While I agree with nearly everything in this letter, I think the future leaders of the church are more likely to be the faithful who perservere at institutions like Notre Dame. ND is one of the most highly rated educational institutions.
I don't know, Varda. My own kids are young, very bright and home-schooled. Macfarlane says the same about his own children. I don't think I could ever give a dime to Notre Dame, no matter how highly rated it is as an educational institution. Nor could I give another dime to my own Jesuit Alma Mater.
I think conservative Catholic parents need to begin "voting with their tuition dollars" and sending their children to the more loyal Catholic schools. Thomas Aquinas College, for instance, is academically superior to Notre Dame, Georgetown and Holy Cross.
Highly rated by whom? The usual pack of liberal termites? Is Yale highly rated? I spent most of my life living in its shadow and knowing its undergraduates and hearing the horror stories. Purely on the basis of academic substance, Yale has long since given up the ghost. Marxists running the philosophy department have been running out of the department anyone who does not share their commitment to the revolution. Read Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale, written when he was editor of the Yale Daily News as an undergraduate (cless of 1951). Buckley's Yale of 1951 looks like a medieval monastery in both scholarship and intellectual achievement compared to the charnel house that Yale has become.
For our own good and that of our children and that of our nation and society, can we now kill off the cult of the publicly recognized (by academic credentials) "expert", the mindless stupidity of employers who hire by academic "credentials", etc.
From what engineering school did Thomas Edison graduate?
Let us start our own internet universities, as Ralph McInerney, a rare Notre Dame faculty Catholic has, save the cost of brick and mortar, re-emphasize education steeped in the truth of our culture, recognize that theology, philosphy and history are more important than football.