Save Liberal Education
Save Saint Ignatius Institute.

e, the undersigned, protest actions which we believe have seriously damaged one of our nation's premier Great Books programs: the Saint Ignatius Institute of the University of San Francisco.

We further believe that the effective gutting of one of the country's finest centers of Catholic liberal education by administrators at the University of San Francisco (USF) teaches a sad lesson about the growing exclusion from our colleges and universities of even the most fair-minded traditional religious educators.

As part of a liberal education, even secular schools ought to expose their students to religious views. But when even a nominally Catholic institution like USF refuses to allow one small center of traditional Catholic learning to exist in the form it has for 25 years, we believe it truly is an educational crisis.

The award-winning great books program of the Saint Ignatius Institute at USF has for two-and-a-half decades been a model — blending Catholic education and liberal learning. The Institute has exposed its students to all points of view, secular and religious, while emphasizing traditional Catholic theology. That emphasis has added to the diversity at the University of San Francisco.

We believe that the summary dismissal of the Saint Ignatius Institute's key administrators by USF President Stephen A. Privett, SJ, and the de facto dissolution of the Saint Ignatius Institute program as a genuine intellectual alternative grossly violate USF's professed commitment to diversity.

The undersigned call upon the Trustees of the University of San Francisco to rehire the fired administrators and to return the Saint Ignatius Institute to its former status.

Furthermore, as supporters of genuine liberal education, we call upon all of our nation's colleges and universities to restore genuine intellectual diversity by granting traditional religious perspectives their rightful place in the curriculum.

William J. Bennett
Director, Empower America*
Former U.S. Secretary of Education

Robert P. George
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence
Princeton University*

Jean Bethke Elshtain
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics
University of Chicago Divinity School*

Michael Novak
George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy
American Enterprise Institute*

George Weigel
Senior Fellow
Ethics and Public Policy Center*

Hadley Arkes
Edward N. Ney Professor of American Institutes
Department of Political Science, Amherst College*

Deal W. Hudson
Publisher and Editor
Crisis Magazine*

Richard John Neuhaus
Editor-in-Chief
First Things, the Journal of Religion and Public Life*

Ralph McInerny
Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Philosophy
University of Notre Dame*

James Gordley
Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Jurisprudence
School of Law, University of California at Berkeley*

J. Bottum
Books & Arts Editor
The Weekly Standard*

Robert Royal
President, Faith & Reason Institute*
Washington, D.C.

George McKenna
Professor of Political Science
City College of New York*

Robert Hollander
Professor of European Literature
Princeton University*

Charles E. Rice
Professor of Law
University of Notre Dame*

Richard Stith
Professor of Law
Valparaiso University*

J. Budziszewski
Associate Professor
Departments of Government and Philosophy
The University of Texas at Austin*

Stanley Kurtz
Fellow, Hudson Institute*

Stephen Schwartz
Contributor, Commentary Magazine*

*Institutional affiliations appear for identification purposes only.