Does Catholic higher ed have to sell its soul?

During the years that radicals suppressed France’s 22 universities after the French Revolu­tion, America’s first Catholic university began operations. Georgetown Universi­ty, which was shielded from government meddling by the US Constitu­tion’s First Amendment, began teaching its first students in 1792.

To accommodate waves of Catholic immigrants in the 19th century, intrepid monks and missionaries went on to found many more schools: Saint Louis University in 1818, Fordham in 1841, Villanova and Notre Dame in 1842, Holy Cross in 1843, Boston College in 1863, DePaul in 1898. Today, some 200 Catholic institutions of higher learning exist in the United States, making up 20 percent of such schools worldwide despite the fact that American Catholics represent only a small subset of global Catholicism.

These Catholic schools exist in an ecosystem with other private, church-related institutions from other traditions, ranging from research universities to small liberal arts colleges. Together, these schools constitute an extraordinary legacy of religious commitment and entrepreneurial zeal in a new, expanding country. Their origins provide a stark contrast to much of postrevolutionary Europe, where centralized states agglomerated higher education under their auspices, often forcing religious thought into seminaries and to the margins of society.