Armaduras reticuladas de acero

The period stretching from the 1880s to the 1920s was pivotal in the universities’ development. Accrediting agencies began to standardize a four-year undergraduate plan of study, forcing many colleges to abandon their six-year curricula and separate legally from their prep divisions. The remnants of these lower divisions sometimes evolved into loosely-affiliated high schools like Fordham Prep in New York, LaSalle College High School near Philadelphia, and Marquette University High School in Milwaukee (Levine, 1986).

In the perceptions of the academic establishment, and of Catholics themselves, Catholic schools during this time offered an inferior education. A Catholic university degree was seen as a poor-man’s alternative to a traditional bachelor’s degree, one that a talented, well-connected student would want to avoid. As early as the 1890s, the president of Holy Ghost College (later Duquesne University) argued that

Catholic colleges could not enforce meaningful entrance requirements because they were too dependent on tuition. Their financial weakness, and the clerical make-up of the teaching staff, meant that little could be offered but the traditional classical course (Gleason, 1995, p. 22).

A high-profile controversy during this time took place from 1893-1903, when Harvard’s longest-serving president, Charles W. Eliot, published a list of approved colleges whose graduates would be permitted to enroll at Harvard Law School without taking required entrance exams. Only three Catholic colleges (Georgetown, Boston College, and Holy Cross) appeared on the original 1893 list. Notre Dame was added in 1894, while Boston College and Holy Cross were dropped in 1897 (Mahoney, 2003). The result was a war of words in the Boston press between Eliot and Boston College’s president, Timothy Brosnahan, SJ, in which Eliot articulated

the biases of the American elite and their belief that most Catholic higher education was insufficient to prepare students for the rigors of Harvard (Mahoney, 2003). It was an attitude shared by many Catholics. As the old immigrant identity began to die out with each generation, this attitude led a majority of Catholics to seek their college educations at non-Catholic schools (Gleason, 1995; Hendershott, 2009; Mahoney, 200; Thelin, 2004).

4.2.4.1 Twentieth-century reforms

By the inter-war years, many Catholic universities had developed into loose umbrella organizations overseeing large schools of law and business, and occasionally schools of medicine and engineering, along with small, classically-oriented undergraduate colleges. During this time, the Ratio Studiorum began to lose its status as the curriculum of choice, and was replaced by a surge in what was called neo-Thomism – a philosophical approach based on the work of St. Thomas Aquinas (Byrne, 2004). Catholic leaders latched onto neo-Thomism and its emphasis on philosophy and inter-disciplinarity as the defining feature of Catholic education, and in that context, introduced theology courses to the undergraduate program of study for the first time (Gleason, 1995). This approach generally did not impress accrediting bodies, which began to insist that university faculty be trained in traditional academic disciplines, with the PhD as a minimal entry point to teaching. The Jesuits argued unsuccessfully that ordination to the priesthood should be considered equivalent to a doctoral degree and that the community of priests on a Catholic college campus should be valued as a “living endowment” to offset accrediting bodies’ financial requirements (Gleason, 1995; Power, 1972). Organizations like the National Catholic Education Association tried unsuccessfully to define themselves as alternatives to traditional accrediting bodies like the Middle States Association and North Central

educational offerings and administrative structures with those of their secular counterparts (Gleason, 1995).

As they began to adopt professional standards for faculty and implement modern tenure systems after the 1950s, Catholic universities also faced a series of challenging new developments from the outside world. As state governments invested in public higher education, new community colleges began to usurp the Catholic schools’ traditional role by providing the poor and the underprivileged with access to education (Morey and Piderit, 2006). First- generation, working-class students now had cheaper alternatives for their degrees, forcing some Catholic schools to rethink their core audiences. Meanwhile, from Rome, Catholic universities found themselves empowered as never before by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, which elevated the role of the laity in Catholic institutions and called for less centralized involvement by Church authorities. Now emerging as complex institutions in their own right, most Catholic universities legally separated from the Church in the late 1960s and early 1970s, incorporating as independent non-profit institutions under predominantly lay boards of trustees (Gleason, 1995). No longer controlled directly by Church authorities, the schools nonetheless continued to face the pressures they had always faced – to maintain or grow enrollment, to compete with secular institutions for faculty and staff, and to offer a high-quality education comparable to what a student would receive elsewhere. Gleason (1995) titled his book about this struggle Contending with Modernity, while Hendershott (2009) titled hers Status Envy – two perspectives on the push to transform Catholic universities into places academically comparable to any other schools in the American system.

It is ironic that, after over a century of arguing that Catholic education was just as good as secular education, after trying to conform their schools to secular standards of quality, and after

downplaying their religious nature to make themselves eligible for federal funding, Catholic universities today should be facing questions about what makes them truly Catholic. This latest iteration of the balancing act between their Catholic and American identities, since the late 1960s, has produced the richest scholarly debate and exchange of ideas, as scholars who care about the future of Catholic higher education discuss what must be preserved, what must change, and what is fundamental to a Catholic college mission. Now mostly under lay control, the schools have had to think seriously about the principles and characteristics that they should emphasize in their classrooms, administrative decisions, marketing materials, and student learning outcomes as they decide what it means to be a Catholic institution in the twenty-first century. These debates are the subject of Chapter 5.