A Circle without a Center | Commonweal Magazine

Source: A Circle without a Center | Commonweal Magazine

…One of the virtues of The Future of Catholic Higher Education is that Heft is well aware of the many differences among Catholic colleges and universities, so he’s careful not to overgeneralize even when seeking to identify common challenges. After all, the present moment might be a golden age for Notre Dame or Georgetown or Boston College, while the great number of much smaller, tuition-dependent institutions struggle mightily with the rising costs of higher education, the decline in the population of traditional college-age students, and what Holy Cross’s new president, Vince Rougeau, recently called “the pressure to produce ‘job-ready’ graduates.” (So much for the liberal arts! It’s a pre-professional world now.) In his review of Heft’s book for Commonweal, Dennis O’Brien likened it to Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. I will follow that hint by formulating my own response to Heft as three scholastic-style questions that readers associated with Catholic colleges and universities can consider for themselves.

As O’Brien notes, the heart of Heft’s book is his model for Catholic higher education—“the open circle” of the book’s subtitle. According to Heft, “A Catholic university should be an ‘open circle’”: the center of that circle should be Catholic intellectual life, but the university also should be open to engaging “other traditions” and “a wide variety of ideas.” In other words, it should be both distinctively Catholic in its intellectual milieu and broadly catholic, or universal, in its interests and ambition.

This is an attractive model, but Heft, to his credit, doesn’t confuse it with reality. The attentive reader will find a number of caveats throughout the book. For example: “We have few Catholic intellectuals to engage in that conversation.” “Catholic intellectuals…are, unfortunately, fewer in number than Catholics with doctorates.” Yet, without Catholic intellectuals, “it is impossible to have a Catholic university.” To the point, “will the major Catholic colleges and universities remain Catholic? I answer yes, but very much on the condition that faculty develop vibrant forms of Catholic intellectual life.” Finally, “unless a core of the faculty at a Catholic university remains committed to the educational relevance of Jesus Christ and the Catholic intellectual tradition, the Catholic university’s distinctive intellectual and existential dimensions will weaken and eventually disappear.”