A Dose of John Garvey

A collection of centers and institutes at the University of St. Thomas is putting on a series of talks entitled: "Daring to be Different: Creating a vision of Catholic Higher Education in Challenging Times."  The goal of the series is to prompt conversation on the same sorts of Catholic identity questions posed by Rob and Greg in recent posts.  (The title of the series comes from St. Thomas' history.  The following quote is often attributed to our founder, Archbishop John Ireland -- though we can't seem to track down the exact cite:  “St. Thomas is not Harvard, or Stanford or the University of Minnesota — all institutions of highest quality. St. Thomas is different. Dear friends, we must dare to be different.”   The question we are posing for this series is:  "In the context of the challenges facing Catholic higher education today, what should “daring to be different” look like for our community?"

Yesterday's installment in the series was a wonderful talk by John Garvey entitled "The Challenges of Mission-focused Leadership at a Catholic University."  In his typically brilliant and elegant way, John shared the vision animating many of the initiatives he is implementing as President of the Catholic University of America.  He focused on the interplay of the complementary relationship inherent in a Catholic University's dual responsibility to nurture the intellect and the faith of its students.  One of his main points was that the Catholic lay men and women who have taken over the majority of the administrative and faculty positions at Catholic universities from the religious men and women who used to run our schools have to take seriously their responsibility for moral, as well as intellectual, formation of the students entrusted to us.  This has to be done not only through the institutional messages a university sends with decisions like choices in honorary degree recipients, but also in structural initiatives that witness positively to the sorts of values we would like to inculcate.  Examples of some of the initiatives John is implementing at Catholic University include reinstituting single-sex dorms, encouraging religious men and women associated with the university to live in the dorms, and university-wide promotion of positive values -- such as a month dedicated to awarding medals to members of the community displaying fortitude, and a focus on temperance during March, the month of St. Patrick's Day and Spring Break.  In addition to these sorts of institutional messages from administrators, John also argued that the individual lay faculty members have to assume greater responsiblity for modelling lives of faith and sanctity.  In an interesting interpretation of the 'Catholic majority' mandate of Ex corde and the US Bishop's norms for implementation of Ex corde, John suggested that this mandate reflects the Pope and Bishops' acknowledgement of the laity's greater competence in running universities, which carries with it the greater responsibility for making personal and institutional decisions that preserve the Catholic identity of the institution.

Since this was a talk by the brilliant John Garvey, my blog post can only capture one of the many important threads running through the talk.  I can only hope he publishes it somewhere soon.  In the meantime, I offer this link to his recent (June 13) address at the USCCB General Assembly on "Religious Freedom and the Love of God", as well as his lovely recent reflection on the martyrdom of the scribe Eleazar from the 2nd Book of Maccabees in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "A Matter of Faith and Freedom."  (And, for just for a smile, a great picture of most of John's 15 grandkids.)