Commentary
It has become increasingly common for university presidents to issue position statements regarding current political and social affairs. More often than not, I find myself in disagreement with the substance of these institutional statements.
Why does the University of Dallas not join the crowd, providing alternative points of view in this space? The answer is a matter of principle grounded in our understanding of what a university is and should be.
The work of a university is fundamentally non-political. We are dedicated first and foremost to the acquisition, growth, and transmission of knowledge, first to our students but also to the wider world. We are dedicated, as our mission statement puts it, to wisdom, truth, and virtue as the proper and primary ends of education. I don’t think it right to post position statements as a university president, for our work is in some ways above politics, and, in other ways, prior to politics.
We’re dedicated to wrestling with, among other things, the moral foundations that lead to right judgment in matters of political and civilizational affairs, knowledge essential to forming prudence in these same affairs, knowledge that’s all too often absent from the pronouncements of pundits, politicians, and public figures. The university ought to examine the nature of the polis and raise the question explicitly of how we ought best to live well together, but, like the interlocutors in Plato’s “Republic,” that examination takes place in some manner outside of the current political order.
When presidents turn their universities into something like political think tanks or lobbying groups, or strike performative poses intended to demonstrate their own presumed virtue, those universities become something other than universities and thus lose their focus on their proper work.
This doesn’t mean the goal is to maintain a posture of neutrality for its own sake, but it does pertain to the need to protect the ability of faculty members and students to inquire freely into all matters, both timeless and timely. This is one of the many points that the 1967 Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action, usually simply called the
Chicago Statement, gets right. The Chicago Statement does an excellent job defending the principal aims of a university and explaining why protecting a Socratic commitment to inquiry is so necessary to the achievement of those aims.
I find its conclusion, a seeming paradox, prescient for our current circumstance of overpoliticized college campuses: “Our basic conviction is that a great university can perform greatly for the betterment of society. It should not, therefore, permit itself to be diverted from its mission into playing the role of a second-rate political force or influence.”
Criticisms I have of the Chicago Statement are not so much of the statement itself, but rather an acknowledgment of the difference there is between a great secular university and a great Catholic university. The Chicago Statement, for instance, recognizes there to be rare occasions in which the university’s mission is threatened and it needs to take an institutional stand.
One way to think of the difference in the case of the University of Dallas is that those occasions are less rare, for the mission is more capacious. The University of Dallas, as a Catholic university, and in accordance with the apostolic constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae, endorses academic freedom and recognizes that academic freedom must be circumscribed by the truth and shaped by a commitment to the common good.
Thus, the University of Dallas does indeed maintain fundamental institutional positions regarding the nature of human beings and the moral law. These matters are hardly neutral principles. We stand for the intrinsic dignity of each human life as an imago Dei; justice as the promotion of a “thick” conception of the common good, which includes material, spiritual, moral, and cultural dimensions; the freedom of people to self-govern; religious liberty; universal human rights; solidarity; subsidiarity; and more. I would argue that these principles aren’t peculiarly expressions of Catholic teaching, but, in fact, principles yielded by and long enshrined in Western civilization’s articulation of the natural law.
Though university presidents ought not to be issuing position statements, that doesn’t mean that universities ought not to include the examination of current political and social affairs in their reflection on first principles. This is especially the case when those affairs question or threaten first principles.
The current situation in the Holy Land is a case in point. The various currents of histories and ideas that compose what we often call the West have always coursed between two poles we mark by their chief cities’ names, Athens and Jerusalem. The Great Conversation of Western civilization has, in fact, been a series of arguments about how to combine freedom of inquiry and dedication to democratic principles—the spirit of Athens—with divine revelation, salvation history, and devotion to sacred truth—the spirit of Jerusalem. Logos and credo wed in the West, but like any good marriage, that hardly means there aren’t tensions.
It’s one thing to take a political position on the complex affairs of Israel and Palestine, it’s another to encourage prayer for those who are suffering (as I recently did), and it’s a third to observe when principles derived from that wedding of Athens and Jerusalem have been jettisoned. The Jewish people, those whom St. John Paul II calls our elder brothers and sisters in the faith, have been the victims, yet again, of genocide. Women and children and other non-combatants have been murdered by terrorists both simply for the sake of doing harm and to prove that those threatening a larger genocide really mean it. Glee at these atrocities against the Jewish people has been expressed in pockets throughout the world.
We ought to feel solidarity with the citizens of Israel, with Palestinians, and with the Jewish people. We ought to encourage all who profess an Abrahamic faith, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, to embrace its highest ideals. As a Catholic university, we must always bear witness—sometimes overtly, sometimes quietly—to the essential complementarity of faith and reason, of credo and logos.
The atrocities recently committed against Israeli civilians are a horrifying example of the consequences of detaching the two, as faith severed from reason can become violent fanaticism. Just war theory, an especially relevant fruit of the Western wedding of faith and reason, makes clear that intending directly the deaths of civilians in recompense must never be pursued. Faith and reason must hold. We ought to draw upon both reason and faith when reflecting on these affairs, so distant in some ways, so near in others. It’s evident that logos and credo are under assault in and around one of the two poles signifying the soul of the West, the Holy Land. Thus, the soul of the West is under attack.
One way to protect the Western soul from attack is to strengthen it, and for a university qua university, and especially so in the case of a great Catholic university, that means to do its proper work especially well. That proper work is pressing difficult questions, including those that arise from this and other current political and social affairs; articulating and testing answers in a manner that draws from the deposit of faith; pursuing wisdom, truth, and virtue; and dedicating itself wholeheartedly to its mission.
For this mission is born from the very heart of that institution that has played and continues to play a particularly significant role in Western civilization, the Church.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
