Getting into Harvard

Commonweal, April 9, 2004 by Daniel M. Murtaugh

Catholic Education in Protestant America

The Jesuits and Harvard in the Age of the University

Kathleen A. Mahoney

Johns Hopkins University Press, $42.95,347 pp.

In 1893 the Harvard Law School drew up a preliminary list of sixty-nine colleges whose graduates would be eligible for "regular" admission. Students from schools not on the list were admitted on a "special" basis. Many of these would have to earn a second AB from Harvard (starting as sophomores or juniors), and all would face exams and stringent GPA requirements not imposed on regular students.

The favored list included no Catholic colleges. This drew protests from the diocesan Boston Pilot and from the president of Georgetown University. In response to the latter, Harvard's President Charles Eliot saw to it that that Georgetown, the College of the Holy Cross, and Boston College were among forty-four schools added to the final list. Four years later, however, Holy Cross and Boston College were dropped. Then, in 1899, Eliot quite gratuitously added insult to injury when, at the end of an article on educational reform in the Atlantic Monthly, he said the Jesuits and Moslems prescribed an unchanging "ecclesiastical" mode of education absurdly cut off from the "immense deepening and expanding of human knowledge in the nineteenth century, and the increasing sense of the individual's gifts and will power."

And so a battle was joined, one that Kathleen A. Mahoney argues brought to a focus the conflict between the educational values of an immigrant Catholicism and a nativist Protestantism. The values were, on both sides, largely unexamined and, as a result, produced many ironies when they were called into explicit conflict. Mahoney's account is particularly good at exposing these ironies in a way that is at once sympathetic and unsparing.

The well-known American nativist hostility to Catholics assumed a particular virulence when directed toward the Jesuits. They were seen as the Special Forces of the papacy in its campaign against the Protestantism that was the root stock of America. Their subtlety and guile, their deployment of equivocation and the broad mental reservation, were popularly opposed to the open and generous honesty of the American patriot and seen to cast a sinister shadow in the New World. Who could believe, one patriot asked a midcentury Harvard audience, "that a Catholic college" (my alma mater Holy Cross) would "be established in the heart of Massachusetts" where its entrenchment on a hilltop over-looking Worcester would provoke "amazement" among the "fathers of New England if they could revisit these scenes"?

Eliot's essay drew a rebuttal from Timothy Brosnahan, SJ, president of Boston College (1894-98), which won and deserved a wide readership. Mahoney includes it in an appendix, and its steely irony and brisk command of the reductio ad absurdum are devastating. Very little in Eliot's argument is left standing, and one notes that he might have been spared this withering blast if he could only have resisted the urge to take a cheap shot at the Jesuits.

Brosnahan's rhetorical success, however, could not disguise the fact that the Jesuits had a real problem in America. Mahoney traces the problem to an unresolved conflict between the Jesuits' Ratio Studiorum (1599) and Constitutions (1552). The first set forth a "pedagogical modus operandi ... applied to a curriculum that mixed elements of Renaissance humanism with aspects of medieval scholasticism; put another way, it mixed the science of man with the science of God." Unfortunately, the sciences of man and of God had no slots for biology, physics, geology, or anthropology--all those sciences that flourished in the nineteenth century. This rendered the Ratio unresponsive to the mandate of the Constitutions, which required the Jesuits to adapt their program of studies to the "times, places, and persons" encountered in their worldwide mission.

Mahoney organizes the greater part of her account of Jesuit obsolescence around these three terms from the Constitutions (with the order of the last two reversed). Her procedure is generally successful, though she does not always avert an inherent risk: the reader can be disoriented when ground already covered under the aspect of "times" is retraversed under that of "persons" or "places." The Jesuits' problem of the "times" was the emergence of the modern research university as the successor to the (usually sectarian) college. This new exemplar of higher education dispensed the credentials for entry into the upper reaches of an expanding economy. The Jesuits' appeal to the classical tradition seemed irrelevant in an era committed to the modern. More troubling was the Jesuits' lack of academic grounding in the new disciplines.

The problem of "persons" was that when leaders like Brosnahan looked back over their shoulders they found their troops had mostly defected to Harvard and Yale and the great state universities of the Midwest. A new capitalist class beckoned these sons of Irish immigrants to the next step beyond lace curtains, and it made its preference in college degrees clear. As the century turned, Harvard was, ironically, the nation's largest Catholic institute of higher learning, if one measured this by enrollment.