American Catholic Higher Education: Essential Documents, 1967-1990.

As the title indicates, this collection is not directed to economists; even for education economists these documents would serve primarily as background readings.

The volume contains a set of documents (drafts and final versions in certain instances) written during a period when Roman Catholic institutions of higher learning in America were seeking to articulate their basic nature. This was in response to an initiative by the Vatican to exert greater central control over Catholic universities worldwide. The documents reveal the American Catholic institutions attempting to define themselves in terms of the decentralized and pluralistic pattern of American higher education. On the other hand, the documents reveal a Vatican initially bent on promulgating a new canon law that would have exerted more centralized and hierarchical control, and would have reduced university autonomy. The documents show the softening of the Vatican's initial intent over time.

The book portrays the effort of the American institutions to educate an apparently uninformed Vatican of several realities faced by colleges and universities in the United States. Among these realities is the First Amendment's Establishment clause. The American Catholics argued that the degree of ecclesiastical control over Catholic institutions envisioned by the Vatican could constitutionally jeopardize federal aid to students attending Catholic colleges. (Indeed, among other things, typically tight church control of parochial schools has kept government subsidization unconstitutional to this day.) Evidently, even proposed canon law must be formulated with an eye to economic realities. Other American realities included independent accrediting agencies, not known in other countries, that would object to ecclesiastical interference with the autonomy of the Catholic universities.

The book indirectly points to some larger lessons that researchers in the field of education economics ought to ponder. First, Catholic universities make it a high priority to keep and enhance their distinctive nature; they, like other church-related colleges and schools, seek consciously to be something other than a replication of State U. Lamentably, too many economists writing about private education usually ignore the essential distinctiveness of private institutions, using instead one-dimensional analytical models that miss this key point. A high-profile example of this is the 1990 Brookings volume Politics, Markets, and America's Schools, which tried to analyze private secondary schools under the rubric of competitiveness, while virtually ignoring that the vast majority of private schools are religious. That competition might manifest itself in unique ways, or be significantly reduced, when schools are essentially extensions of churches, from whose congregations students mainly are drawn, went unremarked in the study.

Another larger, but indirect, lesson for economists is that it is hazardous to equate government-supported education with a high degree of bureaucratic regulation and private education with a high degree of freedom, just because private education has some exposure to the market. This volume clearly documents the readiness of ecclesiastical authority to step into a regulatory role.

The last big, but indirect, lesson for economists in these documents is the reminder that Catholic thought, and possibly Christian thought generally, has reservations about the late-Enlightenment values implicit in much of economics. The American bishops declare that "knowledge of economics and politics will not in itself bring about justice, unless activated by human and religious ideals". The failure of welfare economics to produce norms that most people would regard as substantially embodying justice suggests that the bishops have a point. If I read them rightly, the bishops here have no intent that economics as such should be remade to their liking, but that Catholic universities and colleges should be places where economics students and faculty would likely encounter challenges from outside economics to the narrowness of the discipline: efficiency, after all, isn't the same as justice. (Of course, humane economists such as Arthur Okun have said the same.) Elsewhere, a document warns of the "temptation to reduce self-fulfillment to a selfish individualism". Again, economics was not the target of this remark, which was aimed at the moral climate of too many campuses. Nevertheless, the remark is relevant for judging the adequacy of utility-maximization models that ignore any human motives greater than satisfying the self.

In sum, few economists, as economists, would consider this for their professional libraries. Economists at Catholic universities, or other church-related universities, might gain perspective by browsing the volume, as might university economists with a particular interest in academic freedom and university governance issues.

Donald E. Frey Wake Forest University