The Faith and Fate of Catholic Students at Catholic Colleges: Doing Better than Elsewhere

Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik reports on new research released at the annual meeting of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities that challenges many of the critical conclusions of the 2003 Cardinal Newman Society’s "Are Catholic Colleges Leading Students Astray?" The new study was conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, at Georgetown University, using the annual surveys by the Higher Education Research Institute, at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The research finds that Catholic students at Catholic colleges are less likely than Catholic students at other colleges to move away from the church and more likely to turn toward it. Further, the study finds that the Catholic students at Catholic colleges — while moving away from the church on some issues — more toward the church on others, including both political and philosophical views and specific actions, such as the reading of sacred texts.

A Catholic higher education seems to buffer against larger societal pressures, but not completely.

Richard A. Yanikoski, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, said that the comparisons to non-Catholic institutions are important because this is an era in which college-age students are willing to question faith regardless of their faith and where they go to college. The new research shows, he said, that "a typical Catholic undergraduate student attending a Catholic college or university emerges more spiritually intact than if she or he had attended a public or secular private institution, but not nearly as spiritually active as would have been the case a few decades ago."

Jaschik’s report summarizes the key findings, reproduces two tables, and offers preliminary reaction from Patrick J. Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society.

Purge of Iranian Universities for “un-Islamic” teachings?

The New York Times reports that “there is growing concern within the academic community that the government will purge political and social science departments of professors and curriculums deemed ‘un-Islamic,’ according to academics and political analysts inside and outside Iran.”

Recent speeches by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “suggest that the study of secular topics and ideas has made universities incubators for the political unrest unleashed after the disputed presidential election in June.”

Recommended Reading: The Soul of the American University

George M. Marsden is one of the foremost contemporary historians of American Evangelical Christianity. In his The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford, 1994), Marsden offers an intellectual history of America’s leading universities intended to answer the question,

How was it that distinctively Christian teaching could be displaced so easily from the central and substantive role that it had held in American higher education for over two centuries and in the universities of Christendom for many centuries before that? [p. 31]

Marsden’s  detailed and magisterial account of the intellectual transition from “Protestant Establishment” to “Established Nonbelief” rewards careful study. Interestingly, however, it is not his impressive historical account that has gained the most attention but rather his “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” in which, given the history that he has recounted, Marsden argues against perpetuating the “strong prejudices against traditional religious viewpoints” found in today’s academy.

Recommended reading: Higher Ed and Religion between the American Civil War and World War I

The modern American college and university system has its origins in the period between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I. This period saw the growth of new institutions—especially the research university—and the transformation of old institutions such as the antebellum college.

This time period also saw a new, subdivided, and secular curriculum replace the unified, Protestant (or even Deist) arrangement of learning that was designed to form students in Christian morality and inform them about the harmony between nature and nature’s God. One of the best books on this transformation is Jon H. Roberts and James Turner, The Sacred and the Secular University (Princeton, 2000). I can sketch only some of its contours.