Institutional moral identity and the secular university

Cathy Kaveny poses a fascinating hypothetical about the legitimacy of a private secular university staking out a moral identity that would warrant an institutional refusal to support pro-life student groups.  While I would disagree with the moral claims embodied in that identity, it’s well within a private university’s rights to do so.  I have one potential objection, though.  Assume that elite secular universities begin to adopt a moral identity celebrating individual autonomy, an identity that could be used to justify the exclusion of student groups that oppose abortion or same-sex marriage, or that limit their membership/leadership based on religion. Especially when implemented by the “ruling class” of American higher education, these policies seem geared less toward staking out a particular substantive moral worldview, and more toward the negation of disfavored alternative worldviews.  Put more simply, I am more comfortable with a Catholic university excluding certain student groups or honorees not only because I tend to agree with the Catholic university’s moral claims, but also because the Catholic university is staking out a countercultural moral identity. Elite secular universities are not staking out countercultural moral identities; they are squashing countercultural moral identities.  A Catholic university can be, at its best, a bulwark against the hegemony of intellectual orthodoxy; Yale is more likely to be a vehicle for that hegemony. To be sure, if we were still in Christendom and the Catholic Church was still the dominant intellectual and cultural force in society, I would probably feel less comfortable about Catholic universities refusing to affirmatively support dissenting voices within the university community.  But we’re long past Christendom.