I couldn’t agree more with Robert’s post below on the importance of monogamy. More and more, we are coming to see that the life we value is based on culture and the deep truths that reside within cultural forms, rather than on abstract rights merely, or on so-called scientific imperatives. Ross Douthat recently had a column in the New York Times making the same point about the importance of marriage as we understand it. Monogamous marriage may not even be the most common form of mating in the world and throughout history, he said, but it is basic to our way of life. 

Writing yesterday in The New Republic, Martin Peretz made an interesting observation:

In my view, the really modest struggle against the mosque is probably the closest thing we’ve had to a genuinely grass roots effort against the casual and elitist First Amendment fundamentalists. “No” to admitting in schools that Christmas has something to do with Christianity. But “yes” to public financing of what looks to me like a sleazy venture combining religion, marriage catering, sports activity, political propaganda and what would pretend to be kultcha. 

This statement is incomplete. The “modest struggle” (I love that formulation) is more about most Americans’ ability to see what is plainly in front of them versus a postmodern elite’s fixed ideological view of history and culture.

The majority of Americans see thousands of suicide bombers, tens of thousands of armed jihadists, hundreds of millions of dollars of private funding for terror, widespread support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and the shocking approval ratings for Osama bin Laden in the Arab world, and quite logically worry about systematic cultural and religious problems. The cultural elite either writes off global jihad as the work of “a few extremists” or sees the same facts and asks, “What has America and Israel done to make them so angry?”

Yet the same cultural elite looks at the tea-party movement and expresses deep concern that it is somehow fomenting violence. Even a single act of alleged violence brings an indictment of the entire movement.  

The cultural elite trusts Imam Rauf’s professions of moderation and goodwill despite his support for the end of Israel, his moral equivocation between al-Qaeda and America, his failure to denounce Hamas, his declaration that Osama bin Laden was “made in the USA,” his declaration that America was an “accessory to the crime” of 9/11, and his explicit association with shady characters. At the same time, this same elite mistrusts the motives of opponents, calling them “crusaders” and accusing them of “paranoid intolerance.”

Reflexive hatred for America, contempt for ordinary Americans, appreciation for Islam, disgust for American conservatism, and acceptance of anti-Semitism as ultimately Israel’s fault are all characteristics of the modern American academic mindset. These are a set of attitudes not so much based on facts as based on a strange kind of cultural consensus. Of course Americans who oppose the mosque are bigots. Of course Islam is not the problem. Of course Imam Rauf is a moderate. Of course this is all just whipped up by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

Have the people holding these views closely examined Imam Rauf’s background? His associates’ backgrounds? Are they familiar with the extent of Muslim extremism? Do they know how jihadists are recruited, trained, and funded? Not likely. Yet this ignorance can’t shake convictions formed in the ideological monoculture of their academic past and the reinforced in the urban monoculture of the present.

This is a great article about the practical concerns facing athletic directors on campus in determining which programs to offer. The article specifically touches on how Title IX interplays with financial concerns which often causes sports like lacrosse (which are growing rapidly at the high-school level) to be vastly underrepresented at the collegiate level.

In today’s Harvard Crimson, President Obama lists the ways in which he’s making college more affordable:

We’re tripling the investment in college tax credits for middle class families. We’re raising the value of Pell Grants, and we’ll make sure they increase each year to better keep up with inflation. We’re making loan repayments more manageable for more than one million more students.

No need to thank him. As Cato’s Neal McCluskey told me months ago, all these things raise tuition:

“Government provides lots of aid to students so that they are not the ones paying these additional costs. Taxpayers are. Colleges are nonprofits, so they want to maximize revenue. The more aid you offer, the more they raise their prices to get that aid, because it doesn’t make students worse off.”

His evidence? Between 1986 and 2006, the average cost of attendance at private schools in real dollars jumped by 68 percent. Once the average grant, loan, and tax credit are subtracted, however, the cost jumped by only 29 percent. True, it’s not a slam-dunk case, but it is cause for suspicion.

. . . money burnt, and just more trouble.

There’s been a lot of talk about the higher-education bubble. But this chart is worth a thousand words (or more):

Dr. Mark Perry, a professor of finance and business economics at the University of Michigan, explains his graph here. He compiled data from the Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics, and tracked the relative changes in general prices (the CPI), the median home price, and college tuition, each from 1978 to today.

The contrast between the CPI data and tuition is stark enough. The cost of living has steadily risen, a bit more than tripling from 1978 to today. But tuition has multiplied more than tenfold in the same period, and the rise has accelerated over the past decade.

More telling is the comparison between the housing bubble and tuition. The peak of the housing bubble was in March of 2007, when the median home price was $262,600. That’s a five-fold increase from January 1978 price ($52,300). In the same period, the CPI rose by a factor of 3.27. This means that at the peak of the bubble, housing prices had outpaced the CPI by about 50 percent.

But from 1978 to today, college tuition has increased by a factor of 11.17. This means the rise in college tuition has outpaced the CPI by 241 percent. As Prof. Paul Caron notes, “The college tuition bubble makes the housing price bubble seem pretty lame by comparison.” 

Granted, these statistics by themselves don’t definitively prove that the college bubble is five times as bad as the housing bubble. The crucial variable is the real value of a college education — the increase in real prices doesn’t constitute a bubble if real value has risen equally.

Statistically measuring the real value of education is beyond my ken. But as a recent college graduate, I find it hard to believe that college is 3.5 times more valuable than it was in 1978, or more valuable at all, particularly with students studying so much less.

Hey Hey, Ho Ho, General McCrystal’s got to go!

The New Haven Register reports that some townsfolk and at least one student have honored General McCrystal — who has been hired to teach at Yale this semester — with a good old-fashioned protester’s welcome:

Local peace advocates gave retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal a decidedly unfriendly welcome Wednesday on the first day of classes at Yale University. About a dozen protesters, including one Yale student, carried signs and chanted that McChrystal should be tried for war crimes, rather than welcomed to the campus as a teacher.

. . . “Shame on Yale, put McChrystal in jail,” shouted Debbie Maltesta, one of the organizers of the protest, as the small group repeated the chant.

Click here to see a video of the “peace activists” in action. You know you don’t want to miss it!

Not to get into the “alpha male” debate all over again, but I just wanted to throw in a little factoid I stumbled across recently: The current human population is descended from about twice as many women as men.

Further, I wanted to reiterate an argument I made here previously regarding whether monogamy is “natural.” I believe it doesn’t much matter.

Democracy and capitalism are hardly “natural,” but these institutions have done a great job of channeling humanity’s natural drives into productive and peaceful pursuits. So it is with monogamy. Men may have a natural urge to stray, and women may have a natural urge to pursue higher-status men than their current partners, but the institution of marriage does us a service by putting the brakes on these tendencies. Monogamy creates a stable environment for children, controls sexual jealousy, and (by forcing men and women to pair up, rather than allowing high-status men to accumulate multiple wives) ensures that most men who want to marry can do so.

There’s a reason, after all, that in the great historical struggle between different human mating patterns, monogamy won.

Wendy Shalit writes a funny column sending up much of what passes for “science” in evolutionary biology, as represented in Christopher Ryan’s recent essay, ”Monogamy unnatural for our sexy species.” Basing herself on the techniques of evolutionary biologists, such as observing primate behavior and connecting it to human behavior in ways that suit contemporary sexual agendas, Shalit believes that she too can observe the clear imperatives of sexual adaptation arising from evolution. For example:

“Once at the Toronto Zoo, my family witnessed a male orangutan picking nits off his baby’s hair, while the female lolled about peacefully, grooming herself under a tree. Can there be any clearer precedent, from an evolutionary perspective, for men to scrape the dinner plates while women get manicures?” 

As Robert notes below, blogger Matt Yglesias, arguing for increasing “public investment” in education (K-12 and higher), advances the standard idea that because there is a “college wage premium,” it follows that getting more people through college would be good. He’s specifically jousting with Cato’s Neal McCluskey, but I can’t resist a comment on the wage premium notion.

It’s true that on average, people with college degrees earn considerably more than people who don’t have them. It doesn’t follow, however, that any individual who does not have, or prospectively would not earn, a degree would necessarily improve his earnings to that average, or at all.

For one thing, we know that large numbers of people who have college degrees end up in jobs that do not call for any sort of advanced educational study and do not pay well. It is simply not true that as “educational attainment” levels increase, there will be a corresponding increase in high-skill, high-pay jobs. Moreover, any increase in numbers of young people drawn into college at the margin will consist overwhelmingly of those who have poor academic abilities and motivation. Those are individuals who are even more likely, whether or not they graduate, to find employment in “high school” jobs.

But doesn’t the “wage premium” demonstrate that going to college substantially raises a student’s value to employers? Doesn’t it show that college adds “human capital”?

The first time I heard that argument, about ten years ago, it didn’t pass the smell test. Academic standards at many schools are notoriously weak and students can graduate with deplorable skills even in such basic fields as reading and math. So how could it be that, despite the fact that for many kids college is merely four or more years of “beer and circus” (as Murray Sperber puts it), they were becoming increasingly productive in the labor market relative to non-college kids?

The explanation, I am convinced, is this. There is no growing college wage premium. Instead, what we are seeing are the effects of the well-known phenomenon of credential inflation, as it wipes out good career paths for more and more people who don’t have the right credentials. It is not the case that employers think, “College-educated people are more productive, so let’s pay them more,” but rather that they think,”There are so many college grads in the labor market, why bother extending an offer to someone without a degree?” Credential inflation is herding non-college people into a shrinking sector of the labor market where their lack of credentials isn’t held against them. That, I submit, explains how you can simultaneously have a widespread dumbing down of college standards and a rising average earnings level for college graduates.

Further “investment” in higher education — i.e., getting more young people into and through college — will only exacerbate the problem of Americans who are over-schooled yet under-educated and unable to find employment that pays well enough to make the cost of the degree financially worthwhile.

Matthew Yglesias ends his recent libertarian streak with a post about higher ed. Key part:

The sentiment that America currently over-invests on education as a whole is just wrong. There’s considerable evidence of a growing college wage premium that began to emerge at just the same time that college graduation rates in this country stopped rising. There’s a race between education and technology and historically broad-based prosperity has been grounded in broad improvements in educational attainment. It’s quite true that we can’t achieve those improvements simply by spending more money, but it’s also true that effective education is very much worth investing in.

A few questions. One: If the college wage premium is rising, why can’t we let that, in and of itself, encourage more people to go to college (and investors to support kids who can’t come up with the money on their own), without government involvement? Two: If the rising college wage premium indicates that we need more college graduates in general, and not just more graduates in specific fields that require high skills, why do so many students who graduate college end up in non-college jobs? Three: How does one square the recommendation of sending more kids to college with the fact that 40 percent of college freshmen don’t graduate in six years?

And four: Isn’t it possible that the college wage premium is rising due to a cap on the supply of intelligence? Couldn’t it be that, as the economy demands more intelligent workers and yet the average IQ doesn’t change, intelligent workers can demand more and more for their skills? Obviously, if that’s the case, if we want the premium to go down, we need to import or create more smart kids, rather than funneling not-smart kids into college programs that either (A) won’t lead to good jobs or (B) are too challenging for them.

Via Philly.com:

Only 45 percent of the district’s African American male students graduate in four years while the rate for Latino males is 43 percent.

After studying the problem for 10 months, the task force established by the Philadelphia School Reform Commission is calling for the district to reexamine its zero tolerance policy toward violence; consider offering single-sex classes; add more music and arts programs and raise academic standards.

The district also should give students mentors, internships and opportunities for paying jobs that demonstrate how the academics subjects are tied to workforce skills.

But above all, the panel said, teachers and school staff must treat students fairly and with respect. . . .

The mayor has made improving the high school and college graduation rates in the city a top priority for his administration. [emphasis added]

Nearly two thirds are leaving due to lack of respect?

If college ready is for everyone, Philadelphia could take a page out of New Orleans’s book.

Thomas, I appreciated your post, and I think it hits on something important. If there’s one thing that’s clear after spending much of my professional life talking to students and visiting campuses, it’s that students spend an enormous amount of time on other things. For some, it’s the party and social circuit, for others it’s gaming, for a few activism, and many, many others work. Simply put, college has become so undemanding that students have to fill their time with other things.  

At the height of the dot-com bubble, companies that had never made a dime had more stock-market value than companies that were producing sometimes hundreds of millions in actual profits. At the height of the housing boom, migrant farm workers with virtually no income were receiving no-document loans to purchase homes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And now, in our next bubble economy, college students are going deeply into debt to essentially purchase a resume bullet point. How much is a line item on a resume worth? $100,000? $200,000? $300,000?  

It’s only a matter of time before employers realize that a college “education” that requires a diminishing amount of actual effort is no longer a prime predictor of professional competence. Likewise, it’s only a matter of time before the more savvy students realize that the other things that they do in college (especially if they are working) are providing far more value than the education they’re going into debt to afford.

Students in the Cal State University system will now be able to view their textbooks on their computers, iPads, or even phones. Thanks to a new partnership with five leading textbook publishers, students will be able to access these digital texts at a 65 percent discount.

As a recent college grad, I recall paying as much as $500 to acquire the books for a single class. While I prefer real books to digital ones, the cost savings might have been enough to make me choose digital texts had they been widely available then.

Personally, I spent too much time staring at computers in college, even without having to do all my reading online. I love the cost efficiencies of digital technology. But I hate the way we are now living so much of our lives tethered to mind-numbing computer screens. 

In related news, I just learned that the wonderful four-story Barnes & Noble bookstore in my old neighborhood in Manhattan is closing its doors. This is where I used to go and while away hours browsing, picking up books, thumbing through them, and breathing in the aroma of new paper and ink. I’m not sure which is better: the crisp, green smell of a new book, or the musty, leathery smell of one from the back shelf of an old library.

Once I found an old book at Yale that had not been checked out in 30 years. You could still see the due date stamp on the back page, along with a record of each time it had been checked out — once or twice per decade — going back for a hundred years. Occasionally, I would hold such a book and think of the students from by-gone times, some long since deceased, who had studied and read the very book I had in my hand. The book was a physical inheritance, which I felt, somehow, they had left to me. They were gone; the book was still there.

I miss that feeling.

Over at Education Next. Real Education is there, but Bad Students, Not Bad Schools is missing.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Prof. Bruce Caldwell of Duke University writes about the hole that he sees in the graduate economics curriculum and developing in the undergraduate curriculum — courses in the history of economic thought.

If you think it deplorable that English students can get their degrees without reading any Shakespeare, isn’t it equally bad that economics students can get their degrees without reading Adam Smith, David Ricardo, F. A. Hayek, and, yes, Karl Marx?

The prolific Mark Taylor, chairman of Columbia’s religion department and post-modernist philosopher, has a new book out. Crisis On Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities was released yesterday.

From its description on Amazon:

In Crisis on Campus, Mark C. Taylor . . . expands on and refines the ideas presented in his widely read and hugely controversial 2009 New York Times op-ed. His suggestions for the ivory tower are both thought-provoking and rigorous: End tenure. Restructure departments to encourage greater cooperation among existing disciplines. Emphasize teaching rather than increasingly rarefied research. And bring that teaching to new domains, using emergent online networks to connect students worldwide.

Naomi Schaefer Riley has a review at the Wall Street Journal. On tenure:

The “single most important factor in preventing change in higher education,” Mr. Taylor argues, “is tenure.” It shuts out new talent, allows ineffective teachers to remain in place, and creates a sub-class of part-timers and graduate students who do a great deal of the tough classroom work and grading. A college president in New York tells Mr. Taylor: “I have never been more frustrated. All but a few of my faculty members are tenured, and two-thirds are well over sixty-five but give no hint of when they will retire. Everything is blocked and students are losing interest.”

This is, I think, one of the more interesting problems facing young people — not only with tenure in education, but also in society more broadly — and it’s hardly ever discussed. With increasing life expectancies, the “young” are growing up knowing that they’ll likely be in their 50s or 60s before their parents meet their heavenly reward. To distinguish oneself and make one’s mark while so many establishment institutions remain in the hands of the aged is an utterly new phenomenon. Taylor’s certainly on to something in identifying tenure for the forever-non-retiring as a “block”.

As an aside, in emphasizing teaching over “rarefied research,” Taylor may be standing athwart history, but academia — hand-in-hand with government — seems unlikely to stop its increasingly frenzied research push any time soon.

In the New York Times‘s “Room for Debate” section last week, five writers from within academia tackled the question, “Too Much Free Time On Campus?” The question was sparked by findings that students are spending, on average, ten fewer hours studying per week than they were a few decades ago.

The responses represented mainly the standard fare. Students, as customers, should be satisfied. Kids these days are busy. Services are vital to attract youngsters. And so forth.

One response was slightly different. Raphael Pope-Sussman, a student at Columbia, made the argument that it’s not just students being “busy” that has resulted in fewer study hours, it’s that they’re forced to be “pre-professionals”.

As a student, [a college newspaper] editor may be studying less. But he’s not working less. Many editors at the paper hope to pursue careers in journalism. They aren’t lazy; they’re just pre-professional. . . .

Every year this country pumps out more and more college graduates for fewer and fewer good jobs. Today, you go to college to learn, but you also go because you need a diploma for almost every stable career.

You can mourn the disappearance of an ivy-covered Arcadia where America’s youth once went to discover Big Ideas. But don’t blame the modern college student because he’s spending less time with his schoolbooks.

He’s not lazy. He’s not incurious. He just wants to find a decent job after graduation.

We’ve known for some time that the modern college experience is at least as focused on skills and training as it is on inquiry and study. The writer’s perspective is an important one, I think, because it represents the reigning orthodoxy for how most young people view academia.

And worse, I’d venture to say many of them got the “get a degree to get a job” mentality from their parents.

It’s not an unreasonable argument. No one would dispute that students can benefit from the combination of active work and active study. But that seems closer to apprenticeship, and altogether different from the ideal of a college as removing a student from the concerns of the world for four years in order to obtain a deeper sense of that world.

What’s the point of “commencement” if those gown-glad youth were “pre-professionals” all along?

As the U.S. Open gets into full swing (Go Federer!), the College Sports Council has released a new study looking at collegiate tennis in the Title IX era. As with many men’s sports under Title IX, tennis has seen a decline. But what may be a surprise is that women’s tennis isn’t doing so hot either:

Contrary to popular perception, Title IX’s gender quota has failed to boost womens tennis while it has stripped away men’s tennis teams, according to analysis of NCAA data by the College Sports Council (CSC).

“This new analysis reveals that women’s college tennis is similar to women’s gymnastics in that it hasn’t benefited from the proportionality compliance test for Title IX,” said Eric Pearson, Chairman of the CSC. “Gender quota advocates always profess that Title IX has unquestionably benefitted all womens sports, but when you break it down sport by sport frequently the data tells a different story,” Pearson said.

In 1996, the US Department of Education issued a clarification of Title IX’s regulations that declared the proportionality prong of the three-part test to be a ‘safe harbor.’ The CSC’s analysis tracks the percentage of tennis teams sponsored by NCAA Division I schools since 1996.

Women tennis players have more teams (311) to compete for than male tennis players (258) in NCAA Division I, but the percentage of NCAA schools sponsoring women’s teams has not increased since the 1996 policy clarification (96.4% in 1996 vs. 93.4% in 2009) and the percentage of NCAA Division I schools sponsoring mens tennis teams has declined by more than 14 percent (91.8% in 1996 vs. 77.5% in 2009).

Loads of graphs, data, and other supporting docs are available here.

In this Spiked column, British educator David Perks wonders, “Why are we so intent on sending half the school population to university anyway?”

His piece echos the point made by Hacker and Dreifus in Higher Education? that students who go to college just for a bit of occupational training or to “find themselves” are making poor use of their time and money.

The Smith College alumni magazines that I have been perusing have some interesting features. Apropos of current financial difficulties, one eye-opening article in the Spring ’09 issue features life lessons from Smith alums who lived through the Depression. No one reading it could think for a minute that today’s financial crunch is in any way comparable. One woman from the class of ’27 tells how her salary as a French teacher was suspended. She and the other faculty continued to teach in exchange for bus fare and a daily meal at the school’s cafeteria. She made sure to eat a lot at lunchtime.

Another woman, from the class of ’36, attended Smith on a scholarship, but when her father lost his good job and had to take a much lower level job, she knew it was her responsibility to put her younger sister through college, so she worked during the summers to earn teacher certification. What was the last generation that grew up thinking it might have to help out or even support younger brothers and sisters?

And the habits of frugality that many of these ladies grew up with and continued to learn during the Depression have stayed — such as darning stockings, cutting open the tube to get the last of the toothpaste, and avoiding Starbucks altogether. These would probably baffle most young people today.

They advise saving even a little each week (another ’36 alum attended Smith on $500 her parents had saved by putting aside a quarter a week from her birth), paying cash and avoiding credit, and practicing thrift. 

Word continues to spread about the misogynist and porn-filled college sex events that are now appearing at universities all over the country. Other schools, including Brown and Northwestern, are following Yale’s shining example. Yale pioneered the idea of the college “sex week,” offering pornographers and the sex-toy industry direct access to students in the name of education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) has an essay by professor Margaret Brooks of Bridgewater State University, in which she cites my report on Sex Week at Yale from earlier this year. Brooks argues that, for reasons of educational responsibility as well as legal liability, universities can no longer hand their sex-education programs over to student leaders, absolving themselves of any responsibility for event content.

Important liability issues are at stake. Universities should adopt policies that prohibit presenters from using images that benefit their own publicity purposes but that could potentially harm students’ futures. In addition, to prevent sexual-harassment violations or physical-injury claims, universities should always prohibit presenters from humiliating or making physical contact with audience members. They must be vigilant about preventing nonphysical forms of sexual harassment as well, such as presenters calling women sluts or creating a sexually hostile atmosphere by showing degrading pornographic films.

Of course, one might think it appropriate to make the above appeal on moral grounds. But I predict that the threat of legal or financial liability for sexual harassment is the only thing that will motivate our morally bankrupt universities to restrict graphic and degrading content within their own walls. There are a few students at Yale under the age of eighteen. Have Yale administrators considered the legal implications of showing X-rated films to those students? I doubt it.

Yale’s president, Richard Levin, and other leading administrators seem to view Sex Week with a “kids will be kids” attitude. If he and other administrators don’t care about the moral problems associated with showing films of women being degraded sexually and verbally by men, then maybe awareness of the legal and financial risks they are running will get their attention.

Then again, maybe not.

If this is accurate, about 25 percent of strippers have college degrees.

I’m not aware of any college courses that teach this particular field, but that will probably happen eventually.

In today’s Pope Center piece Duke Cheston writes about a recent decision by the North Carolina Court of Appeals holding that Davidson College, because it is regarded as a “religious institution” (like many liberal-arts college, Davidson has nominal ties to a denomination, but to say that the college is a religious institution is ridiculous), cannot have campus police empowered to enforce state law.

The judge in the case doesn’t like the result, but says that precedent compels it. I think it’s time for the state supreme court to reverse that precedent. The point of the First Amendment is to keep government from adopting religious doctrines. Allowing campus police to enforce laws that apply to everyone doesn’t do that.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an excellent lead editorial on the attack that prominent Democrats have launched against the for-profit higher-education sector.

The editorial correctly identifies the root of the problem as being government-subsidized student loans, stating that the best policy would be to have “no taxpayer loan subsidies for any colleges, profit or nonprofit.” Exactly. Federal financial aid to students has pernicious consequences. Easy money for students combined with the administration’s message that the country “needs” many more college graduates lest we “fall behind” other countries (a silly notion that I’ve attacked frequently, most recently here) does make it possible for unscrupulous for-profit schools to lure in a lot of students who are wasting their time and money. But, the editorial observes, the non-profit sector isn’t any different.

Why does the administration want to impose draconian, overly broad, potentially ruinous rules on the for-profits alone? Evidently it’s the old leftist animosity toward capitalism at work. It’s hard to conclude otherwise from comments like this from Education Secretary Duncan: “Some proprietary schools have profited and prospered, and this is a disservice to students and to taxpayers.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education has the story:

A political-science course on gay marriage is scheduled to begin on Tuesday at Seton Hall University, a Roman Catholic institution in New Jersey, despite objections from the archbishop of Newark, The Star-Ledger reported. The course’s instructor is W. King Mott, an associate professor who is openly gay and has previously challenged the Catholic Church’s position on homosexuality.

Members of Seton Hall’s board of regents met to “discuss” canceling the course back in the spring after the archbishop called its message “contrary to what the church teaches.” This is a case of bureaucratic authority trying to cope with religious authority. It calls into question the role and status of religious authority at what is, ostensibly, a religious school.

Religious universities like Seton Hall must decide to what extent the ideas advanced within their four walls ought to be limited by church doctrine. Certainly there should be a room for a range of views in any good school. But if the Catholic Church is supposed to be running the place, you wouldn’t know it in this case. Seton administrators have decided, apparently, to ignore the archbishop’s objections. And it makes one wonder how Catholic the school really is.

Seton Hall is acting like a conventional university that happens to have a Catholic heritage, not like a Catholic university. From an ideological standpoint, that is an important distinction.