A half century ago, Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California system, observed that modern university life had grown out of two prominent models: the “academic cloister” of John Henry Newman, and the “research organism” of Abraham Flexner.Footnote 1 Both models, he suggested, were already obsolete. In Newman's model,
the gentleman “at home in any society” was soon to be at home in none. Science was beginning to take the place of moral philosophy, research the place of teaching.Footnote 2
But Flexner's model was also passing away:
As Flexner was writing of the “Modern University,” it, in turn, was ceasing to exist. The Berlin of Humboldt was being violated just as Berlin had violated the soul of Oxford. The universities were becoming too many things.Footnote 3
What Kerr saw was the emergence of something altogether different, neither a cloister nor an organism, but what he described as “an imperative rather than a reasoned choice among elegant alternatives”: a multiversity.Footnote 4
For Kerr, the modern multiversity began with specialization:
The elective system…came more to serve the professors than the students for whom it was first intended, for it meant that the curriculum was no longer controlled by educational policy… . Freedom for the student to choose became freedom for the professor to invent; and the professor's love of specialization has become the student's hate of fragmentation. A kind of bizarre academic laissez-faire has emerged. The student, unlike Adam Smith's buyer, must consume—usually at the rate of fifteen hours a week. The modern university was born.Footnote 5
If Kerr was right, then the birth of the modern university coincided with the professorial turn from integration—in either Newman's or Flexner's sense—to specialization and fragmentation.
The contrasting ideal of integration presupposes some epistemic framework that was once at home in America's universities. Yet the historic pattern of these institutions shows that there is a slide from shared inquiry among different scholars within a confessional tradition toward a radical secularity that shows hostility toward theology.Footnote 6 And this slide is more than a change of affiliation with an established congregation. As John C. Sommerville argues, the secularization process has made the modern university a marginal institution, failing to exercise political, cultural, or even scientific leadership.Footnote 7 Disciplines are no longer connected by any transcending attempt at meaning. Sommerville describes the current intellectual climate as “postsecular, by which I mean a situation in which cultural fashion has replaced intellectual argument.”Footnote 8 Lacking a desire to reach across disciplinary boundaries in search of higher syntheses of meaning, many scholars devote themselves to the usual demands within professional gatherings, leaving students to wonder whether their chosen specialized area of study has any connection to others.
I take as a given that Kerr's observations about modern multiversities—which retain the older nomenclature of “university”—are correct, but wish to consider in this article the question of Catholic university mission. Catholic universities, grounded as they are in a history of comparatively small, comparatively homogeneous institutions dedicated to teaching, are latecomers to the kinds of aspirations that gave rise to Johns Hopkins and the land-grant institutions of the late nineteenth century. Yet as the Carnegie classifications for research universities now include a number of Catholic institutions, it is clear that many are wrestling with questions of mission amid growing complexity.
Is integration possible in the modern academy? This article will explore questions about Catholic university mission by attending to modern social imaginaries. By “social imaginaries” I mean ways of imagining the world that influence thinking about what is worth knowing and loving. To put it most simply, the various parties who have interests in what universities do have different ways of imagining the world that university life reflects and helps shape. These different vectors of social imaginaries contribute to the complexity of modern university life, to the extent that some today will observe that the very term “university” is a vestige.Footnote 9 Are Catholic universities different by virtue of their participation in or contributions to the mission of the Catholic Church?
I will rely on Charles Taylor's exploration of social imaginariesFootnote 10 to contrast two categories of imagination, which I will represent with the terms “cosmopolis” and “new Jerusalem.” I will begin my argument with a careful read of Taylor, asking what factors in the changing social imaginaries of modernity have affected universities. Next, I will contrast the social imaginaries represented by cosmopolis and new Jerusalem. The former represents a social imaginary refined by theorists of the past half century reflecting the challenges of globalization. The latter, referenced in the prophetic books and the book of Revelation, symbolizes the Christian hope for a new social order rooted in fidelity to God. Finally, I shall rely on Bernard Lonergan's discussion of cosmopolis to suggest a way to conceive of the distinctive, integrating mission of Catholic universities, rooted in discernment, and point to nascent models that might suggest avenues for cultivating an integrated approach to Catholic university mission today.
I. Modern Social Imaginaries
Central to Charles Taylor's argument about the emergence of a secular age in the West is his description of the ways that people imagine the moral order of society. This imagination has less to do with explicit codes or moral norms, and more to do with the symbolic world of the imagination, influenced as it is by the patterns of relationship among people. He writes:
My hypothesis is that central to Western modernity is a new conception of the moral order of society. At first this moral order was just an idea in the minds of some influential thinkers, but later it came to shape the social imaginary of large strata, and then eventually whole societies. It has now become so self-evident to us, we have trouble seeing it as one possible conception among others. The mutation of this view of moral order into our social imaginary is the development of certain social forms that characterize Western modernity: the market economy, the public sphere, the self-governing people, among others.Footnote 11
The term “moral order” is important to his argument, representing the various ways that members of a community discern patterns of proper interaction with others. Moral order is a felt sense of how to act in a society, and it is this fundamental felt sense that gives rise to more specific norms, rules, and laws.Footnote 12 The imaginary is thus antecedent to thematized moral norms; it is less an object of intellectual reflection than an intuition that may give rise to “common sense.”Footnote 13 Thus every community that has meaningful interactions has some kind of imaginary, some kind of basis upon which those interactions can unfold toward various goods.
Modernity, for Taylor, is characterized by the development of a social imaginary that, over time, came to look very different from that of the Renaissance or medieval period. A key question in A Secular Age points to this difference:
Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?Footnote 14
For inasmuch as belief in God influences a perception of the moral order—for example, believing that morality is rooted in adherence to divine will—the changing belief in God has wrought significant change in the social imaginary. Moreover, this changing belief in God—and the accompanying sources of theological reflection such as Scripture and sacred tradition—influences teaching and research at the university level.
Note that Taylor asserts that the change in the modern social imaginary began in the minds of influential thinkers such as Grotius and Locke. One implication of this origin is that these thinkers' ideas had persuasive power, offering a more compelling insight into the relations between human beings, nature, and God than premodern social imaginaries. They offered a new way of construing the emerging form of specifically economic moral order. Premodern forms of moral order, Taylor argues, were “organic,” deontological structures of either some form of hierarchy or some form of law from “time out of mind.” The modern, economic forms of moral order, by contrast, emphasized “mutual respect and mutual service of the individuals who make up society.”Footnote 15 The new imaginaries involved a reordering of the cosmos. Whereas the premodern person was an element in a divine order, the modern self was an actor in a socially constructed economic order. Whereas the premodern notion of right relationship involved the health of the organism, either in the classical forms exemplified by Plato's Republic or Saint Paul's analogy of the body, the modern notion of right relationship emerged as a kind of equilibrium among various economic actors pursuing their individual interests. Economic behavior, in other words, displaced an archaic notion of duty as the foundational imperative of moral order.
The modern moral order and its corresponding social imaginary were revolutionary in their implications. Rather than seeing the world as a carefully governed whole, with all its constituent parts ordered by a loving hand of Providence, people came to see the world as a system that depended on the economic activity of its members: a common weal or “political economy,” a term coined by Antoine de Montchrétien in the early seventeenth century. Taylor disagrees with the Marxist/Weberian analysis by pointing not to materialist causes, but rather to political and even spiritual changes: the developing disciplines of economic-ordered life, together with a democratization of holiness (my phrase). He points to the changing perception of everyday life, especially in the Reformed tradition, which rejected the older hierarchy of monastic (celibate) life above that of marriage and family life. Le doux commerce emerged as a kind of genteel moral code appropriate to the exigencies of economic life. Summarizing the nature of this revolution in the social imaginaries, he writes:
In the next three centuries, from Locke to our day, although the contract language may fall away, and be used only by a minority of theorists, the underlying idea of society as existing for the (mutual) benefit of individuals, and the defense of their rights, takes on more and more importance.Footnote 16
Concern with the implications of the economic order takes root in modernity not so much as a contrast to Christian faith, but rather as a particular trajectory of that faith. Locke exemplifies the theological foundations of this economic concern by pointing to the order of Providence to furnish human beings with the means of economic exchange.
God having made Man, and planted in him, as in all other Animals, a strong desire of Self-preservation, and furnished the World with things fit for Food and Rayment and other Necessaries of Life, Subservient to his design, that Man should live and abide for some time upon the Face of the Earth…: God…spoke to him, (that is) directed him by his Senses and Reason,…to the use of those things which were serviceable for his Subsistence, and given him as the means of his Preservation.Footnote 17
Locke sees a theological foundation for his emerging imagination of an economic cosmos, a foundation that perdures in certain contemporary worldviews, but has dropped away from others. If, as Taylor suggests, modernity is characterized by social imaginaries that are fundamentally economic, it is surely the case that different political views are rooted in different trajectories of an economic imaginary, and that many of them have left behind or outright rejected their theological foundations.
In light of this description of the change from the premodern to the modern, Taylor comes to greater precision in his description of the term “social imaginary.” It comprises
the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.Footnote 18
He writes further:
I'm talking about the way ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms; it is carried in images, stories, and legends. But it is also the case that theory is usually the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society.Footnote 19
In Taylor's reckoning, the social imaginary acts as a heuristic for interactions and relationships at both the micro and macro levels of a society. It influences not only polite conversation in public spaces; it also shapes public policy. At a university, the social imaginary impacts what counts as polite or impolite conversations among faculty, or trendy or backward conversations among students. It affects the funding or denial of funding to research projects, the development of new courses to address contemporary problematics, and the adoption of texts for curricula or for discussion among departmental colleagues. But because it operates primarily at the level of the imagination, it may be uncritical, carrying forward biases from the wider culture.
II. Social Imaginaries and the University: Cosmopolis and New Jerusalem
Taylor's analysis helps us address our central question of how members of a diverse Catholic university might come to imagine the world they hope to influence. On one hand, how do people embedded uncritically within the modern social imaginary in the United States envision work, relationships, hopes, struggles, and forms of excellence? How does the dominant social imaginary shape epistemic foundations of curricula, relationships between scholars of different disciplines, and aspirations of administrators? By contrast, what are the different ways that people formed intellectually and spiritually in a robust Catholic imagination might influence what happens in a Catholic university, in ways that depart from the implications of imagining the world primarily as governed by economic considerations? How might such individuals' engagement with resources in Catholic tradition through ressourcement and aggiornamento affect their work and the work of other teachers, administrators, staff, and students in the context of a Catholic university?
Cosmopolis
That the modern university is situated within a social imaginary that is primarily driven by economic concerns is not a new thesis; it has been advanced, using different language and evidence, by a number of commentators in recent years. David L. Kirp, for example, points to this thesis in his book Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line. He cites Clark Kerr, who observed that universities “have no great visions to lure them on, only the need for survival.”Footnote 20 Former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman laments the loss of any attempt to address big questions in the modern university, like the question of life's meaning, because of the fragmentation of disciplines according to the research ideal.Footnote 21 Columbia historian Andrew Delbanco points to the democratic ideals that gave rise to colleges and universities in the United States, but laments a false dichotomy between liberal studies and vocational studies, and the economic climate that nudges many students to emphasize the latter.Footnote 22
More recently, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust addressed the “case for college” in a speech dedicated to pushing back against the economic assumptions that influence public perception of college degrees.Footnote 23 She addresses some of the recent data that point to economic benefits of a degree such as earning potential with or without college education. She attempts to move beyond a naïve, uncritical embrace of the economic engine of the modern social imaginary—that is, a reduction of all human behavior to monetary interests—by suggesting broader benefits: exposure to places beyond one's narrow world of experience and encounters with fascinating people.
One of the most important ways in which students learn, at colleges and universities everywhere, is by interacting with people who are different from themselves. If you go to a residential college, your roommate might be from Texarkana, or Toledo, or Taipei. Inside and outside the classroom, you will encounter new points of view—in conversations after a class, on a playing field, or in a study marathon in a crowded dorm room.Footnote 24
For Faust, the value of the university experience is precisely that it moves a student beyond a naïve social imaginary toward a vision of oneself as an actor in a global moral order.
I designate citizenship in this more complex worldview with the Cynic and Stoic term “cosmopolis,” with the adjective “cosmopolitan” referring to the kind of person who embraces being a “citizen of the world.” Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that cosmopolitanism involves two ideals, universal concern and respect for difference.Footnote 25 He observes that what has driven cosmopolitanism is economic exchange, pointing to Voltaire's reflection on the then-growing sense of global interdependence:
Fed by the products of their soil, dressed in their fabrics, amused by games they invented, instructed even by their ancient moral fables, why would we neglect to understand the mind of these nations, among whom our European traders have traveled ever since they could find a way to get to them?Footnote 26
Cosmopolitanism, for Appiah, is an “ethics in a world of strangers,” an attempt to sublate provincialism or nationalism in favor of openness to encounter with the other, and willingness to enter into real conversation. At its best, it represents a true ethic of friendship. Appiah's expansive invitation to this kind of openness nevertheless begs the question of what sort of heuristic structures guide the unfolding of encounter and conversation. Specifically, the question remains to what extent the world as it is can in fact foster authentic relationships among very different people. To use one example, are universities really the best places for fostering authentic friendship across the world, or are they more likely to foster friendships among a wealthy international elite?
Interestingly, in her speech Faust points to the importance of imagination by suggesting that college helps young people to discover new dreams for themselves and for the world they will inhabit. It is telling, however, that the examples she cites are rooted in a primarily economic imagination of success: they are of former students whose professional lives developed as a result of that expanded imagination. In fairness, Faust is speaking to people (parents and students) shaped by modern social imaginaries, who no doubt desire that a university provide opportunities in the modern economic order; and so it is no surprise that the thrust of her argument emphasizes exactly that. It is to her credit that in this forum, she does not limit her argument to the terms of a naïve monetization of a college degree, but rather seeks to invite listeners to critical consideration of cosmopolis:
I have called this speech “the case for college” because I believe that college changes lives. It opens opportunities, reflected in the statistics I recited earlier. Perhaps even more important, it opens minds and worlds—in ways that stretch us—almost pull us—to become different people.
The university may well offer economic opportunity—she is happy to grant that point—but she also calls for it to be a place of cosmopolitan transformation. In that sense, she sees the university as a place where a new social imaginary unfolds, one that pushes back against a naïve embrace of economic benefit to cultivate a more expansively humanistic cosmopolitanism. I wonder, though, whether such transformation can occur in contexts where students are urged toward premature specialization at the expense of humanistic studies, but more importantly I wonder how it is possible for students or nonhumanities faculty to imagine the telos of humanistic studies when there are few incentives in either the curriculum or the structures of professorial life to encourage it.
New Jerusalem
It is interesting to compare the stories of graduates that Faust cites with the stories that Santa Clara psychologist Thomas G. Plante uses to illustrate the mission of Catholic universities.Footnote 27 Both point to success stories, but each has a different model of what constitutes success. Faust highlights the stories of students who are changed as a result of a new imagination of self that leads to professional success and even self-giving. For Plante, though, the key is that students experience a transformation that leads to greater compassion, greater willingness to love, and an openness to the work of God's grace:
Catholic higher education in the liberal arts tradition seeks to help transform students to discover and nurture their gifts and to use them to create a more humane, just, and compassionate world that ultimately helps to build the Kingdom of God.Footnote 28
For Plante, Catholic universities are less likely to be conformed to market demands because they are rooted in a different way of imagining what they want their graduates to become.Footnote 29 He argues that Catholic universities are in a position to move students toward a conversion away from their embrace of the modern social imaginary:
Students, in more recent years, are much more interested in making money than ever before and certainly more than other goals in education, such as developing a meaningful philosophy of life, growing as a person, and engaging with diverse peoples and views, as reported by the yearly UCLA-hosted Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey published by the Higher Education Research Institute.Footnote 30 The view seems to be that higher education is a means to an end, and that end is a high-paying job.Footnote 31
Plante argues that the pervasiveness of this market-driven understanding of college education limits the role of universities. On this point, he and Faust—and many other scholars—would agree. Yet for Plante, cosmopolis is not a sufficient alternative to the modern social imaginary, for it is still embedded within a fundamentally economic moral order. A good university may transform a student's naïve embrace of the dominant social imaginary to a more complex cosmopolitan imagination, but even the cosmopolitan ideal of world citizenship raises the questions of what kind of world one believes he or she inhabits, and whether there is a more hopeful way of imagining the world. There is a teleology in Plante's imaginary that differs from that of Faust. Both agree on education being transformative, and both agree that there is great good in a student coming to self-awareness that overflows into self-giving for the common good. Yet for Plante, there is a specifically theological dimension to this formation: a university that embraces a Catholic imagination invites students to participate in a divine project, building the Kingdom of God as described by Jesus in the Gospels. The telos of this project I designate with the term “new Jerusalem,” referring to the visions of the prophets and John, of a city that fulfills messianic hopes.Footnote 32 In Catholic tradition, new Jerusalem represents the longing for a perfect society of just relations among people who seek to live according to the divine plan. For Plante, what makes Catholic university education in the United States transformative is the fact that its liberal arts core offers students the opportunity to wrestle with fundamental questions, “to engage in deep, thoughtful, nuanced thinking, reflection, and discussion,”Footnote 33 in an education that “hopefully enlivens and enriches them, awakens their natural curiosity and love of learning, and develops their gifts and interests.”Footnote 34 As he describes in the quote above, moreover, all these efforts on a macro level are oriented toward building the Kingdom of God. There is a “Godward” direction to the university's efforts.
Kenneth Garcia attends to this Godward direction in his study Academic Freedom and the Telos of the Catholic University.Footnote 35 He suggests that all academic disciplines share it:
There is at the heart of all inquiry, whether the inquirer is explicitly aware of it or not, a dynamism (an intellectual and spiritual eros, in the words of many church fathers) whose source and goal is the divine.Footnote 36
He describes this epistemology as theonomous, in contrast to the debates about the autonomy of the scholar and the heteronomous influence of a body outside the university, such as the church hierarchy. He urges Catholic universities to recover theonomy as a dynamism in inquiry itself, a dynamism that, he writes, makes a claim about universities in general:
There is an inner teleology driving us toward ever-greater understanding, toward completeness of understanding within an ultimate horizon. Although scholars in non-theological academic disciplines cannot discover divine reality through their methods of inquiry, their inquiries, if not truncated, lead up to the limits of scientific and humanistic knowledge and to larger questions about purpose, meaning, and ultimately, God.Footnote 37
Hence for Garcia, the university as a place where this kind of theonomous epistemology unfolds is realizing what the very term “university”—as opposed to multiversity or pluriversity—really means. As a different kind of social imaginary—an ecclesial social imaginary—new Jerusalem represents a drive toward a divine order in which all knowledge serves the good of the order and those within it.
Jean-Luc Marion underscores the specifically epistemological convictions of what I am calling new Jerusalem. He decries the fragmentation that the dynamics of modernity have wrought, leading to the dissolution of the universality of the university:
Professionalization obviously presupposes specialization, which leads to the renunciation of universality—at least understood as the knowledge de omni re scibili [of everything knowable]. Should we therefore renounce the very idea of the university, if we must renounce the ambition to attain universality?Footnote 38
He reminds us that the development of the term “university” emerged from a particular kind of community that self-consciously sought knowledge as a shared pursuit:
The term universitas [university] at first designated the corporation of the learned, the universitas magistrorum et scolarium, the community of masters and students (scholars), only to become very quickly the name of the instrument of universality, of the universality of the one sapientia humana universalis in many minds.Footnote 39
For Marion, as for Garcia, the very word “university” itself implies an epistemology, and even more a faith—namely, that directions of human inquiry tend Godward, and that all forms of knowing are iterations of the universal truth sub specie aeternitatis. There is a corresponding moral framework within this theological imaginary of the university, a framework that in its broadest contours draws teachers and scholars together in a shared effort of imagining and understanding the cosmos.
Marion's observation about the university being “the instrument of universality” suggests that for many institutions of higher learning, the very term “university” is a misnomer, a vestige of perhaps a certain prestige attached to institutions that once upon a time sought such universality. Garcia notes that the University of Berlin, the prototype for the modern research university, certainly began with aspirations to universality.Footnote 40 He writes:
Berlin was founded on several principles that affected its organization: (1) the unity of research and teaching; (2) academic freedom … (3) the centrality of the arts and sciences, with philosophy as the architectonic discipline. Equally important, the German idealists were concerned about the fragmentation of human knowledge, the severance of reason and faith, and the detachment of the finite from the infinite.
Many contemporary observers of the modern university agree that fragmentation of disciplines is a symptom of decline, and that the humanistic ideals that motivated both the University of Berlin and the original research universities of the United States have been replaced by more crass motives. Steven Muller, a former president of Johns Hopkins, once opined that “universities are turning out highly skilled barbarians.”Footnote 41 Kronman, Delbanco, and Faust, in their works noted above, all share the conviction that university education must recover the dynamism of integration in humanistic education that characterized elite education of an earlier era.
III. Authentic Cosmopolitanism in the Catholic University
John Haughey argues that Catholic universities, rooted in the meaning-making event of the Incarnation, can follow a trajectory different from the early Protestant institutions that have since become secular:
The reason for the inability of the early Protestant universities in this country to retain their religious identities historically—a fact that in itself needs no argument—was that the connections between reason and faith in Christ were not well worked out.Footnote 42
The title of Haughey's book—Where Is Knowing Going?—points to what is at stake in the question of social imaginaries in the modern university. Is knowing going toward technical expertise? Social networking? Financial savvy? Increasingly specialized knowledge unconcerned with larger questions of meaning or ethics? Or, as Haughey hints in the quote above, is it going toward some kind of integrating logos that transforms the way that we look at the world, its denizens, and the economic transactions that shape their lives? Practically speaking, what do the structures of curricula, the comparative rigors of different courses, or the counsel of advisers to take this or that class or “get this requirement out of the way” communicate to students? How do current professors model to future professors what not only their studies, but also their lives are like? What does the university as a whole symbolize to its members and its publics about what is worth knowing and loving?
Authentic Cosmopolitanism
Universities as institutions governed by state and federal laws, as well as policies and protocols from professional organizations—especially policies regarding academic freedomFootnote 43—are limited in their ability to depart radically from the existing social imaginary. Practically, faculty expect to be able to teach and be paid according to their expertise, and students expect to have choices in what they study. Nevertheless, it is certainly possible, and not without precedent, for Catholic universities to develop programs and structures that invite shared reflection among faculty and students. The most significant precedent, though by no means the only one, is the core curriculum,Footnote 44 reflecting as it does fundamental convictions about what an educated person must encounter critically. The need to teach the core places demands on faculty that are antecedent to their other forms of professional development—their research and writing for journals, membership in professional organizations, applications for grant monies, and so on. Universities are in a position to draw faculty into conversations about what the core means, and by extension what it suggests about the mission of the university as a whole. Such conversations—whether in the context of seminars during the academic year or summer, retreats, sabbaticals, or other forums—are opportunities for immersion in a Catholic imagination, both in the content of the conversations and in the process by which they unfold.
When physicists converse with philosophers and social scientists, and when poets converse with economists and legal scholars, new syntheses can emerge that are iterations of a Catholic imagination: a conviction that all elements of the world are intelligible, and that critical inquiry in one discipline can enlighten and expand critical inquiry in another. This kind of faculty formation represents an authentic cosmopolitanism, more expansive than even that which arises from an “ethics in a world of strangers,” for it is rooted in practices that make authentic friendship possible.Footnote 45
The term “authentic cosmopolitanism” draws from the work of Bernard Lonergan, whose study of cognition, the nature of human understanding, and the imperatives of authenticity points not only to the self-transcendence of the knower, but also the institutional structures that provide habitats of knowing.Footnote 46 Cosmopolis, according to Lonergan, is a heuristic for discovering insights that benefit the cultural community for the long term, and for criticizing false developments in common sense. In an age of globalization, the stakes are much higher in developing an authentic cosmopolitanism, for in addition to the benefits of new forms of relationships among peoples, there are the seeds for more widespread and destructive forms of prejudice and bias. An authentic cosmopolitanism will depend not only on individual acts of understanding, but the cultivation of new forms and expressions of cultural community. To put it differently, individual faculty efforts cannot suffice of themselves to solve the world's problems; what is needed are shared efforts in integrating knowledge, and developing and modeling habits of such integration among teachers and learners.Footnote 47
Of Lonergan's notion of cosmopolis, R. J. Snell and Steven E. Cone write:
Progress is not inevitable, and decline is a real possibility. A temptation exists for the university to collaborate without reservation in the general bias of practicality, as if the university existed merely for the lower end of the scale of values, namely the provision of vital values (particular goods) and social values (good of order), while overlooking religious, personal, and cultural values. The challenge is less about civilizational order than it is about cultural development. That is, the university exists to maintain progress and reverse decline by maintaining cosmopolis.Footnote 48
If the cosmopolitan ideal is to be part of the way that members of Catholic universities imagine how they influence the world, it must represent a sustained critical reflection on the limitations of our present economic order, an attempt to answer the question of what must be rendered to Caesar and what must be rendered to God. To be sure, there are certainly many good elements in the present economic order, not the least of which is the opening of new channels of communication among peoples. Ulrich Beck opines that the cosmopolitan imagination allows people to “compare, reflect, criticize, understand, contradictory certainties” about life;Footnote 49 it fosters new forms of encounter. Yet cosmopolis is not of itself a good, but rather a context within which the discernment of goods is necessary. Beck points to what he calls the “cosmopolitan fallacy”:
The basic fact that human experience is being subtly altered by the opening to cosmopolitanization should not mislead us into assuming that we are all becoming cosmopolitans. Even the most positive development conceivable—an expansion of cultural horizons and a growing sensitivity towards new, unfamiliar geographies of life and coexistence—does not necessarily foster a sense of cosmopolitan responsibility.Footnote 50
Authentic cosmopolitanism is thus a shared task among intelligent people practicing discernment. By discernment I am referring not only to an intellectual task, but a broader human task. Within a Catholic imagination, the task of discernment is always understood to be a dialogical process involving the human person and God.Footnote 51 Within communities, discernment means attending to questions about not only what I am called to do, but also what we are called to do as a university community rooted in the event of the Incarnation. For embedded in a Catholic approach to creation—and education rooted in caring for creation—is a faith that God is present everywhere and in all people, and can be discerned by those who are willing to take a critical look. No one can see more than small parts of the whole, though, so the development of responses to cultural decline will necessarily involve thinkers from many disciplinary backgrounds.
The Discerning Catholic University
If Catholic universities today are to avoid the secularizing pattern of early Protestant universities in the United States, they must develop practices of critical, sustained, thematized, collegial faculty reflection on the evolving social imaginaries that influence university life: global, national, ecclesial, and local, always attending to the distinction between cosmopolis and new Jerusalem. Already, many such efforts have been piloted through the efforts of mission officers on a number of campuses. The learning curve is still quite steep, but over the past decade we have seen the beginnings of the fruits of these efforts.
A number of recent books offer models for what such reflections might look like. James L. Heft's Believing Scholars: Ten Catholic Intellectuals is a compilation of the University of Dayton's Marianist Award addresses, and offers critical reflections on how Catholic faith influences the intellectual lives of scholars.Footnote 52 Similarly, John Haughey's In Search of the Whole offers first-person accounts of how different intellectuals today strive for integration as persons and as scholars rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition.Footnote 53 John J. Piderit and Melanie M. Morey's book Teaching the Tradition offers ideas for ways to integrate the Catholic intellectual tradition into the curriculum, ideas provided by practitioners within different fields.Footnote 54
Kenneth Garcia advances several practical suggestions for how to invest in faculty formation in mission, such as seminars, sabbaticals, course development, mentoring, retreats, and others.Footnote 55 John Richard Wilcox, Jennifer Anne Lindholm, and Suzanne Dale Wilcox share Garcia's thesis that institutions must invest in faculty formation, in their book Revisioning Mission: The Future of Catholic Higher Education. They propose a model of faculty “mission communities” that draw together scholars of different backgrounds in conversations about what makes the Catholic university experience distinctive.Footnote 56 These and other embryonic initiatives, such as the Intersections and Common Room programs at my own institution,Footnote 57 attempt to draw scholars into broader, extradisciplinary conversations that reflect what I would describe as a logos Christology—that is, a faith that all authentic knowing coalesces in the knowing person because of his or her likeness to God. In a related vein, James Keenan, in suggesting the development of “university ethics” as a distinctive field within the study of ethics, similarly points to the need for a more comprehensive approach to what happens on a university campus, a need that can be addressed to the specific concerns of Catholic universities.Footnote 58 In particular, he points to the tendency of professors to act as “independent contractors” untrained in the responsibilities proper to the profession.Footnote 59
One specific initiative that continues to bear fruit, even in its embryonic stage, is the Boston College Roundtable, an effort to draw scholars from across institutions in the United States to converse around themes of Catholic university mission through the lens of their disciplines.Footnote 60 In the two years and four sessions since its inception, we have seen hopeful signs that such conversations will be replicated on other campuses, and have been edified by the responses from bishops, college presidents, and mission officers to our journal Integritas.Footnote 61 Our model is simple: we invite extended conversation around a mission-related theme, catalyzed by papers given by scholars who consider the theme through the lens of their discipline. Rather than asking them to depart from their disciplinary interest to consider a theological question, we ask them to ask how their disciplinary training might contribute to a larger conversation about a meaningful topic. Invariably, we find that any meaningful topic has theological implications.
Our hope is that such conversations can be the kind of leavening force suggested by Lonergan's idea of a university being a “reproductive organ of cultural community.”Footnote 62 In this environment, Lonergan writes, human development unfolds from below upward as a person comes to understand him- or herself as a knower; and from above downward, as cultural frameworks make personal development possible.Footnote 63 The cultural framework is a midwife for the emergence of the authentic self. One implication of this understanding is that members of the university community are responsible for the transmission of culture, either critically or uncritically, in ways that are either thematized or unthematized. The danger of an uncritical, unthematized transmission of culture is that it is more likely to reflect common sense, and more specifically elements of a naïve appropriation of the economic order of the world. Instead of nurturing growth of an authentic cosmopolitanism rooted in the hope for new Jerusalem, members of the community may simply be constructing an ivory tower of Babel.Footnote 64
Since graduate studies are concerned almost exclusively with the training within a particular discipline, it falls upon the university to form new faculty in a critical examination of culture through the lens of university mission, by raising the question, how might this specialized area of study contribute to an integrated vision of the common good? The mission officer can be a catalyst for such conversations, but only if there are faculty in the various departments and schools who are willing to initiate or sustain such conversations in faculty meetings. It need hardly be said that hiring for mission must be a priority; the question is whether hiring committees will be willing to value a scholar's ability to cultivate mission-integration conversations as a result of having done doctoral work at a Catholic university, over the possession of a degree from a more prestigious non-Catholic university.Footnote 65
Lonergan was particularly wary of premature specialization,Footnote 66 arguing that it is necessary for a young knower to learn the nature of his or her own knowing first, rather than this or that technical skill that will be obsolete in a few years. More importantly, he pointed to the cultivation of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love as foundational to the integration of knowledge. Such integration is no less important in the faculty member, pressured as he or she is to produce professional work that keeps up with the field. The discerning university community, I am arguing, will prioritize integration and offer support to faculty so that they can model integration for both undergraduate and graduate learners. Practically, this might mean reconsidering the tenure clock in such a way that it allows professors to develop as human beings, as authentic and integrated knowers, as friends and colleagues, and as mentors to students, as well as competent professionals within their specialized fields.
This integrated vision of the human person in community is an important distinction between what I am calling cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and the authentic cosmopolitanism of new Jerusalem, on the other. It rests upon the perennial theological question of the relationship between nature and grace, and the question of whether human beings are capable of transforming society in such a way as to realize their greatest aspirations to justice, peace, and the flourishing of the human community and the world in which they live. A vision of the new Jerusalem does not absolve academics from doing the hard work of analysis of any number of large social questions, such as poverty, war, xenophobia, or other social ills.Footnote 67 Scholars and students at Catholic universities are as responsible for asking and answering questions as those at other institutions of higher learning, whether universities (in the “universalizing” or “integrating” sense explored above) or multiversities. But the key difference is that Catholic universities will draw scholars and students to shared consideration of what a world “charged with the grandeur of God” might look like, and how different disciplinary lenses might contribute to a vision of new Jerusalem.
