Catholicism and Academic Freedom: Authorities in Conflict?

MANY CATHOLIC COLLEGES and universities in the United States have been heeding the call of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II's Apostolic Constitution, and engaging in internal conversations about how to renew and strengthen their distinctive identity. ¹ One of the difficulties this renewal has been facing, especially in those institutions that have achieved considerable prominence in American higher education, is the charge that cultivating their Catholic identity is at odds with academic freedom. This perception exists despite the support that Ex Corde Ecclesiae itself gives this right. As the document says, it is "given to those involved in teaching and research that, within their specialized branch of knowledge and according to the methods proper to that specific area, they may search for the truth wherever analysis and evidence lead them and may teach and publish the results of this search" (note 15). Academic freedom must be balanced by the right "of the community"; together both rights must be preserved "within the confines of the truth and the common good" (s. 12). Thus expressed, the Apostolic Constitution accords academic freedom its first definitive acceptance in the Church's history. ² Nonetheless, many "top-flight professors," even in Catholic universities, "are convinced" that it and Catholicism "are incompatible," writes Charlotte Allen in the New Republic. ³

The following article will challenge the perception of their incompatibility. In so doing, it will inquire into the reasons why this perception exists. In addition, it will draw on my own experience at Georgetown, America's oldest Catholic university. As a member of a task force charged with renewing our Catholic and Jesuit identity, I helped to develop a model of a Catholic university that, inspired by the vision of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, conforms to the norms of academic freedom generally accepted in the United States.

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The first question for discussion concerns why many top-flight professors would perceive Catholicism and academic freedom to be incompatible. The principal reason is that the academic culture currently prevailing in the United States elevates the judgments of professionally trained scholars over the identities of the specific institutions in which they serve. One of the origins of this culture can be traced to the founding in 1876 of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. This is the first American university that consciously imitated the German model consisting of specialized departments dedicated primarily to graduate education. Daniel Coit Gilman, Hopkins' first president, initiated what a noted scholarly study has called "an academic revolution" in American higher learning. ⁴ Faculties began to take as their primary aim the advancement of knowledge rather than the transmission of the West's cultural and religious heritage. As a result, the principal loyalty of faculty members shifted from their institutions to the professional disciplines that evaluated their competence to receive degrees, to publish, and to be hired and promoted. So thorough was this shift in loyalty that today the dominant value in American higher education is autonomy. ⁵ Professional scholars alone, within the appropriate confines of their fields of study, are considered to be the fitting judges in matters of research and education, not the administrators or the trustees of their institution, and certainly not religious authorities considered to be extrinsic to the academic enterprise. ⁶

Among the conditions that sustain the academic culture of autonomy, two are worthy of special mention: the Kantian presuppositions of the modern university, and those of the trend called postmodernism. Kant, as the father of the Enlightenment universities in Germany, exerted his influence on its American imitators. In The Conflict of the Faculties, he puts forth their fundamental thesis. Only philosophy, the chief "lower" faculty, is autonomous, because it is guided by free rational inquiry. ⁷ By contrast, the three "higher" faculties--theology, law, and medicine--are positively guided; they rely on sources heteronomous to free rational inquiry, such as the Bible...