Can a Catholic University be Great: The Viewpoint of a former Stanford professor

Notre Dame history professor, Brad Gregory, recently wrote an essay, which was published in the school's newspaper, on the subjects of academic freedom at Catholic universities and whether Catholic universities can acheive greatness.  The beginning ot this essay follows: 

"In 2003, I left a tenured position at Stanford University, where I had taught for seven years, to come to Notre Dame. I did so partly because here, unlike at secular universities, we can engage religion in the classroom not only as a subject to be studied like any other, but as a human response to the living God. Here we can engage not only Catholic but also other religious beliefs in this way, because of Catholic imperatives to ecumenical understanding and interreligious dialogue. At secular universities, categories characteristic of revealed religions - including faith, revelation, grace, salvation, sin, prayer, miracles, the supernatural and more besides - cannot be pursued from standpoints of religious belief, without presumptive recourse to reductionist explanations dependent on secular beliefs embedded in social scientific and humanistic theories. In the classrooms of such institutions, neither students nor faculty can seriously address religiously related big questions - about life’s purpose, objective values and meaning that transcends human constructions - because the governing ideology is anti-teleological. It is antagonistic to any objective moral norms and naturalistic in its metaphysical convictions. At secular universities, a professor who in class sought to analyze prayer as a human experience of relating to God, or who sought to understand the Bible as God’s saving revelation for humanity, would quickly find herself censured. A Solemn Authority would admonish her that such notions were “inappropriate” in class and that she must keep her “personal beliefs” to herself. Secular universities restrict academic freedom because they exclude from the classroom engagement with religious beliefs precisely as religious. The secular academy thus puts itself in the curious position of excluding from non-reductionist consideration the beliefs by which the overwhelming majority of the human race lives. Such self-censorship is dangerous. Because of the sometimes threatening manifestations of religion in our world, the stubborn refusal even to acknowledge religion as religion and to study it as such amounts to an ivory-tower dereliction of intellectual duty.

Notre Dame rejects these secular restrictions on academic freedom vis-à-vis the great religions and their related ultimate questions. Hence I am much freer academically and pedagogically here than I was at Stanford - I can do everything I did as a Stanford professor and more. The same freedom applies to other faculty members at Notre Dame and, in its respective way, to students as well. As an intellectual community we have critically important academic opportunities that are lacking at higher-ranked, secular institutions and vitally needed by the wider world. . . ."