EDITORIALS:
O'Gara, James
Editorials MORAL EDUCATION The campuses, we are told, are quiet. More students are meditating and even going to church. Religious vocations are up and fewer seminarians cause trouble or go to...
...For these are all issues where it matters where and by whom they are discussed if moral values are to be communicated...
...the value of human life confronted in inextricably connected issues-war, abortion, punishment euthanasia, and the intolerable cost of health care...
...Today, to "protest" may mean to buy Christian Brothers rather than Gallo for the wine party...
...For, in the long run, nothing forms and reinforces character as well as friendship...
...the food and energy crises, man's responsibility for the environment and his fellow men, the inequitable distribution of natural and economic resources...
...Today's college generation is both unscarred and untaught by those years...
...Meanwhile, recently, a group of moneyed priests and laymen announced that, in contrast to the colleges informalizing their religious affiliations ("selling out"), they will start a new real Catholic college where the "truth" will be taught...
...For example: morality and foreign policy, surveillance, spying, subversion and military intervention...
...If the primary goal of religiously-oriented universities were to turn out a generation that is industrious, docile and churched we might be cheered by this evidence of a modest religious revival...
...Morality today is less than ever a list of learnable thoughts...
...the church and labor, toil and creativity in work, human dignity and welfare legislation, a rediscovery of the social encyclicals...
...It can provide them in three ways: by curriculum, prophetic leadership, and community...
...Students, afraid of facing the job market without good grades and marketable skills, work harder...
...So, the students-except when they run around naked in the spring-are quiet...
...sexuality, changing sex roles and behavior, particularly the history and future of women in the church and society...
...For moral values are formed in response to demands-when one must choose between involvement and retreat, and when silence in the face of evil mounts to a share in the guilt...
...But those years also had something very religious that this new age of tranquility seems to lack: moral passion...
...We learned in the '60s that college can't be Camelot...
...But it is still not too much to hope that students and faculty can live together and associate freely in a way that promotes fellowship, understanding between the ages and sexes, a richer intellectual life, and spiritual growth...
...another...
...If they cannot risk alienating a few wealthy contributors in order to witness to a moral principle -by boycotting discriminatory clubs, denouncing the government's abuse of civil liberties-perhaps too high a price is being paid for financial solvency...
...Community...
...Religious vocations are up and fewer seminarians cause trouble or go to jail...
...It is a quality of character that can grow out of the unique combination of teaching, life experience, and reflection that the religiously-oriented university exists to provide...
...They are more obedient...
...Confronted by the twin sins of racial oppression and the Vietnam war, the universities reexamined their relationship to a society that had gone off course and became-by their teach-ins, marches, and the public statements of their bolder leaders- along with the press, the conscience of the nation...
...Administrators, faculty, parents and alumni feel better.But, although man cannot live well without worship, the purpose of the religiously-oriented university is not to get its students into church...
...But, since good theology and lively campus ministries are more and more available on strictly secular campuses, this community witness may be the one last thing that can make religiously-oriented colleges unique...
...The wounds of the late 1960s-with their burnings, clubbings, shootings and bomb scares-have barely healed...
...Leadership...
...For them Mylai is a fact in a journalism textbook they must memorize for a quiz and the Watergate criminals are "celebrities"-like Harold Cosell and Jim Bouton-who will talk for an hour if you give them $2000...
...When the courses have been forgotten what each generation will remember longest about its campus community will be the love its members had-or didn't have-for one another...
...It is to form the values that will enable the citizen to function as a just man in a far-from-just society...
...A university's shared values are best embodied in a core liberal arts curriculum: an integrated series of in-depth interdisciplinary courses-not quickie "gut" surveys-that give students the data, analytical tools and moral perspective to make decisions on complex issues...
...Curriculum...
...This is a special challenge to those religious orders who ones owned their institutions but have gven up their legal domination so that their schools can qualify for state aid...
...and few who have scars would want to open them again...
...Prophetic leadership means that university spokesmen-preferably both the president and the chaplain-should be willing, when necessary, to take stands against the national leadership or public opinion...
...They smoke less "grass"-and drink more beer like their dads...
...This means that if students have dozed off, the educators must wake them up-challenge them again, through academic controversy, to face the moral and religious dimensions of the new social issues that will soon make demands on us all...
...This might mean some adjustment in traditional lifestyle...
...This year's freshmen were less than twelve-years-old when their older brothers and sisters were beaten bloody and gassed in Chicago's Grant Park...
...They might well resolve their crises of identity by redefining their community campus presence with new emphasis on the public witness of their community life...
Vol. 102 • March 1975 • No. 1
