Catholic hiring redux
September 24, 2007, 3:45 pm
Posted by John McGreevy
In the spirit of shameless self-promotion I’ve written a short piece on faculty hiring at Catholic universities, now free on the Commonweal site. All comments welcome and I’ll try to respond as well in a day or two.
Dr. McGreevy:
Thank you for your thoughtful piece on hiring Catholic faculty at Catholic colleges and universities. I found it to be balanced and nuanced, accounting for the complexity of the issue. Surely, many Catholic professors are for keeping colleges and universities Catholic.
The chosen title of your piece is instructive. In my experience, those who call for a “restoraton” or a “realignment” of Catholic colleges and universities are rarely satisfied. In a word, no place can be Catholic enough for them. Quotas are the wrong way to go; there are too many other variables which Fr,. Miscamble and Mr. Dempsey seem never to factor into their views. These were sufficiently rehearsed in that thread on Miscamble’s article in America, save one, that I did not see represented. Graduate programs downsized in the last twenty or so years because of the lack of available jobs for Ph.D.’s, making the pool of available Catholic Ph.D.’s even smaller.
I believe that what is at the heart of the question for those who harrangue about the catholicity of colleges and universities may be a deep Augustinain restlessness in their own souls, which they project outwardly when the cognitive dissonance becomes too much to bear. They seem reluctant to accept the diversity that is evident in Catholicism across the board. Telling is the post from Mr. Dempsey which tries to discount dissident, heterodox, and nominal Catholics on faculties. As I was reading that earlier thread, I suspected that he, if not Fr. Miscamble too, were not interested in hiring self-identified Catholics, but Catholics of a particular sort. I find the discussion of who gets to wear the badge tiresome, elitist, and unjust. Why the need for judging another’s Catholicism with terms like dissident, heterodox, and nominal? I, for one, perefer to have healithier Catholics contributing to the Catholic character of colleges and universities.
Thanks again, for your very thoughful piece.
Superb piece, John. What made it even better was your marvelous prose which I had not noticed before. Secondly, I will fault you, however, for not writing more about what we can learn from such a gifted faculty. It goes without saying that your position will go nowhere with The Latin Mass magazine group.
It is clear that the faculty you mention have a distinctly Christian flavor and while they may not necessarily avoid CDF sanction they will certainly allow spirits to soar heavenward.
It seems to me that (inadvertently) Dr. McGreevey is making Fr. Miscamble’s main point. In reading both full articles back to back, Dr. McGreevey seems to feel that Notre Dame, and particulary its students, are best served having the highest qualified teachers. He gives quite an impressive list. For the reasons he gives, this is preferable even if it continues to reduce both the percentage of Catholic teachers and the specifically Catholic character of the campus.
In the last paragraph of Fr. Miscamble’s article, he also sees Notre Dame having to make a choice between what he calls “strategic hiring… for mission” and “following the lead of “their secular “preferred peer” schools.”
It appears that they are both presenting the identical choice to Notre Dame, the only difference being that their personal picks would fall on opposite sides of the issue.
I find it difficult, Robert G Kribs, to understand your distinction. “Secular “preferred Peer” schools” do not center on the rich Catholic tradition in the Middle Ages.
I would like more on the first three centuries. Not sure whether ND features that era as strongly.
I’ve always thought that the supply question is interesting. Why aren’t there enough priests? Well, not too many Catholic young men want to go into the priesthood–and their families aren’t encouraging them in that direction.
Why aren’t there a lot of Catholic academics-well, many smart Catholic kids aren’t going into the academy. They’re taking their talents elsewhere.
A Ph.D. in philosophy or history can take eight years after college. (age (22-30). This is followed by a couple of years knocking around in a visiting or non-tenure track position. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a tenure track job (starting at about $50,000), and face another 7 years or so of trying to keep that job.
Most people who get into really good grad schools (the sort that will help you get an academic job) could have done well in law school. Starting salary for a law student at a big firm is about 150,000 k now. It’s 3-4 years after college, depending upon whether you do a clerkship.
Unless you really value the intellectual life, and see what you’re doing as a vocation, you’re not likely to do it. Particularly, in my view, if you’re a Catholic man who has been told he has to have a secure job that will enable him to support a family in decent style.
I found Professor Miscamnble’s piece in America to bve oversimplified as if being Catholic makes one a catholic instructor in the sense desired. I think the post here is excellent on that point.
I have a question for cathy K,
Isn’t
thyje issue why there aren’t more good priests and giood catholic academics coming along?
Could it be influenced by the priorities Church leaders have set for such goals but at the same time mau lack what’s needed to attain them?
Dear John,
I put up a few thoughts at MOJ about your very thoughtful essay. It is still not clear to me that there is *that* much distance between your vision and Fr. Miscamble’s, but I could be missing something.
In a nutshell, the question that lingers, for me, after reading your essay is whether we should think that, although — as you correctly suggest — the aspirations and mission (broadly understood) of a great Catholic university cannot be reduced to the “how many Catholics are on the faculty question”, and although non-Catholic scholars like Noll and Marsden contribute in invaluable ways to that mission, it is nevertheless the case that a university cannot do all the important work you describe *without*, at a minimum, what Fr. Jenkins calls a “preponderance” of (broadly understood) Catholic faculty? Put differently, a majority-Catholic faculty is not sufficient for a great Catholic university, but is it necessary?
With respect to Mr. Mitchell’s comment, above, I hope that raising this question does not reveal either an intolerance for diversity in the Church or a “deep Augustinian restlessness”!
Thanks again for the essay.
To piggy back on Rick Garnett’s comment: while it might not be sufficient to count Catholic noses among the faculty, is it in some cases a useful exercise.
At places like Notre Dame, where it is a question of Catholics faculty constituting something slightly below 50%, counting noses might not be high on your priority list. At places like my institution, where Catholics constitute somewhere between 20-25% of the faculty, and somewhere around 50% of the faculty lists no religious affiliation, counting noses might be a more useful exercise.
So I guess I agree with John McGreevey inasmuch as I don’t worry about Notre Dame’s Catholicity very much — it seems pretty robust to me. But that doesn’t mean that Catholicity is not something to worry about, or that the number of Catholics on the faculty is never a relevant statistic.
Fritz,
Do we have too many Catholic colleges and universities, given the number of faculty available to staff them. Should institutions that can’t hit the 50% mark simply give up the name? Or is there a point in being influenced by the Catholic tradition, systematically, even if not numerically dominated by it?
Cathy
With fear and trembling I will answer Bill Mazzella’s question. In our department (Theology) you can study Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic and Armenian patristics to say nothing of what is offered in our biblical menu that, like all such programs, concerns itself with both canonical and non canonical texts. We also offer an interdisciplanry MA in early Christian Studies in tandem with the classics department.
After reading and considering Fr. Miscamble and Prof. McGreevys’ articles (and also the thoughtful posts above by ND Profs. Kaveny and Garnett), I now realize the Catholic faculty/Catholic identity issue is more complicated than I thought it was at first glance. While some critical mass of Catholic faculty seems necessary to me, I’m not sure what that % should be. And while the religious composition of the faculty at a Catholic university is important to its Catholic identity, it is of course not the only factor contributing to such identity.
A Catholic university must be both Catholic and catholic, but there should be IMO an emphasis on the former, at least to the extent that (1) a Catholic university won’t be mistaken for anything but Catholic both visibly and intellectually (including the broad spectrum of Catholic intellectual thought), and (2) it proudly wears its Catholicism, even if that means it slips in the secular rankings of universities that so dominate the college application process today.
Allow me a personal example: My son attended a Catholic high school. The salutatorian in the class before his turned down admission from several Ivy League universities to attend Wheaton College (the Wheaton College in IL, not the one in MA) because it felt like “home” to him. I couldn’t help but be impressed (and I’m sure I’m not the only one) by what he considered important in making his choice for college. I don’t know a lot about Wheaton, but I’m familiar enough with the school to know it has a palpable evangelical atmosphere and identity. Shouldn’t a Catholic university have a distinctly Catholic atmosphere and identity that acts as a magnet for Catholics and interested non-Catholics alike, even if that means its U.S. News & World Report ranking slips? And I’m not talking about a one-note curriculum or a homogenous student body and faculty. To be truly Catholic, we also have to be catholic. But what would be wrong, for example, with also requiring courses that focus on Catholic social doctrine, on the Catechism, and on the history of the Church?
>>Do we have too many Catholic colleges and universities, given the number of faculty available to staff them. Should institutions that can’t hit the 50% mark simply give up the name? Or is there a point in being influenced by the Catholic tradition, systematically, even if not numerically dominated by it?<<
Cathy,
Good questions, to which I have no ready answer. A little Catholicism in an institution might be better than none at all, but a trivialized veneer of Catholicism — where “Catholic” is turned into a brand and nothing more — could well do more harm than good to the cause of Catholic intellectual life.
I am not a big advocate of counting noses as a remedy. After all, it might well be possible for an institution to have a robust engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition even if only 20% of the faculty are Catholic, and it is equally possible that a faculty that was 95% Catholic could be entirely secular in its intellectual pursuits. But nose counting might might well be a decent diagnostic tool. If Catholics are thin on the ground among the faculty, it might reflect a subtle (or not so subtle) bias among faculty in some departments against hiring Catholics, or it might indicate the lack of the kind of vibrant Catholic life — intellectual and otherwise — on campus that would attract good Catholic candidates.
Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments and my apologies for the delay in my (even now, hurried) response.
I agree with F.C. Bauerschmidt that Notre Dame’s Catholic identity is quite robust. I also agree that nose-counting can be a useful diagnostic tool. (And here I am more optimistic than Peter Steinfels, although I think his post is terrific and clearly reflects long experience wrestling with these issues.)
But nose-counting can only be done — even discussed — in a much richer context. This project must include hiring for mission as an intellectual project, hiring non-Catholics specificiallly because they too contribute to the mission of the university etc. Without this larger and carefully thought out intellectual frame the blunt assertion that x% of Catholics are crucial to any Catholic university only inspire cynicism of the least attractve sort.
The sobering numbers about the number of Catholics with Ph.D.s at elite institutions are also important, I should add, and need to be approached with a sense of realism. The hiring strategy at a major research university inevitably has to be different than that at a religiously affiliated small college precisely because of the relative importance of scholarship and making a contribution to the general intellectual conversation. This includes respect from peer institutions — where we hope to place our graduate students — and from whom we can learn a great deal without, I think, mindlessly losing our identity!