The Limits of Truth.

Alice Gallin, O.S.U., Negotiating Identity: Catholic Higher Education since 1960. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. 269pp. $32.00 (cloth).

Alice Gallin begins her fine account of recent American Catholic higher education by following the money: the increase in government funding in the late 1960s demanded a muted religious presence. There were fewer overtly Catholic courses. Theology became religious studies and philosophy lost its apologetic function. Since they no longer integrated the curriculum, these disciplines could not supply the answer to the question of what makes the institution at which they were taught Catholic. After all, non-Catholic institutions had many of the same courses in their catalogs.

As the presence of members of the religious order that founded the college or university diminished through defection, death, and lack of vocations, the importance of the lay faculty increased. For a while this worked as a way of sustaining a Catholic identity because many of these faculty were practicing Catholics who shared and enthusiastically supported the mission set down by the founding order. But this partnership of the remaining religious and the older lay faculty also ran its course. By the 1980s and most certainly the 1990s, the tight job market enabled even mediocre Catholic colleges and universities to hire highly credentialed faculty with little regard given to their religious inclination let alone their Catholicism or lack of it. An unambiguous Catholic identity could no longer be sustained. From this perspective it is no wonder that the Vatican and the bishops got involved, and that at many institutions the administration rather than the faculty raised the issue of Catholic identity. Ex Corde E cclesiae did not emerge from the blue.

This American context was misunderstood by the Vatican which relied on its familiarity with a European view of Church/State relations. In nineteenth-century Europe the demand for Church control of how theology was taught and who taught it was not only a response to secularization but also a necessary protection against the interference of often virulently anticlerical ministries of education. Of course, it soon became clear that this approach "took no note of the unique American system, where the total institution was under the direction of an independent board of trustees and not the state, and where the selection of the theology faculty was done by the administrators of the university and not by a ministry of education" (145). The American method of government funding meant that to be eligible for public aid colleges and universities had to refrain from overt religious teachings. There could be no discrimination on the basis of religious belief in student admission or faculty hiring. Religious activities co uld not be compulsory. Theology or religion must be taught as an academic subject without proselytizing, and academic freedom must be observed.

Academic freedom is certainly one of the most divisive areas in negotiating a Catholic identity. Catholic institutions before Vatican II took academic freedom to mean that professors were free to teach what was true. As Duquesne University's guidelines put it in the language of the 1940: "Academic freedom, like all things finite, has its limitations. To transgress those limits is not freedom but license. For there is such a thing as objective reality, truth that is truth regardless of what any particular human mind may think to the contrary. Consequently no man is free to teach objective falsehood simply because subjectively he fancies it to be the truth" (5). Imagine the reaction of contemporary Postmodernists to such unabashed and unscarequoted references to objectivity and truth, and of feminists to the sexist language.

As it happened, economic pressures and the loosening of the reins of authority after Vatican II led most Catholic colleges and universities in the 1960s and 1970s to replace this view of academic freedom with one more compatible with the guidelines accepted by almost all American colleges and universities. Council documents and encyclicals like Gaudium et Spes made academic freedom an easy sell to most leaders of Catholic higher education. But today, with the rapid disappearance of Catholic lay and religious faculty, to follow without any qualification the AAUP guidelines on academic freedom would severely compromise, if not eliminate altogether, the "Catholic" in "Catholic university."

Gallin lays out for the reader the outline of what constitutes a Catholic institution of higher education. It should have a communal, not merely an individual, commitment to Catholicism, present a dialogue between Catholicism and the advances in knowledge, be faithful to the Church as a conduit for the meaning of the faith, and serve students and others according to its Catholic mission. In order to preserve a Catholic identity without returning to the older notion of academic freedom exemplified by the Duquesne guidelines, colleges and universities have tried various initiatives. For example, to insure that those not well versed in Catholicism are cognizant of the issues raised by Catholic identity in-house seminars on the Catholic mission of the institution and programs like the Collegium project, which bring faculty from various Catholic colleges and universities together to discuss the issues relating to Catholic identity, have been developed. In addition, some colleges and universities have developed pro grams in Catholic Studies to help convey the meaning of Catholicism to students. Finally, Institutes of Catholic Studies for research have been funded.

As I was reading Negotiating Identity I recalled attending a conference as a graduate student at which I witnessed an exchange between Sidney Hook and Henry Aiken, a moral philosopher from Harvard. I forget the exact subject under discussion but I do remember that Aiken in a gentle and civil manner was trying to work out a rapprochement between two rival positions. Hook would have none of it. Aiken replied that all he was trying to do was to carry water on both shoulders. An unfortunate example because Hook retorted that Aiken would wind up with water on the brain.

I relate this anecdote because I fear that Sr. Alice Gallin is likely to be subjected to the same kind of unwarranted attack. In a recent review in First Things it has already happened. In his review of Negotiating Identity Ishmael Law charges that negotiating will end badly for (his version of) Catholicism because academics are not to be trusted. Law compares them to "your lovable ex-con brother-in-law who keeps wanting you to cosign the loan for his Jaguar" (August-September 2000, 63). Happily, if she foresaw this sort of criticism, Gallin was not deterred from trying to reach a still point in the controversy over what makes a college or university Catholic in her nuanced and fair-minded treatment of a thanklessly complex and contested issue.

James E. Giles is a member of the Editorial Board of CrossCurrents.