Carozza on academic freedom and Catholic character

A great read.  Check it out:

. . . [M]erely the tolerance of diverse views on campus without any authentic engagement of our humanity in its capacity for criticism and judgment is virtually irrelevant to the mission and identity of a great university. If that is what is meant by academic freedom, it is almost trivial and much too uninteresting to the serious questions of our lives to warrant a deep commitment. In fact, an uncritical free-for-all can be worse than insignificant, because it encourages the opposite of freedom: the subjection of our reason to the whims of intellectual fashion; sentimentalism and moralism (whether of the right or of the left); or mere inculcation upon our students of the opinions of others (and the power, money and self-interest behind them). That is why Jenkins was right to affirm that, "Our greatest contribution as intellectuals and scholars . . . consists rather in the cultivation in ourselves and in our students of this scholarly temperament in a world that is often uncomfortable with uncertainties, questions and new perspectives."

But then what is the place of Notre Dame's Catholic identity in this insistence on the freedom of our reason to reach always onward? The intellectual and moral tradition in which we are situated provides a sustained, complex and deep grappling with the mystery of human life and the universe around us, but one that is mostly ignored, and sometimes systematically excluded, from the intellectual life of most elite universities today. Notre Dame can't be a great and Catholic university without a pervasive and serious attempt to propose this tradition as an explanatory hypothesis for understanding the things that we study and teach and for ordering the way we ought to live as a community. To be very clear: in the context of study, teaching and research the Christian tradition is a proposal, not a shield from inquiry or an obstacle to knowledge, but an invitation to verify something, to test it through sincere criticism (in the original, literal sense of "separating" or "evaluating") and thus to arrive at a more mature appropriation of its value. It is an understanding of Catholic character reflective of a dynamic life, not of formal and sterile doctrine. The scholarly temperament in its encounter with tradition is an opening up of reason, not a closure of discussion. . . .