Catholic higher education: What happened?
Woodward, Kenneth L.
CATHOLIC HIGHER KENNETH L. WOODWARD EDUCATION: WHAT HAPPENED? A PARENT'S LAMENT am paid to write about...
...As I came to see, opportunities that allow me to talk not only with students but almost everyone there had belonged to the Wranglers or the with faculty and administrators...
...The answer would fewer guidance counselors...
...He plus handling and UPS charges is a physician and philosopher at the Single copies: $1 University of Chicago...
...But count me among those who feel that there periment-and yes, posture and pose-if you do not have fachas been, on balance, a deterioration in education in general, ulty who engender such non-classroom intellectual and spiritual and Catholic undergraduate education in particular...
...In all the hammock, in a youth culture that provides discussions I hear of Catholic higher education, no one ever a pleasing surrogate for real adulthood...
...the Boston Methodists in fourth place (8.8 percent...
...For me, going to college ism and the like...
...But young Catholics are not alone in their ignorance...
...Now it is almost impossiIn some ways, of course, the undergraduate culture at Notre ble to flunk out...
...University and the author of the recently published College Catholics: Abortion alone illustrates the substance and climate of curA New Counterculture (Paulist Press...
...To take up the arts City/State/ZIP and sciences is to learn the grammar and concepts of a dis- MC/VISA orders accepted...
...4~~-r;.err~aH Leon p s rre~ krtt CARLOS GOMEZ gives a first-hand account of the Dutch system that many commentators take to be the model for be„ oso~d4t ~r~ ~sreMs the law and practice of euthanasia...
...To be sure, most of us do that informs the experience of learning...
...From Asia, Africa, North and a student must be initiated into that kind of personal, moral, in- South America, and Europe, Concilium reflects the many facets tellectual, and imaginative quest which I take to be the purpose of the world church...
...emerges in response to another question: "Are you a born-again It is the annual study of college freshmen that has been com- Christian...
...Reflection" using Dostoevski and Pascal, Simone Weil and Parents, first of all...
...In different ways, it still Last year, I sat in a room with a collection of CEOs in New is...
...Just as we are all born into in NYS call collect (914) 941-7687 a language system not of our own choosing but without which ORBIS BOOKS, Dept CLM, Maryknoll, NY 10545-0308 we could not even think-so through education we are born again into an ongoing conversation on which cultures and Commonweal 9 April 1993: 15 seriously while they are still in school...
...In fact, it took three more when it comes to undergraduate education, and I think years and as many universities before I felt that I had reached Catholic colleges and universities ought to be too...
...past...
...For all the reasons which have been endlessly discussed, The first attitude remains, unfortunately, a central dogma of high school graduates are, on average, less well prepared than the American way of life...
...rent controversy...
...In the be able to answer that question...
...Two years ago I attended a sesquicentennial conference at Notre Dame devoted to the work of one professor, Frank O'Malley, tenured without a doctorate, whose single-minded efforts to nurture Catholic intellectuals and to vivify Catholic culture and imagination profoundly influenced more than three decades of the university's best-or, at least, its most intellectually athletic-undergraduates...
...More guidance, The title would be: "College: Is It Worth It...
...Nor would they learn, unless they wandered into an dren to Catholic colleges and universities are dis- aberrant theology elective, that Catholic writers and artists appointed in the results...
...Almost a third, 31.7 percent, say they are...
...When asked to name their current reli- odds with some aspects of American society, propelling them gious preference (italics mine), 30.5 percent identify themselves into the center of several current controversies, some of them as Roman Catholic, indicating that Catholics, usually estimat- considered beyond the need of argument: complete personal ed at 22 per cent of the U.S...
...Not my usual lunch time long, rather angry article in which I cited the spiritual smug- crowd...
...Indeed, is there a university or college left in ly, and, yes, more controversially to our sorely afflicted socithose traditions which manifests a discernible intellectual pedi- ety than that tradition to which we are all the unworthy heirs...
...Dame...
...But then I would look at The young themselves are not to blame...
...So too with Catholic colleges and universities...
...They also form the largest reing of the decade of greed-and a ligious group among freshmen, followed by Baptists at 19.3 f f hint that the '60s-style social ac- percent...
...Fortunately, none of them was inter- Please specify titles: ested in becoming an engineer...
...the point where I knew how to learn without the support of for- The problem, of course, is that those who teach the liberal mal education...
...In our classes and in endless student discussion groups, we argued over what a Catholic university is and ought to be...
...In other words, cept that which questions the dominant culture), and the relegation of most individual or personal morality to a private, and MICHAEL J. HUNT, a Paulist priest, is the Catholic chaplain at Tufts irrelevant, sphere...
...Although Notre Dame was not as intellectually de- sustained in homes, neighborhoods, and the like, where ethnic manding as it should have been, there were enough good patterns are properly preserved and extended...
...In it, I would acknowledge what the economists tell bracing campus culture which confronts entering students and us, namely that people with college degrees earn more over their challenges them to become other than what they are...
...A Baptist...
...We live in a society in which some 90 percent of How, then, should a student answer the second question while Americans say they believe in God...
...Whether you also get an education is altogether another be a religious community on a Catholic campus that is not also matter...
...Are Catholic university professors so defensive about their But the schools, too, must shoulder the blame...
...Globe's education reporter, An- A major and frequently neglected religious demographic thony Flint, had been sifting through a statistical treasure house...
...While piled for the last twenty-seven years by the Higher Education little ambiguity was permitted by this question with its direct Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles...
...on a higher level of freedom, self-indulgence, and self-absorption...
...Or'9$n C48 o !4~ re,e$re0 $ y,Ck~ , Why not put this special report to use in wNr Carl o$ P E 4~ your next program...
...Dame in the fifties was also inbred...
...They are taking women's study program, the feminist caucus, the black stud- longer to establish careers and longer yet to marry...
...And afterwards, Novak, Daniel Callahan, and that most ge- IN hen I roam about the campuses of elite nial and erudite of American Catholic scholars, John T. colleges and universities today, let me tell Noonan, were together at Harvard...
...But who even hears that quaint phrase today...
...And knowing the at college is not learning time...
...not settle into our life's work until long after graduation...
...Intruding father that I am, I [ I Individuals $60.00 [ ] Institutions $75.00 told my own children that I would not pay for vocational cours- Single volumes @ $12.95 each, + $3.00 postage...
...privacy and freedom, the divorce of public law from the reach What makes that 30.5 percent noteworthy is that students them- of traditional morality, tolerance of all manner of diversity (exselves, and not their parents, were asked...
...be taught...
...To Address me, all learning is a form of conversation...
...Where was Garry Wills as a stu- cated person no matter how she or he goes on to make a living...
...In 1993: The Messiah in History, Is There Roo of a higher education...
...Bulk orders are available: LEON KASS examines the consequences 1000 copies: $200 for physicians and medical practice if 500 copies: $150 doctors are given the authority to kill or 100 copies: $ 50 assist in the suicide of their patients...
...Isn't this essentially Plato's question, Founded in 1965 and published six times a year, Concilium is "what is the good life...
...The Catholic campus should answers itself automatically...
...And the educated person is the one who answers the Now Available from Orbis Books second and third questions in light of the first...
...religious tradition that speaks more critically, more coherentAn evangelical...
...They expected their have addressed the substantive issues of human experience children to graduate with an adult knowledge of with a distinctive, though variegated, religious imagination...
...into college, but to stay in as well...
...For ex- in America today-constitutes a first point of reflection: ample, when asked if they agree with the statement that "racial Religious groups that offer a countercultural alternative to the discrimination is no longer a major problem in America," 85.1 dominant, highly secularized culture are exactly those religious percent disagree, up from 79.1 percent of last year's freshman options which attract the largest numbers and the greatest parclass...
...born-and actors, and musicians, and salesmen and-most ob- But what the Catholic tradition means by those words is rather vious of all-athletes...
...By that he means on preconciliar Catholicism...
...It requires explicitly Catholic tradition...
...But then, as Soren Kierkegaard once remarked, stimulus for our making books and ideas, culture and its criti"a roomful of experts is only a crowd...
...What is worth doing...
...They are certainly to do...
...1991 defeated in Washington State 1.992 defeated in California 1993...
...versation...
...In COMMONWEAL'S spe- ffb et, dew 1 Dutch 5tfe cial supplement Alexander Morgan 1 15 report Capron, professor of law and medicine at the University of Southern California, l please seed es of the '613 AS0 101 me and Vicki Michel, associate director of the 1 university's Center for Health Policy and ' a paymen enc nSea 1 1 Ethics, analyze its language, criteria, and 1 safeguards...
...1994...
...To be relevant, education I certainly would have learned more had I entered college a must, in the proper sense, be irrelevant to the demands of the year or two later...
...Big deal...
...Even so, both are at of today's freshmen...
...The most acquaint their students with the fundamentals of their own redisappointed are those who think that they can become, say, a ligious tradition...
...I was struck by two things: the great variety of professions represented among the returnees-not only professors and writers showed up but lawyers, doctors, and businessmen as well-and by the feelKENNETH L. WOODWARD is a senior writer for Newsweek magazine...
...after graduation...
...When I was an undergraduate, we read Christopher Dawson and wondered with him what a Catholic culture might be for our own time and place...
...I am not unaware of the questions of multiculturalBut again, there was a difference...
...Most graduates, espe- already had into questions, to provoke them into examining cially in liberal arts, enter the outside world with at most a vague the deeper grounds of their superficial certitude...
...Justice and peace are fine...
...Do they not realize that, relifundamentals on the part of entering students...
...Nor am I conteachers, curious students, and stimulating student organiza- vinced that in the humanities, the categories of race, class, and tions to provide us with something to be as well as something gender are the most important or revealing...
...Who is to blame...
...Commonweal 9 April 1993: 13 communion, then you may have an educational community, pos- What we have in undergraduate education is an expensive sibly an academic community, but you most certainly do not credentialing system...
...The numbers in this study of college freshmen are For those of us serving in the church's ministries to higher yet another indication of the superficiality of secularist analyeducation, the UCLA study also suggests that we may have a sis that holds that the role of religion is in great decline and that much more receptive audience among college students than we the future belongs to those religious traditions that make the have imagined...
...But thanks to several profes- attention these days...
...But thank God the smugness of the their parents were for higher education...
...Each issue focuses on a single theme of vital importance...
...So there it is: to be educated is to be able to to allow more time for emotional maturity before taking up converse-to converse with knowledge, with intellectual the serious and increasingly expensive business of higher ed- discernment, and with passion about the central ideas of our ucation...
...But most students, I suspect, who discover a destiny-a It's not enough to say that Saint X is a school that teaches vocation that chooses them-do so through extracurricular ac- values unless Saint X is prepared to locate those values in an tivities...
...gist...
...Now it follows for me that higher vocational training, what- Please return this form with your payment...
...tion...
...It is, as you can see, properly philosophical...
...In a seminary, of all places...
...ever its merits, is not education...
...they are taking longer to grow up, society ought to respond 14: 9 April 1993 Commonweal by mandating at least a year-preferably two-of public ser- civilizations depend...
...But where do they sup- that they cannot read or write a complex English sentence...
...ticipation...
...For the past year, I've been thinking about writing a book...
...They have no skills...
...vide places to pray, sacraments to receive, important and If a student attends to the first two questions, then the third countercultural as these activities are...
...Which is to say whatever of value I have tural forces...
...yes or no answer, the numbers suggest that the appeal of bornThis year's study of college freshmen provides us with a snap- again Christianity cannot be treated as a transitory fad in shot of attitudes, plans, backgrounds, and opinions based on a American religious life...
...My answer was: Everyone present...
...same 419193 - " r r 1 Address e 1 Cit ) irr0wo r r 1 r r 1 r r r r L Methodist tradition in the humanities...
...In the far so blind to the outside world that they cannot realize what treadistant fifties, you could assume a certain grasp of religious sures lie in their own tradition...
...claims to be Catholic cannot do other than locate that quest within the community of faith...
...Those For example, at Notre Dame these days it is possible to postgraduate years too, ought to be a time for discovery...
...I believe any selves...
...That is, I would not pay for business courses, training in journalism, and the like...
...Robert Bellah, who, as distinguished profesfind among some younger faculty at Catholic univer- sor of sociology at Berkeley, attracts an elite to his classes, tells sities a different kind of smugness, one that looks down me that a third of his students are illiterate...
...Five years after graduating from the university, I wrote a York, all of them Notre Dame alumni...
...California's euthanasia proposition was r r described as "state of the art" legislation r r Y ork,1,4 , by its proponents...
...But few of them are able he or she is still a student...
...Is there a 16: 9 April 1993 Commonweal Euthanasia on the Ballot...
...The trick then giously speaking, the Catholic tradition-for better and worse-is was to transform the simplistic, clear-cut answers the students at the moment the only religious game in town...
...But I fear that is not the case...
...What would I like to do...
...journalist, simply by majoring in something called journalism...
...Salvation versity today...
...But from two or more perspectives, as Hobart, a wonderful liberal there is another way to measure the American Catholicism of arts college, requires of its graduates...
...Subscribe Now...
...Yes, I'm an unreconstructed purist sors who were also mentors, I did...
...El ALL IS NOT LOST MICHAEL J. HUNT AN EARLY LOOK AT THE CLASS OF '96 he strongest signal yet of the pass- they're self-identified Catholics...
...Today's students need more structure, not less...
...Lucky indeed is the student who uses the Catholic curriculum as Catholic...
...population, are over-represented...
...How pose that the reforms of Vatican II came from, other many of today's students can approach an intellectual question than from the minds of preconciliar Catholics...
...He is a physician at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center...
...gree...
...So was Michael Novak...
...Nor is the addition of philosopportunity college provides to experiment and thereby discover ophy sufficient...
...to offer others I owe to those mentors, who nurtured me in If a campus does not husband such undergraduate groups, Catholic education and culture...
...I am well religious identity, so proud of their own doctoral credentials, aware of the problems facing Catholic educators...
...Let me be clear: there cannot degree...
...and appreciation for their faith, and that expectation has not At Harvard University, Robert Coles has for years taught an been realized...
...work life than those without them...
...It is waste time or, for an in- difference ought to be part of a Catholic higher education...
...A PARENT'S LAMENT am paid to write about the relationship between reli- ing of kinship, of bloodline, that we all shared despite the difgion and culture and the culture of religion...
...My strong conviction is that no youngster aged er and better way to provide most students with what little they eighteen or nineteen ought to be in college...
...Ethnicity is a folk phenomenon and is plore...
...It was a place, I said, where average SAT scores for that year's incoming freshmen, and smugmost students could feel secure in the extraordinary assurance ly asked how many of us thought we could get into the unithat they are saved in this world as well as in the next...
...Must gender, class, race, or, alternatively, the sonality-take longer to come by...
...Name My own idea of a liberal education is hardly unique...
...All this makes me something Bookmen, undergraduate discussion groups mentored by of a participant-observer in higher education, though not in any O'Malley which provided the fellowship and extracurricular way an expert...
...Sociologists now verasks whether their college or university is host to such cre- ify what parents have for a long time recognized, namely, that ative communities...
...Please include a 9 X 12 self-addressed DANIEL CALLAHAN explores the conse- envelope with 52 cents stamp) quences for society and medicine of legalizing euthanasia...
...I was initiated into a wider world to ex- vival is already dead...
...Catholic literature...
...As I suggested earlier, the classroom experience alone can- CONCILIUM not answer these questions...
...But the purpose would be ous traditions...
...So must the discussion and the debate COMMONWEAL'S special report has been used by hospital ethics committees, diocesan social justice offices, law and public policy centers, prolife ~ar.r~g organizations, parish discussion groups, patient advocacy groups, college ethics I, ~~ s ~~A°sr~r~k , a r courses...
...That service could be domes- this conversation rests of necessity with the past, with varitic or foreign, civilian or military...
...And, I would submit, second kind is no longer tenable...
...Above all, how many the fifties...
...A closer look at the study (The Chronicle of Higher Education, Born-again Christianity and Catholicism arrive at their enJanuary 13, 1993), yields some very interesting, if less publi- counters with modernity from different histories and employ cized, insights into the religious identity and religious values largely incompatible theological methods...
...cism, faith and intellect the substance and excitement of our I'd like to offer a view from outside the academy about the undergraduate experience...
...And that is, as I have suggested, the way orchestrate through the media what passes for cultured conit ought to be...
...That's how journalists are tribute in social service...
...greatest accommodations to the prevailing culture...
...And efforts to recover it through they are less well educated-except perhaps in engineering, and an infusion of charismatic groups or recourse to automatic obe- in some sciences-when they graduate from the university...
...dience to the Roman magisterium, as at the Franciscan University Undergraduate education is the way that this society has of in Steubenville, Ohio, only compounds the smugness bred by warehousing the young because it cannot absorb them into the an un-Catholic quest for spiritual certainty...
...They are the vicwhat college education costs and ask whether parents-and, tims of a mindless, narcissistic, commercially driven youth increasingly, students-get honest return on their investments culture created and tolerated by adults, parents as well as edof time and money: whether, in other words, there isn't a cheap- ucators...
...On the undergraduate level, much of vice before entering college...
...A parent who does not follow up the bill- Georges Bernanos, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Flannery paying end of his or her responsibility with systematic scruti- O'Connor, Walker Percy and Seamus Heaney, to awaken his ny of which courses a student plans to take-and why-ought academically privileged undergraduates to the spiritual and not to complain when Johnny graduates with a pastiche of cred- moral dimensions of human experience through literature...
...Where is the ferment today...
...Parents also ought to monitor what their children at I wonder how many Catholic universities offer the same kind Catholic colleges are learning about their own religious tradi- of course to their students...
...es...
...I have never regretted a moment of And their disappearance, I maintain, says as much about the my own experience with Catholic education, from home through culture of undergraduate life today as those two other frequently grade school, high school, and university...
...cipline-including mathematics...
...I know of few students, real undergraduate education ought to force the stu- especially the aggressively vocational, who pose this question dent to answer three related questions...
...What he failed in this life through higher education and in the next by belonging, to consider is that secondary education is not what it was in the through no fault of their own, to the one true church...
...This was true in my generation as well...
...But you cannot find a course in too often, life is on hold, adulthood can wait...
...They gave me my convictions where apprentice writers and thinkers and artists probe and exand concerns...
...It it hours and an undergraduate "major" he cares or knows little is, in many respects, what O'Malley once did at Notre Dame...
...What is worth doing...
...None" ranks third as a religious preference, with tivism is on the rise...
...Yet for the mass of students, free time different from what, say, a Buddhist means...
...But I ask: Must Hear me when I say that in politics, in the arts, in the more our Catholic college and university students be the last to nocomprehensive task of reimagining the social weal, there is no tice that it exists...
...not the most intellectually interesting...
...survey of 213,630 entering freshmen, statistically adjusted to That such a large number would claim affiliation with either represent the 1.7 million young people who entered college in Catholicism or born-again Christianity-the two most controthe fall of 1992...
...They were self-conscious you what I see: huge preserves where herds Roman Catholics who formed their own intellectual commu- of adolescents are suspended, as if in a nity on that most religiously inhospitable campus...
...They speak of ca- fessors of theology must do what high schools did in the past...
...Character, ies program, the charismatics, really claim to be heirs to such competence, and commitment-the hallmarks of the adult percommunities...
...A representative of the university regaled us with the ness that I felt affected the campus...
...Because of my job as a magazine writer, I also man- But it wasn't just the bloodline running through Frank age to visit college campuses with some irregularity, O'Malley that explained our commonality...
...for Christ in Asia?, The Spectre of Mass Death, Resurrection or It is also properly theological, and a college or a university which Reincarnation?, Migrants and Refugees, and Mass Media...
...That is, I take it, one of the goals of higher ed- arts are no longer certain what they are or how they ought to ucation...
...We inThe fact is, very few people end up doing as a career what they habit a religiously ignorant society, especially among those who majored in in college...
...It took me five semesters to catch the intel- marketplace-and to much else that clamors for the student's lectual eros I mentioned earlier...
...But what skills do they possess...
...English majors there would never know that their own inherited culture had produced a body of litIr oo often parents who are serious Catholics and erature which ranks among the great achievements of Western who have dutifully sacrificed to send their chil- culture...
...I have alsoferences in our ages, our majors, and our experiences of Notre written about the family, at least what's left of it...
...We discover what we can and can- be a community of faith where even non-Catholic students recnot do by first reaching beyond ourselves, asking what is worth ognize the provenance of a long and lively religious tradition doing and what we would like to do...
...What can I do, given my limitations...
...In college, all the Jewish-American novel...
...Yet without such knowledge and appreciation exceedingly popular course called "The Literature of Christian there is no point to Catholic higher education...
...But with one intellectual, just as there cannot be an intellectual community important difference: in the past, the trick was not only to get on such a campus that is not also religious...
...Some schools locate their Catholic using the time outside the class to discover through activities identity by pointing to all the volunteer hours students conwhat one likes to do and is good at...
...You pays your money and you gets your have an intellectual community...
...Can the today's young are taking longer to grow up...
...A threshold was that any ethnic tradition which looks to the university for surcrossed, a quest begun...
...But study feminist literature, African-American literature, even all too often, there is no search, no discovery...
...CATHOLIC HIGHER KENNETH L. WOODWARD EDUCATION: WHAT HAPPENED...
...You would think that my second question-what would I Let me say what I think an undergraduate education like to do?-would be the one students most often ask themis and how it ought to be approached...
...A Pentecostal...
...reers, but most often settle for what comes their way...
...creasing number of students, work time to help pay the cost of Theology alone cannot be the discipline that identifies the getting credentialed...
...He is a philosopher, bioethicist, and director of the Hasting Center...
...This article is adapted from a talk he gave at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota...
...So long as they limit their educa- to summon intelligible, coherent reasons for what they believe tional experience to doing well in the classroom, they'll never or why...
...It would be both foolish and inaccurate to as18: 9 April 1993 Commonweal...
...Today, prosense of what they will do there for a living...
...economy...
...I have been and re- noted causes: the decline in secondary education and the permain critical of the latter, but always from what I take to be a vasiveness of television, mindless music, and other puerile culCatholic perspective...
...To be sure, a professor in an- struggle to survive at any cost, many marginal schools have thropology, for example, may stimulate a future anthropolo- become marginally Catholic...
...uinely Catholic education...
...Recognizing that take away from their undergraduate experience...
...It is far from perfect and necessarily incomplete...
...EUTHANASIA i The efforts to legalize Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide will continue...
...That guidance must come from a be "no...
...time, most of which are timeless...
...But the first question-the quesThe Theological Journal of the 90s tion most students safely ignore-is what the liberal arts are all about...
...Flint, along with other commentators, noted a versial and certainly the least politically correct religious groups growing social awareness among this year's freshmen...
...It is not enough that a Catholic campus prothat sense of vocation without which no career is worthwhile...
...But in order to answer that question a world-wide journal whose contributors embody a "who's with even a college graduate's sense of temporary satisfaction, who" of theological scholars...
...In short, going to college is experience of speaking in tongues, be the only communal flags not a passage out of a puerile youth culture but its continuation students can salute...
...These organizations no longer exist importance, indeed the transcendent importance, of a gen- at Notre Dame, or at other Catholic campuses I have visited...
...Ask where today's public thinkers in the church have been smitten by that intellectual eros-that love of learncame from, what intellectual and spiritual environments nur- ing for its own sake-which is supposed to animate the edutured them in their youth...
...On the matter of ethnic studies, my feeling is represented a sharp break with adolescence...
...dent...
...Call 1-800-258-5838...
Vol. 120 • April 1993 • No. 7
