Religion & Law

Patrick Deneen has a bracing critique, here, of the modern "multiversity."  It's something of a gut-check for people (like me) who have a lot invested in the "Catholic university" project.  Are we on the wrong track entirely?  (HT, again:  Phil Bess).  A bit:

Our current universities no longer undertake what they were designed to achieve, and hence have become largely dysfunctional institutions whose activity - classical liberal education - exists in profound tension with their role - conveyors in the global meritocratic marketplace. It should be recognized that a vast chasm has arisen between what today's colleges and universities are for - the bestowal of credentials - and what they were designed to achieve - a liberal education. The truth is that our colleges and universities are palimpsests - a helpful word that describes a kind of recycled medieval parchment, so rare that it was used and re-used, with old writing often being removed for new and more updated text. Our institutions of higher education are most visibly palimpsests in their buildings: the ancient gothic structures recall a form of education that stressed religious training and vocation, just as the names of the offices of the university - professors (those who "profess faith"), deans (short for "deacon") and provosts (once, a high-ranking church official) - point to the older roles that were once religious and traditional. It is easy to deceive oneself that the universities have not fundamentally changed when one concentrates on the remnants of an eviscerated culture, but the truth is that the old writing has been erased and a new text determines the course of modern education.

Traditionalists and conservatives may decry the decline of liberal education at the heart of the modern university - and its replacement by a Left-wing agenda - but the deeper truth is that liberal education has been more fundamentally and powerfully displaced by demands of global competition. While traditionalists and conservatives might wish to apportion blame to the vast Left-wing conspiracy - particularly those increasingly irrelevant faculty whose postmodernism has become a form of stale institutional orthodoxy - the truth is that the rise of the Left faculty was a response to conditions that were already making liberal education irrelevant, a sort of pathetic and ultimately self-destructive effort to make the humanities relevant and "up to date." These purported radicals - mostly bourgeois middle-class former hippies - were not agents of liberation, but a deeper reflection of the reality of the irrelevance and neglect of the liberal arts in a dawning new age of global competition.

UPDATE:  Archbishop Wuerl on Catholic universities and the Church, here, at "The Catholic Key."