A Problem with Undergraduate Education at Notre Dame

In our "corporate" reflections thus far about Notre Dame's Catholic character and about our future plans to promote Catholic intellectual life on our own campus and beyond, we have--and understandably so--concentrated almost exclusively on programs aimed at faculty members and graduate students, both here at Notre Dame and at other colleges and universities. What has been lacking is sustained reflection about what we can do as an institution to initiate our own undergraduates into Catholic intellectual life and to nurture the budding Catholic intellectuals among them. Significantly, the Colloquy for the Year 2000, the university's blueprint for the next ten to fifteen years, barely touches on the topic. This omission is a serious one, since the fact is, I submit, that it is relatively difficult, and relatively rare, for our undergraduates to leave this place with a clear conception of what it is to be a Catholic intellectual or with any deep aspiration to become one. Another way to put this point is to say that it is not at all easy, or common, for our undergraduates to experience Notre Dame as a Catholic university.

Let me spell this out a bit more carefully. It is relatively easy for typical Notre Dame undergraduates to experience Notre Dame as a university and to come away with a fairly accurate picture of what it is to be an intellectual who specializes in one or another academic discipline. After all, our students spend the bulk of their time here taking courses in a wide array of disciplines, reading and pondering books and articles, taking examinations, doing appropriately circumscribed research, writing papers, attending extracurricular lectures, and (one hopes) engaging with faculty and fellow students in intellectually stimulating conversations. In addition, most of our students have ample contact with--or at least ample opportunity for contact with--faculty members who willingly serve as model intellectuals.

Again, it is easy enough for our undergraduates to experience Notre Dame as Catholic. This university is surely without parallel in the sheer abundance of physical expressions of its Catholicism, ranging from the proliferation of "outdoor" manifestations (the Golden Dome, the mural of Christ the Teacher, the Grotto, the Stations of the Cross, and innumerable religious sculptures, etc.) to the equally impressive "indoor" manifestations (the magnificence of the Basilica, chapels in every residence hall, crucifixes in the classrooms, still more sacred sculptures and images, etc.). What's more, these are all merely outward signs of a sincere and abiding conviction that the spiritual and moral development of our undergraduates is of utmost importance to Notre Dame as an institution. Through the efforts of the office of Campus Ministry and of a whole bevy of campus and off-campus organizations, undergraduates are provided with ample opportunity to partake of the sacraments, to receive doctrinal and spiritual formation, to foster their own prayer lives, and to engage in a wide variety of service projects both within and beyond the local community.

Despite all this, however, I still maintain that very few of our undergraduates experience Notre Dame as a Catholic university. In fact, one of the most obvious and disturbing trends at Notre Dame over the last twenty years has been the gradual but unmistakable separation of the intellectual life of our undergraduates from their religious life--a separation that mirrors the physical separation of those parts of the campus dominated by academic buildings (the "university" part of Notre Dame) from those parts of the campus dominated by the residence halls (the "Catholic" part of Notre Dame). The principal explanation for this trend is as obvious as the trend itself, viz., the shifting composition of the faculty. The hiring policies of the last twenty years have had the direct (though perhaps unintended) effect of bringing to campus many faculty members who do not think of themselves as Catholic (or, more generally, Christian) intellectuals and so have not thought deeply or at all about what is involved in serving our students as role models of Catholic (or Christian) intellectuals. At the same time, the proportion of faculty members who belong to the Congregation of Holy Cross has dwindled, thus diminishing an important intellectual presence among our students. What's more, in the courses that fulfill the relevant university requirements, philosophy and theology are by and large taught as narrow and technical disciplines and are not presented with the explicit purpose of linking our students' spiritual and moral aspirations with their intellectual aspirations. Consequently, it is unusual for our students to be confronted systematically with the idea that (i) the Catholic faith provides us with a profound and coherent intellectual framework that attempts to answer our deepest metaphysical questions about origins and destinies and the human condition (that is, about what the Greek philosophers called 'first principles'), that (ii), guided by this framework, the faithful can unify their lives in such a way that they can see their own intellectual endeavors as an integral part of their personal response to the 'universal call to holiness', that (iii) this framework, far from being monolithic, simply sets limits within which interesting and fruitful debates and disagreements can take place, and that (iv) this framework provides an intellectual standpoint from which to assess and engage the other broadly philosophical frameworks, both rationalist and anti-rationalist, which dominate contemporary American culture.

I don't wish to paint a bleaker picture here than is either necessary or accurate. Obviously, Notre Dame still harbors many faculty members, both Catholic and non-Catholic, for whom there is no bifurcation of the intellectual life from the spiritual and moral life. To the extent that our students come into contact with these teacher-scholars, they have a decent chance of being inspired intellectually and spiritually by people who want to present themselves as models of Catholic (or Christian) intellectuals. Nonetheless, the number of practicing Catholics and other Christians on the faculty has diminished significantly over the last twenty years, and even here it is important to distinguish a Catholic (or Christian) intellectual from an intellectual who just happens to be Catholic (or Christian). The result is that the probability that any given undergraduate will be exposed to model Catholic (or Christian) intellectuals has been steadily decreasing.