The Capstone
America Magazine is doing interviews of the presidents of three Washington, D.C. area Catholic universities. The first interview, with Patricia McGuire of Trinity Washington University, is posted here.
Some excerpts:
Among many complaints, the fact that I was not a religious and not “Catholic” enough for some was a source of bitter conflict. Even worse, in the eyes of some, was the fact that more and more students of many different faith backgrounds were coming to Trinity, and many of these students were black and Hispanic women. Catholicism became a scrim covering deeper attitudes: “We don’t mind diversity,” said one alumna, “But are they Catholic?”
I had to learn how to teach our alumnae about the real meaning of Catholic mission as giving witness to the world, living the Gospel teachings on social justice in service to others regardless of their religious affiliation. In this effort, I had strong support from the Sisters of Notre Dame, whose own charism is action for social justice, the education of women and the poor. It was a Sister of Notre Dame who asked the galvanizing question in a board meeting on strategic planning in the early 1990’s: “Why are we trying so hard to reclaim traditional markets when we have literally tens of thousands of women at our doorstep who need this mission so much?”
Another:
Trinity’s radical choice to embrace the educational needs of the most marginalized people in our city makes this institution’s idea of being Catholic distinctively different from many other colleges and universities today. Because of this radical commitment to educate low income students, we have made other choices that are significant – we don’t participate in “beauty contest” rankings like U.S. News and World Report’s “Best Colleges” surveys, for example, because rankings exemplify wealth and elitism, not service. Disdaining rankings and not engaging in the preening competitiveness that warps the images of so many colleges today is a deliberate choice because we believe that investment should all be focused on our students, not public images.
And a sobering look at the state of Catholic higher education:
Catholic colleges and universities quite uniformly—the University of Notre Dame may be an exception, but even so—are grossly under-funded and under-capitalized. We don’t talk much about this at the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU)—and we should—but this sector is very fragile financially. We are private institutions, which is an increasingly small slice of the higher education universe. We all have remarkably small endowments compared to other private schools. We have aging behemoth buildings from the turn of the century—19th to 20th. We serve a world in which too many “Catholic” parents want something narrow and limiting if they want their children to go to Catholic colleges, and not finding that narrow orthodoxy, they prefer public schools.
We’ve spent entirely too much time in Catholic higher education worrying about defending against interfering bishops when the real threat is the very foundation of the institution financially and in terms of the enrollment markets.
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