"Why Notre Dame?"

Here is a must-read essay by my friend in Notre Dame's history department, Brad Gregory.  Brad is a very distinguished scholar, whom ND lured away from Stanford.  And, in this piece, he explains why he moved.  (It builds on things Brad wrote, in the context of l'affaire Vagina Monologues, about why a University's decision to actually worry about the content of what it sponsors does not render it an intellectual backwater.)

Now, I want to bracket the question whether Notre Dame actually has those characteristics that, in Brad's view, more than justify a move from Stanford.  But, assume that it does:

Were it not for this difference -- and Notre Dame's potential to become a kind of institution never before seen in American higher education, namely a first-rank research university that is also genuinely Catholic -- I never would have left Stanford for it. What would have been the point, if Notre Dame's Catholicity were as vestigial and vaporous as that of so many other institutions that had lost their formerly robust religious character? Better simply to stay at a great secular university to begin with.

What drew me to Notre Dame was its Catholic identity. Numerous academics think that any university with a religious mission must be inhibiting academic freedom, marking itself as sectarian and advertising itself as intellectually narrow. Such a characterization justly applies to some religiously affiliated colleges and universities, which want to keep the wider world at bay. Not so Notre Dame. In fact, in my experience, there is greater academic freedom at Notre Dame than at leading secular universities, in ways that both derive from and reach beyond its Catholic mission.

"What would have been the point"?  Exactly.  Educational (and other) institutions that chafe at the suggestion that "Catholic" should describe reality, rather than origins, need to face (and to be made to face) the question:  "What is the point?"  (The question should also always be squarely in the view of those who make decisions about institutions like Notre Dame.) 

Also:  Non-Catholic universities, and those who believe that an authentically Catholic university is, in the end, an impossibility (because "Catholic" limits "university"), need to ask themselves, "where has Prof. Gregory gone wrong?", when he says:

It is liberating to be at a University with a wider scope for academic freedom because it lets religion be religion on its own terms.