BY MICHAEL P. MURPHY
University of California Chancellor Clark Kerr famously observed in 1957 that higher education is best described as “a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over car parking.” Humorous as this is, Kerr’s insight is also a serious one—and it serves as an anchor upon which to tether this brief response to Christopher Kazcor’s analysis of mission drift in Jesuit colleges and universities.
The symptoms and corresponding remedies Kazcor names are astute and well imagined. There are many reasons for mission drift—from the fiscal caution of “no margin no mission” on the one hand, to something Dorothy Day might utter on the other: “Don’t associate me with university mission. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily”—a sentiment that will sound familiar to those who work on the ground in mission integration. To be sure, there are also scores of examples of fruitful mission initiatives and integration alive today at AJCU schools, but there would not be such a widespread call for new upper administration roles in mission leadership were it not for the tacit recognition of crisis.
The expressions of mission drift are manifold: to ride the metaphor fully, those who spend time on the water know well that when one thing drifts out, something else fills the void. As Kaczor suggests, mission has been subtly subordinated to other values and often replaced with cheaper versions of it—corporatism, managerialism, credentialism, consumerism, among others —adulterated approaches to education that are often contrary (and occasionally hostile) to Catholic intellectual, spiritual, and social teaching traditions, the dynamism of which have been a compass and a “way of proceeding” for 480 years.
This is the elephant in the room in mission world: that the Christian humanistic tradition that undergirds the Jesuit and Ignatian approach to higher education is being sold off by the pound—and often from the inside. Catholic higher education, as Kazcor observes, is becoming increasingly indistinguishable from its secular counterparts. To diagnose more pointedly here, the Catholic, Jesuit university is in danger of becoming just another neoliberal product—a series of knowledge corporations that sell goods of technical “know-how” bound together not by the common good (articulated in Catholic Social Thought), but, to riff on Kerr, attenuated by all too common values dictated by the techno-capitalist demands of contemporary culture.
Many faculty—no matter their discipline or faith—feel the burn here; and colleagues who might normally stay safely “anodyne” between the finer points of faith and reason, are united today by creeping concern about a common antagonist: neoliberal and technocratic forces that are impeding our fragile educational project (not to mention eating our students alive).
It is precisely here where AJCU schools can offer another constructive remedy: establishing programs in faculty engagement that innovate precisely from the Catholic, Jesuit intellectual tradition.
A representative sample (above) of the over 250 faculty who have participated in a semester-long seminar that “studies in a systematic and scholarly way the educational enterprise of Loyola University Chicago through the prism of the Catholic intellectual heritage, Jesuit history, and Ignatian philosophy, spirituality, and pedagogy.” Photo courtesy of Loyola University Chicago.
This was the hope at Loyola University Chicago (LUC) when we created All Things Ignatian: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Justice, and the Common Good. This incentivized, semester-long seminar—launched in 2016 and led by Loyola faculty—focuses on the Catholic intellectual tradition as a resource for institutional thinking and being. The seminar anticipates Kazcor’s remedy of cultivating “researchers and teachers who know and love the Catholic intellectual tradition in every academic department and school” and puts flesh on it. Over 250 faculty from across LUC schools and disciplines have participated in the seminar, and there is a version for staff as well. As one would expect with conversations centered on disputed questions in faith, reason, and justice, the seminar is a place of both tension and transcendence—and, as often, I am happy to report, a place of both personal and intellectual renewal.
Programs like the faculty seminar are the connective tissue that unite our communities, not around private issues like car parking but around a shared, living tradition, one that Kazcor puts before us so well: a mission of mindfulness, comprehensiveness, depth, integration, and affirmation.
Michael P. Murphy, a literary scholar and theologian, is director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Tradition at Loyola University Chicago.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Skye Studios via Unsplash.