'Academic Excellence' Is Not an Excellent Criterion
Last week the Rev. Wilson Miscamble, a professor of history at University of Notre Dame, spoke on campus about the conscious and strenuous efforts that he believes would be required to maintain the Catholic character of Catholic institutions of higher education, such as Georgetown. His main proposal — that Catholic colleges and universities should seek to hire and retain a faculty composed of a majority of Catholic professors — received a critical response by incoming interim Dean of the College, professor Chester Gillis. Gillis argued that such a course should not be taken if it would compromise the “academic excellence” of the institution. It was suggested that such a compromise would lead, in turn, to the reduced academic status of a university like Georgetown.
I find this response puzzling in at least two respects. First, this university — like most others — currently considers criteria that should be included along with the ambition to achieve “academic excellence.” These include, but are not limited to, efforts to increase gender and racial diversity. There are times — most expressly in efforts to promote affirmative action — when it is argued that “academic excellence” should not be the sole or exclusive criterion. At other times, it is suggested that additional criteria such as gender or race should be considered when “all things are equal.” If either of these two arguments hold true in such cases, why cannot the same hold true for the effort to actively and consciously recruit Catholic faculty? I raise this question not to criticize affirmative action policies per se, but precisely to point out that we are already willing to consider additional criteria deemed to be important to the institution. If such criteria can be deemed a legitimate addition to “academic excellence,” then why not Catholicism at a university with an official affiliation with the Church?
Secondly, and in my mind, more importantly, I am puzzled that the very criterion of “academic excellence” is invoked as if it is a self-evidently neutral and objective standard, one that is not itself worthy of investigation. The criterion of “academic excellence” is largely guided and influenced by 19th century historicist and progressive assumptions, and is measured mainly by the ability of faculty to publish original research in peer-refereed journals and highly-ranked academic presses. As a consequence, this criterion valorizes specialization over the integration of inquiry and education across fields toward the end of forming the whole person. It emphasizes the training of graduate students over that of the formation of undergraduates. It implicitly rejects or at least mistrusts the legitimacy of tradition as a source of authority or guidance and makes little or no place for pedagogic approaches that seek to convey tradition or emphasize one’s own cultural inheritance. And it places most emphasis upon the judgments of wholly secular disciplines outside one’s own institution (for instance, over tenure decisions), thus ultimately conforming any university to the expectations of highly-ranked secular and religiously disaffiliated peer institutions. In short, the seemingly neutral criterion of “academic excellence” is loaded with a deep set of philosophical presuppositions that ultimately influence and shape the institution, and that have led universities around the nation inexorably toward the rejection of religious affiliation and a dogged pursuit of conformity to a single and unquestioned norm.
The irony is that it is precisely a Catholic world view — one that understands the compatibility of faith and reason and that seeks to achieve a comprehension of the connections between all the branches of knowledge in light of a created order — that is particularly well-suited to gaining a critical distance from the unexamined presuppositions contained in a criterion such as “academic excellence.” A university guided by such a world view could quite ably achieve excellence according to that standard without necessarily conforming to the commonly invoked standard now rendering our nation’s institutions wholly identical. I would submit that Georgetown can do a greater service to higher education — particularly in the education of our secular peer institutions and to the cause of diversity in higher education — and ultimately and most importantly to the education of our students, if we keep vibrantly alive such avenues of inquiry. It bodes ill, however, when faculty and officers of this institution invoke a criterion such as “academic excellence” without further reflection on what it really means and avoid asking whether we must wholly conform to the world without being willing to resist or correct its narrowing and homogenizing tendencies.
Patrick Deneen is an associate professor of government and director of the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy
Apr 11 2008 at 10:22 p.m.
I may not agree with the entiriety of what you've written here. (Particularly some of your moves in the second half of the op-ed, which, I fear, ignores the uncomfortable reality that there is much still to be said for 19th century+ notions of academic excellence amongst faculty, if not as THE superior criterion for selection than certainly as a PRIMARY criterion, perhaps coupled with - but not derrogated by - an emphasis on undergraduate teaching ability - although the market effects of elite college competition amongst high-achieving undergraduate students may take care of this without a policy shift)
However, in general, this is an extremely erudite and insightful piece. Your criticism of the immediately negative response to the proposal is ... it's just excellent. Essentially, you deftly pull back the curtain on one of the 'Left Consensus'' favorite parlor tricks - the appeal to reason and consistency when it so serves, and the simultaneously and utterly disturbing willingness to abandon all such considerations when it ill-suits the hidden background project of (take your pick - deconstruction, racial agenda promotion, equality campaigning, resentiment-style attacks on elite, etc.)
I'm sure that you'd likewise disagree with some of what I'm saying here - :) I trend a bit toward the sensational, I recognize - however, I hope I've conveyed my appreciation for this piece in its nuance and insight. It has not fallen of deaf ears. Please continue to write on matters like this ... It's nice to read a legitimate piece of thought once and a while, inbetween the blather that fills so many of these pages.
Apr 11 2008 at 11:52 p.m.
Question - is Professor Deenan advocating that there be a requirement that a majority of professors at Georgetown be Catholic? That seems to be what the first paragraph is going for.
While I think that 'academic excellence' can at times come at the expense of the actual students, mandating a majority of Catholic professors would be a near-sighted pseudo-solution to the problem. I think the sin of lack of focus on cura personalis is committed by Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jewish and secular faculty alike.
Apr 12 2008 at 11:12 p.m.
One thing that needs to be pointed out here is that the first part of this article is a straw man. Georgetown has enormous affirmative action for Catholic candidates, and more so for Jesuits. The university routinely creates Jesuit lines when departments find someone who they feel meets minimal criteria of competence. Many departments, including mine, take engagement with the Catholic tradition to be a positive factor in all hires, and a requirement in many. There is already vastly more Catholic affirmative action at GU than there is for women, minorities, etc. So pretending that anyone in the GU administration is favoring the latter while rejecting the former out of hand is simply false.
The issue was whether there should be a guarantee that a majority of Catholics would always be on faculty. That would be an affirmative action standard vastly stronger than any standard favoring women or minorities ever put in place anywhere, so far as I know.
As for the rest, I've never met a professor in my 20+ years in academia who thought that academic excellence was "a self-evidently neutral and objective standard, one that is not itself worthy of investigation." Not one. I've never been on a search in which the contours of the notion were not debated. I've seen spirited debates over specialization versus integration, undergraduate teaching vs graduate, historical research vs non-historical. This goes on all the time. What is agreed by most academics is that there is some meaningful distinction between the quality of academic work that potential professors are capable of, some reasonable judgments to be made of academic excellence. And in practice, in most departments, there is a reasonable commonality of judgment on this. Again in my own, we find almost universal agreement on quality across massive personal differences of politics, religion, style of philosophy, use of history, etc. This has allowed us to put together a highly diverse department that is, well, academically excellent.
However one defines excellence, it is pretty clear that the imposition of a requirement that half of one's faculty be from a small national minority will lessen the excellence of that faculty. Of course one might argue that this is a good thing, that keeping a Catholic minority is important enough to warrant this. I'll not debate that here. But one certainly can't argue for this view by pretending that GU does not already support Catholic hiring or by claiming that no one ever thought that there are debates to be had over excellence.
Mark Lance
Apr 14 2008 at 9:16 p.m.
Mark Lance's opening comments are wrong: there is no affirmative action for Catholics. I'd like to hear details about professors hired in the last 5 years who were viewed favorably because of any knowledge of Catholic thought. I don't know of anyone who fits that category. To my knowledge, there have been only a couple of Jesuits hired in the last 5 years, not exactly affirmative action.
Apr 15 2008 at 12:30 a.m.
For the record:
If there were such a thing as "affirmative action" for Catholics or Jesuits at Georgetown, it would have to be declared a miserable failure. Twenty five years ago, the student body was 66% Catholic. Today that figure hovers around 50%. Today, the full time main campus faculty is less than 2% Jesuit. I'm not sure what that figure was 25 years ago, but I'd bet the farm that it was many times what it is today. I'm sure there are people on campus who could provide that figure.
On a brighter note, the percentage of women and minorities on campus -- in the student body, in the faculty, in the administration -- has grown enormously over the past 25 years. If Georgetown wants to practice affirmative action, it has shown that it can do so. To claim that there is "vastly more Catholic affirmative action at GU" than for women and minorities is laughable on its face. We call that "data-free analysis."
How someone can argue that there is hiring preference given to anyone at Georgetown on the basis of religion or faith is beyond me. Georgetown's own hiring policies prohibit asking an applicant about his or her religion or faith unless religion is a specific part of the job (e.g., it's fair to ask an applicant for Jewish chaplain if he or she is Jewish). I'm not a philosopher, but doesn't that make hiring faculty on the basis of "Catholic affirmative action" logically impossible?
Granted, for the sake of intellectual diversity or service to the intellectual tradition that gave birth to the Georgetown, the university might look to hire people who have engaged the Catholic tradition in his or her academic work, but that is hardly "Catholic affirmative action." If I hire a committed millionaire capitalist who is also an expert in Marxism, is that "Marxist affirmative action"? Marxists, I bet, would say "no."
This country is planted thick with excellent colleges and universities that choose to be committed to the project of secular humanism. They do good work, and in many cases they pay a lot better than Georgetown. It puzzles me when people who are so obviously opposed to, offended by and angry at the Catholic tradition choose to work at a university that is, by history and on-going choice, Catholic.
It must be painful for anyone with a modicum of self knowledge and a functioning conscience to cash a paycheck from an institution whose identity he finds so offensive. Akin, I'd say, to being in the Hitler Youth while claiming well intentioned innocence -- except that the Hitler Youth were, well, young.
Apr 15 2008 at 3:40 p.m.
Professors Deneen and Miscamble are among a growing number of far-sighted academic leaders who recognize the serious plight of all universities in this country--not just Catholic ones--that have fallen down in adoration of the idols of the age. In short, they want to replace the regnant ideologies with reason and faith and the values that inhere in every university's tradition. It might come as news to the denizens of once-Catholic universities that higher education across the land is benefitting from the active presence in the classroom of professors who are not only competent in their fields but also committed Catholics--persons who find less opposition in discharging their mission in state universities than they would at places like Georgetown and Notre Dame.
Apr 15 2008 at 4:03 p.m.
Faithful Alum and others:
You are wrong about several things. It is not illegal to take Catholicism into account in hiring at a Catholic institution. We do in the philosophy department, and I know other departments do as well.
What I wrote about Jesuit hires is simply correct. Philosophy has not hired many Jesuits, but in my time here has hired two. both were in lines that would not have existed had we not found a Jesuit that we thought would benefit the department. Why no more than this? Because very very few Jesuits are going into philosophy. We have a standing policy that the Jesuits in the department will be on the lookout for anyone who is good who is graduating with a PhD in philosophy. If they are identified, the department will review them and see if they meet the "minimal criteria of competence". (Apparently this formulation caused offense. I apologize. The idea was not to disparage Jesuit hires, many of whom I have the utmost respect for. The "minimum" is generally quite high. In philosophy, we understand that we would not hire anyone who stood out as less competent than the norm, no matter the funding of the position, or the affirmative action category. So we set a minimum standard of what we expect to be a full and respected member of the department. But for all that, this is quite different than an open search where the goal is to find the best philosopher we can.)
If we think they do meet those criteria, we put the name forward to the university asking for a position. We have every expectation that this request will be granted. It always has been. This is a policy not unique to philosophy.
Comparing the rise in female faculty to the drop in Jesuit is a bit odd. Currently more women than men are graduating college, and the numbers finishing graduate school are rising precipitously. It stands to reason, without any affirmative action, that the numbers would begin to rise in the professoriate. The opposite is happening in the ranks of Jesuits.
Finally, I find it very surprising that people assume I'm opposed to affirmative action for Catholics or Jesuits. Indeed, the willingness to attribute horrible hostile motives to me is a bit sad. But for the record, I think the sorts of affirmative action I've just described are perfectly appropriate, and I've argued for stronger affirmative action. I agree with the actual point of the poster who ignorantly mocks me by talking about capitalists who bash Marxism. I have argued on many occasions in my department that at least a substantial part of the "critical mass" "constructively engaged with" the Catholic tradition should be practicing, believing Catholics. I think that is clearly what is intended in the goal, is what in practice we look for, and is clearly appropriate.
So please folks, before you decide I'm a Marxist -- just for the record I'm not -- opposed to Catholic affirmative action, hostile to the Catholic tradition, or anything else, consider asking me what I think. The mere fact that I ask us to acknowledge reality does not imply any views on such issues. No doubt you will find views of mine to denounce, but at least let them be ones I actually hold.
Mark Lance
Apr 15 2008 at 5:50 p.m.
I only know details about hiring for my own department. Let's consider the last 6 hires (which goes back more than five years.) In 4 of the 6 cases the search was substantially affected by the fact that they had knowledge of and support for Catholic thought. (Note, and support for. All 4 were Catholic and worked in the area.) In 3 cases this was a necessary condition of the job. And that does not include the promotion of Alfonso Gomez-Lobo to a chair that also required this.
Out of 30 ordinary faculty with primary or secondary appointment in my department, there are 3 Jesuits, 13 Catholics, and 13 people actively engaged in research and teaching on areas of the Catholic tradition. (The last two groups overlap by 11 people.)
Mark Lance
Apr 28 2008 at 8:11 p.m.
Having listened with attention to what Dr. Gillis had to say at the panel discussion, I am greatly surprised to see Professor Lance speaking of an affirmative action policy in favor of hiring Catholics. Dr. Gillis said, quite explicitly and several times, that an applicant's religion was not taken into account in Georgetown and that it would be illegal to do so. When Fr. Miscamble expressed surprise, Dr. Gillis responded that he was speaking of District of Columbia law, not federal law. Given his role as incoming Dean, I took this to be an authoritative statement.
As to the consequences of such a policy, I had thought there would be no dissent from a key finding of George Marsden's leading study ("The Soul of the American University") that a "religion-blind" approach would eventually lead to representation substantially reflecting the religion's place in the general academic population. No doubt that will then be termed the necessary "critical number." And, by the way, does anyone know, or is anyone willing to tell, what the present proportion of Catholics is?