So my tweet in response to renowned sociologist Christian Smith’s piece in First Things on why he’s “done with Notre Dame” got hella hits (at least way more than I usually get). So I thought I’d expand on it here.
In his spicy “goodbye letter,” Smith touched on several patterns that I’ve been noticing for quite some time in my experience within Catholic higher education—namely at my alma mater: the shift of the Catholic university from a mission-minded institution dedicated to building community and forming students’ minds and souls to a bureaucratic corporation moving commodities (students) along an assembly line in order to reach their bottom line.
This tends to leads admins to push out competent, caring, and devout professors who treat their work as a vocation and who are committed to building up a sense of community within the institution, in order to bring in people with “credentials.” In the case of theology departments, professors with real convictions and scholarly acumen are replaced with theologians well-versed in the latest lingo and fads [postcolonial, womanyst, queer, etc theology] who more often than not are careerists that care more about building up their resume than serving their students/school community, or about trying to actually be a competent scholar.
I entered Fordham in 2010 as a lost puppy, weary of the secular [neolib] platitudes I had been fed my whole life, longing for something more substantial than the flimsy exhortations to “just be myself!” and to “make the world a better place.” Is anything true, meaningful, lasting in this world, I wondered? Does anything really have a point? Why go through the trouble of going to college, getting a good-paying job, and living a nice comfortable life if we’re all just gonna die in the end?