Catholic Universities in the Crosshairs?
With regime change come attacks on universities. History is filled with precedents—Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, Chile in 1973, Cambodia in the late 1970s, and Viktor Urban’s Hungary in recent years. Leaders who seize power when democracy is in crisis often set their sights on academia. Purges and extermination may follow, while academics willing to comply with the new regime take up vacant positions or passively indicate their fealty. An infamous example: an Italian state university at which only 1 percent of the faculty (twelve professors) refused to swear an oath to Mussolini in 1931.
At the moment, it’s not like that in the United States. Many American universities are private, not public, and so not as vulnerable to the whims of an administration. The U.S. is not under the kind of authoritarian regime that Italy, Germany, and Chile were. And academic freedom in the U.S. is influenced less by state control than by the market forces of higher education. But market pressures can be just as effective as government orders. And Donald Trump’s various executive actions pose additional challenges: Colleges and universities are facing a loss in federal funding; some schools are pausing or cutting back on admissions, freezing hiring, and eliminating programs and departments. This could accelerate efforts already underway to marginalize or cut disciplines seen by technocrats and some politicians as superfluous luxuries or politically suspect. The Trump administration’s cut of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University (“due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students,” according to a statement) shows the interplay of domestic politics, foreign affairs, and cultural and religious tensions in the government’s dangerous incursion into higher education. The subsequent arrest and detention of pro-Palestine protestor Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate and green-card holder, should cause even more alarm.
The Trump administration’s attack on university DEI programs is a late-stage capitalism version of what in Hitler’s Germany was known as the Gleichschaltung—“bringing into line” all aspects of society. While the full legal implications remain murky, the order from the Department of Education has revealed fissures in the world of higher education; some universities are defending DEI, but others not so willing or able. Cultural and ideological forces are at work here, as are economic factors: some schools can’t survive the loss of federal funding. Trump, as is always the case, is deepening existing divisions and sowing more—divisions between institutions with large endowments and those heavily dependent on tuition; between administrators and faculty; between students who have greater financial resources and no legal worries, and students for whom life is much more complicated.
It was once a given that the personnel at the higher levels of U.S. government were among “the best and the brightest”—for better or worse, people drawn from elite institutions of education, but with intellectual commitments to (and knowledge of) longstanding American principles and traditions. Many members of the Trump administration also hail from elite backgrounds, but they are unknowledgeable and anti-intellectual; the proudly ignorant attitude of Sarah Palin years ago is de rigueur today. Thus government policies are enacted with hostility toward culture, and knowledge is good only as far as it creates wealth. The contempt for humanistic culture and the liberal arts is palpable. In attacking universities in addition to so much else, Trump, Musk, and Vance are accelerating the collapse of institutions that have characterized the Western world for more than two centuries.
In the United States, there is also of course the vast network of Catholic universities and colleges. Trump’s attacks on higher education affect them too, though differently than in the past because of the shift at many schools from religious leadership to lay leadership. Priestly ordination or membership in a religious order gave university presidents a kind of protection from government interference or threats; lay presidents don’t have quite the same immunity.
The Trump administration’s policies against higher education are also helping push Catholic universities and bishops apart; neither has a visible, unified, national strategy of its own in response. Some hoped that the executive orders paralyzing the work of many Catholic organizations would wake the USCCB up to Trump, or at any rate, wake up more of its members. But this has not happened. And Catholics who thought Trump’s focus on liberal, elitist, or “woke” academics would keep the spotlight off their schools might have to think again, or at least come to grips with the fact that many Catholic colleges reflect the complexities both of American Catholicism and American culture at large. The same students who protest to protect immigrants are often the same students who want a drag show.
Trump’s executive orders are so sweepingly vague that it’s actually impossible to know how to implement them. What many Catholic faculty and administrators wonder is what kind of “threshold” of Catholic activity or identity they need in order to be able to invoke religious exemptions (with the support, perhaps, of U.S. bishops). While it is true that DEI programs have often been developed in the absence of a significant theological component, it is equally true that asking Catholic universities today to renounce DEI-type programs is equivalent to asking them to renounce their Catholicity. The response from the dean of Georgetown Law articulates what many other university administrators and faculty think but are not willing or free to say: that the Trump administration’s injunctions are a “constitutional violation” and “the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic mission.” Other universities aren’t changing the substance of their DEI initiatives, but because the loss of funding is an existential threat, they have changed the name. Others are simply more compliant. There is fear that someone is compiling a list of those who work in DEI on Catholic campuses. Thus the situation poses urgent questions not just for the leaders of Catholic institutions of higher education, but also for theologians, religious studies scholars, philosophers, and others who study and work at these schools—as well as those who support them.
Indeed, Catholic colleges and universities have a unique role to play here, not just because of their number and presence throughout the country, and not just because of their visibly Catholic character. Rather, it’s the Catholic intellectual imperative to “think politically”—to think, that is, about the res publica. As Italian theologian Marcello Neri put it recently, “From Scholasticism to modern times, the existence of a Catholic Church that was both an empire and a state forced theology to think deeply about the character and purpose of worldly institutions and enabled it to shape what we now call ‘international law.’ Catholic theology should start thinking again about those issues, given the authoritarian turn that democracies are taking today, the crisis of international law as a rule respected by all countries, and the rewriting of the world order.” The Christian intellectual tradition was instrumental in the creation of the liberal international order in the last one hundred years; the recently dismantled USAID was but one exemplary product of this convergence.
The identitarian and sectarian reactions to globalization represent the abandonment of this universalism. For all Catholics, not just “Vatican II” or “liberal,” this propagandized “culturally Christian” illiberalism is a theological defeat, and much worse than a rollback of DEI programs. This is true as well for Catholic colleges and universities, whatever their disposition towards liberalism: “religious liberty” as understood by the Catholic Church today cannot just be about “freedom of the Church” as a response to perceived persecution by secularist progressives; it must also take into account the administration’s incursion on Constitutional protections for religious teaching and freedom of worship on Catholic campuses.
The question is how to respond with a long-lasting defense against these attacks. The response can come only from Catholic institutions that have not abandoned theology (which is much more than keeping their theology and/or religious studies departments), since the response lies in a political theology robust enough to counter Trump’s radical deconstructionism and delegitimization of institutions. Having an idea of what the university is requires having a theology of the state, of the market, and of the Church.
This is all the more important given what Trumpian Catholicism entails. It’s not just the fact that many Catholics voted for Trump and Vance; it’s that Trump and Vance have a fervid following among the destructive anti-institutionalist voices that have also found their way into the Church. This is compounded by the new oligarchy’s dominance of virtual spaces and the slide of theological and ecclesial discourse within the university. Many people (including students) now turn to YouTube hacks and reactionary traditionalists who are only too happy to cash in on their existential angst and spiritual concerns, often serving up an impoverished version of old-style apologetics.
For a long time, Catholic university faculty feared the return of control and surveillance by ecclesiastical hierarchies, even as the technocracy made inroads in higher education as an allegedly non-ideological and more pragmatic presence. The anti-humanities effort driving university governance has been underway for a while now, and it’s unlikely that any amount of new enrollment could turn the tide, especially now that the federal government sees the humanities as a prime target. American Catholics face the question of how not to repeat the mistakes of Catholic intellectuals in Europe confronting the rise of Fascism and Nazism a century ago. Things are moving fast and being broken even faster. While the pontificate of Francis provided energy for what could be a re-founding moment for Catholic theology and universities, the Trump presidency is giving us a very tight timeline to act.
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