Alan Jacobs on Wheaton

In the latest First Things, Alan Jacobs (Wheaton) has a piece on the recent firing, by Wheaton, of Joshua Hochschild, who had informed the school's administration that he was entering into full communion with the Catholic Church.  He writes:

[W]hat principles or concerns should guide Wheaton’s leaders as they reflect on the options before them? It is easier perhaps to say what should not guide them. First on that list would be the all-too-common assumption that religious particularity is always a bad thing, that it amounts to “sectarianism” or violates the gospel of “diversity.”

On the contrary, there are good reasons that some colleges and universities might choose, in the interests of intellectual coherence and the promotion of fruitful conversation, or in the interests of, say, service to the Church, or out of a love for Truth itself, to confine their constituency to those who share a set of core beliefs. The wide-open doors of the modern university—even supposing that they really exist—are a good thing but not the only good thing. Certain valuable and productive conversations happen in classrooms at Wheaton or Thomas Aquinas that simply cannot happen in the classrooms of secular universities. This was a point lost on the concerned citizens of Wheaton in 1877—with their longing for the unspecifiable uplift of “moral and religious influences”—and it is equally lost on many of Wheaton’s critics today. . . .

What elements of Wheaton’s mission are aided by its faculty being confined to Protestants? This, it seems to me, is the question that matters most. I must confess that I have difficulty in saying what such elements might be. Conversely, the riches of Catholic intellectual traditions, when embodied in persons of deep Christian conviction and piety, offer great resources for the fulfillment of that mission. Wheaton has never neglected the traditions themselves, but it has chosen to pass over brilliantly gifted proponents of those traditions when those proponents have also stood under the authority of Rome. At this juncture in the history of Christianity in the West—when it is besieged in so many ways by so many opponents—I am not sure that a school like Wheaton can afford to go it alone much longer. Even if we could, would it be wise and charitable to do so? . . .

The Reformation may not be over, but many of the suspicions and hostilities that accompanied it should be. Wheaton could strike a great blow, not for insipid and vacuous “moral and religious influences,” but for true Christian unity, if it welcomed into its midst Josh Hochschild and other Catholic teacher-scholars who share his passion for Christian truth.

Update:  I missed Rob's post, below, on the same matter!  Sorry!