Fraters Libertas

No Catholics Need Apply

Front page article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal on a college professor at an evangelical Christian college who was recently relieved of his duties by the school. His offence? Becoming a Catholic:

Wheaton College was delighted to have assistant professor Joshua Hochschild teach students about medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, one of Roman Catholicism's foremost thinkers.

But when the popular teacher converted to Catholicism, the prestigious evangelical college reacted differently. It fired him.

The story goes on to detail the rational for the firing. It does not appear to be an isolated occurrence:

Mr. Hochschild's dismissal captures tensions coursing through many of America's religious colleges. At these institutions, which are mostly Protestant or Catholic, decisions about hiring and retaining faculty members are coming into conflict with a resurgence of religious identity.

Historically, religious colleges mainly picked faculty of their own faith. In the last third of the 20th century, however, as enrollments soared and higher education boomed, many Catholic colleges enhanced their prestige by broadening their hiring, choosing professors on the basis of teaching and research. As animosities between Catholics and Protestants thawed, some evangelical Protestant colleges began hiring faculty from other Christian faiths.

But now a conservative reaction is setting in, part of a broader push against the secularization of American society. Fearful of forsaking their spiritual and educational moorings, colleges are increasingly "hiring for mission," as the catch phrase goes, even at the cost of eliminating more academically qualified candidates.

Addressing faculty at the University of Notre Dame, the school's new president, the Rev. John Jenkins, recently expressed concern that the percentage of faculty who were Catholic had fallen to 53%, compared with 85% in the 1970s. Today's level is barely above a line set in 1990 by the late Pope John Paul II, who decreed that non-Catholics shouldn't be a majority of the faculty at a Catholic university.

Notre Dame is compiling a database of candidates who can contribute to the university's religious mission. Administrators say that instead of reducing quality, Notre Dame's religious identity has lured some premier faculty, such as associate professor Brad Gregory, who left a tenured job at Stanford in 2003 for an equivalent, higher-paying position. "Notre Dame's Catholic character wasn't only a factor, it was the factor," says Mr. Gregory, a Catholic, who specializes in the history of Christianity. "By any ordinary measure, you'd be crazy to leave Stanford for Notre Dame."

I don't begrudge a private religious college hiring and firing their faculty based on religious faith. But I have a couple of problems with this decision.

The first is practical as Wheaton has discovered:

Meanwhile, Wheaton hasn't replaced Mr. Hochschild. One obstacle: Most scholars of medieval philosophy are Catholics.

More importantly, at a time when Christianity in America (very possibly the last best hope for the future of Western Civilization itself) faces ever increasing pressure from secularism, applying religious purity tests to your faculty seems a bit absurd. Christians of all denominations (and Jews as well) should be looking for ways to find common ground rather continuing to pick at differences that are really rather insignificant in the bigger picture. As Benjamin Franklin once succinctly put it, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."