US bishops encouraged to advance renewal of Catholic colleges
"The Catholic paradox is that we have a massive infrastructure of higher education, with average outcomes."
Catholic colleges and universities today are largely failing to fulfill their mission, and the bishops have an important role to play in correcting the problem, the provost of Dartmouth College said Wednesday.
Santiago Schnell, who is also a renowned mathematical biologist, spoke to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Orlando. He offered his reflections on the state of Catholic higher education today, 25 years after the conference implemented Pope John Paul II’s apostolic constitution on education, Ex Corde Ecclesiae.
Questions of policy, leadership, and culture at Catholic universities continue to be points of contention in the United States. This past year, the University of Notre Dame appointed an outspoken abortion advocate to direct one of its academic institutes, then announced days later that the appointed faculty member would not assume the director role after widespread condemnation of the appointment by students, university donors, and bishops.
Schnell said that although Catholics are present in American public life today – making up, for example, more than a quarter of Congress and two-thirds of the Supreme Court – they lack a sufficient presence in the institutions that form ideas, language and imagination.
“The Catholic paradox is that we have a massive infrastructure of higher education, with average outcomes,” he said.
Roughly 1 in 5 U.S. adults is Catholic, and there are 230 Catholic colleges and universities in the country, enrolling more than 600,000 students, he noted.
But only 35% of adult Catholics in the country have at least a bachelor’s degree – just matching the national average among all U.S. adults. And among Hispanic Catholics, this figure is 20%.
Meanwhile, 43% of U.S. adults who were raised Catholic no longer identify as Catholic today, he continued. And those who no longer practice the faith are more than twice as likely to cite changes in belief than scandals in the Church as the primary reason.
Clearly, Schnell said, there is a crisis in Catholic higher education.
At the root of it, he told the bishops, is the fact that Catholic institutions have largely imitated their secular counterparts.
A strong focus on rankings has become a “rival magisterium” for Catholic colleges, affecting their hiring, curriculum and strategic planning decisions, he said. Students are primarily trained for jobs rather than formed for human flourishing. Even the academic vocabulary embraced by Catholic colleges centers on themes like “progress” and “success” rather than the human person.
At this point, Schnell said, most Catholic colleges have become essentially secular, imitating non-Catholic schools rather than embracing their distinct religious identity.
“When you look at the missions of the secular institutions, and when you look at the missions of the Catholic universities, the missions are not very much different,” he said. “Everyone wants to be a force for good. Everyone wants to help the poor. Everyone wants to support democracy. But we’re doing that in a way that is devoid of religion.”
To counter these trends, Schnell called for an awakening in Catholic higher education.
Catholic colleges and universities should embrace their distinct religious identity, he said. They should ensure that academic freedom is ordered toward truth, and should be clear that their identity is not that of an NGO or political organization.
Rather than focusing simply on workforce preparation, Catholic institutions should realize that they are forming the Church’s intellectual future – and hopefully the next Doctors of the Church, Schnell said.
He also called for an attentiveness to the percentage of Catholics among the faculty and students, noting that he had recently turned down an opportunity to serve as president of a Catholic college where the vast majority of both students and teachers are non-Catholic.
“We have changed the demographic and the composition of the faculty and the student body to the point that it has affected what [John Henry] Newman called the genius loci, the spirit of the place,” he said.
Newman’s idea, he elaborated, is that what makes a university Catholic is not simply the Masses or classes offered, but the general spirit of the place, carried out, for example, through conversations of students as they walk across campus, and traditions handed down from one generation of students to the next.
This Catholic identity can be formed but not engineered, he stressed. It should be considered in how curriculum is selected, how leadership roles are appointed and in how honors – including speaking platforms – are bestowed.
Schnell noted that the conversation on the subject will be continuing in the closed-door session of the conference’s meeting.
But he left the bishops with a closing reflection on their own role in shaping Catholic higher education.
“You could be more vocal, you could be more pushy, and I think you are being too respectful. You own the word ‘Catholic.’ We academic administrators don’t,” he said.