Article published Apr 19, 2009
Human life fund is perfectly suited to Notre Dame
By DAVID SOLOMON
My colleague, Jean Porter, charged in her Viewpoint on Holy Saturday
that the recently created Notre Dame Fund To Protect Human Life will
promote "direct political activism." Her article is both inaccurate and
misleading.
It
is simply untrue that the fund promotes direct political activism.
Neither the mission statement of the fund nor the events sponsored by
the fund involve political activity that goes beyond the normal
engagement of the contemporary university with the surrounding culture.
The
purpose of the fund, according to its mission statement, "is to educate
Notre Dame students in the rich intellectual tradition supporting the
dignity of human life, specifically in its beginning stages, and to
prepare those students, through personal witness, public service, and
prayer to transform the culture into one where every human life is
respected."
The first two events the fund sponsored on campus
were a faculty debate and a dinner at which undergraduates could
discuss life issues with faculty members. Neither event had a
politically partisan tone. The fund is primarily concerned with
teaching and research but, like many similar ethics enterprises, it
also takes an interest in the moral formation of students.Of course,
many universities -- including Notre Dame -- are broadly engaged in
some sense with matters of cultural conflict and political debate.
Former
President Father Theodore Hesburgh rose to national prominence largely
because of his "engagement" in the civil rights revolution a generation
ago. Anyone who visits his office -- and mine, too, for that matter --
will find in our offices a photograph of Father Hesburgh locked
arm-in-arm with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at a civil rights
protest in Chicago in the 1960s. In the same spirit, the fund helped
make it possible for Notre Dame students to march arm-in-arm with
faculty and administrators at the March for Life in January.
Father
Hesburgh was also instrumental in founding and funding the two most
prominent and politically engaged academic institutes on campus -- the
Kellogg Institute for International Studies and the Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies. Even minimal attention to their mission
statements and to the list of activities they fund establishes that
they are politically engaged. But Porter would surely agree that they
are not guilty of political activism.
Notre Dame is rightly
proud that many students participate in service projects organized
through the Center for Social Concerns, one of the jewels in Notre
Dame's crown. This center is guided by the rich tradition of Catholic
social teaching which provides direction for Catholic individuals and
institutions in cultural and political matters, especially having to do
with basic questions of social justice. The Center for Social Concerns
surely need not apologize for its allegiance to Catholic social
teaching, nor would Porter, I am sure, accuse them of political
activism.
Underlying Porter's attack on the Notre Dame Fund are
deeper issues about how intellectual and moral formation are to be
combined in the contemporary Catholic university. She laments the fact
that in her experience "it is already difficult to get undergraduates
to discuss abortion in any kind of open-minded and balanced way. They
are afraid to explore their own questions and concerns on this
extremely difficult subject -- afraid of what their peers will think,
and perhaps afraid of losing the good opinion of their professors as
well."My own experience with Notre Dame undergraduates after teaching
them for 40 years is quite different. I find that most students are
eager to explore the intellectual grounds for their often unreflective
views on abortion. They are frequently intimidated -- not by the very
few openly pro-life faculty at Notre Dame -- but rather by the
prevailing opinion in our culture, especially among the educated elite
in our colleges and universities, that it is intellectually second-rate
to defend the intrinsic dignity of the unborn.
The sneers most
frequent at Notre Dame, as elsewhere in contemporary higher education,
are aimed at pro-life students, not at the pro-choice students whose
views are in vogue in popular culture and celebrated at the very
highest levels of our political regime, even in the inner-most recesses
of the White House.
The Notre Dame Fund to Protect Human Life
aims to help students recover the intellectual grounds necessary to
defend the intrinsic dignity of every human being. The issue is moral
truth, not politics.
In this respect, the fund continues Notre
Dame's long history of promoting an educational environment in which
students are introduced to ideas that help them resist unjust and
exclusionary doctrines, whether those excluded are racial minorities,
women or the unborn. If this is unacceptable "political activism," then
Porter has a problem not with the Notre Dame Fund to Protect Human
Life, but with the University of Notre Dame itself.
David
Solomon is the W.P. and H.B. White director of the Notre Dame Center
for Ethics and Culture as well as a faculty member in the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and a member of the steering
committee for the Notre Dame Fund to Protect Human Life.