From ghetto to hilltop:
Carlin, David R. Jr.
promoting a ballot measure that would punish "aggressive pan- ed deinstitutionalization-shuttering these places, sending peo-...
...Catholicizing of Catholic colleges, and I gala and the concerts, before the inaugu- Is he a creature of the media giving only applaud those colleges that are fighting ral ceremony and the balls-before all that, lip service to the normal processes of govvaliantly to hold onto their Catholic iden- William Jefferson Clinton was confront- ernment as those believe who point to his tity...
...us jobs, lived in poorer neighborhoods, had always had a capital T in those days), these Beginning in the mid-1960s, they loaded higher crime rates, etc...
...Are there Jane Addamses for al hand-holding, and practical skills for survival in what will our time, secular saints for whom the very idea of a public equivsurely be tough times...
...But they were not places where the small minority (a process facilitated by a a society overwhelmingly non-Catholic...
...Catholic colleges had worked so well that children or grandchildren of immigrants...
...pital wards and undesired adults on the streets...
...Now we realize things are much more complicated, her free hospital care-and it will help others who are in des- that the communities in question have mostly zoned and gated perate straits...
...On the other hand, (non-Hispanic) Catholics caught up with higher education can be di- they sheltered these upwardly mobile the rest of America, a moment symbolvided, very roughly, into two periods: (1) young Catholics from a world of non- ized by the election and presidency of John the era of the Catholic "ghetto," which ran Catholic high culture...
...Others Catholics were socially inferior...
...Yet that realThis mother-to-be needs concrete gestures of caring, emotion- ization only reframes the issue...
...the greater question is: "Will American Catholics remain distinctively Catholic, or will they be swallowed up by the largely secularized culture that surrounds them...
...In spite of having an official philoso- they now found themselves deprived of Compared with other Americans of phy (Aristotelianism) and an official the- their traditional social function...
...His inaugural was planned days of the ghetto...
...They preserved Kennedy (1960-63...
...ly in the United States, the pations: medicine, law, education, busi- 2. The moment finally arrived when history of American Catholic ness, government, etc...
...life of the mind always flourished...
...But the very next day, at the time her name was sent up...
...ple back to their communities-as a good deed of a humane This social bargain surely helped the sixteen-year-old-it got society...
...Will Catholic colleges remain Catholic...
...That heroic age-and to recant on glowing campaign promis- and orchestrated by close friend and proit truly was heroic-is gone forever...
...Right, Mrs...
...but they produced relatively few at the same time, and virtually in the same 6: 12 February 1993 Commonweal proportion, the Catholic identity of those OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy colleges has grown increasingly tenuous...
...Ingram...
...the pre-assimilation era and the academ- stringent code of ethics he insisted his ap- Is he psychologically unfit to take over ic quality of the recent era of full assimi- pointees must agree to and some of the peo- the nation's problems and deal with them...
...They had pragmatism and exalted the ideal of pure, decided to plunge at long last into the mainless income and education, held lower-stat- disinterested truth (or rather Truth, which stream of American academic life...
...Maybe that's what the Haight Street ado- alent of love is not an embarrassment and an irrelevance...
...were largely out of touch with American As a result, faculties at Catholic colleges Catholic colleges played a critical role intellectual life...
...lation...
...Catholic colleges seem to be traveling the same road many Protestant colleges journeyed in the nineteenth and early twenti- The nation still basks in the seems unable to separate himself from his eth centuries-a road leading to complete glow of a perfect Inau- former corporate clients, only reluctantly secularization, to complete loss of religious guration Day, made almost responding to pressure to give up repreidentity...
...is the lesser question...
...Is he hyp- Peter Gruber, chairman of Sony Pictures, of its existence: the religious identity of ocritical, as those claim who point to the Inc...
...icans at their own game...
...but formed an "operation bootstrap...
...and teachers were increasingly despite inferior social status...
...But the skys darkened, cold rain poured, and Is he heartless and dissembling, as those that's not my theory...
...But many of those on the streets really need more and frozen out the unwanted, dumping undesired infants in hosthan dollars impersonally transferred by an indifferent state...
...They had a social function to nuns, who had hitherto constituted the great ican Catholicism had three great social perform, and they performed it to perfec- majority of teachers, were reduced to a goals: (a) to retain a Catholic identity in tion...
...The es...
...scholars and scientists, and almost none OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin, Jr...
...magical by blue sky and senting some of them while in office...
...On the one hand, they per- producing doctors and lawyers and ac- those in the far-off days of the ghetto...
...Ron Brown, Critic Jonathan Yardley refers to his "perBut the Catholic college and universi- confirmed for secretary of commerce, haps pathological" tardiness which staffers ty is inseparable from the Catholic population generally...
...Is the Yet this balance has been lost in contem- fore the ringing of the bells and the fire- same decision evidence of perhaps lessporary America...
...ducer Harry Thomason and sold to four great challenge for the contemporary I cannot remember an incoming pres- networks for semi-exclusive use...
...It's what the orphanages, asy- by Heart: AIDS and Schoolchildren in America's Communities, lums, reformatories, and homes for wayward girls were supposed and AIDS in the Industrialized Democracies (both Rutgers to, and mostly failed to, deliver...
...By the 1950s John Tracy Ellis and others were asking, "Where are the Catholic intellectuals...
...David L. Kirp is professor of public policy at the University I know what is wrong with this idea...
...and they didn't burden them with the con- II and was quickly followed by the great 1. In the era of the "ghetto," Catholics fusing results of modern biblical scholar- cultural revolution of the late-1960s...
...tender minds from exposure to such hea- came all the more dramatic a dividing line (2) the era of integration, which has run thens as John Dewey and Sigmund Freud, because it roughly coincided with Vatican from the mid-1960s to the present...
...for until then intellectualism had been such a stranger to American Catholic Like the history of (non-His- they elevated children of blue-collar, life that hardly anyone noticed it was abpanic) Catholicism general- immigrant stock to higher-status occu- sent...
...priests and In this long and difficult period, Amer- stitutions...
...That is, countants...
...In gen- sharp decline in numbers of priests and (b) to maintain a sense of collective pride eral, their faculties had few members with nuns...
...trip from Monticello to Washington, be- to the country they seek to escape...
...of the first rank...
...Postassimilation Catholic colleges and universities will be maintained only if there is a postassimilation Catholic population to support them...
...A priest or sister in the president's office, a handful of clerics on the faculty, and a few chaplains living in the dorms: today IT DOESN'T HURT TO HOPE in many colleges this is the Catholic fili- CLINTON IS GOOD AT COMEBACKS gree on an otherwise secular structure...
...Thus I deplore the de- works, before the reunion on the Mall, the than-conscious racism...
...were predominantly immigrants and the ship...
...It was relatively easy to construct ghetto-like colleges in the age of the Catholic ghetto...
...Commonweal 12 February 1993: 7...
...promoting a ballot measure that would punish "aggressive pan- ed deinstitutionalization-shuttering these places, sending peohandling...
...It is tum-of-the-centu- of California, Berkeley, and author, most recently, of Learning ry progressivism, warmed-over...
...And it was relatively easy to create mainstream American colleges in the era when Catholics fully entered the American mainstream...
...The Catholic institution of higher education is ident so criticized and analyzed before tak- press aide for the inaugural bus trip was to blend, in a kind of Hegelian synthesis, ing the oath of office...
...Even before the symbolic Guard return fleeing Haitian boat people pecially needs this in the intellectual life...
...And Now if you have a theory of society bright January sun...
...and (c) to Ph.D.s, they were overloaded with priests hired on the basis of academic merit, recatch up to or even surpass old-line Amer- and nuns of narrow education, and they gardless of religious affiliation...
...Some of European ancestry, mainly Protestants, ology (Thomism), both of which scorned them simply went out of business...
...lescent angrily demanding a dollar needs too-something that DAVID L. KIRP might be called the public equivalent of love...
...As the Zoe Baird knowingly broke the law she which says that the more secularized things old saying goes, it did not rain on President was to administer-a fact known to Clinton get the better, then you will applaud the Clinton's parade...
...ple actually appointed...
...A generation ago, we regard- University Press...
...And in the press, not, as on other trips, a young staffer but the distinctive features of the first two eras the raising of doubts continues...
...O "Where there's life there's hope...
...This moment befrom the nineteenth century till the 1960s...
...They were magnificent at today are academically far superior to in this process...
...ed with challenge and horror abroad and close relationship to Hollywood and teleOf course there is no going back to the with hard realities at home compelling him vision figures...
...As I see it, a healthy the weather was reflected in the storm sur- say who point to his decision to continue modem society needs a balance between rounding his unfortunate choice for at- the Bush practice of having the Coast secular and religious elements, and it es- torney general...
...colleges were extraordinarily pragmatic in- their faculties with Ph.D.s...
...The fact that the question FROM GHETTO TO HILLTOP was finally being asked was an indication OUR COLLEGES, OUR SELVES that the change was just around the corner...
...de-Catholicizing of Catholic colleges...
Vol. 120 • February 1993 • No. 3
