For an example of the struggle to articulate and maintain a university's Catholic identity that does not involve the Vagina Monologues, check out the storm caused here at the University of St. Thomas by the administration's practice of not allowing unmarried partners to travel with faculty on student trips. A sampling of the coverage can be found here, here, and here, and the protest letter signed by (some) faculty and staff is here.
Rob
UPDATE: After I posted this, I was asked why my name is not on the protest letter. There are several reasons, including the fact that accusing the administration of being "hypocritical" and displaying a "lack of integrity" are unlikely to facilitate a healthy resolution of a difficult issue. Also, the resolution currently before the faculty senate suggests that a faculty chaperone could choose whatever travel partner they wish without limitation. Here are my original comments in response to that resolution:
I would be more sympathetic to [this] resolution if it simply called for travel privileges for same-sex partners who are in long-term, committed relationships and are legally precluded from pursuing more formal recognition of those relationships. That proposal would still stand in tension with the school’s Catholic identity, but it would raise a different set of considerations than the broader and, in my view, more radical suggestion that a faculty member’s choice of travel partner is none of the school’s business. The implicit presumption is that faculty members are teachers by instruction, but not by the behavior they model – or at least that the modeling function is limited to circumstances chosen by the faculty member.
If I paid tuition for my child to attend any college, Catholic or not, and the faculty chaperone on a trip abroad slept with a different partner at every stop on the journey, for example, I would certainly complain to the administration. And if the administration responded to my complaint with “that’s none of our business,” I would wonder what sort of formation process is contemplated at that institution. If I go out for drinks with students one evening and end up getting falling-down drunk, that’s no longer just my personal business; I’ve made it the school’s business by modeling my behavior for students.
The resolution should strike us at the law school as especially problematic because we’ve set out a distinct mission of educating the whole person, which puts the burden on us to know that we’re being watched, not just listened to. If folks want to have a conversation about what sorts of relationships are legitimate models for students on university-sponsored trips, that’s one thing. But to suggest that our choice of travel partners is irrelevant to the formation of students that occurs – intentionally or not – on such trips, that’s quite another.
I'm not sure how other schools have handled this issue, but I'd welcome any reactions, insights and recommendations.
I've been following the media coverage of the Equality Ride, a cross-country protest tour through which GLBT students hope to bring attention to anti-gay policies and practices at Christian colleges. Whatever our view of the policies being protested, it is, in my view, a valuable model of cultural engagement by the riders, who seem to be targeting hearts and minds, rather than the levers of government power. Equally interesting are the divergent approaches taken by the institutions themselves, ranging from the fortress mentality (e.g., Liberty having the protestors arrested for setting foot on campus) to the facilitation of dialogue (e.g., Bethel planning various discussion forums with students and faculty). As Wheaton College's provost recognized, "this is a significant event" because "it signals a heightening of the pressure that's going to be on our institution as we are discordant with the general culture on our stand of sexual morality."
Rob
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Naomi Wolf has a blistering critique of what has become a highly successful and outrageously immoral genre of books for adolescent girls:
The great reads of adolescence have classically been critiques of the corrupt or banal adult world. It's sad if the point of reading for many girls now is no longer to take the adult world apart but to squeeze into it all the more compliantly. Sex and shopping take their places on a barren stage, as though, even for teenagers, these are the only dramas left.
Rob
Thursday, March 9, 2006
Yet another study suggests that parental notification laws might be more efficacious than The New York Times concluded. (Thanks again to Carter Snead.)
Rob
Jack Balkin welcomes the political implications of the South Dakota anti-abortion law, noting that George Allen, Mitt Romney and John McCain have all spoken favorably of the legislation:
If Republican presidential candidates announce their support for criminalizing abortions in the primaries in order to win the votes of the pro-life faithful, their Democratic opponents will be more than happy to remind the public of that position when the general election comes round. That, I predict, will help split the Republican coalition that has governed the country for years.
For this we can thank the wonderful folks in the South Dakota legislature, who have put the criminalization of abortion squarely on the table for public discussion. By making it important for Republican politicians to take a stand-- not on the relatively popular issues of partial birth abortion bans and parental notification requirements, but on the far less popular question of criminalizing abortion-- South Dakota has managed to do what years of Democratic politics could not-- create a wedge issue that will destroy the Republican party's winning coalition nationally.
Rob
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Amy Sullivan visits Alabama to explore the GOP's increasing restlessness over whether it can keep evangelical voters in the fold.
Rob
