Catholic Higher Education in Protestant America: The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University (review)

In 1893, Charles W. Eliot, long-time president of Harvard (1869-1909), announced a list of "acceptable" institutions whose graduates would be admitted to Harvard's law school as students of regular standing. Conspicuously absent from this list were leading Jesuit institutions such as Boston College, College of the Holy Cross, and Georgetown. This deliberate omission launched a controversy lasting over a decade and called into question the legitimacy of Catholic higher education against Protestant hegemony within the academy.

Mahoney's excellent treatment of this conflict is carefully chronicled in this most recent work dealing with the battle between Eliot and the Jesuits. The author goes to great lengths to cover both sides of the dispute that raged for several years and caused an egregious rift between President Eliot and Father Timothy Brosnahan, S.J., former president of Boston College. Their feud sparked a bitter polarization between many Protestants and Catholics.

The book is divided topically into three sections. Part 1 explains the conflict between Jesuit and Harvard educators over Harvard's refusal to offer graduates of Jesuit institutions (such as Boston College) "regular standing" admission to Harvard law school. The second section examines how Catholic higher education struggled to carve out a clearly defined niche for itself within a predominantly Protestant society. Finally, Part 3 explores how Jesuit higher education had to reexamine and redefine its curricular content and values amid the emergence of the "age of the university," beginning in the late nineteenth century and lasting till the present.

The first section exposes the philosophical underpinnings of the conflict caused by Eliot's rejection of the values of Jesuit higher education that held strongly to the Ratio Studiorum, a seven-year course of study developed by Jesuit educators in order to instill a strong competency in Ciceronian Latin, rhetoric, philosophy, and Catholic dogma. The Ratio Studiorum was a carefully prescribed curriculum, antithetical to the elective system, which Jesuits considered to be "an abdication of pedagogical responsibility" (Gleason, 1995, p. 51). Eliot's championing of the elective system at Harvard, arguably his paramount achievement (Neilson, 1926), brought him into sharp philosophical debate with Boston College's Father Brosnahan.

In the second section, Roman Catholic, and specifically Jesuit higher education is examined against the background of a Protestant landscape. For example, at the turn of the twentieth century, many Roman Catholics were becoming part of the burgeoning American middle class and were greatly drawn to non-Catholic institutions of higher education like Harvard, in part so that they could culturally assimilate into mainstream society. Mahoney is careful to point out that, even though students from Jesuit institutions were not admitted to regular standing at Harvard Law School, a large number of Roman Catholics (more than 300) were enrolled at the undergraduate Harvard College, giving Harvard the highest Roman Catholic enrollment in American higher education at that time. Thus, one cannot characterize Eliot's refusal to admit graduates of Jesuit institutions to regular standing at the law school as a purely religious conflict.

Finally, the third section examines how the Roman Catholic system of higher education had to reevaluate itself and determine whether it would change to join the mainstream of academia or whether it would hold fast to the distinctiveness that undergirded a separate subculture within American life. For many Catholics, the choice of being true to their religious and cultural heritage was more important than any attempts to integrate with mainstream society by "tainting" themselves with a higher educational system that they felt contributed to societal degradation and a contempt for Catholic beliefs. Yet, ultimately, in the twentieth century the Roman Catholic system of higher education underwent a metamorphosis whereby Catholic institutions accommodated a certain level of change that "did not entail a complete concession to modernity, but rather a mix of adaptation and resistance" (p. 242...