Bishops' Plan Worries Many
By Wendi Maloney
In November the National Conference of Catholic Bishops approved, by a vote of 223 to 31, guidelines for implementing the Vatican document Ex Corde Ecclesiae in the nation’s Catholic colleges and universities. The document, issued by the pope in 1990, addresses the relationship of Catholic institutions of higher learning to the Holy See.
At its fall meeting a week before the vote, the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure formulated a statement urging the bishops not to adopt the proposed guidelines because of the restraints they would place on academic freedom and institutional self-government.
The guidelines represent a third attempt by the bishops to implement Ex Corde Ecclesiae in the United States. A first set of draft guidelines received widespread criticism on Catholic campuses for failing to take into account the institutional autonomy characteristic of American colleges and universities. The bishops adopted a revision of that draft in 1995, but the Vatican rejected it.
The new guidelines, which will now go to Rome in quest of approval, require theology professors on campuses affiliated with the church to secure a mandate from local bishops in order to teach. They also call on Catholic institutions to fill most of their vacancies with Catholics and urge college and university presidents to take an oath of fidelity to the church upon assuming office.
Committee A, in its statement, underscores threats to academic freedom that arise from granting local bishops veto power over faculty appointments. Such a policy, the statement argues, "places the judgment of academic speech in nonacademic hands to be judged by nonacademic standards" and thus reflects "a fundamental misunderstanding of the collegial nature of American higher education."
The statement further cautions that requiring Catholic institutions to fill most of their vacancies with Catholics "may unduly limit the faculty’s ability to exercise its best professional judgment in the vital areas of faculty selection, potentially disabling it from selecting a faculty of the highest academic quality."
Commenting on the vote, James Read, a political scientist who heads the AAUP chapter at the College of Saint Benedict, remarked, "I have great concerns about the bishops’ decision. I hope the guidelines will be implemented in a way that does not make any radical change in the tradition of academic freedom and faculty governance at Catholic institutions."
In the months before the guidelines’ adoption, some faculty members at Catholic institutions doubted that many Catholic colleges and universities would actually adhere to them. "They just can’t afford to go along with the bishops’ plan; there is too much at stake," Rodger Van Allen, a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, told Academe. James M. Bergquist, a colleague of Van Allen’s in Villanova’s history department, agrees. "If the plan comes to pass, it’s likely that many Catholic institutions will have to declare themselves structurally independent of the church. They will say they follow the Catholic tradition but are independent," Bergquist predicts.—WM
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