The Real Crisis in Catholic Higher Education

I know this is a blog about Catholic legal theory, but because it’s a Catholic blog I assume it’s about, well, everything and that surely includes Catholic higher education. As many readers of this blog know, John Tracy Ellis wrote a famous article in 1955 (“American Catholics and the Intellectual Life”) bemoaning the state of Catholic higher education. Ellis began with an observation from Denis Brogan that “in no Western society is the intellectual prestige of Catholicism lower than in the country where, in such respects as wealth, numbers, and strength of organization, it is so powerful.” Ellis’s essay has prompted a lot of soul searching and striving over the last fifty years to build up the academic profile of Catholic universities, with mixed success.

That’s all well and good, but I have a different question: why are Catholic universities not winning more at what is--let’s be honest--one of the most powerful forces in American culture, major college sports?

Consider this: since Georgetown and Villanova won back-to-back national championships in 1984 and 1985 respectively, no Catholic school has won the national basketball championship. Since then, only five have been to the Final Four: Providence (1987), Seton Hall (1989), Marquette (2003), Georgetown (2007), and Villanova (2009)--that’s five teams from Catholic schools out of 104 teams in the Final Four over those 26 years. The results in football, as every Notre Dame fan knows, are no better. Notre Dame’s last national football championship was in 1988, and of Notre Dame’s 11 consensus national championships, seven came before 1950. (Random trivia: What is the only Catholic school to win a football national championship--however determined--other than Notre Dame? Answer: the University of Detroit in 1928.)

Now I know there’s a selection bias problem here--there are only two NCAA FBS (i.e., Division I-A) Catholic schools (Notre Dame and Boston College) and just 41 out of 346 NCAA Division I basketball programs are Catholic schools. (By the way, I’m no statistician, but even I can see that Catholic schools should proportionally be in the Final Four about 12% of the time, but there have been only five Final Four teams in 26 years, a rate of roughly 5%.) But I don’t think it’s a public-private issue. Since Villanova’s championship in 1985, there have been five basketball championships won by private schools (Duke four times and Syracuse in 2003) and private schools make it to the Final Four regularly (Butler is a recent and prominent example). In football, excluding Notre Dame there have been 13 national titles won by private schools in the modern era (USC seven times, Miami five times, and BYU in 1984).

My anecdotal impression is that Catholic high schools still win more than their share of state championships, partly because they can more easily recruit kids from across public school district lines. So why do Catholic universities fare so poorly? A well-known Catholic historian only half-jokingly told me a few years ago that the decline of Notre Dame football was a manifestation of the decline of the American Catholic Church (see Robert Putnam and David Campbell's recent book on the changing landscape of American religion showing that Rust Belt ethnic Catholicism has collapsed). Is the explanation that the networks of parochial grade schools, Catholic prep schools, and Catholic universities that once achieved athletic success have now evaporated as major college sports--notably football, as this interesting Wall Street Journal piece from a few years ago argued--has become more Southern and big state school dominated? I say let's have a John Tracy Ellis-inspired challenge for Catholic university sports.