Douthat on Universities and a Challenge for Catholic Higher Education

I thought this "student-protesters-have-a-point" piece in the New York Times yesterday by Ross Douthat was especially insightful amid these fraught times on campuses. As Douthat puts it in his quick summary of the history of American higher education:

Over this period the university system became increasingly rich and powerful, a center of scientific progress and economic development. But it slowly lost the traditional sense of community, mission, and moral purpose. The ghost of an older humanism still haunted its libraries and classrooms, but students seeking wisdom and character could be forgiven for feeling like a distraction from the university’s real business.

Fast forward to the contemporary university, Douthat writes, and "the university’s deeper spirit remained technocratic, careerist and basically amoral."

But it seems to me there is an opportunity here for Catholic universities to respond to this challenge. Some of the most interesting passages (in Chapter Three, for example) of Laudato si' speak to the concern about technocracy run amok, and--at their best--Catholic universities maintain a commitment to the liberal arts and humanistic learning (even in professional schools of law and business!) that leavens the loss of moral purpose of the university. It may be that Catholic universities can help give the university back to itself. To do so would entail discerning those trends in the modern university that have been destructive of the aims of higher education (pick your favorites) and providing a witness to the possibility of something better--a stronger sense of community, moral and intellectual seriousness, and student formation for a life worth living.