THE PERILS OF “PREFERRED PEERS”

“Rather than aiming to be like the ‘preferred peers,’ why shouldn’t a proudly Catholic university like Notre Dame set a new standard of true excellence.” – George Weigel

By the Sycamore Trust

We provide below a recent First Things article by the prominent Catholic author George Weigel on the pernicious effects of Notre Dame’s consuming ambition to be grouped with the high-ranking, resolutely secular universities it considers its “peers.”

The relentless pursuit of this goal has been a primary cause of the weakening of Notre Dame’s Catholic identity.  A school that is “too Catholic” just can’t make the cut in a secular academe that is deeply suspicious of the influence of religion.  And so we have a Notre Dame wanting to be thought, even to be, Catholic, but not so Catholic as to prejudice its chances of being considered at least the near-equal of the Harvards, Yales, Stanfords and Dukes of the world.

Our most fundamental concern has been the effect that this chase after “peers” has had on faculty hiring. The stress in hiring is on research and for applicants with impressive secular credentials — degrees from “peers,” publication by their presses.  The consequence has been a radical reduction of Catholic faculty representation, a subject to which we will return shortly.

But this infatuation with secular “peers” reaches much more broadly. We will discuss shortly, for example, the administration’s candid, if not refreshing, acknowledgement that it does not want tuition to slip materially below peer institutions notwithstanding the punishing cost of a Notre Dame education, as well as the alarming prospects of a weakening of the Theology requirement and the establishment of a liberal arts college in a China hostile to the Church, human rights, and academic freedom.

The First Things article we reproduce is by no means the first to take note of this “keeping up with the Harvards” syndrome. Here are a couple of others:

The Irish Rover

The Irish Rover reviewed the pervasiveness of this phenomenon last year.  For example, in revising its disciplinary standards, of all things, Notre Dame looked to 17 “peer institutions” only four of which were Catholic.  And in faculty hiring, the article cited the recent major expansion of research positions together with the late Professor Charles Rice’s warning about the school’s “preoccupation with research greatness” and its quest for  “acceptance as a great university according to the standards of Yale [and] Stanford.” (Subscribe to the Rover here.)

Ethics and Public Policy Center

In a tribute to the late Professor Ralph McInerny, George Weigel noted Dr.  McInery’s conviction that the university “had gone off the rails in its dogged and relentlessly self-promoting attempts to measure itself against what it likes to term ‘peer schools.”  Dr. McInerny, Weigel said, understood the wrongheadedness of this self-measurement plumb line, “given the intellectual chaos, political correctness, decadence, and madcap trendiness that has afflicted these ‘peer schools’ since the late Sixties.”

Now, here is Mr. Weigel’s latest contribution in full:

The following article was originally published in First Things on August 12, 2015 by George Weigel.

On Catholic campuses that aspire to Top Ten or Top Twenty status in publicity sweepstakes like the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, one sometimes hears the phrase “preferred peers.” Translated into plain English from faux-sociologese, that means the schools to which we’d like to be compared (and be ranked with). At a major Catholic institution like the University of Notre Dame, for example, administrators use the term “preferred peers” to refer to universities like Duke, Stanford, and Princeton, suggesting that these are the benchmarks by which Notre Dame measures its own aspirations to excellence.

By the current standards of American higher learning, Duke, Stanford, and Princeton are indeed excellent schools. But is their excellence the excellence to which a Catholic institution of higher education should aspire? Are they the benchmarks by which a Catholic university with dreams of glory should measure itself?

I doubt it. Boasting vast endowments, many very fine teachers, and excellent programs in some fields, Duke, Stanford, and Princeton nonetheless participate in the intellectual incoherence that is the chief hallmark of 21st-century American higher education. None of the three has a serious, demanding core curriculum, in which students absorb the intellectual patrimony of the West and are thus equipped to meet and engage other cultures. Duke has an excellent divinity school and a glorious chapel; but it would be a stretch to say that serious theology and an appreciation of human beings as innately worshipping creatures are hallmarks of a Duke undergraduate education. Princeton has the great Professor Robert P. George, but its philosophy department is adept at turning out graduates who doubt that there is anything properly describable as “the truth.” As for Stanford, its response to the decadence of campus life today has been to institute a monitored regime of political correctness that would be risible if it were not sinister.

Aspirations to excellence should be applauded in any field. The real question is, what do you mean by excellence? And as I survey the higher altitudes of American higher education in the first decades of the twenty-first century, at least as measured by U.S. News and World Report, I don’t see a lot that Blessed John Henry Newman, author of The Idea of a University, would recognize as “excellence.”

I see extremely bright students, often ill-served by ideologically distorted teaching. I see extraordinary wealth used for endless fundraising. I see lots of scientific and technological innovation, usually untethered from any serious consideration of whether something new is good or bad, ennobling or dehumanizing. At the undergraduate level, I see a curricular smorgasbord that not even the brightest eighteen-year old could reasonably be expected to navigate, so as to graduate as a well-rounded, well-educated young adult. The high-priced-spread schools may be excellent by their own guild standards (for those vaunted rankings depend heavily on peer reviews, one academic hand scratching another academic back). But would Newman accept those standards or find these schools excellent? My hunch is he’d find them deeply confused, no matter how wealthy.

Catholic higher education in the United States is, in my experience, the best Catholic higher education in the world. But it could be better. And the notion that it will become better by aspiring to be like today’s Ivies (or Ivy wannabes like Duke and Stanford) strikes me as a hangover from the vertigo of the immediate post-Vatican II years. Then, a lot of Catholic educators, seeking to let some fresh air blow through the windows of their classrooms, imagined that refreshing breezes would be imitating schools like Harvard, Cornell, and Berkeley (which in those days was widely regarded as not only the country’s greatest public university, but its greatest university, period). The problem was that Harvard, Cornell, and Berkeley were on the cusp of losing their minds and deconstructing their souls.

Rather than aiming to be like the “preferred peers,” why shouldn’t a proudly Catholic university like Notre Dame set a new standard of true excellence, based on and measured by the Catholic tradition of integrated learning and integral human formation?     

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

In his inaugural address to the faculty, Father Jenkins asked:

If we are afraid to be different from the world, how can we make a  difference in the world?

Indeed!

 

http://sycamoretrust.org/bulletins/150822.php