From the Academy

How pleasant to hear the Winds of Change roaring through Catholic colleges and universities! So, at least, we are told by Mr. John Cogley and company. (Mr. Cogley has been preferred to as a living Torquemada of the Holy Liberal Inquisition at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, where he is to edit a magazine called the Center—of the Abyss, I take it.) But many senior professors at Catholic institutions think otherwise. “Great has been the most odious of revolutions!” So writes to me a well known scholar at a (though not The) Catholic university. ‘‘Our university is changed almost out of recognition, and by no means in all respects for the better. It is this goddam sentimental ecumenicalism, or should I say sexumenicalism? We have sponsored large public discussions of homosexuals and abortion, and are to have a seminar on birth-control… . How silly and unreal and juvenile to imagine that any efforts of yours or mine could reverse the currents—what vanity! Let us help God to save our souls—that is the main point.” Quite abruptly, discussion of Catholic universities has become fashionable in the liberal journals, which long ignored any alleged works of the mind in such places. Harper’s describes Notre Dame at length; Saturday Review rejoices over the innovations at Fordham. The University of Chicago Press publishes a volume called The Shape of Catholic Higher Education, “employing the tools of social science and high-level journalism,” with a foreword by Mr. David Riesman, that eminent Papist.

THE DISINTEGRATED liberals’ enthusiasm for the new brooms at Catholic colleges amounts to this: the Catholic institutions rapidly are being secularized, in every sense of the word; soon they will be virtually indistinguishable from state universities and from private universities that long ago cast off their moorings to Protestant sects; and in the foreseeable future, colleges and universities maintained by Catholic orders may cease to exist altogether, what with the difficulty of raising money and the decay of their original ends. The liberals, in fine, come to praise the Romans at long last—and to bury them. How kind! And how pleased the presidents of some Catholic institutions seem when they are told by liberal educationists that their colleges are becoming almost as good as second-rate state institutions. A decade ago, I spoke at the National Catholic Education Association’s convention, on the state of Catholic colleges, and later published my remarks under the title “An Outsider Looks at Catholic Colleges.” At that time, I pointed out that if such colleges are to survive and to leaven the lump of American culture, they must give up quantitative competition with state institutions and turn to reinvigorating the moral imagination and the works of right reason. Not a few Catholic college and university presidents then were afraid to admit to their faculties anybody who might in the slightest degree stir up thought in those complacent backwaters.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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Georgetown University

How pleasant to hear the Winds of Change roaring through Catholic colleges and universities! So, at least, we are told by Mr. John Cogley and company. (Mr. Cogley has been preferred to as a living Torquemada of the Holy Liberal Inquisition at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, where he is to edit a magazine called the Center—of the Abyss, I take it.) But many senior professors at Catholic institutions think otherwise. “Great has been the most odious of revolutions!” So writes to me a well known scholar at a (though not The) Catholic university. ‘‘Our university is changed almost out of recognition, and by no means in all respects for the better. It is this goddam sentimental ecumenicalism, or should I say sexumenicalism? We have sponsored large public discussions of homosexuals and abortion, and are to have a seminar on birth-control… . How silly and unreal and juvenile to imagine that any efforts of yours or mine could reverse the currents—what vanity! Let us help God to save our souls—that is the main point.” Quite abruptly, discussion of Catholic universities has become fashionable in the liberal journals, which long ignored any alleged works of the mind in such places. Harper’s describes Notre Dame at length; Saturday Review rejoices over the innovations at Fordham. The University of Chicago Press publishes a volume called The Shape of Catholic Higher Education, “employing the tools of social science and high-level journalism,” with a foreword by Mr. David Riesman, that eminent Papist.

THE DISINTEGRATED liberals’ enthusiasm for the new brooms at Catholic colleges amounts to this: the Catholic institutions rapidly are being secularized, in every sense of the word; soon they will be virtually indistinguishable from state universities and from private universities that long ago cast off their moorings to Protestant sects; and in the foreseeable future, colleges and universities maintained by Catholic orders may cease to exist altogether, what with the difficulty of raising money and the decay of their original ends. The liberals, in fine, come to praise the Romans at long last—and to bury them. How kind! And how pleased the presidents of some Catholic institutions seem when they are told by liberal educationists that their colleges are becoming almost as good as second-rate state institutions. A decade ago, I spoke at the National Catholic Education Association’s convention, on the state of Catholic colleges, and later published my remarks under the title “An Outsider Looks at Catholic Colleges.” At that time, I pointed out that if such colleges are to survive and to leaven the lump of American culture, they must give up quantitative competition with state institutions and turn to reinvigorating the moral imagination and the works of right reason. Not a few Catholic college and university presidents then were afraid to admit to their faculties anybody who might in the slightest degree stir up thought in those complacent backwaters.