From ghetto to hilltop: our colleges, our selves.

Like the history of (non-Hispanic) Catholicism generally in the United States, the history of American Catholic higher education can be divided, very roughly, into two periods: (1) the era of the Catholic "ghetto," which ran from the nineteenth century till the 1960s; (2) the era of integration, which has run from the mid-1960s to the present.

1. In the era of the "ghetto," Catholics were predominantly immigrants and the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Compared with other Americans of European ancestry, mainly Protestants, Catholics were socially inferior. They had less income and education, held lower-status jobs, lived in poorer neighborhoods, had higher crime rates, etc.

In this long and difficult period, American Catholicism had three great social goals: (a) to retain a Catholic identity in a society overwhelmingly non-Catholic; (b) to maintain a sense of collective pride despite inferior social status; and (c) to catch up to or even surpass old-line Americans at their own game.

Catholic colleges played a critical role in this process. On the one hand, they performed an "operation bootstrap." That is, they elevated children of blue-collar, immigrant stock to higher-status occupations: medicine, law, education, business, government, etc. On the other hand, they sheltered these upwardly mobile young Catholics from a world of non-Catholic high culture. They preserved tender minds from exposure to such heathens as John Dewey and Sigmund Freud, and they didn't burden them with the confusing results of modern biblical scholarship.

In spite of having an official philosophy (Aristotelianism) and an official theology (Thomism), both of which scorned pragmatism and exalted the ideal of pure, disinterested truth (or rather Truth, which always had a capital T in those days), these colleges were extraordinarily pragmatic institutions. They had a social function to perform, and they performed it to perfection. But they were not places where the life of the mind always flourished. In general, their faculties had few members with Ph.D.s, they were overioaded with priests and nuns of narrow education, and they were largely out of touch with American intellectual life. They were magnificent at producing doctors and lawyers and accountants; but they produced relatively few scholars and scientists, and almost none of the first rank.

By the 1950s John Tracy Ellis and others were asking, "Where are the Catholic intellectuals?" The fact that the question was finally being asked was an indication that the change was just around the corner; for until then intellectualism had been such a stranger to American Catholic life that hardly anyone noticed it was absent.

2. The moment finally arrived when (non-Hispanic) Catholics caught up with the rest of America, a moment symbolized by the election and presidency of John Kennedy (1960-63). This moment became all the more dramatic a dividing line because it roughly coincided with Vatican II and was quickly followed by the great cultural revolution of the late-1960s. Catholic colleges had worked so well that they now found themselves deprived of their traditional social function. Some of them simply went out of business. Others decided to plunge at long last into the mainstream of American academic life. Beginning in the mid-1960s, they loaded their faculties with Ph.D.s; priests and nuns, who had hitherto constituted the great majority of teachers, were reduced to a small minority (a process facilitated by a sharp decline in numbers of priests and nuns); and teachers were increasingly hired on the basis of academic merit, regardless of religious affiliation.

As a result, faculties at Catholic colleges today are academically far superior to those in the far-off days of the ghetto; but at the same time, and virtually in the same proportion, the Catholic identity of those colleges has grown increasingly tenuous. A priest or sister in the president' s office, a handful of clerics on the faculty, and a few chaplains living in the dorms: today in many colleges this is the Catholic filigree on an otherwise secular structure. Catholic colleges seem to be traveling the same road many Protestant colleges journeyed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--a road leading to complete secularization, to complete loss of religious identity.

Now if you have a theory of society which says that the more secularized things get the better, then you will applaud the de-Catholicizing of Catholic colleges. But that's not my theory. As I see it, a healthy modern society needs a balance between secular and religious elements, and it especially needs this in the intellectual life. Yet this balance has been lost in contemporary America. Thus I deplore the de-Catholicizing of Catholic colleges, and I applaud those colleges that are fighting valiantly to hold onto their Catholic identity.

Of course there is no going back to the days of the ghetto. That heroic age--and it truly was heroic--is gone forever. The great challenge for the contemporary Catholic institution of higher education is to blend, in a kind of Hegelian synthesis, the distinctive features of the first two eras of its existence: the religious identity of the pre-assimilation era and the academic quality of the recent era of full assimilation.

But the Catholic college and university is inseparable from the Catholic population generally. It was relatively easy to construct ghetto-like colleges in the age of the Catholic ghetto. And it was relatively easy to create mainstream American colleges in the era when Catholics fully entered the American mainstream. Postassimilation Catholic colleges and universities will be maintained only if there is a postassimilation Catholic population to support them. "Will Catholic colleges remain Catholic?" is the lesser question; the greater question is: "Will American Catholics remain distinctively Catholic, or will they be swallowed up by the largely secularized culture that surrounds them?"