Why should we think that colleges and universities with a distinctive religious identity are anything but a dying breed? The question was dramatized by an influential book, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford, 1994), by historian George Marsden. Marsden retells the story of how Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, Boston University, and hundreds of other colleges and universities abandoned the Protestant Christian character of their early years and became the largely nonsectarian institutions that we know today. It is a fascinating story, which many readers took as grim warning that the remaining religiously affiliated institutions would not resist the same forces. See reviews of Marsden's book by J. A. Appleyard , S.J., Stanley Hauerwas, and Alan Wolfe.
For the most part American Catholic colleges and universities stayed apart from the academic mainstream until after World War II, so it was a plausible question whether Marsden's thesis applied to the world of Catholic higher education. Marsden himself wrote an interesting article in which he reflected on the lessons that Catholic colleges and universities might learn from his study, "What Can Catholic Universities Learn from Protestant Examples?" (in The Challenge and Promise of a Catholic University, University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
Another writer has left no doubt that he thinks Marsden's story has been repeated in Catholic institutions. James T. Burtchaell—in The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities (Eerdmans, 1998)—traverses the same ground but with detailed case studies of particular colleges and universities and their changing relationships to the church denominations with which they were originally identified. Burtchaell's book is of special interest because, unlike Marsden he included Catholic institutions in his study, among them Boston College. The book's title makes clear the author's thesis, that these institutions have blurred the religious identities they once had through links to their sponsoring denominations and have assimilated the values of their secular peers. For reviews of Burtchaell's book, see Neal Coughlan , John Peter Kenney, and Michael Beaty.
On the other hand, there has been no lack of voices with a positive view of the role of religion in the academy. One of these is Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion in American Life at Boston College. In several articles such as "Higher Learning" (Lingua Franca, March-April 1996, 70-77) and "A Welcome Revival for the Academy," (Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 Sept., 1997 pp.B4-B5) he has argued for the distinctive contribution that religiously oriented views of human experience make to the dialogue of viewpoints that the university is home to. Another academic who has written on the gap that results from eliminating religion from our analysis of public issues is Georgetown's Joshua Mitchell ("Of Answers Ruled Out," Academe 82:6, Nov-Dec.1996). And, of course, it could be said that virtually all of the essays that are mentioned in these pages under the heading of "Catholic universities" and "Jesuit universities" implicitly or explicitly advance the claim that there is a positive role for religiously identified colleges and universities in the spectrum of American higher education
There are a number of good books that explore the range of religiously affiliated colleges and universities and the models they offer. One of these is by Robert Benne, Quality With Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001). Another is Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Success in the Twenty-First Century, by Richard T. Hughes and William B. Adrian (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1997).
Evangelical Christian institutions have recently become involved in the debate about the role of faith in the university. Mark Noll stirred up the waters with his book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). Two recent articles by James Turner ("Something to be Reckoned With", Commonweal, 1999) and Alan Wolfe , ("The Opening of the Evangelical Mind", The Atlantic Monthly, 2000) take issue with Noll's views. Another article ("Resisting Secularization", New Oxford Review, 1995) by David Solomon points to the lessons Baylor and Notre Dame can learn from each other about resisting secularization.
For more on the idea of secularization, see The Sacred and The Secular University, Jon H. Roberts and James Turner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).This is a twofold investigation of the sciences and the arts and their relationship to religious traditions in USA higher education. It is important because it challenges how we read the secularization of the academy, offering an alternate view about how and why the secularism of once religiously affiliated schools began and eventually controlled curriculum and culture.
Mark R. Schwehn's Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) is a thought-provoking book about the shifting priorities that have redefined the faculty's role in education over the last hundred years. Forming students in the wisdom of the community, Schwehn argues, has yielded to research and the production of knowledge as the faculty's primary responsibility. Lost is the kind of training in inquiry and civic responsibility grounded in virtues—humility, faith, self-sacrifice, charity—that derive from a religious view of life.