The Faculty Subculture:
Maturation and Reevaluation

At the time of the strike, many of the clerics in the Church leadership had fair reason to believe that many, if not most, of the faculty implicitly accepted the values of the ecclesial subculture. A survey of the university’s “official” publications, including The Catholic University of America Bulletin, American Ecclesiastical Review, and the Catholic Educational Review, indicates that the editorial policies of these publications were framed by this ideology at least from 1960 to 1966. The contrast with other independent Catholic journals like Commonweal, America, and Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) is striking. As the latter publications turned inward after 1963, with an increasing number of articles focused on changing definitions of Catholicism and the means of reducing the hierarchical structure of Church authority, the university’s publications maintained their outward focus on the problems of modernity and looked inward only to comment on the guiding value of paternal leadership.[18]

While there was no explicit requirement that the faculty be Catholic, religious affiliation and statutory provisions barring faculty from offending against Catholic doctrine produced a faculty that was almost entirely Catholic. And almost one-third of the faculty between 1964 and 1967 were members of the clergy.[19]

More directly, the exercise of ecclesial authority to defend Catholic dogma had been going on for years with little dissent from the faculty. In 1962, McDonald forced the canon law department to refrain from offering any suggestions for revision to the Council.[20] A year later, McDonald cancelled a lecture series by prominent advisors to the Council, including John Courtney Murray and Hans Kung, who were considered theological liberals. Only three faculties (graduate arts and sciences, theology, and canon law) offered written protests of this action, even though the university was being sharply criticized nationwide in the press.[21] Likewise, “members of the biology department just tucked in their tails and didn’t pursue the issue” when McDonald cancelled their symposium on the centennial of Darwin’s Origin of the Species, which the administration feared “could be viewed as a Church position on evolution.”[22]

Rev. Robert E. Trisco in 1967, newly-appointed Academic Vice Rector

Despite these kinds of concessions, the faculty came to the university with the expectation that it allowed the greatest freedom in a Catholic context. Biology professor Roland Nardone, physics professor James Brennan, church history professors John Tracy Ellis and Robert Trisco, and theology professors Charles E. Curran and Carl J. Peter all said they believed Catholic University would allow greater openness of research, in a less paternal atmosphere than most of the other Catholic colleges and universities they were familiar with at the time.[23] In that sense, the desire for scholarly freedom differed little in 1967 from what had been in the 1950s and early 1960s. With the exception of Trisco—the only source who was in the administration at the time—all respondents insisted that the Council did not substantively change the faculty’s perspectives on this fundamental issue.[24]

However, there was a substantial evolution in the basic assumptions of the faculty after the Council, even among those labeled “conservatives.” Between 1963 and 1967, the faculty changed from a “very lackadaisical attitude toward procedures” to a position that insisted they were vitally important as a limit on the ecclesial exercise of power.[25] They also moved from a state of social fragmentation to the formation of structures that would bind the faculty together as a community. A year before the strike, Look magazine took note of the changes taking place at many Catholic higher education institutions:

The Council has called for changes in almost every aspect of Catholic life. It has offered thrilling new ideas of freedom and lay participation and new understandings of the concepts of authority and obedience. But the Council wrought its revolutionary changes on the level of idea and theory. The forms and structures of the Church remain essentially the same. The working out of new forms and new relationships is the Church’s major task today.[26]

Catholic educators nationwide were increasingly “pressing for the meaningful participation in the governance of their schools.”[27] This was reinforced by pressure from secular and governmental sources for a reduction in the sectarianism of Catholic colleges and universities.[28] And thanks to the increased communications with non-Catholic scholars after Vatican II, members of the faculty were becoming more attuned to secular models of academic government, particularly those enunciated by the American Association of University Professors.[29]

Evidence for the change in faculty attitudes is easiest to trace in the School of Theology. At the outset of Vatican II the school of theology was poorly regarded in many theological circles, due to its close affiliation with conservative theology professors like Joseph C. Fenton and Rev. Francis J. Connell.[30] They drew particular attention for their bruising attacks on John Courtney Murray and other progressives who would rise to stardom as periti (academic advisors who helped draft the documents produced at the Council). The faculty also allowed McDonald to appoint members of the department without consulting anyone except the papal ambassador, Vagnozzi.[31] In a case quite comparable to Curran’s, in January 1963 McDonald dismissed Rev. Edward Siegmann, a member of the Canon Law Department who had become associated with progressives at the Council. When pressed, McDonald cited unspecified (and apparently nonexistent) “health concerns.” In response the faculty of the school offered only a written protest, and did not seek the support of faculty in other schools.[32]

However, after the first session of the Council, Fenton and Connell’s positions were largely discredited and they left the university. The theology faculty began to take an increasingly adversarial role to McDonald’s interventions. In addition to the resolution belatedly condemning Siegmann’s dismissal, the faculty passed resolutions challenging McDonald’s decision to ban four “liberal” theologians from speaking on campus,[33] and acted to break the school’s relationship to the archconservative American Ecclesiastical Review.[34]

At the same time, a new dean of the school, Rev. Walter Schmitz, embarked on a program to hire progressive young faculty in an effort to bring the school into line with the reforms initiated by the Council. As a result, there was a large increase in new, young, and “progressive” faculty. In addition to Curran, the other key theologians who helped lead the strike, Fr. Carl Peter, Fr. Robert Hunt, Fr. George Kanoti, and Fr. Sean Quinlan, were all hired between 1963 and 1966. Fundamental to their thinking was the idea that Church authority was important, and indeed valuable, but that its coercive aspects should not be exercised in a university context. Despite these changes, Schmitz managed to convince McDonald that there was no significant shift in theological opinion on the faculty until Curran’s appointment.[35]

Schmitz was so effective in convincing the administration that the school was duly submissive to the Church hierarchy that McDonald and the Trustees attempted to move the Department of Religious Education from the College of Arts and Sciences into the School of Theology as part of an effort to gain control over the religion classes taught to undergraduate students. The decision was made without consulting the faculty, and McDonald announced the move to the Academic Senate as a fait accompli made at the direction of the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees.[36] It reflects a new perspective on the exercise of authority that the Academic Senate rejected the administration’s move. In the process, the theology department gained new allies against the impositions of McDonald and the Trustees, and many of the faculty leaders in the strike took the lead in rejecting this move.[37] As a result, by 1967 the theology faculty had obtained a degree of consensus in the general faculty that due process and academic freedom belonged at the university and should extend even to those responsible for teaching Chu. Equally important, they began to put to rest older ideas equating silence and loyalty.

These marked crucial changes in the evolution of the faculty subculture. A 1968 report on the university by outside auditors charged, “for all its appearance as a democratic institution with democratic processes and safeguards, the faculty has had only minimal involvement in formulating and implementing academic policy.”[38] The structural problems began with the Academic Senate, ostensibly the key to the faculty’s share in governance, which had essentially calcified into an “old boy’s network” that did little to check or challenge McDonald and the Trustees. It was only after the religious education flap had angered a wide segment of the campus community that the Senate passed a motion demanding a joint Trustees-Senate Committee. This simple demand for a direct channel of communication had been tabled for almost two years.[39]

As a means of empowerment, following the unrest over the Religious Education move, the full professors of the university organized an assembly in October 1966.[40] This body was seen as a means of building bridges between the various faculties, and of arming of the faculty against the clerical leadership of the university.[41] According to Brennan, the assembly was “the closest thing we had to a labor union.”[42] Indeed, after its formation, it would act to seek McDonald’s ouster, publicly offering other candidates for his post and privately asking O’Boyle to limit or remove him.[43] This would be cast as a means of fully implementing the changes of Vatican II, particularly the renewed importance of the laity in the Church.[44]

These efforts reflect a broad and profound change in the faculty’s view of authority, which diminished the legitimacy of the ecclesial subculture. Office-holders were no longer considered sacrosanct simply because they were in the Church’s hierarchy, freeing the faculty to take direct action in demanding limits on that authority. Perhaps of equal importance, the faculty gained a new appreciation for practical value of due process and academic freedom rights. Even the most “conservative” members of the faculty were thus reoriented in the years between 1963 and 1967 by these changes. Without this fundamental evolution of the faculty’s worldview, the strike could not have occurred.

Notes