As a university, Notre Dame’s preeminent mission is to teach. As a professedly Catholic university, that teaching should embrace all important aspects of the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church. The ultimate question, then, is is what do the students learn about Catholicism?
We discuss elsewhere reasons for fearing the answer: the secularization of the faculty and the dilution of the curriculum. Here we continue the discussion by examining the data that are available about the actual effect upon students of a Notre Dame education.
It is a commonplace that students entering Catholic colleges and universities are, as a group, singularly ill-informed about their religion. Not surprisingly, Notre Dame students evidently are no exception. Dr. Marian E. Crowe, who for some years taught the required Arts & Letters Core Course, reports,
“Very few of them either know much about or understand even the most basic Catholic teachings.” Dr. Crowe tested her impression by giving her students a “Catholic quiz.” The result: “The good news was that a little more than half of them could name the seven sacraments. The bad news was that most of them knew nothing else about Catholicism.” More, in their fundamental outlook her students “express the relativism and individualism so rampant in our society.”
Thus, the challenge to Notre Dame is now much greater than in the past, while its capacity to respond has been weakened by the relative decline in Catholic professors and the dilution of the curriculum. It is unsurprising, then, that Dr. Crowe should say that on the whole “Catholicism is communicated primarily as a matter of doing good works.” As to the few hours of Catholic theology that are required, Dr. Crowe observes, “[T]rying to do sophisticated theology with young people who have no basic foundation in their religion seems an untenable project, one not likely to produce fruitful results.”
Substantial evidence bears out Dr. Crowe’s appraisal. While Notre Dame has not taken, or at any rate has not made public, comprehensive studies to measure its success in terms of the effect of a Notre Dame education on its students – universities seem wary of the standard means of evaluation employed by other types of enterprise – there are, fortunately, significant data available. They are dispiriting.
An article in the December 6, 2007 issue of The Scholastic recounts some of the results of a 2004 survey of Notre Dame students by the highly respected Higher Education Research Institute of UCLA. The survey, which was given to students from a large number of other universities as well, was designed to identify changes over four years in students’ “beliefs and values.”
It is unsurprising, perhaps, that after four years at Notre Dame there was a shift to the left politically. But what will be both surprising and distressing to many is the substantial decline in agreement with central teachings of the Church.
Specifically, after four years at Notre Dame:
- With respect to abortion, the percentage of pro-choice students went up from 31% to 42%.
- With respect to pre-marital sex, the percentage of students who approved if the couple “really like each other even if they’ve only known each other for a short time” went up from 21% to 36%.
The survey covered a great many more issues that would be of considerable interest to parents, prospective and present, and to others in the Notre Dame community, but these results have not been released. We have not sought them because we received no response to our prior request for similar data produced by an earlier HERI study.
Another survey that provides discouraging supplemental and confirming evidence was conducted by the University’s Office of Institutional Research and reported in the February 24, 2005 issue of The Scholastic.
The survey framed the issue in terms of changes in “spirituality” over four years at Notre Dame. The discouraging results were these: Almost half of the students reported no change in their spirituality, and of the remaining students, more than twice as many reported a decline as reported an increase in spirituality. Specifically, 29% reported a “slight downward” change and 8% reported the change had been “much downward,” whereas only 1% said their faith had undergone “much upward change: and only another 15% reported a “slight upward” change.
Finally, it is worth taking note of the results of an earlier HERI study of students at 38 Catholic institutions, including Notre Dame, that was completed in 2001. (It is the Notre Dame part of that survey that we sought from the University without success.) The results are consistent with the 2003 survey that we described above. While the absolute figures vary somewhat, the proportion of students moving away from Church teaching during four years was essentially the same. For this whole group, at the end of four years 52% believed abortion should be legal, 70% that homosexual marriage should be legal, and 48% that pre-marital sex was not immoral, up from 38%, 52%, and 28% respectively.
There were two additional interesting features to the earlier study: First, as to these moral questions it did not make much difference whether the Catholic students attended Catholic or secular schools, and, second, non-Catholic students at religious non-Catholic schools fared better on all counts. Not only did their views on particular moral issues change less, but 26% of them reported “much stronger religious beliefs and convictions since entering college as a freshman.” Notre Dame doubtless outranks all of these schools in the U.S. News & World Report table, but they have their own claim to excellence.
None of this means that students cannot get a fine Catholic education at Notre Dame. With determination and discrimination they can, and many do. But what is needed is the predominantly Catholic faculty that the Mission Statement promises and a curriculum to match so that all students and parents will be assured of the Catholic education they expect and deserve.
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