellectual life on campus.” Freddoso observes that “Notre Dame today is something like a public school in a Catholic neighborhood.”
The heart of a Catholic university — of any university — is its intellectual life: most importantly, the teaching and learning within its classrooms, and then the research and publishing of its faculty. If the truths of the Catholic faith do not suffuse these endeavors, the university simply is not Catholic. The difference between Notre Dame and other industry leaders (such as Georgetown and Boston College) lies in the comparative quality of the “Catholic neighborhood.” At Notre Dame, it is good.
Encouragingly, a handful of small colleges have kept the faith. Among them is Belmont Abbey College, of Charlotte, N.C., under the courageous leadership of its president, Bill Thierfelder, and its chief academic officer, Ann Carson Daley. Saint Vincent’s College, of Latrobe, Pa., is also on track, under the direction of Jim Towey (formerly President Bush’s assistant for faith-based social services and, for many years prior to that, legal counsel to Mother Teresa). The leadership team at Mount Saint Mary’s, in Emmitsburg, Md., is very strongly committed to its Catholic character, as is that at Benedictine College, in Atchison, Kans., where Stephen Minnis is president. These and the few other genuinely Catholic schools should be cherished, supported, and patronized. But they are a tiny slice of the whole pie of American higher education. And they are not likely to multiply.
We need a new paradigm for delivering Catholic higher education. It is time to go where the Catholic students are. More than 80 percent of them attend non-Catholic institutions, where the Church’s mission has long been limited to pastoral care: On campus or at nearby Newman Centers students attend Mass, go to confession, and meet other Catholics. We must ratchet this menu of options up — way up — to include serious and sustained intellectual formation. The goal should be to establish, at or near every college with a substantial Catholic student population, a free-standing center devoted to intellectual formation, to the cultivation of the Catholic mind.
This is the other Catholic higher education.
— Gerard V. Bradley is professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, and a former president of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
1, 2, ping-a-roo.
§ Aquinas College, Nashville, Tenn.
§ Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, Fla.
§ Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, N.C.
§ Benedictine College, Atchison, Kan..
§ The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. § Christendom College, Front Royal, Va.
§ The College of Saint Thomas More, Fort Worth, Tex.
§ DeSales University, Center Valley, Pa.
§ Franciscan University of Steubenville, Steubenville, Oh.
§ Holy Apostles College & Seminary, Cromwell, Conn.
§ John Paul the Great Catholic University, San Diego, Calif.
§ Magdalen College, Warner, N.H.
§ Mount St. Mary’s University, Emmitsburg, Md.
=C 2 Providence College, Providence, R.I.
§ St. Gregory’s University, Shawnee, Okla.
§ Southern Catholic College, Dawsonville, Ga.
§ Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, Calif.
§ The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, Merrimack, N.H.
§ University of Dallas, Irving, Tex.
§ University of St. Thomas, Houston, Tex.
§ Wyoming Catholic College, Lander, Wyo.
I have friends who went to St. Thomas in Houston and seemed to like their experiences there.
That sums it up nicely. Notre Dame has lost it's way, in the Catholic sense, and has led the way or influenced other Catholic universities to do the same.
Good post. thanks.
I dont know about the rest of them, But Notre Dame needs to lose it’s Catholic status and change it’s name.
Father Jenkins the so-called priest who seems to run the place was bad enough to allow an abortion loving Kenyan to give a speech there, but now his insistence on punishing real Catholics to the fullest extent is unforgivable. If this guy is a catholic priest then I am the Pope.
It appears that Catholic University and Providence College are new additions to the list, based on new presidents who have really tried to change the culture which had been far too lax. NO more Vagina Monologues etc, getting rid of bad faculty, as they attempt to attract more orthodox students.
I am finishing up at the Thomistic Center there. The place has its good points, but it's a mixed bag in my experience. They have one dorm, and it's coed (if you can believe that), so the "hook-up" culture is unfortunately rooted here among the undergrads. The Basilians are a good solid, but aging and somewhat uninspired group. They are perfectly "orthodox" mind you, just a little stiff and aging. The place has its positives, but I wouldn't say that it's "super-Catholic." Sadly, Bradley's phrase "a university in a very Catholic neighborhood" applies in a sense to UST also.
Then again, it's located in Texas. That's a big plus!!
my daughter is a junior at the U of Dallas, also on the list. i wouldn’t characterize it as SUPER CATHOLIC either, but they do teach from the Mandatum and there are no gay clubs, no vagina monologue screenings etc. Of course there is hooking up etc. but it’s not like it’s anything goes. Also she has great conservative professors. The BIBLE has been discussed in her international law class and also in the class on political regimes. That would not happen at Georgetown i assure you.
She ended up at UNT, and is now in the final year (fingers crossed) of her five year program.
As much as I loved my years at Gonzaga, there's no doubt they'd still be having financial programs if not for the success of the basketball team. It really put GU on the map, as undergraduate enrollment has doubled (from my days) to over 4000.
Fr. Bob Spitzer did a great job serving as President for the last 10 years.
It does take time to learn the value of the core curriculum at schools like Gonzaga. I'm blessed that I was able to enjoy such a unique college experience.
Yes, I’ve heard many good things about U of Dallas. I know that Janet Smith taught there, and she was an instructor of mine at Sacred Heart Seminary. Terrific lady!! I think she has got it right about the “guerrilla” tactics needed to spread Catholic living today. We are awash in secular modes of thinking and living. You almost wish God Himself would intervene directly in people’s consciences. People don’t care what’s right and wrong anymore.
It was my daughter’s first choice of college and we are very happy with it. The academic rigor will stand her in excellent stead. My daughter has a partial academic scholarship also, and there are a ton of kids with work/study, other arrangements to be able to afford to go there. The Rome program is a huge draw. She had a fantastic experience there on their Rome campus last fall. We researched authentically Catholic universities prior to her applying to schools, that is what she wanted. My son is a senior at the Jesuit Gonzaga College HS in DC and applying to schools next year. In his case he is more interested in a decent division I athletic program to follow! LOL!
in my case (back in the day) a Catholic college was the last place I wanted to spend the next four years after having spent the previous twelve years in Catholic school. I hated the authoritarian atmosphere and wouldn’t have gone to a Catholic college if they gave me free tuition and paid all my expenses. From what I recall most of my peers probably felt the same, only 10-20% were going to Catholic universities.
ping
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