You would expect a good deal of diversity at a gathering of global higher education institutions, especially when said institutions serve such varied constituencies. Colleges and universities located in Australia, the Philippines, Chile, Spain, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and the United Kingdom should have distinct problems based on geography and culture. Further, the range of mission relative to such institutions (from research universities to those serving first generation college students) should raise different issues pertaining to the knotty question of Catholic identity.
As it turns out, the differences between these institutions are not as apparent as one would expect. A globalized system of Catholic higher education is also globalized relative to both opportunities and challenges. While worldwide interest in higher education grows (even if many of these institutions are experiencing a crisis of trust from the public), the same trends threatening liberal arts colleges in the United States can be found in the Philippines or Chile.
What are the challenges that Catholic higher education faces at a global level? While a partial depiction of the phenomenon, Catholic identity is threatened at such institutions in a twofold manner. First, there is the global virus of the technocratic paradigm, threatening both the teaching and research missions of the Catholic university. Think about this virus as a relatively novel pandemic, the COVID-19 threatening Catholic identity. Second, there remains the constant threat of a certain liberalism, one that John Henry Newman responded to in his Idea of a University. This liberalism sees religiosity as necessarily evolving into an impetus to morality, absent any epistemic claim upon the human person or institution. Think about this virus as the flu, changing forms, but functioning as the same sort of virus we have been suffering from since the 1800s.
By both acknowledging and responding to these two challenges, I believe American higher education might find a way beyond the kind of culture wars that have turned Catholic identity into an open war fought by either the Cardinal Newman Society or a thin version of secular liberalism, happy to see Catholicism reduced to a James Joyce quip, here comes everybody. The task before us is to think differently about the rationale for teaching and research alike. And in this regard, can the Catholic university of the twenty-first century present a vision of human flourishing founded in a posture of seeking contemplative wisdom, one that avoids the two viruses?
Virus #1: The Technocratic Paradigm
By now, the reader is likely familiar with what Pope Francis means by the technocratic paradigm. Loosely, the technocratic paradigm is the reduction of the human person to producer and consumer; human existence comes to be fundamentally about the value to the economic order. You possess value based on your economic potential. It is for this reason that the technocratic paradigm treats so many as surds, remainders who can be excluded from the social order if they possess no value.
In higher education, the technocratic paradigm is experienced both at the level of teaching and research. First, students have grown to treat higher education as access to professional and therefore economic success. If the subject matter does not immediately pertain to a future career, then the study of said subject matter is useless. You want me to read Dante or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz? What does that have to do with my future career in business? As an engineer?
At our gathering in Rome, it was clear that each institution was struggling with this issue. I know the challenge! As an educator, it is necessary to offer an apologia for the raison d’être of whatever humanistic discipline one is teaching. You do not want to take philosophy? Or history? Certainly, theology. Let me tell you why this discipline is valuable to you. You will need it, I promise. Great engineers are good thinkers. With each of these apologias, there is a ceding of ground to the paradigm. It is no longer important to ponder truth for its own sake; it all must have a purpose.
This paradigm is also persistent among researchers at both colleges and universities. For professors, this unfolds in a variety of ways. First, research is now assessed in ways related only to metrics (the number of citations) rather than the quality of argument. As any intellectual historian knows, popularity does not always equate to importance. Second, the research of individual professors continues to be evaluated in terms of applicability. The university is more likely to feature the research of a professor who works in a technological or scientific field than a professor dedicated to Italian literature or the arts. Third, there is the dilemma of rankings, which are closely connected to the research production of the institution. What is measured may not be what the institution values missionally, and therefore, the kind of research promoted at a university level can easily bend toward the rankings. If this allows us to climb in the QS university rankings, then we will pursue that research.
The technocratic paradigm, in essence, destroys the teaching and research missions of the university. What remains is a purely economic entity, not a community of scholars, teachers, and students. The students come to receive a credential whose purpose is economic. The teachers endure their teaching, looking for an occasion to escape into the lab or the library, where the real work of the university is done.
This paradigm has significant consequences. As an educator, my students have never been more anxious, cautious, afraid to fail and therefore to learn. Every assignment is a measure of their worth and future. We can and must do better, if we are to provide a human, dialogical place of learning.
Virus #2: A New-Fangled Liberalism
John Henry Newman eschewed the kind of liberalism that reduced religion either to mere subjective/aesthetic experience or ethos. Revelation demands more than this. It offers an epistemic claim: the God who is can be known. In fact, this God revealed himself. And therefore, knowing this God, in the manner by which this God is known (contemplatively, sacramentally, in terms of Scripture) is part of what constitutes the universality of the university. There is no university, in Newman, without theology. There is no university without the possibility of God.
The liberalism of Newman’s university has morphed. While there remain committed atheists of the nineteenth-century liberal type, the threat today is different. Simply, the university’s religiosity should be expressed in a way that is found acceptable by the broader cultural milieu: in terms of social value. The religious university can have a place at the table. But its position must be in terms of contribution to either ethics or social good. At our conference, this was described as the third mission of the university: its social or economic impact.
Now, let me be clear. There is nothing anti-Catholic about the claim that the university owes something to the wider social body in its teaching and research. The dilemma is when the university’s religious identity is accepted by the state, government, or wider culture of the professoriate only in terms of its contribution to public ethics. Religion becomes entirely ethos. Logos and pathos, be damned.
This version of liberalism remains persistent at many colleges and universities, including Catholic ones, insofar as it morphs religiosity into an acceptable discourse in the public domain. The dimensions of religion that make claims about truth, about the value of contemplation, prayer, and friendship with God must be tossed overboard. What matters is a certain version of social value. This kind of liberalism is not only decried by Newman, of course, but has worried figures like the once Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who in his writings has argued for the presence of a more robust religiosity in the public square.
Catholic universities have a particular responsibility to fight against this malaise. The discipline of theology has a prophetic role at the Catholic university. Its purpose is not only in passing on the rudiments of Catholicism to future generations but to militate against a rationalism that presumes that the visible is the only authentic source of knowledge. A rationalism, with its own technocratic bias, that measures the validity of a university’s teaching and research in terms of social impact alone.
The Catholic University: Not Sectarian, Not Technocratic, Not Liberal
All of this leads to a question: how can a Catholic university avoid both the technocratic and liberal reductions? First, one should be clear that the approach cannot be sectarian. Catholics still have a lot to learn from John Henry Newman. A university is not a catechism class (though both possess value). As already stated, the Catholic university is not a sectarian entity whose primary purpose is to pass on Catholic identity to future generations. For Newman, the university remains a place to form the young in the pursuit of wisdom, to know how to know. For us, living in the United States, that includes the work of research. Professors who study the totality of the human condition can contribute to the work of the Catholic university. And it means welcoming a diverse faculty and student body, who are interested in learning, teaching, and researching in the context of a Catholic worldview.
At the same time, the technocratic paradigm is a significant challenge. We need to uphold a vision of Catholic identity that does not reduce the human person to a mere economic actor: you are valuable because of what you can do. Many of the challenges caused by AI in the classroom point back to the prevalence of this paradigm. Students use AI because they think the professor wants a product. Professors use AI to grade essays because they think the student is a product. In fact, one of the primary ways that the mission of the university is described is easily co-opted by a technocratic paradigm. Teaching is about “knowledge transfer.” The image presumes that student and teacher alike is receptacle, and the full receptacle (the professor) deposits the knowledge into the head of the empty receptacle (the student). No wonder, I suppose, that so many students turn to AI.
In a Catholic context, we can fight against this technocratic approach to teaching and research alike. How? It would require an intentionality at the level of university governance to reward the slow, patient, often contemplative mode of learning, teaching, and research. Are there other metrics by which we might measure the education of our students, the research of our scholars, or the passion of our educators? How much do we consider the quality of teaching in the work of tenure? Neoliberal education is bad for everyone. The university. The student. The faculty. The social body.
Rejecting the technocratic paradigm does not mean we eliminate business, engineering, medicine, or criminal justice from our curricula. But it does mean that such study must be about the seeking of wisdom. Professional education is not technocratic. But it must be infused through a humanistic wisdom that perceives the purpose of human life as more than acquisition or consumption.
Contra a secular liberalism, can we be Catholic in a particular sort of manner? Catholic institutions necessarily believe that the enfleshment of the Word changed everything. A religion reduced to ethos forgets that Catholicism is ultimately about participation in divine love. But it is that participation that makes us distinct, capable of participating in various public discourses out of our religious particularity.
None of this demands a sectarian identity. We do not want to be the best Catholic college or university. We want to be the best Catholic college or university. That is, we want to make decisions out of our fundamental claims about knowledge, the human person, and what constitutes the good life. All of this, it should be said, is grounded in religious particularity.
Let me concretize this claim. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Notre Dame (my alma mater and my place of employment since 2010) made the difficult decision to open for in-person classes during the Fall of 2020. It would have been easy to follow the trajectories of peer institutions: close it down, maybe open in the Spring. But we recognized that there was something incarnational about the educational project that digital learning could not replace. Our students would learn more together (even if it was a weird together) than apart. So, we took the steps to do this. It involved regular testing, contact tracing, and exceptions for professors and students who were at risk.
The decision was made through an incarnational principle, the sense that the Lord who dwelt among us also wanted us to dwell among one another. At the time, it was provocative. But that is what it means to be such an institution, eschewing both the technocratic paradigm and the liberalism that eviscerates religious particularity.
A social good the Catholic university can offer is a response to another pandemic, the anxiety experienced by so many young people. It may not make the cover of the New York Times or the Washington Post, but the Catholic university has a responsibility in late modernity to offer a contemplative, resonant education.
My own university has a quite successful series of commercials, defined by the term “What Would You Fight For?” The commercials are moving examples of the way that professors at Notre Dame used their discoveries for the common good. I would argue that we need a commercial in this series on contemplation. In an age where speed is valued more highly than contemplation, where control is the primary disposition the late modern person adopts, can we advertise that we are creating a university community governed by a different logic: what Harmut Rosa, the German sociologist of religion, calls resonance? We think it is worthwhile to slow down, to take a class like God and the Good Life in the Department of Philosophy, to read Augustine’s Confessions with a popular theologian priest for no particular reason than the delight of reading, and perhaps to spend a semester thinking about what it would mean to be happy in the context of marriage and family life (a class I have taught now for nine years). What would you fight for, the commercial would ask? Contemplation. I would fight for slowing down, pondering, wondering, and considering.
Here, one is contributing to the social good in a way peculiar to the Catholic university, one that values the flourishing of both the physical and spiritual life. It would be a university that was truly Catholic.
I conclude here with theology’s role in militating against both the technocratic and naïve liberal viruses. The presence of theology in a core curriculum is an underlining that the meaning of human existence cannot be measured by disciplines that do not consider the telos of the human person: communion with God. Theologians employ a rich array of research methodologies in practicing the art of theology, but the foundation of the discipline remains the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). Professor and student alike are not created primarily as productors and consumers. They are created to know God.
And lastly, faith itself cannot be reduced to piety. Faith, even supernatural faith, provides a distinctive mode of knowledge. Contra secular liberalism, there is more to be seen than the eye beholds. The poet knows this when he crafts words in a way that reveals that a flower or a sky is something even more splendid. The scientist knows this when she discovers in cellular structure or the starry skies above a source of wonder tending toward doxological praise.
Insisting that theology have a seat at the table, therefore, is not only about tradition (we have always offered two courses). It is not only about the Catholic identity of our students (they need theology, or they will stop being Catholic). Rather, the presence of theology (if it is done by well-formed professors) is the vaccine that may inoculate the university against both the technocratic and secular liberal paradigms that are global threats to Catholic higher education.
And how much richer higher education is when there is the presence of such institutions.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay was precipitated by the author’s participation in an expert meeting related to Catholic higher education that took place at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome at the end of September 2024.
