The Atlantic Discovers Jesuit ‘Rebranding’

By  Nicholas Frankovich, January 4, 2015

Jesuit universities are “rebranding” themselves, according to this piece in The Atlantic. While they still have to “fall in line with the Church as a whole,” they are also “places where young adults are encouraged to think critically.”

Translation: Georgetown, Boston College, Holy Cross, and the 25 other Jesuit institutions of higher education in the United States have begun to value intellect, just like their secular counterparts, though they find themselves handicapped by constraints that the heavy hand of Rome places on their academic freedom.

The stereotype underpinning that narrative is longstanding. It has been motivating Catholic colleges and universities to shake off their Catholic identity for more than half a century. At this point, it’s not so much a news story or even a feature story as it is history, which is still unfolding but has been unfolding so long and so consistently that, I hate to say it, a hundred years from now Fordham should be no more a Catholic university than Columbia is any longer Anglican.

In Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education (2009), Anne Hendershott argues that non-Catholic educators have been slamming Catholic colleges in the United States since the beginning, which was 1789, the year of Georgetown’s founding. By the 1960s, a critical mass of the faculty and administration at the Catholic institutions themselves were running away from the Catholic label and working overtime to reinvent, or rebrand, the places as secular.

Many were financially squeezed. In New York, Governor Nelson Rockefeller pushed for state subsidy of private colleges and universities, but Fordham, St. John’s, etc. appeared to be ineligible because of the Blaine Amendment. No problem, said the Bundy Committee, appointed by Rockefeller to implement his plan. The committee reasoned that the colleges were no longer seriously Catholic except in name. In reality, they were secular colleges in embryo. They were clearly following the pattern established by private schools that long ago cut their ties to the Protestant churches that founded them:

First, laity replace clergy in the administration and on the board of trustees. Then the denominational affiliation is quietly retired though an “explicitly ‘Christian’ identity” is maintained for a while. After a gradual transition, perhaps over several generations, the school comes to be understood by all to be “plainly secular,” the committee noted with approval. “We believe that this movement is greatly in the interest of all.”

Representatives of leading Catholic universities gathered in Land O’Lakes, Wisc., in 1967 and issued a statement declaring for all practical purposes their independence from the Church. Pushback from Rome came in 1990 in the form of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, in which Pope John Paul II wrote that “every Catholic University, without ceasing to be a University, has a relationship to the Church that is essential to its institutional identity.”

Although the fading of Catholic identity has been an issue with Catholic schools across the board, Jesuit colleges and universities tend to come in for special criticism, because of their relative prestige and perhaps because they’ve been among the worst offenders. Their reputation in that regard, however, as in so many others, may be exaggerated. To his credit, Fordham’s president in his roughly twelve years in office has taken subtle measures to raise the school’s Catholic profile. He’s swimming against the tide, but Godspeed to him.

As for the “critical thinking” that is supposed to be at odds with having to “fall in line with the Church,” the Jesuits of yore, the tough-minded philologists and philosophers and theologians, as opposed to the tender-hearted social workers who have succeeded them, would have understood the need to think critically about “thinking critically,” which used to go by the name of “the hermeneutics of suspicion.”

To think critically about the Church is only to think with the spirit of the age. The Church invites us to think with her instead. Most people prefer the spirit of the age. So do too many Catholic schools, as they follow the herd, leaving the creative minority to homeschooling and independent scholarship.

 

Full article with links and documentation at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/395664/atlantic-discovers-jesuit-rebranding-nicholas-frankovich