There are over 200 colleges and universities in the United States that claim some level of association with the term “Catholic.” Some emphasize and celebrate their close ties with the Catholic Church and/or a particular teaching order of priests and nuns. Some seem to finesse their affiliation with the Church, trying to walk a fine line between a parochial identification on the one hand, and a broader educational mission on the other. And finally, some “Catholic” colleges come pretty close to denying any real association with the Church as they drift toward a secular identification that allows for little more than a nostalgic respect for the “Catholic tradition.” Wherever an institution might fall on this continuum of Catholic identity, however, all of these colleges and universities are working out in practice the complex and vexing question of how best to balance or reconcile the religious faith that indicates “Catholic” with the academic freedom that defines any university worthy of the name.

As many readers of The Review of Politics will be aware, this question is at the heart of a rather heated debate at the moment concerning the future of Catholic higher education in the United States. This debate is obviously of great significance for the colleges or universities whose identity, mission, and institutional viability are directly at stake. But the debate also matters a great deal to the many people outside of these particular campuses who greatly value the contribution that Catholic institutions have made to American higher education but who also understand the complexity and difficulty of combining devout fidelity to Catholic teaching with an unshakable commitment to free inquiry and dialogue. These are not simple matters, and so constructive contributions to the debate have to avoid simplistic answers. Participants have to be respectful of the important values being advanced by the other side, and anyone presuming to offer answers to these questions should model the values of Catholic education by grounding their position in critical thinking, judicious analysis, and respectful judgment.

Unfortunately, Anne Hendershott, Professor of Urban Affairs at The King's College in New York City, has supplied none of these critical elements in her new book. Instead, she has produced in Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education a narrow polemic in which she is so sure of her own righteousness that she never really bothers to take the opposing arguments seriously enough to cogently refute them. For Professor Hendershott, the leaders of most Catholic colleges and universities in the United States are not merely misguided or naïve or even plain wrong in their efforts to establish and maintain a recognizably Catholic presence on the top rungs of American higher education. No: in her telling, the leaders of these institutions are nothing more than social climbing phonies who have betrayed the Catholic souls of their institutions for the modern equivalent of 30 pieces of silver—status and respect from the secular academic community.

The fact that so much of the author's energy is expended attacking the motives of her opponents rather than refuting their arguments would by itself call into question the book's value for those readers looking to gain greater insight into the debate over the future of Catholic education in America. But I am afraid that the book's failings go well beyond those of tone or approach, or even of the validity of the personal calumny that the author heaps on those who disagree with her. To put it bluntly, Status Envy is so full of unexamined assumptions, unsubstantiated assertions, and clumsy attacks on its opponents that I suspect Professor Hendershott may actually have done real damage to her cause in writing this book. If Status Envy represents the level of intellectual discourse and academic rigor that its author wishes to apply to Catholic education in the United States, then no one should be surprised if many of its readers run rapidly in the opposite direction.

Beyond the ad hominem claim that most Catholic educators are insecure frauds, Status Envy's argument is that most of the so-called Catholic colleges and universities in the United States are no such thing, and that the urgent task of faithful Catholics is to insist that these institutions of higher learning rededicate themselves to what the author calls “orthodox Catholicism.” Characteristically, this loaded phrase—“orthodox Catholicism”—is left undefined in the text. But anyone who actually reads the book will conclude that Professor Hendershott means it to denote uncritical acceptance of the Catholic Church's teaching on sexual morality. Those who accept all of those teachings without question or comment are “orthodox.” Those who do not, or even those who seek nuance or complexity in the Church's tradition on these matters, are written off as insufficiently orthodox, and therefore inauthentically Catholic. Complex debates on Catholic campuses over the nature of academic freedom, or the relationship between faith and justice, or the potential tension between authority and inquiry are swept aside in favor of repeated denunciations of “Queer Film Festivals” and The Vagina Monologues, and a metronomic insistence that a greater commitment be made on Catholic campuses to advancing the Church's teaching that elective abortion must be made illegal in all cases. No one can deny the significance of these issues for the Catholic Church, or for the universities associated with it. But the overwhelming attention that Professor Hendershott gives to matters such as abortion and gay rights suggests that, for her, Catholic identity and indeed “orthodox Catholicism” are defined by issues of sex and reproduction. That is sure to strike many readers as a rather limited definition of what “Catholic” can mean in the context of higher education.

Status Envy, however, is burdened by more than merely its grounding in limited definitions; it is also weighed down by its reliance on distorted logic. Over and over again, the author begins to take a position on one of the many issues that are implicated in the broader debate over Catholic education, but then simply drifts off into unsubstantiated assertions, and even, at times, incoherence. An early example is an illustrative one. On page 9, Professor Hendershott claims that today's Catholic colleges are characterized by “an increasingly faithless faculty culture in which Christian professors are discriminated against.” That is an incendiary charge, and one surely worthy of careful examination. But instead of engaging in that examination, the author instead immediately offers the oddly contradictory assurance that “it is difficult to claim widespread discrimination against faithful faculty members,” despite having made that exact claim just one paragraph earlier, before moving on to unrelated commentary on the popularity of books celebrating atheism, and then to the first of an endless number of denunciations of those “who believe that the Church is a site of oppression for women, gay men, and lesbians.” Frankly, it is hard to know what to make of this style of argumentation. To be fair, I have no doubt that there is a culture war raging on Catholic campuses, and that the combatants on both sides use any levers of institutional influence available to them in advancing their positions. But if “Christian professors” are being “discriminated against” on Catholic campuses, Professor Hendershott sure hasn't provided any evidence of it. Citing Christopher Hitchens's book sales and noting that The Vagina Monologues is being performed at Notre Dame are not relevant methods for supporting such an eye-popping charge.

This tendentious reliance on non sequitur recurs throughout Status Envy. But it reaches truly disturbing heights in Professor Hendershott's suggestion that there is some sort of mutually reinforcing correlation between (a) a bishop's willingness to enforce theological orthodoxy on Catholic campuses, (b) that bishop's tolerance for pro-choice dissent within his diocese, and (c) that bishop's likelihood to be implicated in the clergy sex scandal that rocked the Catholic Church a few years ago. Again, if the author has any evidence to support this explosive charge, she has not presented it in Status Envy. Indeed, if she has any idea whatever of how to test such a claim in a way that would pass even the most elementary academic muster, she offers no sign of it in this case, or anywhere else in her book. Instead, she seems blithely content to assert a sensational but wholly unsubstantiated argument that then allows her to mount a remarkably personal attack on a few “liberal” bishops whom she is anxious to denounce as insufficiently orthodox. To be honest about it, I found Professor Hendershott's shoddy use of the clergy sex scandal in this way to be so intellectually disqualifying on her part that had I not already agreed to review the volume for this journal, I would have put it down for good right then and there.

More than anything else, Status Envy: The Politics of Higher Education is a squandered opportunity to shed sorely needed light on some of the most fascinating theological, sociological, and institutional questions facing the Catholic Church in America today. I don't have a vested personal interest in Catholic higher education, but I certainly recognize the importance of the debate surrounding its future at the moment, and I can readily acknowledge the important values being advanced by advocates on either side. Moreover, like all interested observers, I enthusiastically welcome books that take clear sides in this debate, and I greatly value authors who offer powerfully articulated arguments based on their careful thought and on their personal experience in the Catholic academy. Unfortunately, the author of this particular book had so many personal scores to settle, and so many caricatured villains to demonize that it apparently never occurred to her that a fair-minded reader might end up being more appalled by the rawness of her resentments than enlightened by the cogency of her arguments.