Fordham theology professor Charlie Camosy recently posted an interview (here) on the Crux website with fellow theologian and Providence College faculty member Holly Taylor Coolman. The interview addresses the recent controversy swirling at Providence College concerning Catholic identity, mission, and diversity.
As the editor’s note to the interview explains, Anthony Esolen, a professor of literature at Providence College, recently published a pair of essays in Crisis Magazine (here and here), in which he argued:
that the college’s understanding of “diversity”’ is more rooted in secular political ideology and contemporary gender theory than in a distinctly Catholic worldview. A faculty petition described his position as based on “racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic, and religiously chauvinist statements,” and an email from Providence College President Father Brian Shanley disassociated the administration from Esolen’s views.
In the interview, Professor Coolman says that the current controversy on campus represents the inevitable collision of two groups.
One group is composed of Catholic faculty members who believe that Providence College’s “Catholic identity should be at the center of everything we do, and they look to the long history of Catholic tradition, including recent documents like Pope St. John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae, as crucial.” They seek to avoid the fate of many American colleges and universities, once founded under Protestant auspices, but that are now thoroughly secular. This first group supports diversity, but they believe that it should be understood and rooted in the College’s Catholic identity.
The second group is made up of “people who tend to fall on the margins in our community, and also those supporting them.” They see “systemic forms of exclusion” in the wider society, and in Providence College, in particular, whose 100 year history “includes almost nothing of the African-American experience, or of Hispanic culture and tradition.” They support Providence College’s efforts to “recruit more students, faculty, and staff from underrepresented groups.” Coolman says, however, that this group is not composed of secularists as “some of these folks would also note that their concerns [about diversity] are prompted by Catholic commitments, beginning with a recognition of the dignity of every human being.”
Let me offer two observations with respect to the two groups that Coolman describes, some version of which can be found on the campus of virtually every Catholic college and university in the United States.
With respect to the second group that Coolman identifies (and here I speak of Catholic campuses in general, though I suspect it may also be true of Providence College ), it should be admitted that there is substantial contingent who are in fact hostile to any meaningful expression Catholic identity and mission. Sometimes this hostility is on display for all to see. Sometimes faculty are genuinely embarrassed to be affiliated with an institution that identifies with being “Catholic” because they associate this identity with being misogynist, patriarchal, homophobic, and anti-choice. Although Pope Francis’s popularity and his championing of certain acceptable causes (immigration, the environment, chief among them) may have made this affiliation slightly more palatable, this contingent would happily jettison the unwelcome baggage of Catholic identity if given the opportunity. As one Loyola colleague remarked upon learning that the University can make use of Loyola’s Catholic and Jesuit identity in reviewing proposed faculty hires, “Let’s secede!”
More often than not, however, opposition to Catholic mission and identity is not overt. On the contrary, those hostile to this mission and identity are happy to appropriate its language. They cloak themselves in the words of the institution’s mission statement – the pursuit of “social justice,” being “a man or woman for others,” “care for the whole person,” and of “finding God in all things.” Regardless of whether they are Catholic, practitioners of another faith, or are non-religious, they openly profess their enthusiasm for the school’s mission. And they can do so in good faith because “social justice” is what they define it to be, and not as the term is used and understood by the Church’s magisterium and in the wider Catholic intellectual tradition. That is to say, they can support a mission dedicated to “social justice” because the “social justice” they have in mind exactly coincides with how the term is understood in the wider, secular academy.
It must be admitted, that many of these individuals came to the Catholic college or university where they now teach or study not knowing much about the school’s professed identity. And what they did observe upon their arrival, they were told was “nothing to worry about. ” These telltale signs of Catholic identity could be safely ignored. The signs of a Catholic presence on campus – the crucifixes on the wall, the grotto dedicated to Mary, the picture of Pedro Arrupe or Vincent DePaul, and the talk of Dominican, Jesuit, Franciscan, Benedictine or some other “charism” – were all for private consumption by willing customers. After all, religion and spirituality in American life in general is thought to be a purely private affair that can be taken up or put down as one chooses. Thus, these students and faculty often inferred (and sometimes were expressly told) that these signs of identity were merely ornamental or ceremonial – that they did not reflect a genuine commitment meant to influence the intellectual life of the school. Thus, any move by the school to realize a more robust identity gives rise to a sense of betrayal – the rules of the game have been changed in mid-contest. These students and faculty thought they were a part of a secular university that enjoyed the trappings of religiosity as a matter of nostalgia, or to please older and more wealthy alumni. But the quixotic pursuit of Catholic identity in the academic work of the institution is, at worst, offensive, and at best a serious impediment to the achievement of genuine excellence, and the recognition of that achievement by secular peers. As such, it is something to be opposed, albeit often under the pretense of upholding the mission.
The second observation relates to the first. Prof. Coolman says that many in the second group she identifies cite to Catholic premises as a basis for their support for diversity on college campuses, “beginning with a recognition of the dignity of every human being.” No doubt many who oppose the “longstanding exclusion and unjust mistreatment of marginalized people” are sincere in their opposition. And they are correct in pointing to the Catholic tradition as sharing in the condemnation of such mistreatment. But their invocation of the specifically Catholic premise of human dignity is often incomplete and sometimes incoherent.
Thus, for example, the Catholic concept of human dignity (like any number of its secular counterparts) insists that gays and lesbians “must be treated with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” and that “[e]very sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided” (Catchism §2358). But the Catholic concept of human dignity does not require the state to grant legal recognition to gay and lesbian couples in the form of civil unions or same-sex marriage. Similarly, some of the same people who argue for inclusion of the “marginalized” (meaning, among others, racial minorities, members of the LGBT community, and adherents of religions other than Christianity) would exclude unborn children from their rightful place in the human family and under the protection of the law. While, one might argue for the right to abortion based on some secular notion of human dignity, faithful recourse to the Catholic understanding of human dignity precludes such a move.
A third and final comment on Prof. Coolman’s interview. She says that what has been lacking at Providence College is leadership that sufficiently nourishes the College’s mission through a “clear articulation of things like the college’s history, the Catholic tradition, and the Dominican tradition” as well as “an invitation across campus to collaborate to share in working out that mission on campus.” She says that Providence College lacks “both of these elements, but especially the second.”
I believe that what Coolman says of PC is true of many Catholic colleges and universities.
Of course the invitation to collaborate – to share in the work of a common mission – will be an empty one if the substance of what one is being invited to share in isn’t clearly set forth. While the main problem at Providence College may be the absence of an invitation to collaborate and live out the College’s mission, I believe that the bigger problem at most Catholic institutions is a clear articulation of the institution’s identity. This failure is not due to a lack of time and effort spent word-smithing mission statements. Rather, it is due to a lack of courage in having the willingness to plainly say what needs to be said, to draw boundaries, to acknowledge that not everyone will find this vision of education attractive, to explain in concrete terms what this identity affirmatively demands and what it precludes. Coolman notes that at Providence College “engagement with the mission in faculty hiring processes has also been seriously inadequate.” It is no exaggeration to say that faculty hiring is the most important way in which a school’s mission is operationalized. As such, a clear articulation of the criteria to be used in “hiring for mission” is indispensable if Catholic colleges and universities are to have any hope of maintaining their identity and genuinely offering the distinctive kind of education they now claim to provide.
Thursday, December 22, 2016
I don't agree with everything in this piece by Victor Tan Chen, but I think it makes a number of good, challenging claims -- echoing, in places, things that Rusty Reno has been saying at First Things or that Murray, Putnam, and Vance have highlighted in their recent books (and that our own Paul Horwitz has blogged about). It is particularly worth a read, maybe -- as we're grading law-school exams, writing recommendation letters, etc. -- by those of us who are privileged/blessed to work in institutions that play such a large role in driving the competitive, exhausting meritocracy and in providing the credentials, merit-badges, and networks that are increasingly required for access to the upward mobility, social status, and the cognitive and other elites. Here's just a bit:
One possible answer . . . is the notion of grace—a stance that puts forward values that go beyond the “negatives” of the narrow secular creed and connect with individuals of diverse political viewpoints, including those hungry for more in the way of meaning than the meritocratic race affords. . . .
The concept of grace comes from the Christian teaching that everyone, not just the deserving, is saved by God’s grace. Grace in the broader sense that I (an agnostic) am using, however, can be both secular and religious. In the simplest terms, it is about refusing to divide the world into camps of deserving and undeserving, as those on both the right and left are wont to do. It rejects an obsession with excusing nothing, with measuring and judging the worth of people based on everything from a spotty résumé to an offensive comment.
. . . At the same time, grace reminds the well-educated and well-off to be less self-righteous and less hostile toward other people’s values. Without a doubt, opposing racism and other forms of bigotry is imperative. There are different ways to go about it, though, and ignorance shouldn’t be considered an irremediable sin. Yet many of the liberal, affluent, and college-educated too often reduce the beliefs of a significant segment of the population to a mash of evil and delusion. . . .
Really, though, the people who could learn from grace are the prosperous and college-educated, who often find it hard to empathize with those—both white and nonwhite—who live outside their sunny, well-ordered worlds. When people are not so intent on blaming others for their sins—cultural and economic—they can deal more kindly with one another. Grace is a forgiving god.
For one reason or another, a number of people in the blogosphere have been writing culture war posts in the last few days. Perhaps it's the end of the year, or the looming political changes, or exam avoidance, or just the holiday cheer. For those who are interested, have a look at Mark Tushnet's recent post, Paul Horwitz's response, and this rather grim comment by R.J. Snell--all of them culture war related.
But the piece I really want to highlight is alluded to in the Snell post--Philip Rieff's "The Newer Noises of War in the Second Culture Camp: Notes on Professor Burt's Legal Fictions," published in 1991 and in response to Robert Burt's then-recent book, "Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land." I cannot do justice to the entire piece, but here is a fragment that is, in its way, responsive to each of the three posts above:
Let there be fight? And there was. And there is. James Joyce's pun, on the words of Jewish second world creation, Genesis 1:3, is more than mildly amusing; it gives readers the most exact and concise account I know of the sociological form of culture. Culture is the form of fighting before the firing actually begins. Every culture declares peace on its own inevitably political terms. Unless a culture is defeated politically, as the Jewish was from the Roman conquest to the founding of Israel, it will assert itself politically. A living culture, even one that imitates life by politicizing its cultural impoverishment, works for itself. That cultural work is the matter and manner of disarming competing cultures, inside and outside its previously bounded self. In its disarming manner, a culture makes the ultimate political means of enforcement, armed force, unnecessary....
12) Kulturkampf. The German compound word for the disarming force/form of culture has an awkward English equivalent: culture/struggle. As I remarked in the first note, the punning polemical genius of Joyce brought him closer than any sociologist I know to both the formal fighting sense of culture and its superordinate creative sense. It is in that both/and that the historical task of culture is always and everywhere the same: the creation of a world in which its inhabitants may find themselves at home and yet accommodate the stranger without yielding their habitus to him. Here and now, pluralism has its price: a united front of second against third world assaults [for Rieff's discussion of first, second, and third worlds, see earlier in the piece], which are often mounted in the name of pluralism.
13) Origins of kulturkampf. Law is the ultimate weapon, before any turn to harder ware, in a kulturkampf. That word first appeared in common German use in the early 1870's during the struggle of the National Liberal political party to disarm by law the moral/educational authority, and political pulpitry, of a triumphalist Roman Catholic hierarchy, revitalized as it then was by its dogma of papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals. The aim of the National Liberals was to shift the German Catholic imagination away from the church to the state. The Pope responded to newly restrictive laws by forbidding clerical conformity to them. In turn, the state dismissed clerical resisters from their duties and, moreover, suspended their state salaries. Elites of the kulturstaat, both Catholic and Protestant, then learned a fatally rational and enduring lesson: the high price of being other than indifferent to the temptation of opposing the machtstaat.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Prof. Stephen Schneck passed on to me a notice about an upcoming conference ("Erroneous Autonomy: The Dignity of Work") at Catholic University of America that might be of interest to MOJ readers. Michael Sean Winters blogs about the event here.
The event is co-sponsored, it appears, by the AFL-CIO and that union's President, Richard Trumka, is one of the speakers. (I'm afraid I was not invited to explain that and why the Church's social teachings regarding the dignity of work and the freedom of association do not, contrary to the suggestions of some, provide support for public-employee unionism as it exists and is practiced in the United States. Maybe next time.)
I continue to suspect that the anti-libertarianism campaign of some Catholics who are political progressives often sets up straw men (i.e., attacks as "libertarian" or "Randian" positions that do not depend on or reflect the unsound anthropological premises of philosophical libertarianism). Here's a post I did a little while ago (on the occasion of an earlier CUA conference in this series), that tries to develop this concern.
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
For Christians, this season is a powerful reminder that we do not face the challenges of this fallen world alone. Immanuel – God with us – is an infinite and eternal source of hope, demonstrating that the Almighty Creator of the Universe cares enough about each one of us to become a baby born in a manger. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, the Incarnation reveals that “God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in . . . . He loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”
God’s radical love for human beings revealed through the Incarnation provides a compelling and countercultural reason to love others as we love ourselves. Increasingly, it seems, our world defines us by our differences and implores us to care for others only to the extent that they look like, think like, or act like we do. Or at the opposite extreme, the world urges us to ignore difference and push everyone into the same consumer-driven framework, as though culture, religion, and worldview can be glossed over by maximizing economic self-interest. Both extremes contribute to what Pope Francis refers to as “the globalization of indifference.”
The Incarnation offers a better way: Christ came because of His love for human beings, and that love was not diminished by the particularity or messiness of the human condition. Christ’s love does not ignore or negate difference – it transcends difference through a radical embrace of “the other.”
The division and discord of the present day have been painfully on display this week from Aleppo to Ankara to Berlin to our own neighborhoods. We are grappling with serious concerns about the well-being of religious and racial minorities, with diminished trust in social institutions (including the Church), and with anguished questions about the continued viability of a shared vision of the common good.
Under these circumstances, we need the Incarnation more than ever. The hope of Christmas provides the foundation for a conception of solidarity as robust as the vision cast by the Church as it recommitted itself to engaging the modern era during the Second Vatican Council:
The joys and the hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.
Solidarity is not contingent on our ability to identify similarities between us and the other, but rather, in the words of Pope Paul VI at the time of the Council, “binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception, and of actively helping him when he comes across our path.”
So what does this have to do with the day-to-day life of a Catholic university? Everything. In Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II charged Catholic universities with the task of forming “an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ.” That is a daunting task, to be sure, but it is, with God’s help, attainable. It will flow more from an orientation of the heart than a tactical decision of the mind. Are we ready to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception? And what would our campuses look like if we did?
As we approach a new year, there is plenty in the world about which to be anxious. But there is great confidence to be found in the Gospel’s reminder that God is with us. If we take that to heart, there is neither reason for despair nor time for indifference.
Over at the Law and Religion Forum, my colleague, Mark Movsesian, has an interview with Ashley Berner, professor and deputy director of the Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins School of Education, concerning her new book, Pluralism and American Education: No One Way to School. Here's a bit from the conversation:
L&R Forum: You argue for “educational pluralism,” which you say is a “middle path” between state-sponsored uniformity and a libertarian, privatized model. Could you explain what you mean? How would educational pluralism work in practice?
Berner: Educational pluralism asks us to de-couple funding schools and operating schools. Thus in the Netherlands, only 30% of students attend state-funded, state-operated schools, while the rest attend schools that are funded and regulated by the state but operated by non-state institutions. Educational pluralism also requires regulatory guardrails that apply to all schools, thus ensuring some level of coherence across (for instance) content and assessments and sometimes admissions.
That’s why I think of it as a middle path: education is a public good (hence state-mandated requirements) that may be provided by a variety of civic organizations (religious or otherwise).
L&R Forum: Most Americans think that uniform public education is necessary to promote good citizenship. Yet civic knowledge among public school students is appallingly low. Why the mismatch between theory and practice? What benefits would educational pluralism offer in this respect?
Berner: Citizenship formation includes specific knowledge (How does the government work?), specific skills (How do I write my Congressperson?), attachment and participation (Why is this country/state/city worth participating in?), and tolerance (How can we respectfully disagree?). Cultivating the above requires a robust academic program and the possibility of classroom debate. Yet many of our schools – public and private – undervalue the content and skills required to engage in the democratic process. Do schools insist that all students know the basic tenets of the Constitution? Or understand the separation of powers? Or can name the capital of every state? What about actually learning a foreign language and knowing world geography inside out? Our public schools don’t even come close, and plenty of non-public schools undervalue rigorous content.
A second reason may be that many schools struggle to articulate the why’s for students, a point that James Davison Hunter’s book, The Death of Character (2000) drives home. Citizenship requires duty to something greater than oneself. In schools with strong normative cultures, the “greater than” is simply more readily available than it in a supposedly neutral school. Scott Seider’s Character Compass (2012) takes us inside three Boston charter schools whose core commitments draw upon Aristotelian, Pacific Rim, and performance ethics, each of which shapes their respective traditions and rituals.
Educational pluralism simply foregrounds the role that values and commitments play in school culture. The structure of educational pluralism does not solve the problem of citizenship formation by itself. It does, however, create space for schools that are organized around explicit normative claims. And in general, non-public schools provide richer academic content than do district schools. Put these two factors together, and the odds are that pluralizing the school system will yield better civic outcomes.
Monday, December 19, 2016
In this brief, bracing blog post, Prof. Brian Leiter (Chicago) states that "Until religious orthodoxy of whatever stripe dies out, humanity will be at risk, alas." Hmmm. Putting on my University of Chicago green-eye-shade, I'm pretty sure that -- going strictly on the evidence, of course -- humanity's smart welfarist move, behind the "veil of ignorance" and all that, is to prefer "religious orthodoxy" to the other, rival kinds.
Friday, December 16, 2016
Thanks to the folks at the Federalist Society for hosting a conversation -- now a podcast, available here -- between our own Tom Berg and me about "the future of religious liberties under the new administration." Check it out!
