Tough choices on campus
Schroth, Raymond A.
I I I THE CATHOLIC CHARACTER OF A UNIVERSITY Tough choices on campus RAYMOND A. SCHROTH T HIS SPRING, the one millionth student will graduate from the twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and...
...Ignatius Jesuits would establish a college-within-the-college -- call it Borgia College -- in a special dorm with strict study hours, no noise, no visitors of the opposite sex after l 1 P.M., daily prayer, a curriculum loaded with Thomistic philosophy, three required theology courses, and professors noted for their orthodoxy...
...He has published ten book reviews and two articles in Commonweal, America, and Cross Currents, and has submitted a chapter from his dissertation to a scholarly journal...
...but the LuceyMarquette.study "clearly contradicts this...
...Of course this is sometimes true...
...the energy and emotional resources to deal with the frustrations and challenges of the job search -- resumps, interviews, presentations and faculty politics...
...the five junior faculty fear that Hope will have an edge on them in the competition for tenure in an already overtenured department...
...Jesuit presence in the residence halls...
...9 The free and disinterested pursuit of truth for its own sake...
...What can St, Ignatius -- or any Catholic college in a similar situation -- do...
...And no less than academic freedom, but an adherence to the principles spelled out by the American Association of University Professors and the statutes of each institution...
...Peter's College, Paul C. Reinert of St...
...Yet this will not happen easily...
...In fact, in his address to the Jesuit presidents in Rome in November 1985, the Jesuit General, Fr...
...Ignatius will inevitably attract lay teachers who admire Jesuit goals...
...This means that, within these norms, the administration of a Jesuit institution would have to support the right of a faculty member to take a position contrary to the magisterium's position on some controversial issue - - e.g., abortion, papal authority, etc...
...It may become a process of death and rebirth, or simply facing the kind of "death" -- or "indifference" to material success -- that is at the heart of Ignatian spirituality...
...It seemed to me as academic dean that, at this particular time, Holy Cross, a Jesuit college committed to social and economic justice, needed one more faculty member with these concerns...
...I would indicate that it exemplifies these six qualities...
...Somehow, religious schools must profit from the diversity and professionalism recent faculty have brought, yet not lose the religious purpose for which they were founded...
...In a Ph.D...
...Some see a tension between working in huge institutions and the "preferential option for the poor...
...Others could be painted, transferring all that you know of myth and geometry onto the shell...
...Not merely academic freedom, but a habit of mind where every half answer leads to new questions...
...In a sense, this would extend the principle of affirmative action - already applied to minorities, women, and Jesuits -to laypersons with special personal qualities...
...Daniel Degnan, S. 1., of Seton Hall Law School, makes the case in another paper that all Catholic universities face this same identity crisis...
...In spite of the valid idea behind it -- that an institution should recruit people who support its goals -- in practice it is an invitation to a witch hunt and a clause that faculty political cliques could use to purge troublemakers...
...and a willingness on the part of the administration, faculty, and trustees of certain institutions to spell out the initiatives they would take, including some sacrifices, to attract both the few Jesuits available and laymen and women "who would undertake a special responsibility toward the Catholic tradition and culture of the school...
...At the same time, all twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities face a future in which what it means to graduate from a Jesuit institution is becoming a more critical and problematic question -- for students, faculty, and the whole American church -- than it has ever been before...
...a readiness to be a Jesuit presence at a non-Jesuit institution, such as the several outstanding Jesuits now at the Catholic University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Missouri...
...The same Times news article that listed Jesuit successes reported that today tlrere are only 950 Jesuits among the 15,408 teachers and administrators in the twenty-eight schools...
...The Jesuit chair already works well at Georgetown and Boston College...
...Many said they shared or accepted our commitment to faith and justice in a general way, once it was explained...
...But most had given the character of the college little thought...
...Kolvenbach made special note of how these matters relate to the teaching of economics...
...A lay-majority board of trustees, rather than the Jesuit provincial, chose the president and set overall policy...
...There are 10 Jesuits on a faculty of 190...
...a campus ministry team where the chaplains also teach...
...We should consider the possibility that Father Hope's expectations in applying at St...
...Not only are there fewer Jesuits, but fewer are inttrestedin the higher education apostolate...
...We do not strengthen the Catholic intellectual life by pulling young believers back in...
...In a "start-over" scenario, the St...
...Leah Shelleda Fulton Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket Hide some in comers so you may suddenly come upon them and the shape of beginning will startle you...
...some faculty abhor interdisciplinary topics...
...Catholic and Jesuit schools must adhere to the highest proS PEAKING TO Jesuit university presidents from around the v, orld gathered last November at Fra.scati, Italy, Jesuit Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbaeh nmde the following observation: "Each discipline within the realm of the huntanities and social sciences is well aware that the values transmitted depend on the inevitable assumptions about the human perscm . . . It is here especially that the promotion of justice in the name of the Gospel can become tangible and transparent...
...a high percentage of those 139 are already slated Commonweal: 170for seminaries, social action, law, or medicine...
...Furthermore, any threat to an individual's tenure based on a change in his religious status would receive very little support from the academic profession, the courts, or -- I suspect -- from the broader religious community...
...B UI~, NOW THE situation is more complex...
...scholarly leadership on the 28 March 1986:171part of Jesuit faculty...
...I I I THE CATHOLIC CHARACTER OF A UNIVERSITY Tough choices on campus RAYMOND A. SCHROTH T HIS SPRING, the one millionth student will graduate from the twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States...
...Ignatius...
...At the same time, ill-advised and flawed as the Vatican's proposed schema may be, it does not address a completely imaginary danger...
...This is not a uniquely Jesuit problem...
...I suspect that the two plans that offer the best prospects for the future are: a willingness'on the part of Jesuits to disengage themselves from institutions that do not give them the best opportunity to fulfill their mission in the church as they understand it...
...While the Vatican congregation's Proposed Schema for a Pontifical Document on Catholic Universities is addressed to the universal church, the controls it proposes -- for example, giving the local bishop authority over Catholic university theologians -- run counter to the historical experience of American Catholic colleges which have prospered on a degree of intellectual autonomy, adopted the professional standards of the American Association of University Professors, and received funding from private foundations, corporations, and state and federal agencies...
...Another scenario would center the university apostolate more in the religious commu(Continued on page 174) Commonweal: 172nity itself with the Jesuit faculty looking for leadership more from the rector than the president...
...Both to become eligible for government funding and, in the wake of Vatican II, to bring our institutions academically into the mainstream of American higher education, Jesuit resident communities were legally incorporated as separate from the educational institutions...
...in the 1960s there were 1500...
...Last spring the Holy Cross administration asked the economics department to try to make one of the two persons it was hiring someone who shared the "general thrust" -- i.e., the ideas that the poor are particularly vulnerable and that economic ideas have human consequences -- of the American bishops' letter on the economy...
...9 A classical curriculum -- one centered around the liberal arts and sciences -- though not nec~sarily with rigid core requirements...
...9 Commitment to academic excellence -- students continually challenged to go beyond what they have already achieved...
...that the economics "profession" and other academic professions were value-free...
...The community would take the initiative in recruitment and, in cooperation with the administration, sponsor Jesuit faculty by establishing special Jesuit chairs...
...1. Phase out the Jesuit identity gracefully but decisively...
...9 The integration ofintellectual and personal life: students often live together with faculty, sharing their social, religious, cultural, and athletic lives outside the classroom, so that the student becomes morally educated through the friendship of older men and women...
...6, 5, and 4 at the smaller colleges...
...But this year it's different...
...Ironically, partly because Holy Cross is so "Jesuit," with its exceptionally loyal alumni, liberal arts tradition, reputation for Christian liberalism, Catholic and boarding student body, high attendance at Mass, and thirty working Jesuit faculty or administrators, I naively overestimated the faculty's willingness to accept an idea which seemed to follow from the nature of the institution...
...Religious commitment can never be a substitute for academic excellence and scholarship...
...Thus Jesuit universities which have allowed the "growth departments" -- those that attract students, such as marketing, management, accounting, economics, and computer science -- to dominate their curricula and set the tone of the school have a special identity problem...
...acter of the community so as to shape its identity -- there won't be enough Jesuits in the too distant future to staff twenty-eight schools...
...Opponents of this idea argued that this would put off the "best" candidates...
...These schools -- which now enroll 178,500 -- will pass that milestone at a time when, as educational institutions, the majority enjoy good -- and a handful, very good -- financial and intellectual health...
...But what do I mean when I say a college or university has a Jesuit identity...
...And Mike Walsh was not concerned about numbers of Jesuits, but thought that with "one very competent, scholarly" Jesuit in each department -- quality over quantity - - Jesuits would have stronger Jesuit universities...
...In 1984 there were 139 Jesuits in graduate studies 079 in 1981...
...In my own formulation, this plan does not require that the teacher be CathoCommonweal: 174lic...
...Those were heady days...
...That, of course, did not answer the question...
...News and World Report (November 25, ! 985) in an impressionistic survey of presidents, included four Jesuit schools -- Scranton, Gonzaga, Loyola-Marymount, and LeMoyne -- among the nation's ninety "best...
...The New York Times Selective Guide to Colleges, limiting its analyses to 250 of the best schools in the United States, picked ten Jesuit institutions -- San Francisco, Santa Clara, Fairfield, Georgetown, Loyola of New Orleans, Boston College, Holy Cross, St...
...in this perspective, economics will see material things as instruments fi~r the service of individual people . . . . all other science and, technolog)., when taught and studied from the perspective of the promotion of justice, will be acutely conscious that all research must ultimately promote the dignity of the human person...
...only six members of the department are women, so there should be another woman...
...They could sell the seventy-room Jesuit residence to the college as a dorm and let the handful of tenured Jesuits who wish to remain rent a house off-campus...
...Ignatius College, a case-study composite of a moderately competitive, liberal arts college with a slipping enrollment of 3,000 outside a fading industrial city in the Midwest...
...This loss of "control" was, for some Jesuits, a traumatic "sell-out...
...It led to no real policy changes...
...the discipline to produce the scholarly articles that will lead to both tenure and, more important, a lifetime of productivity...
...Some of the candidates have Ivy League degrees and have published books...
...which by nature and self-definition are purely secular and value-free, even to the extent that being value-free is a value in itself...
...Louis University, and others -- and some of the future troops who would be manning today's trenches...
...Indeed a secular humanist or a religious Jew can often embody some of these ideals, such as a commitment to social justice and high standards of scholarship, and pursue them more vigorously than certain Catholics...
...Ignatius are unrealistic...
...that one Jesuit -- or one hard-working, religiously committed man or woman -- who stands out is worth ten who sit back...
...and the spiritual "indifference" to success that will allow them to "fail" or lose tenure if the cost, in terms of moral compromises, is too high...
...Rather, they are individualists, as likely to disagree with a Jesuit administrator or other Jesuit member of the faculty as any faculty member...
...But I think most would agree today that it was a necessary, if painful, step into a new era where Jesuit schools and Jesuits as individuals have become professionally and intellectually more competitive with their secular contemporaries, and have matured spiritually as well...
...Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, singled out economics and medicine as fields which "when taught and studied from the perspective of the promotion of justice, will be acutely conscious that all research must ultimately promote the dignity of the human person...
...What makes a school Jesuit...
...Perhaps he should have fattened his dossier with scholarly publications before applying, and downplayed his interests in students...
...2. Draw the wagons into a circle...
...Peter's College in Jersey City...
...On the one hand, Hope is not, by purely secular standards, the "best" candidate, but he is the kind of teacher who has traditionally given most Jesuit schools their character...
...interaction between the Jesuit community and lay faculty...
...In short, we opened the ghetto doors forty years ago...
...This is so in a decade when the common wisdom in higher education circles has predicted, as a result of the demographic dip in the college-age population, that a good many colleges must either radically adapt their curricula, special programs, and marketing strategies to attract new students (foreign students, retired people, working people, etc...
...The experience produced merely a collection of statements and exhaustion from the men who went through the community discussions...
...The question of Catholic identity in a pluralistic and secular culture faces every one of the 235 Catholic colleges in America, from Notre Dame to the local diocesan college...
...lhis is an ideal which a sufficient number of the faculty and administrators -- not just the campus ministry team -- must share if it is to mean anything at all...
...Although Jesuit superiors could not "close" St...
...This identity question is obviously not a new one...
...Hope's "field" is "wrong" -- the department wants late nineteenth-century, he's early- -- or his proposed courses overlap with someone else's favorite course...
...but my impression is that additional structures which turn the community in on itself or which might weaken its loyalty to the Jesuit president, who usually needs all the loyalty he can get, will also dilute religious influence in the larger academic community of which it should be an integral part...
...and my experience in interviewing hundreds of applicants in six years as academic dean at Rockhurst and Holy Cross is that the overwhehning majority are attracted by the fact of a job, then by location, salary, benefits, opportunities for scholarship, and quality of the student body more than the religious aims of the school...
...On the other hand, a lot of factors may -- probably will -- block him at St...
...Some of the Jesuit faculty, because of age or lack of marketable skills, won't find new jobs easily...
...When I explained my resignation to the Academic Affairs Committee of the Board of Trustees at Holy Cross, a group which had always supported me, one asked if I believed it was still possible to have a really Jesuit college or university...
...At the same time, the wisdom of what I would call the McLaughlin-Walsh 1964 rule seems more powerful than ever: that Jesuits and Jesuit schools should try to lead...
...seventeen are tenured...
...All the evidence indicates that if you need a critical mass of Jesuits -- i.e., enough to significantly influence the day-to-day living charREVEREND RAYMOND A SCHROTH, S.J., is the Will & Ariel Durant Professor at St...
...Of the five-hundred resumes that came in for an open position, one is from Father John Hope, S.J., thirty-five, who is a few months away from finishing his interdisciplinary dissertation at a good but not top university...
...This will be painful in many ways, The salaries of the employed Jesuits had helped support the retired fathers in the community who will have to find new homes...
...Ignatius Loyola -- the search for the greater good and the ability to find God in all things...
...In practice this might mean that study and research in any subject, or the development of friendships, is also, ultimately, a search for God...
...Let me mention some of the various ideas that have been proposed and some of the difficulties each entails...
...In the extreme form of this plan, the individual Jesuit's contract would be with the religious community, which in turn would contract with the administration...
...The New York Times, March 27, 1985, reported that Holy Cross, Georgetown, Boston College, and Fairfield are overwhelmed with applicants, and that Scranton also attracts outstanding candidates...
...Today, Jesuit identity comes not so much from formal control as from the cooperation of several agencies: a Jesuit president and Jesuits in other administrative posts...
...he wants to moderate the rowing team and encourage students to join the Jesuit Volunteer Corps...
...In this way, the argument goes, an elite corps of students would receive a "real" Jesuit education...
...and he simply presented himself as he is -- expecting that his Jesuit priesthood and pastoral enthusiasm would be assets...
...He is a dynamic teacher, hard worker, loves to celebrate the liturgy, and be around young people...
...or become intellectually excellent enough to beat the competition, or die...
...Legal precedent, he says, would support religious schools in these efforts...
...9 A commitment to faith and justice: the student should graduate more concerned about how he/she can serve the world than about how he/she can become upwardly mobile at a faster pace...
...This does not mean that, mathematically, there are 4 Jesuits preparing to teach in each school...
...On the other hand, this may lead to new opportunities...
...Then you will know the exact distance between you and the rising god...
...the majority were raised Catholic, and a small but devoted core of this group identify strongly with the Jesuit spirit of the school, while the others retain either nostalgic affection or latent hostility towards priests...
...5. The future of Hope...
...Good people can disagree on that...
...the rest -- Protestant, Jewish, atheist -- are either sympathetic to the religious goals of the school or quietly hostile to them...
...D. s from top secular universities into religiously affiliated colleges (often much to the intellectual benefit of the colleges), both the standards and the spirit of the colleges are set not by the school's religious traditions but by the professional associations -- in economics, philosophy, political science, sociology, etc...
...the Jesuit member, for personal reasons, is reluctant to support Hope vigorously, etc., etc . . . . None of these reasons is completely irrational...
...One result of this could be, the argument goes, that a Jesuit who leaves the priesthood would also lose tenure at the college...
...And fewer appear interested in struggling to get Ph.D.s when the academic job market is so tight -- particularly in English and history -- and when, for a number of political reasons (some of them valid), it is increasingly difficult to get a Jesuit a job in a "Jesuit" school...
...In some ways Jesuits have talked it to to death in national conferences, annual meetings, magazine articles, and late-night conversations...
...Ten years later, the American Jesuits in higher education launched "Project 1," a process that required each college community to reformulate and publish its own goals...
...This essay does not argue that my Holy Cross proposal was the best, or even a wise, approach...
...p ERHAPS TODAY'S young Jesuits will have to add new dimensions to their asceticism: a willingness to undertake the best possible Ph...
...3. Take no initiatives, for fear of offending some faculty, and allow "market" forces to determine the make-up of the faculty...
...Of the twenty members of the department, one is a Jesuit just this side of retirement...
...and a concern by the trustees for the Jesuit character of the school...
...Leo McLaughlin, for example, lamented the failure of Jesuit colleges to lead: among American colleges, they were neither the best nor the abominations -- "Our tragedy is that we have been 'good enough.' And we have been satisfied with that...
...Ignatius, they could conclude that, since lay-faculty support for the Jesuit identity is lukewarm, St, Ignatius should not be listed among the twenty-eight...
...It brought together the leading Jesuit presidents and educational thinkers in the country -- Michael P. Walsh of Boston College, Vincent T. O'Keefe of Fordham, Leo McLaughlin of St...
...This scenario also imagines, incorrectly, that Jesuits are of one mind on academic policy, or even on what a Jesuit college is...
...D. programs without the confidence that they will end up with suitable positions at Jesuit colleges and universities...
...It means also that the rough draft of the 1985 widely circulated pontifical document, which suggested that teachers at Catholic universities should be "chosen, nominated, and promoted" on the basis of their academic ability and "doctrinal integrity and uprightness of life so that they may cooperate effectively to achieve the goals of the university," could possibly violate this principle...
...Louis, Fordham, and Marquette -- and although it zinged some for over-indulgent social life or mediocrity, the Jesuit schools made the list with general praise...
...It does argue that personal attitudes and values do matter in recruiting faculty, particularly in certain fields...
...Of the 139, 43 were in theology, but only 2 in chemistry, 2 in economics, and 3 in computer science -- fields where the demand is high...
...III II II 28 March 1986:175...
...dissertation for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1978, a casestudy of Marquette University, Gregory F. Lucey, S.J., concluded that, since Catholicity can only be an educational reality if the faculty and staff, to a sufficient extent, constitute a community of shared values, given recent hiring and tenure decisions, Marquette -- and many institutions like it -- will lose its distinctive Catholic character by 1998...
...The identity crises of the late 1960s and early 1970s developed over issues of ownership and control...
...Ignatius should probably call itself something else...
...We had a sense that our expanding institutions were on the threshold of an exciting era...
...9 Its pervading philosophy is inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of St...
...I think these initiatives should include a special reference to the moral dimension of the issues of peace and justice...
...At the same time, if this pattern continues indefinitely, and unless someone intervenes to convince the department of the value of a new young Jesuit, St...
...that personal values were irrelevant in the hiring process...
...Meanwhile, college and university catalogues show a wide variety in numbers of Jesuit faculty: 47, 45, 36, and 25 at four of the largest universities...
...Let us imagine the English or history department at St...
...laymen and women who share the Jesuit purpose...
...Economics, for e,~ample, while it has its own methods and rules, when' taught and studied from the perspective of the promotion of iustice, will refuse to be locked into a concept of ecouomy which only deals with 'things,' but will see that it has to consider the relationships among persons...
...As attractive as this vision of order and its highly structured curriculum may seem, my fear is that these students would be prepared for a world which no longer exists, and that both they and their professors would lose sight of the ideal that the goal of all higher education is the free and fearless pursuit of truth -- not just some truths which n~ay reinforce a particular worldview...
...And U.S...
...According to the principle of the greater good, the president, and some faculty, may take positions at other Catholic colleges in the area and impart some Jesuit values without being in a Jesuit institution...
...I N 1964, the old Jesuit seminary, Woodstock College in Maryland, sponsored an institute on the future of Jesuit higher education...
...Widespread opposition to this proposal, opposition which tapped into other faculty-administration conflicts, led to my resignation...
...and the question has become all the more critical this year in view of the renewed efforts of the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education to impose its own standards for Catholic identity on American institutions -- norms which, many presidents feel, would be disastrous in their consequences, in terms of academic freedom, public image, and funding...
...They should resolve it, he says, by rediscovering John Cardinal Newman's educational ideas, and also by establishing a national planning commission that will help colleges find and hire a "cadre of Catholic men and women, highly qualified academics who would undertake a special responsibility toward the Catholic tradition and culture of the school and the life of the student body...
...that considering any personal beliefs in the hiring process was a violation of academic freedom...
...An articulate handful are unhappy with their lot because they couldn't land jobs at more prestigious institutions...
...I replied that I had devoted the last sixteen years of my life as a teacher at Fordham, and dean at Rockhurst and Holy Cross to the conviction that it was possible...
...Two of the hottest proposals were pooling our national resources in a "university center," like Fordham or Georgetown, and sending our men to work on secular campuses rather than in our own schools...
...Thus, a school with grade inflation or a lot of easy courses, or one swept away by athleticism to the point of making academic compromises, has weakened its Jesuit spirit...
...But, increasingly, partly because the tight job market has sent more Ph...
...In this sense, what appears as a crisis of numbers may become an invitation to self-death and eventual renewal...
...4. In the hiring process, search for persons who already share the goals spelled out in the official documents of the school...
...Nor could the rector anticipate solidarity...
...But then, this was the year there was an opening...
...The argument goes that a school with a name like St...
...Although I note now how many of the participants, both among the speakers and the seminarians, are no longer members of the Society of Jesus, they said some wonderful things that are still true today...
...I I I II I fessional academic standards in the selection, evaluation, and tenuring of faculty...
Vol. 113 • March 1986 • No. 6
