What Notre Dame Does Better Than Yale
By Margaret Blume in Ethika Politika
Father Edward Sorin staked Notre
Dame’s academic success on the Catholic tradition’s claim that faith heals and
elevates reason, rather than impeding its progress. I would like to offer
my testimony as proof that Fr. Sorin’s wager was successful. I have been
at Notre Dame as long as I was an undergraduate at Yale. And I can
sincerely say that Notre Dame’s core curriculum makes students better thinkers.
Yale’s system, which does not
include theology and is based upon “distribution requirements” and “learning
goals” rather than disciplines, left me with a mind that has needed these four
years at Notre Dame in order to think coherently. True, I was surrounded
by exceptionally smart people and an intellectual energy and rigor that Notre
Dame would do well to encourage, and my mind became sharper and quicker and
more aware of its own workings. But this only accelerated the crisis: I
began to ceaselessly seek some regulative ideal for truth that could unify the
fragments of knowledge I had gathered, and lead my mind out of its own
turnings. It took the intellectual journey of a 196-page senior thesis
for me to understand that what I was really looking for was theology.
After four years in Notre Dame’s theology department, I know that what I
was really looking for was Scripture.
I was fortunate to receive a superb
Catholic education before going to Yale, and so the arbitrary, piecemeal
academic system made my mind restless and confused, rather than superficial.
For many of my friends, however, the inability of various disciplines to
speak to one another was taken for granted, and they became accustomed to
contradiction, and to mechanistic or fuzzy thinking. Notre Dame’s current
core curriculum requirements, on the other hand, ensure that students have at
least encountered sources that unlock the mind’s capacities. In the Bible
is contained not only an idea of God, but an anthropology, epistemology,
metaphysics, history, poetry, political philosophy, even the principles of
science, and the challenge of these disciplines is to interpret their own
traditions and innovations in a Biblical light. It is Scripture, however,
interpreted through the theological tradition, which offers an account
expansive enough to contain and judge them all. Probing the Christian
theological account, and bringing other knowledge into dialogue and conflict
with it, teaches students how to think. How can both Genesis’s creation
account and evolution be valid, for example, and what does this mean for our
understanding of time? Is the freedom enshrined by liberal democracy the
same freedom into which Scripture aims to lead the human person?
I could give more important reasons
in defense of university theology requirements than intellectual maturity.
They are indispensable if the university is to remain Catholic in any
real sense, linked to the Church at the level of learning. If the unique
task of theology—namely, to teach about God according to His own
self-revelation—is given to other disciplines, this is equivalent to taking our
Christian answers to the “big questions,” and pretending to know them on our
own. In his homilies on the Book of Ezekiel, Origen grasps what this
means: We, the Church who is Bride, abandon our Bridegroom, and plagiarize the
truth originally communicated in love.
This certainly is not the
intention of the administration. As a Notebaert fellow, I am grateful for the university’s commitment to the
academic excellence of its graduates and undergraduates. This is why I beg those making the decision not to undo Fr. Sorin’s wager. Faith does heal and
elevate reason.
I was a humanities major at Yale,
attempting to unite philosophy, literature, and history into a coherent vision
of reality. I wish I had learned sooner that disciplinary education is
formally prior to interdisciplinary education. I learned the hard way
that basing a curriculum upon learning goals abstracted from disciplines, and
scattered throughout various areas of study, disintegrates both the thing
studied and one’s mind. Only the discipline of theology is capable of
studying the transcendent vision of reality given in revelation; only the
discipline of theology has as its methodology “faith seeking understanding.”
Curriculum changes that reduce the
theology requirements in favor of “learning goals” that are related to mission,
but abstracted from the discipline, will destroy the unique excellence of Notre
Dame’s intellectual formation. I am grateful for my college education,
and I did find both “Lux et Veritas” at Yale. Having been educated in
both models, however, I attest that Fr. Sorin won his wager. As things
stand, I would advise parents to send their children to Notre Dame rather than
to my alma mater, not only to become greater football enthusiasts, but to
become better thinkers. I very much hope that if and when I have a child,
the advice still holds.
Editor’s note: This article first
appeared on the Irish Rover‘s website on
February 26 and is reprinted with permission.
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