Just Universities

Catholic Social Teaching Confronts Corporatized Higher Education

Gerald J. Beyer

• Editorial: Fordham University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780823289981
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Didattica
• Categoría: Istruzione superiore

Gerald J. Beyer's Just Universities discusses ways that U.S. Catholic institutions of higher education have embodied or failed to embody Catholic social teaching in their campus policies and practices. Beyer argues that the corporatization of the university has infected U.S. higher education with hyper-individualistic models and practices that hinder the ability of Catholic institutions to create an environment imbued with bedrock values and principles of Catholic Social Teaching such as respect for human rights, solidarity, and justice. Beyer problematizes corporatized higher education and shows how it has adversely affected efforts at Catholic schools to promote worker justice on campus; equitable admissions; financial aid; retention policies; diversity and inclusion policies that treat people of color, women, and LGBTQ persons as full community members; just investment; and stewardship of resources and the environment.

1 The Mission of Catholic Higher Education in the Age of the Corporatized University

My students and I were having an excellent semester in my course on economic ethics, or so I thought. The students seemed engaged, coming to each class eagerly prepared to partake in discussion. On one particular afternoon, I had a memorable conversation with a student from the class, who remains one of the most brilliant students I have ever taught (he later obtained a fellowship in a doctoral program in one of the hard sciences at an elite university). He told me that he was enjoying learning about Catholic social teaching on economic life, but he was doubtful of its relevance to “real-world” issues. Ever the candid conversation partner in addition to his intellectual acumen, Peter bluntly stated that he failed to see institutions actually trying to embody the principles of Catholic social teaching, including our own Catholic university.¹ In his view, if it is impossible or impractical for a Catholic university to implement CST, how can we think that secular institutions will do any better? Peter grew up a devout Catholic, but he had clearly grown tired of what he perceived as hypocrisy in church-related institutions. “Do as I say, not what I do” was no longer working for this bright and inquisitive young man.

Catholic institutions of higher learning must demonstrate their own willingness to implement the church’s social teaching, such as its insistence on the human dignity and rights of all, in order to preserve its credibility. Over the years, numerous students have candidly stated that learning about Catholic social teaching is pointless when they fail to see Catholic institutions living up to the tradition’s own ideals. Others have sat in my office and expressed their dissatisfaction, and sometimes despair, over what they perceive to be the university’s reduction of the ideals of Catholic social teaching to mere rhetoric. Students often recognize when food service and janitorial staff are not paid living wages. Many are deeply disturbed by this fact, as well as by the shockingly low wages of adjuncts and the resistance to unions on Catholic campuses, despite the church’s full support of the right to just wages and unions.² Such violations of the church’s own social teachings often challenge the faith of Catholic students. As theologian Johannes Baptist Metz has argued, many young Christians yearn for a church that adopts more “radicalism” in the struggle for social justice and less “doctrinal rigorism.”³ In recent decades, one out of three baptized Catholics has left the church, often citing “hypocrisy” and “other moral failures” as reasons.⁴ While many young Catholics either remain disillusioned with the church or have abandoned it altogether, research also shows that young Catholics want to know that their faith makes a difference in the world.⁵ Dean Hoge concludes in his study of young adult Catholics that “if the relationship between social justice and a specifically Catholic identity were more immediate to young adult Catholics, their perspective might be more concerned with structural approaches, aggregate effects, power and institutional systems—in keeping with contemporary church teaching regarding social justice.”⁶ Thus, confronting injustices on our campuses and illuminating how CST positively influences our institutions is vital to the faith formation of our students. Although this book focuses on Catholic colleges and universities, it also has implications for Christian universities of all types, as young Christians from many denominations often leave their churches in search of more socially progressive communities.⁷

By virtue of their identity and mission, Catholic universities are urged to promote Catholic social teaching and to consider its prescriptions for a more just and peaceful world.⁸ As the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has stated, “if Catholic education and formation fail to communicate our social tradition, they are not fully Catholic.”⁹ The aim is not simply to transmit knowledge, but to help shape the minds and hearts of our students so they can transform the world for the better.¹⁰ In other words, we should seek to aid them in conscience formation. If teaching CST is to have this kind of transformative effect on our students, Catholic educators and institutions must move from talk to action. Modeling the ideals of the Catholic social tradition is even more important than teaching these ideals in the classroom. The late Catholic ethicist William Spohn trenchantly discussed the formation of students’ consciences, maintaining that “we learn that a wise, compassionate, and committed life is possible from the living witnesses whom we know. The ideals that guide conscience do not reside in the starry heavens but in actual people we admire.”¹¹ Rick Malloy, SJ, the university chaplain and former vice president of Mission and Ministry at the University of Scranton, puts the matter this way: “The moral praxis of our Jesuit institutions creates the context within which the practicality of the practice of moral norms and values by our students does, or does not, make sense. One concrete means to form the moral conscience of our students is clear: struggle to make Jesuit schools truly moral institutions.”¹² The same can be said, of course, about all Catholic institutions. If we practice what we preach (and I believe our students are hearing about the values of the Gospel and Catholic social teaching on our campuses), our “students will be more likely to develop as moral persons.” If, on the other hand, we fail to model those values, “we will be subtly communicating to our students that it makes more sense to ‘Look out for Number One,’ ‘Grab All the Gusto You Can’ and forget the poor and oppressed of our world.”¹³ The commodification of higher education has created an environment increasingly dominated by both the “power and the ethic of the marketplace.”¹⁴ If we leave this trend unchecked, we implicitly tell our students that they are engaged in a market transaction, meant for their pleasure and prosperity. In this scenario, it makes good sense to cheat or to plagiarize, as those routes may be the most “efficient” road to “success.”¹⁵

In his 2008 address at the Catholic University of America, Pope Benedict XVI stated that above all, Catholic universities must be a place where young people “encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth (cf. Spe Salvi, no. 4).”¹⁶ This encounter, he argued, must have both “informative” and “performative” dimensions. Fostering this encounter should entail more than just “communicating data.” The life of the campus community must manifest commitment to truth and love.¹⁷ In other words, if we want our Christian students to grow in their faith and in their relationship with Jesus Christ and to become citizens responsible for the common good, we need to show them what the truth, beauty, and justice of the Catholic tradition looks like when incarnated.¹⁸ They will not likely be attracted to the values of the Gospel if they do not see them in reality, or at least perceive that we are trying to embody them to the best of our ability. The individualistic, hedonistic, consumerist, promiscuous, and relativistic culture that characterizes much of college life today will remain embedded unless we show our students another way.¹⁹ As Malloy argues, “students … deeply desire to free themselves and form communities in light of Jesus’s call to serve and love others. They just aren’t being shown how.”²⁰ Malloy adds that every year 1,400 deaths and 70,000 sexual assaults and rapes happen as a result of drinking on college campuses. According to a White House Council on Women and Girls report, our nation’s campuses—where one in five women report being sexually assaulted—put women at risk more than in other environments in our society.²¹

Catholic institutions are generally no better than secular universities at eschewing the “beer and circus” culture that Murray Sperber described almost two decades ago.²² Of course, many of our students admirably exemplify the love and discipleship of Christ in myriad ways, and I have had the privilege of meeting some of them. But there are many more (like me during my earliest student days) who fall into destructive patterns of behavior such as binge drinking or other addictions while struggling to discern their true nature and calling. To add to these problems, many students at our universities see college as a gateway to the world of high-class living. In deciding a course of study and a future career, making a commitment to the common good takes a back seat to individual success, very often conceived in terms of earning a salary in the highest income bracket. Giving in to the desires of the “I want it now” consumer, many colleges and universities create a country club atmosphere, replete with state-of-the-art fitness centers, stadiums, restaurants, and retail shops, rather than a place of learning.²³ As I will discuss throughout this book, Catholic institutions often fall prey to this trap, failing to challenge the status quo in this and in many other ways.

The Corporatized University and the Neoliberal Project

The corporatization of the modern university partly explains why Catholic universities fail to fully impress upon our students that the good life, the life God intends for us, entails loving one another and creating communities where the dignity and rights of all are respected. This point will become more obvious throughout this book. At this juncture, I want to describe the paradigm that informs many decisions at our Catholic colleges and universities today, a paradigm that conflicts with CST.

By corporatization of the university, I mean “an institution that is characterized by processes, decisional criteria, expectations, organizational culture, and operating practices that are taken from, and have their origins in, the modern business corporation.” Corporatized universities are “characterized by the entry of the university into marketplace relationships and by the use of market strategies in university decision-making.”²⁴ These strategies include, among others: responsibility-centered management (forcing individual colleges and departments to be fiscally independent); viewing students as customers and emphasizing “customer satisfaction”; heavy reliance on quantitative metrics to measure performance; hierarchical organizational structures; downsizing or elimination of departments (especially in the humanities) because they fail to generate revenue; the marketing and “branding” of the institution; the increasing number of managers and administrators; and accepting funds from corporations in exchange for influence over research and academic programming.²⁵ According to Marc Bousquet, the corporatized university engages in a bevy of business endeavors (from apparel sales and selecting vendors for books, food services, etc., to copywriting intellectual property) in order to enhance revenues and contain costs. In this way institutions of higher education are “commercialized: they’re inextricably implicated in profoundly capitalist objectives, however ‘nonprofit’ their missions.”²⁶

The c...