Last Friday I heard another anecdote involving George Bernard Shaw. Some of you probably know the accurate version. At least as I heard it, it was a species of good news/bad news story. A pompous acquaintance came to Shaw with the good news that one of the Royal Academies had asked him for a report on his life’s work. The bad news was that he had been given fifteen minutes.

“How can I sum up all my achievements in fifteen minutes?” he asked Shaw. And Shaw supposedly replied, “Speak very slowly.”

I have been rather obsessively investigating and talking to people, maybe even occasionally talking at people, about the role and future of Catholic higher education for about a dozen years. The good news is that one of the chapters in my recent book makes almost all my ideas on the subject readily available. I don’t have to worry about squeezing them all into a quarter hour today. The bad news, of course, is that having published that, I either have to produce some fresh thoughts or shut up. Or speak very slowly.

Catholic colleges and universities once existed for largely defensive reasons. They were founded to protect the faith of young Catholics from hostile forces while helping these children of immigrants get ahead. When I was a senior in high school, the Jesuits in charge had to be pressed, maybe even with hints of a lawsuit, to send a classmate’s transcript to godless Yale. That was not untypical. At the girls’ high school of a friend, the nuns had to be similarly pressed to send transcripts to Jesuit colleges—apparently on the grounds that they were almost as godless as Yale.

Of course, these aims were somewhat at odds—to protect students from dangerous forces while simultaneously promoting their assimilation into the American mainstream. But to an amazing extent, the colleges and universities and the religious orders that founded them succeeded in this balancing act.

The cost, however, was high, as a growing number of Catholic thinkers and leaders began to recognize in the 1950s. As an essentially defensive or protective enterprise, Catholic intellectual life was naturally isolated, parochial, in too many respects second rate. Where Catholicism made an intellectual impact on the culture, it was more often than not through the work of converts or European thinkers or refugees. The Second Vatican Council reinforced this sense of shortcoming, as it substituted dialogue for warfare as the church’s dominant way of relating to contemporary culture and society.

For several decades after the Council, Catholic higher education focused on achieving scholarly excellence and assuring academic freedom. It did this in the face of educational and economic changes that often made sheer survival a remarkable achievement. Today, the struggle to achieve and maintain high scholarly standards remains a constant. As does vigilance about open and free inquiry. As does institutional survival. But a quantum leap in regard to those goals has already occurred. As it occurred, the sense became palpable that Catholic higher education was reshaping itself in fundamental ways. Some people were worried about that. Some people were elated. Some people—the wisest, I believe—were both.

For a long time, that sense of reshaping produced more grumbling and cheers than fresh or clear articulation. But in the last dozen years, reflection on where Catholic higher education has arrived and where it needs to go and how it should understand itself, has reached, it sometimes seems, a fever pitch.

I am not going to try to compete in a few minutes with the remarkable books that have appeared, by David O’Brien, Philip Gleason, Michael Buckley, James Burtchaell, Charles E. Curran, George Dennis O’Brien, and Alice Gallin, among others, or the flood of thoughtful essays, many provoked or inspired by Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Constitution on Catholic Universities, a text that has been virtually eclipsed by the Vatican’s all-consuming interest in the juridical norms and applications, especially regarding the one discipline of theology. I commend all these works to you.

Instead I will simply name seven developments that I consider essential to the articulation of Catholic higher education’s new and vital potential, and I will draw one or two conclusions of my own from each.

The first is the scholarly critique of the secularization of American higher education. Scholars like George M. Marsden, Douglas Sloan, and James Turner have given us an historical perspective on the great American universities’ loss of their religious roots, or as the subtitle to Marsden’s magisterial work, The Soul of the American University (Oxford University Press, 1994), puts it, “From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief.” Whatever one thinks of that trajectory, these historical perspectives have removed it from the realm of inevitability to that of human, sometimes very human, choices or defaults. For Catholic educators, in particular, this has sharpened awareness of the powerful secularizing undertow in academic culture. It has underlined the question, Why does American higher education simply need more of the same?

The second development is the post-modern critique of privileged narratives, in this case in higher education. Maybe I should avoid the word “post-modern” here, loaded as it is with many meanings and agendas, some highly debatable. But certainly it no longer goes unchallenged that the modern university is the latest stage of a self-evident, absolutely ordained course of progress, to which others must aspire, rather than one among a number of possibilities. It is widely recognized today that no search for truth stands totally outside all presuppositions and all communities of searchers. All thinking is tradition-based and all inquiry is tradition-directed, an obvious point once one recognizes that modernity, too, represents a tradition. Likewise, “there are different kinds of universities, beholden to diverse educational traditions,” such as those of natural science and the Enlightenment. (Alasdair MacIntyre on tradition-based inquiry and David B. Burrell on different kinds of universities, in David B. Burrell, C.S.C., “A Catholic University,” in Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University, University of Notre Dame Press, 1994, pp. 57-59.)

This intellectual shift reinforces the argument that other models, not rejecting those specific traditions but emphasizing other traditions as well, would enrich higher education.

The third development is the demand for pluralism and multiculturalism. Like post-modernism, multiculturalism is a slippery term. In its larger, I would say authentic sense, multiculturalism is not simply a diversity of individuals, backgrounds, or points of view. It is a diversity of cultures, that is, of living traditions, of communities, bound together by shared memories, convictions, and ways of life—but also (and this is what is meant by living traditions or communities) renewing those memories, convictions, and ways of life under the challenges of changing circumstances.

A zoo represents a diversity of specimens. A forest, an ecology of living species, represents pluralism and multiculturalism.

What does it take for these communities of memory, conviction, and ways of life to renew and reproduce themselves as living species, not captured or stuffed specimens? Well, they need to bring together a certain minimum population. They need institutions of learning, transmission, research, inquiry, criticism, and discussion. In our age and society, that usually means higher education.

The three developments I have mentioned—first, the historical critique of the secularization of Protestant-founded and inspired higher education in America, second, the dethroning of a model of higher education beholden to Enlightenment and natural science presuppositions about truth and the purpose and nature of inquiry and education, and third, the claims on behalf of multiculturalism—these are all foundation blocks of a new case for Catholic higher education. It is a case that argues Catholic higher education’s contribution to educational pluralism, to widening the underlying traditions that frame inquiry, and to keeping vital communities of shared memory, convictions, and ways of life.

A fourth development deserves mention here: the widespread dissatisfaction with the fragmentation and credentialism of scholarly life and with the moral disarray and drift of too much student life. Only yesterday, in a piece about student cheating on the op-ed page of the New York Times, a University of Virginia professor reflected about the larger need to make scholarly questions bear on real life. Too many humanities teachers, he lamented, “prefer to operate at a safe and scholarly distance.” Questions about the human value of a work for the student’s life or personal transformation make professors uneasy. There are many reasons for this, the author suggests, “but a big one is the overall shift among universities to making the object of a liberal arts education not so much the development of the individual’s inner life as it is the acquisition of skills.” (Mark Edmundson, “How Teachers Can Stop Cheaters,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2003)

I believe that higher education today can benefit from Catholicism’s historic commitment to relating faith and reason, defending both against skeptics and rationalists. Higher education can benefit from Catholicism’s historic concern, so well exemplified here at Providence, with the liberal arts and with the integration of knowledge. It can benefit from Catholicism’s historic rejection of a purely instrumental view of learning, and from Catholicism’s stress on both contemplation and moral purpose in education and intellectual inquiry.

(Although there is not time to develop this theme, on the eve of September 11, we should also recall the importance of Catholic education’s potential for operating and thinking in an international register. This is not simply a matter of a semester abroad program or area studies but of a profound sense of spiritual citizenship in a people who transcend barriers.)

Along with these four general developments in the academy and intellectual life, I would like to flag three that are more specific to Catholic colleges and universities.

First, the overwhelming majority of Catholic students are not on Catholic campuses. For every Catholic student at a Catholic college, at least five are on community, state, or private campuses. If any notion lingers of the defensive goal of protecting Catholic students from threats to their faith, then Catholic resources are drastically misplaced. The mass of Catholic students will never be embraced by Catholic schools. Instead, these colleges and universities will make sense only if they are incubators, unlikely to be found elsewhere, of scholarship and thinking pertinent to Catholicism in the discussions and research they foster. They will make sense only if they are incubators of Catholic leadership in the students they educate. It is unfortunate that, for many people, the test of Catholic identity and mission at Catholic colleges and universities seems to be what discussions and events should supposedly not happen on these campuses rather than on what should.

Second, student bodies and especially faculties on most Catholic campuses are religiously diverse. Of course this differs from school to school. I believe that non-Catholic students and faculty overwhelmingly respect these institutions’ Catholic mission and identity, even if they are sometimes puzzled by what the discussion of that mission and identity means for them personally. The actual truth is that non-Catholics often exhibit mission-related priorities in their scholarly interests and teaching style to a greater degree than do Catholics. I am thinking of historians, sociologists of religion, philosophers, and theologians I have known, non-Catholics who have brilliantly illuminated facets of the Catholic heritage.

Indeed, Catholic identity must embrace scholars of other faiths and of no faith not simply as admissible presences in Catholic higher education but as essential to its purposes. Other Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and other religious and non-religious perspectives are intrinsic to a Catholic university, not something external against which Catholic identity is balanced. In this way, too, Catholic institutions can be a model of retaining a distinctive focus energized, challenged, and enlivened by diverse perspectives, what a Georgetown faculty document some years ago happily termed “centered pluralism.”

The final development to which I must refer is the decline in the membership of the religious orders that have founded and maintained Catholic colleges and universities. Existing as a kind of flexible, entrepreneurial tertium quid between the bishops, with their immediate responsibilities, and the laity, often minimally educated and unorganized, these orders built an array of educational institutions in the United State unmatched anywhere else in the world. Those orders have long been the vehicles of religious identity and distinctiveness on these campuses. Today their ability to continue that role, though still real, is undeniably diminished. The baton must be passed to—and grasped by—lay people, or the steady pull of secularization and homogenization will prevail. Some religious orders have tried to prolong their charism in lay ranks. A wise step, although occasional efforts to do this while subtracting or minimizing the charism’s Catholic character, on the grounds that it is more acceptable to be Jesuit, Franciscan, Vincentian, or even perhaps Dominican today without being Catholic, are destined, I believe, to collapse. If Catholic higher education is to realize its remarkable potential to contribute something distinctive, and something badly needed, to the academy and to the culture, the C-word cannot be avoided. Nor can be the shadows of Catholicism’s past sins against the mind and free inquiry, and the fears those memories still stir.

The seven developments I have mentioned amount to this: Colleges like Providence confront a new opportunity, and a new need, and a new challenge. The directions you choose cannot be dictated simply by large goals or abstract principles, but by the particular circumstances of your history, your constituencies, your resources. But no choice is more important than the choice to reflect on these matters among yourselves, openly, honestly, willingly, lovingly. I would be more than satisfied if these few minutes were a modest and encouraging contribution to such a continuing reflection.

Thank you.

© Peter Steinfels, 2003. Not to be quoted at length, reproduced, or published without permission.