An Interview with Pres. John Garvey

Here is (I think) a really good interview with my friend and former colleague, John Garvey, who is now the new President of the Catholic University of America.  It's all worth reading, but this part struck me in a particular way:

In Catholic higher education, there’s much talk about Catholic identity. It seems that it means different things to different people. What does Catholic identity, on a practical level, mean here?

There are two kinds of things you want to look at. In the first instance, Catholic identity is carried by, and most importantly consists in, hiring faithful Catholics to teach on the faculty, and so that a majority of the faculty should be people faithful to the witness of the faith. Also, I think it’s important to represent people of other faiths who are committed to the mission of the university and who add intellectual dimensions or depth to the discussion, but within the context of this. It’s not something that people can be indifferent about. That is the most important thing, and it carries over into classes in history, classics, sociology, economics and business. That’s essential. The bishops, in the norms that they promulgated in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, had it exactly right.

I have said to the faculty that it’s important for all of us to keep in mind the norms that the bishops have promulgated, that a majority of the faculty should be committed to the witness of the faith. I’ve spoken to the deans and department chairs about how that’s something we need to make part of our hiring process — and not just keeping count after the fact, but rather at the beginning of the process, to make sure that our search operates in the way that good affirmative-action searches operate: You proactively go out and seek out people who want to work at a university like this and include them in the mix of people that we interview. We make part of the interview process a discussion about the nature of our Catholic mission and ask prospective faculty members what they would contribute to that. So, it’s very much part of our public discussions and search processes.

A second dimension is the student-life dimension. This is something I’m a little bit newer to, in one way, but in one way I’m not. Unlike many of my predecessors, I have been a consumer of Catholic education. Jeanne and I have educated five children in 95 years of Catholic education, all told. All of them have been to Catholic colleges and universities. It’s really important to us, in following our children through college, not only what they study in the classroom, but also because they are living at the universities: What are their lives like in the residence halls? What are their opportunities for the sacraments in their everyday life? What are their friends’ attitudes towards the Church, towards Mass and the sacraments, and towards the beatitudes? Because much of the work of raising your children, once they reach a certain age, is who they are living with. Having the right student life at the university is a really important part of what kind of adult Catholics they grow up to be. For us, it was really important that they be at a place where they could meet young Catholics, because they’re going to fall in love with somebody, and that is a consideration. . . .