Note: This post was in the queue before this piece by Matthew Bowman went up at the Salt Lake Tribune.  So it wasn’t created as a response to it, but in a way it does respond to the idea that the Catholics have figured out a way to effectively balance free thought with the religious character of a university that BYU would do well to adopt. They’ve had their own boundary maintenance and messiness as well. 

Sometimes as members we can get a little navel-gazy and think that a particular situation we are in is unique when it’s not. In the case of BYU and its current boundary maintenance there’s nothing new under the sun, and we see analogous situations not only across time within our own faith but also across faiths as well. 

I finished reading The Coup at Catholic University. I teach an occasional class at Catholic U and do Catholic-related stuff for my data work so I thought it was relevant. To summarize: 

Catholic U is the Catholic equivalent of BYU in the sense that, unlike Notre Dame and other Catholic schools, it is directly overseen and run by the US Catholic Church. In the immediate aftermath of Vatican II there were a lot of clergy and theologians who were opposed to the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality, including birth control (not so many now, more on that later). Father Curran was denied tenure in the theology department because his teachings ran contrary to that of the Church. This was followed by a massive flurry of student and faculty protests that essentially intimidated the Board into not only appointing him, but to give him tenured status. Eventually, years later, the Vatican itself under then-Cardinal-Ratzinger had him removed by fiat. 

At stake during this fight were fundamental questions about whether you could have a legitimate university with a religious affiliation where the religious authorities could have some say over the teaching, research, and governance, or whether the academic side by its nature has to be completely autonomous and the affiliation is along the lines of Duke and other universities that are pretty much affiliated in name only. 

I’ve already hashed over a lot of the particulars of the BYU case, but I just wanted to make some observations and compare/contrast points. 

• Agitation from the street isn’t what it used to be. The first-person accounts of these events describe well-attended, large, and frequent Vietnam-era type student and faculty protests and placards. (I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the Chamberlin et al. BYU controversy that happened in the early 20th century similarly elicited a fairly massive student reaction, but I can’t remember the exact citation). However, I suspect the halcyon days when you could get most or even a significant fraction of the student body to show up for a protest about something university governance-related that doesn’t directly affect them are long gone. My experience in a half dozen universities over the years is that the kind of students who show up to these things is a very limited, particular group that aren’t representative of the student body, who in general mostly want their credential so that they are more financially comfortable (and who can blame them). Maybe this is bad, maybe this is good, but that’s the way it is.

 

• I’ve mentioned this a billion times, but it’s hard to get ahead of “the direction of history.” In the immediate aftermath of Vatican II virtually nobody believed that the future would be one where young Catholic priests are much, much more conservative than their boomer liberal elders. 

 

• The above makes it require a certain strength of conscience to stand up against a large group of people when you just fundamentally don’t think they’re right. Some of the cardinals insisting on Catholic U’s right to set up doctrinal parameters were not popular and had a certain “here I can stand and can do no more,” sense despite the groundswell that everybody thought would overtake Catholicism. In today’s BYU context I get the sense that there is a legitimately large group of parents and donors supporting the brethren’s new direction. I don’t think that was the case at Catholic U. Of course, whether that makes these cardinals curmudgeons or leaders of integrity depends on whether you think they were right.  

 

• After Curran left Catholic U he wrote a book called “Faithful Dissent.” This has overtones of the “loyal opposition” moniker that some members adopt and that was later rebuked by President Oaks. I suppose whether dissent becomes disloyal or unfaithful is in large part determined by 1) how active you are in promoting that dissent (per President Oaks), and 2) where you land on the continuum of dissent. We all dissent on something or another, but at some point there is so much dissent it’s hard to see what room is left for the non-dissenting.

 

•  One of the benefits (or drawbacks, if that’s your take) of being a smaller faith is there is much more centralization and decision-making processes are much less ambiguous. We know who the next leaders are going to be and we have clean rank-and-file lines of authority and decision-making. Technically Catholics do too, but there are so many institutions and so few layers of management, canonically speaking (technically only two, bishop and pope) that in practice the governance of Catholic Church-related institutions can get conflicted, so in large part I think a lot of the back-and-forth power struggle at Catholic U just wouldn’t happen in a BYU context.