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Edward T. Oakes, S.J.,"A Jesus Just for Me," First Things, March 2006, reviews Garry Wills, What Jesus Meant. Oakes spanks Wills for his"elitist crypto-Anglican sensibility," but in defending the Roman Catholic church, Oakes delivers a telling polemic:
the two great institutional legacies of the Middle Ages to modern civilization are the Catholic Church and the contemporary university, of which the latter is surely the more rigidly hierarchical: With its politically correct orthodoxies, its hegemonically imposed anti-hegemonic discourse, its salary-mongering, its freedom from taxation (how Constantinian!), its speech codes, its teacher evaluations conducted sub secreto pontificio, its heated debate over the minutest matters, its hair-splitting fights over teaching loads and research assistants (tenure as benefice!), the contemporary university makes the Catholic Church look like a Quaker meeting house.
Speaking of medieval legacies, Sark, the smallest of the four major Channel islands, is best known as the smallest independent state in the British Commonwealth. It has just surrendered its other chief distinction by abandoning feudalism for democracy. As Charles Frederick Briggs and Caleb Crain say,"Steamboats Are Ruining Everything." Thanks to the Gleeful Gecko for the tip.
Margaret O'Brien Steinfels,"What's History?" dotCommonweal, 8 March, reports on a remarkably civil discussion at the New School between St. Louis University's Donald Critchlow, the author of Phyllis Shafly and Grassroots Conservatism, and Harvard's Lisa McGirr and Ohio State's Paula Baker. Steinfels contrasts the constructive discussion at the New School with slash and burn reviews of Critchlow's biography by Alan Wolfe for the New Republic and Judith Warner for the New York Times. For Steinfels, the difference raises a series of questions about the difference between reviews at a distance and face-to-face discussion, the expectations of historians and pundits, etc. Critchlow gets a more sympathetic, but thoughtful review from Southern Illinois University's Jonathan Bean at Conservativenet. Thanks to Dave Merkowitz at Merkowitz Mumblings for the tip.
Stephen F. Hayes,"Who'll Let the Docs Out?" Weekly Standard, 20 March, continues the Weekly Standard's persistent fight to persuade the administration to speed the release of documents captured in Afghanistan and Iraq. President Bush says he favors their release; his Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, stands in the way of it happening.
I see, now, that you were accusing Oakes, not me, of being a "mini-Horowitz". This side of the bend, that doesn't change much, because it is only dismissive name-calling.
Barry DeCicco -
3/15/2006
Ralph, I've not accused you of anything; please re-read what I wrote. At this point I'm going to beg off, because you've gone rather far around the bend.
Ralph E. Luker -
3/14/2006
Barry, I'm afraid that you've so bought into academe's political correctness that you've lost the capacity to criticize it. Worse than that, you accuse those of us who retain it of being mini-Horowitzes. You really do need to lay aside the invective and hostility, step back from your own biases, and take a fresh look at the world.
Barry DeCicco -
3/14/2006
Ralph, this is getting surreal!
"Oakes has a point of view."
I agree totally; his point of view has been shown to be falacious. Considering that he's a professor, this says that the seminary that he teaches at is a real horror story, or that he's a liar. I'd bet on the second; there's a strong smell of Freudian projection coming from him.
"It antagonizes folk like yourself who don't share it"
Somebody coming around talking falsehoods frequently antagonizes me, yes.
"I understand that you don't think that "trading wives in" for "newer models" among the undergrads is the equivalent of the church's sex scandal, but at the last place I taught full-time, the faculty member chosen by the board of trustees to be the president of the institution had traded in old wives for new undergraduates 3 times."
This sentence doesn't prove much; that president was sleazy, a word which is too good for child molesters.
Trading in wives for undergrads is sleazy; but it's not child molestation, and it's not covering for known child molestation, and it's not using Churchly prestige and moral authority to cover for child molestation.
Now, perhaps I'm a bit perverted, but the cure for that university president is large alimony payments; I'd have harsher punishment for the child molesters (and their helpers).
Ralph, your 'anti-university bias' isperhaps better described as an 'anti-PC' reflex. You reflexively hop onto any anti-PC bandwagon that passes by. This case looks like a mini-Horowitz.
Ralph E. Luker -
3/14/2006
Me? "Anti-university bias?" You've _got_ to be kidding! Oakes has a point of view. It antagonizes folk like yourself who don't share it. All the more reason you should be exposed to it. I understand that you don't think that "trading wives in" for "newer models" among the undergrads is the equivalent of the church's sex scandal, but at the last place I taught full-time, the faculty member chosen by the board of trustees to be the president of the institution had traded in old wives for new undergraduates 3 times.
Barry DeCicco -
3/14/2006
Ralph, your anti-university bias is showing again. Oakes is so full of it that his eyballs are brown:
1) Hierarchical - the Catholic church has far more powers to punish/restrict/expel dissident priests, brothers and sisters than a university does for tenured faculty.
*And* the basic structure of the Catholic Church is hierarchical; the teachings are propagated downwards, from tradition, pope, college of cardinals downward. Priests and laity don't decide on the doctring (merely obedience). The equivalent in the universities would be if a very small number of senior professors in each field were to define doctrine, and any research questioning that doctrine was considered null and void.
2) Sex scandals - the equivalent to the child abuse scandals is not professors divorcing their wives for 'newer models', it would be if professors were *raping* students. And if, once discovered, the presidents of the universities repeatedly persuaded the victims and families to keep quiet, while transferring the professors to another institutions. *And*, once discovered, lying repeatedly and blaming the victims. With misconduct going to the extent of paying for psychiatric treatment for the victims (as a means of restitution), and then insisting that the university's attorneys had the right to access those records, because the university paid for the treatment.
Other of Oakes' criticisms:
"its speech codes," Covered above.
"its teacher evaluations conducted sub secreto pontificio,"
How public is the inner workings of the Vatican? Or of J. Random Bishop?
"its heated debate over the minutest matters, its hair-splitting fights over teaching loads and research assistants (tenure as benefice!),... "
I don't even need to comment, do I?
Robert KC Johnson -
3/13/2006
This isn't a comparison that would have immediately come to mind, but I agree with Ralph that the polemic is telling: I'd be hard pressed to argue that the contemporary academy wasn't characterized by "politically correct orthodoxies" or "hegemonically imposed anti-hegemonic discourse" or "speech codes, its teacher evaluations conducted sub secreto pontificio, its heated debate over the minutest matters, its hair-splitting fights over teaching loads and research assistants (tenure as benefice!)."
On the RA issue--or a similar case in which I was involved, the dispositions fight--sure, as Oscar points out, the status quo qithin the academy eventually bent. But only after the threat of litigation and negative publicity (the RA case) or the threat of congressional intervention and negative publicity (dispositions). There's no evidence that absent such outside pressure, the internal workings of the academy would have produced any change. The Church does seem to operate similarly in this respect.
Ralph E. Luker -
3/13/2006
As I suggested, I don't know that there's been any more of a breakdown in the church's self-policing of its priests than there has been in school districts' self-policing of their faculty members. I'm not sure what "facts" he has wrong. But, for most of the issues outlined in the polemic, its "telling" quality can't be settled on the basis of "facts." His position reflects a point of view. It's one that you don't share, but you can't destroy it with "facts." What "facts" would demolish his analogy between tenure and a benefice? What "facts" would dispute salary mongering or hair-splitting disputes among academics about teaching loads and research assistants?
Oscar Chamberlain -
3/13/2006
At the risk of being called hair splitting, the RA restriction did not restrict "What RA's think in their own room." The rule, mistakenly, equated their room with an office because it is often where RA's counselled people and because it was part of their compensation. The rule did have a secularist bias, as it did not incorporate a ban on secular causes that might be equally controversial and fervent.
As I have said repeatedly, that rule was wrong. And, more the point, that rule is gone.
As to whether I have shown a secularist bias, well, I don't know. Is it secularist to point out that the Catholic church had a serious breakdown in protecting children from deviant priests? Is it secularist to point out that the Catholic church is expanding its policing of its own educational institutions?
In short, is it inherently secularist to state that the polemic--or at least the section you quoted--fails to make its point because it is factually incorrect in several of the comparisons it makes?
Ralph E. Luker -
3/13/2006
Oscar, I suspect that you think the polemic I cited "sheds no light" because of your secularist bias, right? Did it immediately occur to you that Wisconsin's restriction on what RA's could study and think in their own rooms was a violation of elementary values for a liberal arts education? The polemic I cited is valuable precisely because it stands the secularist assumptions of many academics on their heads and forces us to think more self-critically.
Oscar Chamberlain -
3/13/2006
Ralph,
This is degenerating pretty fast/ We could keep kicking this comparison back and forth but maybe we should cut from the comparison to the underlying debate.
American higher education has flaws. (I am an adjunct who is a trailing spouse to a full professor, so I get to see and experience a lot of the good and the bad.} But I think that, overall, for all its flaws it is a decent system and that many people get a good education from it, whether they are in regional campuses or the flagship institutions.
It sometimes seems to me that you think it is more bad than good. Maybe I am wrong; maybe you simply think it more important to highlight the flaws in order to push reform amd make it better. I can honor that, even if we sometimes disagree on what is right or wrong.
But the sort of polemic that you quoted sheds no light. It is so over the top that the bit of truth within it is lost in the vituperation. Moreover, it is the sort of sound bite beloved of those critics who seem to hate the good in the academic world as just as much as they hate what is wrong. And you, a rightfully respected scholar, when you quote favorably polemics like that, give strength to the wreckers as well as to the reformers.
And that, now that I think about it, is why I answered the polemic with a polemic.
Ralph E. Luker -
3/13/2006
I see: age makes the difference and makes it o.k. with college students. But you're saved by the fact that college faculty have relatively little contact with kids under 18. If you're looking for equivalencies, we're getting about one to three charges of sexual exploitation of elementary and high school students a week by public school teachers in metropolitan Atlanta. It makes the priests of Boston look like saints.
Oscar Chamberlain -
3/13/2006
Where to begin Ralph.
1. I don't think that for a moment in real life that you would equate the sexual abuse of middle school age adolescents with consensual relationships in which the younger party is 18 or over. So why do you equate them here?
2. The RA rule at my institute was wrong. It was also publicly debated and has now been eliminated, granted with the assistance of the state legislature. It's not education's finest hour, but it is also a reminder that public universities are not self-contained entities that need not answer to individuals. Compared to private businesses and religious institutions, public universities are easier to influence by students and by outside groups.
Now, by "easier", I do not mean that they are always sufficiently easy to influence or sufficiently open. But, this polemic was a comparison, and by comparison to the Catholic church and private businesses, public universities are open.
Jon Demarest Rudd -
3/12/2006
I wonder how many other contemporary American institutions could stand comparison with the medieval church?
The front offices of major corporations, for example?
Ralph E. Luker -
3/12/2006
Oscar, I pretty much entirely disagree with you on this. As for your example #1, why do you restrict this to institutional presidents? Think faculty members and think that there is no single entity against which aggrieved parties could bring a class action lawsuit. The evidence can only be anecdotal, but I'll never forget the fact that three department chairmen at one of my former institutions left wives of 10, 20, and 30 years for members of the Class of 1979. My sense was that tenured males, for the most part, regarded female students as potential plunder.
As for your points #2 & #3, do you teach at branches of the University of Wisconsin? Have you just had to withdraw an administrative order about what ideas residential advisors could consider with others in the privacy of their rooms?
Oscar Chamberlain -
3/12/2006
OK, there are problems in academia. We know that. I even concede one point, which is the far-too-frequent descent into hairslpitting. But the rest of this is garbage.
Example 1, for the polemic. University presidents generally could not have protected sex offending priests by transferring them from university to university. Public universities in particular are not nearly as private as the Church is, and they have had no scandal that remotely resembles the Church's institutional betrayal of its young people.
Example 2, somewhat less polemical. As has been noted in many places lately, the Church has been expanding its control over its educational institutions. They are becoming more orthodox and less free with each passing day.
Example 3, for a more moderate discussion, Has anyone actually made a rigorous comparison between universities, religious groups, and the private sector to see which allow, on balance, the freest play of ideas? I suspect that, with occasional exceptions, public universities would come out on top.
