Over at Commonweal, Massimo Faggioli wonders if Catholic universities are “positioning and marketing themselves as part of the mainstream liberal-progressive realm of higher education.”
Here is a taste of his piece:
…Student enrollment is trending down, for a variety of reasons—from perceptions about academic competitiveness and future employability to economic conditions related to the pandemic. Even Jesuit institutions, generally thought to be the strongest subgroup of Catholic universities, are feeling the pressure: John Carroll University, Marquette University, St. Louis University, and Wheeling University are dealing with deficits, cutting staff, or gutting programs.
But in seeking to address these challenges, many schools are putting their Catholic identity at risk—namely, by positioning and marketing themselves as part of the mainstream liberal-progressive realm of higher education. Of course, there are conservative Catholic institutions that are doubling down on Catholic identity, even if in ways that can be concerning. But these schools have a strong natural affinity with certain kinds of Catholics, as well as a supportive institutional partner in the clerical establishment. You could say that liberal-progressive Catholic higher education has no such “core strengths,” and that may be partly its own doing. It has embraced deconstruction of the neo-Scholastic hegemony since Vatican II so fully that it’s now suspicious of any Catholic institutionalism. It has been too accommodating of the identity politics that have taken root since the 1960s. It is perhaps still too closely linked to a vision of Catholic higher education laid out more than fifty years ago in the Land O’Lakes Statement, which is showing its age. And, in a sort of culminating gesture, it adopted a view of 1990’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae (and also the Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1992) based on the belief that John Paul II and the Vatican were imposing an unacceptably unilateral understanding of Catholicism and Catholic education.
That is why locutions like “in the Catholic tradition” or “in the Catholic heritage” entered the mission-statement language of so many Catholic universities in the last few years. “Hiring for mission” has replaced “hiring Catholic,” with mixed results. If “hiring Catholics does not in itself guarantee that the Catholic mission of these universities will be preserved and nurtured,” as Peter Steinfels wrote here all the way back in 2007, the same can also be said of hiring for mission. One of the problems with hiring for mission is that the fear of ecclesiastical tyranny is still much stronger than the fear of being put completely in the hands of technocrats. The capitalist culture of today’s university model puts the business school in a central place and outsources moral responsibility to business-ethics programs. But even liberal-progressive Catholic institutions tend to make Catholic identity a matter of marketing and public relations. What is often forgotten is that since there is no constitutionally established church in the United States (as there is, for example, in Germany), the Catholic educational and cultural structure still relies on an essentially ecclesial institutional system that benefits only marginally from the support of public institutions.
Read the rest here.
