Preserving a Catholic Identity
As just about everyone also knows, although Ex Corde was not directed only to the Church in the United States, it plainly has special relevance for American Catholics: There are many more Catholic colleges and universities here than in any other country, and the Catholic identity of many of them has grown problematic during the last several decades.
Since early last year, the U.S. bishops adopted a plan for implementing the papal document, and the Vatican approved it a few months later. Since early this year, the bishops have been working on a plan to implement their implementation. It seems that preserving Catholic identity doesn’t come easy these days.
The bishops have been having trouble for two obvious reasons. First, from the start, the administrators and faculty members, especially the theologians, in most of the country’s big Catholic schools opposed the idea of structured accountability to the Church and dug in their heels to resist. Second, the bishops have been disinclined to tangle with the administrators and the academic theologians on this issue.
Whether problems arising from attitudes and values can be remedied by rules is not clear. Nevertheless, where attitudes and values are sound, identity problems either do not exist or are easily solved. Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, is a case in point. As Lee Edwards, a fellow of the Heritage Foundation, makes clear in his eloquent, sagacious, and informative book, Freedom’s College: The History of Grove City College, the institution has much to teach other schools. Courage and conviction are central to the lesson.
An “Undenominational” Christian School
Located 60 miles north of Pittsburgh, Grove City College has 2,300 students who inhabit an attractive campus of more than 150 acres. Though affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, it is, according to its charter, “an undenominational Christian school.” It ranks high among the nation’s liberal arts colleges (fifth in the North in the last U.S. News and World Report ratings). The latest average SAT score for incoming freshmen was 1,258.
Grove City provides academic quality at bargain prices. At last count, it offered tuition, room and board, and a laptop computer and printer for $12,500 a year. The school keeps expenses down by operating on business principles. For example, it does not grant its professors tenure; its teachers — 77 percent of whom have Ph.D.s or the equivalent — work on contract and spend most of their time teaching, not researching.
No alcohol or drugs are allowed on campus. Grove City has no coed dorms. Attendance at a nondenominational Christian worship service is required 16 times each semester. There are more than 20 Christian service groups. Many Grove City students make international medical mission trips in the summer, and 10 percent participate in an inner-city outreach program during Easter break.
All this alone would make Grove City College unusual in the context of American higher education. But the school is best known for something else: It does not receive — and does not want — federal money.
In 1977, Charles Mackenzie, Grove City’s president at that time, realized that fine print in the Title IX anti-sex discrimination compliance form, which is required in order for a school’s students to receive government grants, would force Grove City to comply with, not only all current, but all future federal regulations governing colleges and universities. (People who have counted say that federal rules applicable to institutes of higher learning now number 7,000.) Mackenzie refused to sign. A federal administrative law judge later noted, “There was not the slightest hint of [substantive] failure to comply with Title IX…. This refusal [was] obviously a matter of conscience and belief.”
The little Pennsylvania school and the government slugged it out for seven years. In 1984, the Supreme Court handed Grove City a moral victory, ruling that only its financial aid office had to submit to regulation. “An unedifying example of overzealousness on the part of the federal government,” Justice Lewis Powell concluded in his majority opinion.
Stand Up and Fight
Even so, Grove City elected to quit the federal grant program. In 1996, it quit the federal student loan program, too. Student aid now is offered under private plans. Says current president John Moore, “As a private, Christian college, we have legitimate concern about federal interference in what we teach and how we teach it. This was the most compelling reason for deciding to withdraw from the program.”
Is the engrossing story told in Freedom’s College applicable to other colleges and universities? No, if that means across-the-board literal application. The policies of a small liberal arts school in a rural area that appeals to a distinctive population of potential students and their parents could hardly be transferred unchanged to a large research university or an urban institution serving a diverse student body.
But Grove City is a valid model for other colleges just the same. While many other schools were embracing “multicultural” madness and moral decadence, Edwards writes, “Grove City College was the beneficiary of its own steady rise in excellence and the equally steady decline of American higher education.” He attributes its success to its independence and also to its leadership: educators and trustees with a clear vision of what they wanted—“excellent education in a thoroughly Christian environment at an affordable cost”—and the courage to make the vision real.
At the U.S. bishops’ general meeting last November, a university theologian was given the floor to present the Catholic Theological Society of America’s objections to Ex Corde—mainly, its requirement that Catholic theologians teaching in Catholic schools seek a mandate from their local bishop certifying that they teach in communion with the Church. “It has been a century since the potential for open conflict between theologians and bishops has been so great,” the professor said. Let us hope he is wrong. But if he is correct, let us hope that our bishops will take a leaf from Grove City’s book—that is, stand up and fight.
(This article courtesy of of CRISIS, America's fastest growing Catholic magazine.)
