Many colleges are revitalising Catholic identity, says Jamie MacGuire, Special Report Editor.
As we reveal in our inaugural survey of US Catholic college education, the university environment in the United States is changing – and fast. The number of students enrolled has declined from a high of 18.1 million in 2010 (where it had been more or less stable since 1990) to 16.9 million in 2023. At least 44 colleges have closed since 2020, and others are sure to follow. With Catholic high schools – the lifeblood of US college admissions – the picture is even bleaker.
Yes, prestigious colleges and universities such as Notre Dame, Boston College and Georgetown continue to be highly selective and achieve first-class results. Of these leading colleges, Notre Dame remains primus inter pares, a great American Catholic institution that has become a battleground for the fight to preserve a true Catholic identity on campus, with its alumni – who have donated billions – divided on the subject.
Notre Dame is at the forefront of Catholic moral and public debate in the USA. Its football team’s high-profile head coach, Marcus Freeman, recently converted to Catholicism, while on campus there is the influential Catholic professor O Carter Snead, Professor of Law at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, and author of What It Means to be Human, and the Scottish-American moral philosopher and Catholic convert Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue.
However, fissures are appearing that threaten the Catholic identity of these legacy institutions which some now regard as operating more like “Catholic hubs” with competing (even clashing) conservative and liberal factions. A significant part of the problem, argues Notre Dame professor and historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, is the failure of Catholic institutions to sustain authentically Catholic values, drifting instead to a social and moral relativism, and secularism.
Perhaps inevitably, Notre Dame has changed since the days of its famous uomo universale president “Father Ted” Hesburgh, who oversaw the university’s expansion from 1952 to 1987. “My experience at the University of Notre Dame – recognised by everyone, except rivals, as the exemplary Catholic research institution – suggests that Catholic values are doomed to depletion, not only because of relentless secularism but also because political polarisation has divided us irreconcilably,” wrote Fernández-Armesto recently in the Herald.
These words – coming from Notre Dame’s William P Reynolds Professor of History – are worrying. The identity of many Catholic educational institutions is now under daily trespass from the forces of secularism and the progressive tide of toxic cultural and gender politics. As Nick Letts, a Catholic philosophy student at Boston College, argued in a recent article in The Torch (the college’s Catholic newspaper), many Catholic colleges are drifting towards becoming outposts of Catholic sub-culture. In pursuit of the top applicants and retaining their academic and sporting status, many are making “uneasy compromises” with their Catholicity. They trade “Jesuit university” for “school founded in the Ignatian tradition”. They promote the call to service more than the “call to holiness”. Admissions departments claim that American universities are “only as Catholic as you make them”.
Among the factors causing this change are the rise in fees, the absence of low-cost labour caused by the decline in vocations of nuns and brothers, declining Mass attendance and participation in parish life, rising prices, and the lingering effects of the sexual abuse crisis which the bishops, in their misguided desire to present robust statistics to the Vatican, failed to address effectively for decades.
A number of initiatives have been launched to address the issue of affordability, including the Cristo Rey Jesuit schools, the Inner-City Scholarship Fund and such lay efforts as Student Sponsor Partners, the Children’s Scholarship Fund, Partnership Schools and Faith in the Future. This and the increasing availability of publicly funded vouchers and educational savings accounts and, as in Oklahoma, refundable educational tax credits for religious schools, could help stabilise and eventually reverse the downward trend. However, the institutional Church, beset as it is by an ageing clergy, a slew of sex abuse lawsuits, the suspension of statute of limitations provisions in the states and, increasingly, once unthinkable diocesan bankruptcies, appears ill-equipped to address the situation.
Inevitably, all of these factors affect the Catholic college and university landscape as well, where upwards of 10 colleges have closed in the last decade, and others are in precarious financial condition.
With that in mind, the Catholic Herald has set out to survey American Catholic colleges and universities for the first time. We bring a fresh lens, as we did with our influential US Catholic Leaders of Today survey published in October last year. Our list is not in any sense exhaustive. The 100 colleges profiled represent under half of the total of 230 Catholic colleges nationally identified by the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. Our criteria reflects excellent academics, affordable tuition, extracurricular offerings and a serious effort to preserve an authentic Catholic identity. We have also included those making the Wall Street Journal Best US Colleges 2024 rankings of the top 400 nationally.
While premier-league colleges such as Notre Dame, Fordham and Georgetown have been drawn into the culture wars, we found Catholic faith and identity being best preserved at many smaller, lesser-known colleges, including the 12 endorsed by the Newman Guide, which vets Catholic colleges for their spiritual fidelity. Good examples are the spiritual mission of Thomas Aquinas College, the Catholic University of America, the University of Dallas, the Franciscan University at Steubenville and Christendom College. Since a small college like Christendom cannot really be compared to a first-rank research university like Notre Dame, with $17 billion in endowment, we have broken down our survey into national, regional and liberal arts colleges so all sizes are represented.
We found a continuing change in curricular emphasis away from theology, philosophy and the liberal arts and towards business, marketing, health, computer science and recreational pursuits. The emerging thinking is that it is now time to stop spending a fortune in public funds to colleges that select students in accord with a self-serving agenda favouring wealthy donors and so-called “holistic” admissions practices. Ending public subsidies for colleges that embrace the ethos of a restrictive country club is democratic and equitable, and Catholic colleges and universities, by virtue of their philanthropic and meritocratic histories and traditions, are perfectly positioned to be part of a more socially beneficial and productive future.
We worry about how Catholic colleges and universities are dealing with the near ubiquitous trend towards woke language and thought-policing at elite secular schools. Instead of standing up for freedom of choice and expression, our report reveals many instances when students felt unable to express their true feelings due to social pressure to conform to either politically correct, woke or left-wing progressive thinking.
Yet we aim to be inclusive. We are grateful for an interview with Jesuit educational leader Paul Fitzgerald, SJ, president of the liberal University of San Francisco – whose website includes no reference to Catholic religious formation or worship – as our brief has been to include all shades of US Catholic universities, including a well-known Jesuit Massachusetts college whose campus hosted a conference sponsored by Planned Parenthood that nearly resulted in the college being stripped of the right “to be recognised as a Catholic institution” by a local bishop. We believe students must make up their own minds. Above all, we abhor censorship and believe in intelligent, morally rooted individual choices.
As Hillsdale College’s John J Miller wrote in National Review: “It can seem the hardest working people on campus are those who aspire to take offence at ordinary words and phrases. As they sniff around for slights, they are like detection dogs that find false positives everywhere and won’t stop barking.”
There is, notably, a groundswell renaissance of classical education at the elementary and high school levels. Timothy Dernlan, of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, said in a January 2023 interview that over 200 new classical schools have opened in the last year. Great Hearts Academies, another network of classical charter schools, operates more than 30 schools across Arizona and Texas and is preparing to open campuses in Louisiana and Florida. It would be logical for graduates of such schools to consider Catholic higher education or to start their own, a win-win for the Catholic cause.
Of course, the interests of established educational bureaucracies and those of parents in the education of their children will continue to collide, as parents rightly refuse the state’s assertion of co-parenting privileges. Recent Supreme Court cases have recognised that parents, not the state, are the primary educators of their children, giving hope that parents, including Catholic parents, will continue to exercise their rights as they see fit.
It is therefore more pressing than ever that Catholic institutions hew to their principles and provide an education worthy of the name and their long-established traditions. It is with this fervent wish to preserve Catholic identity on American college campuses that the Herald publishes its first special report on US Catholic colleges and universities.
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