A couple of days ago, I placed a post here on the Mirror of Justice, spring-boarding from Peggy Noonan's column decrying a growing gulf between average Americans and opinion leaders, including those in the universities.
At the end of the post, I asked this question:
Have we, or at least have those Catholic professors who take the Catholic legal and social thought projects seriously, done a better job of remaining connected to the real world?
I opened the comments to that post, which prompted a vigorous ongoing discussion, and I thank Paul Horwitz, Steve Smith, and others for their generous contributions, both in agreement and disagreement with the premises of my post. One of the commentators referred us to the "No Hidden Agenda" web site, which had linked to Mirror of Justice and offered some thoughts on the question. Herewith an excerpt, which emphasizes the need to stay connected through service to the broader community:
My experience, especially in the theology department at Fordham University, is that many of us are [that is, many Catholic academics are remaining connected to the real world]. Especially considering the outreach into the Bronx community via the service learning courses that many of us are teaching, we are starting to challenge the standards of the secular academy in light of our identity as constituted by Catholic Social Teaching. We have the wonderful opportunity in our courses to combine activities that might be dismissed as ‘activism’ in other circles with detailed, rigorous study and argument in the classroom. I’m teaching my first service learning course this fall and my medical ethics students will actually be serving institutions like New York Presbyterian Hospital and Calvary Hospice Center in ways that will immeasurably increase the impact of the course on their lives–in addition to being of service to their local New York community. It also has the added benefit of lending practical experience to my students which they can then use as a tool to evaluate the often sterile and abstract arguments I will force them to read as part of any modern academic medical ethics course.
Perhaps this model of learning should be the norm, instead of the exception at a Roman Catholic University. Perhaps part of what it means for a University to be Catholic is to engage the world in the spirit of its social teaching in a way that the secular academy finds to be ‘trivial’ or ‘populist.’ But in a classic both/and argument, Catholic universities need to stand firm in the belief that being true to this aspect of their identity actually furthers the goals of a rigorous education.
