Renewing Catholic higher education

The need to engage Third World socialism

     Seeking to spread the word about my last commentary of July 14, “On the failure of American Catholicism: Can Catholic higher education renew?”, I submitted a summary and link to the moderators of the Catholic Social Thought, Politics, and the Public Square Facebook group.  Upon posting my summary, the administrator of the group, Timothy Kirchoff, replied with the following comments.

Your analysis is well-reasoned, and I can't argue that Notre Dame, along with other modern secular universities, has failed to offer a sufficient critique of our existing systems. I would also admit that, from my perspective as a Notre Dame grad who has had several encounters with the Sycamore Trust, I can't say your impression of them is unfair, though they would probably just say that Notre Dame's commitment to poverty-related initiatives is not under threat.

     At least some note should be made that one reason universities cannot offer a good critique of our systems is that they invariably profit from them: producing successful and well-connected alumni to participate in a system is practically incompatible with producing alumni who will work to radically upend it, and those graduates who do come out willing to upend the world are the least likely to be in a position to do so. Similarly, profiting off of the ever-increasing price of higher education is not compatible with critiquing the high costs of student loans, and investing/growing the endowment entails participating in massive amounts of, well, investment, which means participating in the stock market and all of its... questionable ethics. In addition, some Catholic universities have come under pressure for their treatment of adjunct professors, and for fighting against their attempts to unionize, to which some adjuncts have pointed toward the Church's pro-union tradition.

     But in the defense of Notre Dame (and to some degree, the Sycamore trust) there is a lot of crossover and cross-pollination among the students engaged in the Center for Social Concerns and the groups that are connected to the Catholic mission: the Institute for Church Life and the Center for Ethics and Culture are housed in the same small building as the Center for Social Concerns. In addition, many professors were attracted to the school by some aspect of its Catholic mission, which includes serving the poor in some cases and the kind of Catholicism represented by the Sycamore Trust in others- and in some cases, both. In addition, the focus on undergraduate teaching- and the limited attempts to attract Catholic professors- has, to my understanding, kept Notre Dame from falling into the exploitation of adjuncts that occurs in other universities.

     With respect to the "concrete steps" that Dugan did not enumerate, I may have a little more insight to offer. My senior project at Notre Dame centered on the ways in which professors used the Catholic social tradition in their teaching, research, and interaction with colleagues, so I had conversations (by email or in person) with around 50 professors of different disciplines and different interpretations of the Church's social tradition. The professors who integrated these ideas often did so on their own initiative, with relatively little cross-collaboration or institutional support. The pro-life professors all knew each other enough to recommend other people to speak to about my project, but that doesn't mean that they worked together to see a complete and cohesive picture of the Church's potential critique of modernity, and even the academic conferences which pulled them together would reflect on culture war far more often than class war.

     The most notable instance of institutional support was a program that discontinued around the time of my matriculation in which professors would be allowed to teach one fewer course in a semester in order to collaborate with another professor in studying some aspect of the Catholic tradition, and a course I took as a freshman about just war theory and Catholic diplomacy was a direct result of a political science professor taking advantage of that program. The university can't just recruit people with Catholic politics and pedigrees, it needs to actively incentivize and encourage its existing faculty - Catholic or not- to study the Church's theological and social tradition, and to then integrate those insights into their work. Not every professor I ended up interviewing was Catholic, and those who weren't were attracted to the university because they understood there to be a social justice element of Catholicism- and the university could do more to offer them resources.

     I replied to Kirchoff as follows.

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I am in agreement that many professors and students have a personal commitment to the Church's social teaching (I was among them once upon a time), and that there have been some institutional initiatives. I think the key question now is: Can they be mobilized for fundamental structural and systemic change in the context of the current multidimensional crisis of the world?

      In today’s commentary, I offer my reflections on the question I presented to Kirchoff.  Can the many professors and students committed to the social teachings of the Church organize themselves for systemic change in Catholic higher education, so that it can effectively and morally respond to the current world crisis?  I begin with a review of the contemporary world crisis, whose characteristics are obscured by the prevailing Western viewpoint.

Contemporary dynamics of the world

     The situation of the nation and the world is fundamentally different from the post-World War II period of 1945 to the 1970s.  Today, the world situation is defined by what many Third World leaders and intellectuals call a multidimensional crisis; and the nation has become what many call a decadent imperialist power whose aggressive conduct exacerbates the multidimensional crisis of the world.  It seems to me that Catholic social teachings, with their calls for integrated analysis of serious world problems from a moral point of view with a priority for social justice, provide the necessary guidance in response to the world and national situation.  Indeed, the emergence of world multidimensional crisis combined with American decadence makes possible a new stage in the evolution of Catholic higher education, in which the many persons committed to the social teachings of the Church can move forward from personal witness to systemic change with respect to the practices and priorities of Catholic higher education, particularly with respect to issues of social justice in the world.

     When I refer to the decadence of the nation, I refer not only to the fact that it has lost its moral bearings, but also to the fact that its think tanks, politicians, social reformers, journalists, academics, and activists possess a framework of assumptions and beliefs that distorts their understanding of the world and national situation, preventing them of grasping the necessary steps for creating political stability, for expanding productivity, and for a just distribution of power, resources, goods, and services.  A nation or society in decadence not only is in decline, but it also lacks the capacity to understand the reasons and to stop the decline. 

     In the United States today, concerned citizens have the duty to seek to understand the basic structures and dynamics of the world-system and to develop the capacity to interpret the policies the USA in world-systemic context.  To attain this capacity, we must liberate ourselves from the myopic viewpoint of the North—which is blind to surviving colonial structures—through sustained encounter with the exceptional revolutionary leaders and the anti-imperialist social movements of the Third World, enabling the personal discovery of relevant questions and issues that previously were beyond consciousness.

     The recent emergence of social justice warriors of the Radical Left is a sign of the decadence of the nation.  They adopt a radical subjectivism, completely contrary to the premises of the constructive revolutions of the modern world.  They believe that it is a question of shaming, discrediting, cancelling, and erasing individuals that they identify as blameworthy, on the basis of superficial considerations.  The social justice warriors understand neither the historical and contemporary sources of the current national and world situation nor the structural transformations necessary for creating a more just, politically stable, sustainable, and prosperous world-system.

     The decadence of the nation first took root in the period 1865 to 1914, when the Native American tribes and nations west of the Mississippi were conquered, expanding the previous forced relocation of the eastern nations; when industry and banking became concentrated through unethical and unfair competition; when Jim Crow segregation emerged to undermine full emancipation from slavery; and when the USA launched a long-term imperialist project against the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.  During the period, however, such anti-democratic forces and dynamics were challenged by an alternative more democratic vision, represented by the populist and anti-Trust movement, the 1913 economic package of the Woodrow Wilson administration, and the movements for the full rights of blacks and women.  Subsequently, the two world wars stimulated an emphasis on production related to war, which cast aside the Wilson economic program and enabled the consolidation of power by the large corporations, forming what C. W. Mills called “the power elite.”

     Thus, the stage was set for the decisive moment, the period of 1945 to 1948, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when the nation would have to decide between the historic promise of democracy and its imperialist dynamic.  Would the people retake control of the political process and the institutions of the nation?  Would the nation reign in the corporations and turn to a permanent peacetime economy, based on the promotion of the economic development of the new nations moving toward independence, as FDR had suggested and as the colonized peoples were proposing?  Would the nation turn to the protection of black rights, in accordance with the proposals of the dynamically expanding African-American movement?  Would the nation turn to support for the socioeconomic development of indigenous nations, as the American Indian Movement would soon propose?

     In that decisive hour, the nation turned to a permanent war economy, the militarization of American society, and the construction of new forms of intervention in the affairs of nations.  The Cold War ideological construction justified this turn through the creation of communist phantoms everywhere, thus justifying military presence all over the planet.  In distorting the actual conditions of the world, and in denigrating the narratives of the world’s peoples, the Cold War ideology condemned the American people to ignorance of the world.  The foundations for our current decadence were laid, when American power was at its height.

     Aside from its jingoistic nationalism and moral illegitimacy, the Cold War ideology was flawed by the fact that the colonial world order, in both its colonial and neocolonial forms, was itself unsustainable.  The colonial world order was based on the false premise that there would always be new lands and peoples to conquer and exploit.  But during the course of the twentieth century, the world-system was reaching and overextending its geographical and ecological limits.  To this must be added an important fact with respect to human nature, namely, the colonized peoples were not going to accept the fate of powerlessness, underdevelopment, and impoverishment assigned to them by the world powers; they were going to resist, and they were going to develop sustained anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of resistance, with a force capable of taking political power in a number of states.  By ignoring these fundamental facts, the world-system was headed for sustained structural crisis.

     The post-World War II imperialist turn shaped the nation’s response to the movements for indigenous and black rights.  Significant concessions were made, creating a fundamentally different reality with respect to race.  However, the changes primarily related to individual rights, with limited attention to community development, such that it was the middle class that primarily benefited from the reforms.  This approach was consistent with the prevailing tendencies in the emerging neocolonial world order.

     The Vietnam War was a tragic sign of the fundamental contradictions of the world-system.  It demonstrated that the colonized peoples were capable of creative military strategies adapted to their disadvantage with respect to military power, and that the people were morally and politically prepared to heroic sacrifice to attain their sovereignty.  And it demonstrated that the imperialist powers could not grasp the situation, and they would overextend themselves seeking to maintain a world domination that could not ultimately be sustained. 

     The world economic crisis of the 1970s—characterized by both stagnation and high inflation—further pointed to the unsustainability of the world order.  The global economic “stagflation” coincided with the united political action of the colonized states, whose proposal for a New International Economic Order was supported by the socialist bloc states of Eastern Europe and was passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1974.  But the Western power elites could not see the need for fundamental structural change in the world-system.

     In their ignorance, confusion, and anxiety, the powerful Western nations turned to aggressive war against the states and peoples of the world, which occurred in three stages.  The first was the neoliberal economic project, launched in 1980.  It deprived Third World states of the limited sovereignty that they had attained, and it obligated them to eliminate the limited protections of the needs of their peoples that they had implemented.  The global elite defended this project with the counterfactual claim that extensive state involvement in the economy had caused the economic problems that the nations and the world confronted, ignoring the fundamental fact that the world-system had reached its geographical limits and could no longer expand in the same manner as the previous four centuries.

      The second stage was the launching of wars of aggression to bring states in line with the imperialist agenda.  It was justified as a War on Terrorism, given credibility by the shameful attack on the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001.  There has emerged what critics of the Left and Right have called “endless wars,” indicated by the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

      The third stage was initiated in 2014, involving what Third World anti-imperialist leaders and intellectuals have called “unconventional war,” which involves multidimensional actions against targeted nations, including: the imposition of economic sanctions; the application of commercial and financial restrictions against third nations that have economic relations with a targeted nation; the dissemination of ideological distortions concerning the targeted nation, combined with false depictions of a given crisis situation; and the ever-present threat of military force.  The goal of these strategies is regime change, or if such does not occur, the creation of a situation of ungovernability that would establish justification for direct military intervention.  The targeted nations have included Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Syria, Iran, and Russia (via Ukraine).  The tactics of unconventional war have been applied against China, without their being a full-scale unconventional war against the Asian giant.

       There are signs that the unconventional war is backfiring.  The targeted nations, although suffering severe economic hardships, have for the most part been able to resist with their political stability intact.  And the unconventional war has further delegitimated the United States and the Western European powers in the eyes of the world, especially in the Third World.  It has accelerated the process of Third World unity in opposition to the bullying of the world powers.

      The process of Third World unity in pursuit of the true sovereignty of their states dates back to 1955, when leaders of newly independent nations of Africa and Asia met in Bandung, Indonesia.  The principles formulated at Bandung were carried forward with the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1961; with the above-mentioned adoption in 1974 by the UN General Assembly of a declaration calling for the creation of a New International Economic Order; and with Cuba’s assumption of the presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement from 1979 to 1982.  Subsequently, the implementation of the neoliberal project provoked confusion and division in the Third World.  However, its spirit of resistance has been renewed in the first decades of the twenty-first century, with the 2006 Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana marking a return to the classic proposals of the Third World project.  The period has been characterized by the creation of a new political reality in Latin America, in which alternative parties formed by socialists and progressives have taken political power through electoral processes in several states; and by China’s increasing emphasis on a foreign policy of win-win cooperation with the nations of the South, greatly increasing the capacity of the Third World nations to implement their vision of South-South cooperation in the creation of an alternative, more just world order.  The process has accelerated during the last couple of years, with the intensification of East Asian integration; the turn of the Arab states toward unity and toward greater relations with China and the global South; and the movement of the African states toward greater unity.

The Third World project lives

Can professors and students in Catholic colleges and universities turn to systemic change?

      Although the unconventional war of the past decade may be backfiring and thus may not be able to accomplish its goals, it nonetheless places humanity at much greater risk by increasing possibilities: for sustained worldwide political instability, in which local violent gangs increasingly fill space created by deteriorating political structures; for sustained and deep global economic crisis; and for ecological and nuclear holocausts.  Some say that the survival of the human species is at stake, although a stage of barbarism is also possible.

      In this scenario that are important moral voices in the world.  The most important is the voice of real socialism in the Third World, and especially the communist parties of China and Cuba, held in high regard throughout the Third World.  The socialist and progressive states and parties understand and explain the sources of the present collapse of civilization, and they are constructing in theory and practice an alternative world order.  In addition, Shiite Islamic theology is important in formulating the need to construct a more just world rooted in divine revelation, with the vision implemented in practice in the Islamic Republic of Iran ( see “The Islamic concept of a just social system: Islam and the future stage of communism,” March 31, 2023; “Ayatollah Ebrahim Raisi in Latin America:  Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba forge a counterhegemonic alliance,” June 16, 2023).  Furthermore, the social teachings of the Catholic Church, articulated in the encyclicals of the popes in recent decades, are an important and influential critique of the existing trends of the world order, calling for respect for the sovereignty of the poor nations and attention to the needs and just aspirations of the poor.

     In the United States, there is very little consciousness of Third World socialism and Shiite Islam.  However, in Catholic higher education, as Timothy Kirchoff points out, there are many faculty and students with commitment to the social teachings of the Church.  They provide fertile ground for the elevation of the consciousness of the people.

     If we reflect on the question on the basis of engagement with the world, we see that in Cuba and in other nations constructing socialism, the transformation of higher education was made possible by the taking of political power.  The revolution in power was able to support the projects and goals of socialist and progressive professors, freeing them to realize their potential.  In contrast, in the United States, where the corporate elite and their political representatives rule, it would be very difficult to transform and liberate higher education to fulfill its true mission of seeking the truth and the right.  In his reply, Kirchoff has pointed out such structural limitations with respect to Catholic higher education.

     For this reason, I have been orientated in my writing to proposing an alternative political party or political movement that would seek the taking of political power through an electoral process, based in a socialist/progressive/conservative people’s alliance that would be committed to social justice at home and abroad, and which would be respectful of the American Constitution and would be in tune with the religious and spiritual values of the American people.  See, for example, “Socialism with US characteristics: Based in the founding principles of the American Republic,” January 3, 2023; and “The possible taking of power by the people: Possibilities for the USA and the global North,” February 14, 2023. 

      Nevertheless, there are significant possibilities for reforming Catholic higher education in the United States in the context of bourgeois rule.  This possibility exists because of the historic guidance of the Church on social questions, which always has been present in partially shaping the concrete reality of Catholic colleges and universities, as Kirchoff has noted.  In reflecting on the necessary responses to the current multidimensional crisis, professors and students at Catholic colleges and universities have the social teachings of the Church as a valuable resource for understanding and as a source possessing moral authority, which could be central for forging a structural change in the priorities and practices in Catholic higher education, forged in response to the multidimensional crisis of the world and fall of the nation into decadence.  The unprecedented urgency of the current world situation, occurring at a time in which the desire of Catholics and white ethnics for acceptance by American society is no longer the powerful force that it once was, could stimulate a movement in Catholic higher education toward a fulfillment of its mission as Catholic higher education.

     But I offer a caveat.  The guidance of the Church is oriented to general principles.  She calls professors and students to analyses of the serious contemporary problems, especially poverty and inequality in the nation and the world.  But the analyses must be done by the professors and students, leading to the formulation of solutions.  And in the case of the United States, the prevailing tendency is to formulate understandings of the basis of the American experience, and not to encounter the Third World anti-imperialist movements in the quest for understanding.  This tendency must be overcome, as I maintain above, in order to broaden and deepen understanding.  There must be not only commitment to the creation of a just world and to the social teachings of the Church, but also to a simultaneous engagement of Third World anti-imperialist and socialist movements in the quest for understanding.

What practical steps can be taken? 

     What specifically can we do?  I am not sure.  Perhaps it would be possible to form a nationwide committee that would review the current work of the various centers and institutions in Catholic colleges and universities, as the basis for making specific recommendations with respect to deepening and expanding in practice the presence of the Church’s social teachings in Catholic higher education, taking witness of the faith beyond the personal to the systemic.

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