Institutional Diversity and Identity in Catholic Education
St. Bonaventure University is a Catholic liberal arts college in upstate New York. Run by the Franciscans, it is perhaps most famous because Thomas Merton once taught there. They deserve to be famous for another piece of history. For a period, they had a core program of studies that was the only one of its kind in the world.
Following in the path of their namesake, they structured their core around the Itinerarium mentis ad deum, the journey of the mind into God. The original Bonaventure conceived of St. Francis’s vision of the Six-Winged Seraph as an account of the mind’s ascent from outward things to inner things toward higher things. In these courses, students were shaped by a Bonaventurian vision such that their education followed this path. In aiming for this educational course, what they offered was different than other Franciscan schools, from other Catholic schools, and from any secular university.
Alas, they gave up on this core and its delightful uniqueness. Students at Bonaventure still take an impressive class on the spirituality of Francis and Clare; but they gave up on a robust vision for a shrunken version of it, and the world became a little less diverse because of it. In what follows, I want to consider the question of Catholic institutional identity and discourse around diversity. Specifically, I argue that too often in giving up on or reducing our institutional identity we undermine actual (intellectual) diversity even while we talk more about diversity.
More Difference but Everything Is the Same
Bland sameness afflicts much of life today. Wherever one turns these days, it is hard to miss some institution proclaiming its commitment to diversity. Businesses, the military, churches, and, especially, universities all claim to be diverse places. Behind these identical claims to difference there is a rush towards sameness, a rush that is particularly acute at the university level. As colleges have become corporatized and monetized, they have also suffered from an intense drive towards institutional uniformity while proclaiming diversity. Every school claims to prioritize STEM (but not really the Math part), has rapidly growing business programs, and sports some kind of slogan about change or progress. They hire the same marketing firms to design the same brochures telling you how unique the school is.
The most important expression of this uniformity is in the elimination, or diminution, of university cores. These used to be the heart of an institution and were the distinguishing mark of the institution. Instead of a distinctive core, many have switched to GenEd requirements. Is there anything more uniform than GenEd? Students receive a scattering of courses in random subjects in a way that ends up looking the same everywhere and never obstructs the central work of producing employees for corporations.
The elimination or diminution of core requirements has overtaken many Catholic colleges too. These should be places where students encounter ideas and traditions of thinking that are different than at other schools. This difference is particularly affirmed and explored through philosophy and theology requirements. On campuses particularized by friars, sisters, and priests, students should bustle into the classroom to find the ever-living theological ideas. What they should find there, even if they grumble about it, they will not find at more prestigious Ivy League schools or less expensive state schools. To attend a university that requires you to probe the five ways, to revive your restless heart, to develop a politics centered on the preferential option for the poor, and to examine the visible signs of invisible realities is to attend a university that is different.
