Warrior Blogger on Breitbart Radio

A particularly good interview, with some cogent questions about academia, done by Breitbart Radio.

Professor John McAdams of Marquette University appeared on Breitbart News Daily Friday morning to discuss his defense of traditional marriage, and how politically-correct enforcers are threatening his position at the university.

Sirius XM host Stephen K. Bannon pointed out that Marquette is a Jesuit university, and wondered how a position in defense of traditional marriage could make trouble for a professor at such an institution.

“I didn’t actually even defend traditional marriage,” McAdams said. “Simply the right of a student to defend traditional marriage without being bullied and demeaned. That was the whole point about my blog post.” In that post, McAdams described the case of a student who was told to drop a class by an angry leftist professor, who exclaimed that defending marriage between men and women was intolerably “homophobic, racist, and sexist.”

“As for so-called Catholic universities, first you have to understand that Jesuits are thin on the ground these days,” McAdams continued. “The president of Marquette’s not a Jesuit, the provost isn’t, the dean of arts and sciences isn’t… there are so few Jesuits that so-called Jesuit institutions pretty much aren’t run by Jesuits.”

He added that the Jesuit order itself was no longer a “bastion of Catholic orthodoxy.” This left universities like Marquette to suffer at the whims of “whatever fads prevail in academia generally.”

“For example, if it’s pandering to the gay lobby, they’ll pander to the gay lobby, and they’ve done so a lot,” said McAdams. “If it’s pandering to racial minorities – blacks, American Indians, Hispanics – they’ll do that, too. And, like all universities, there’s kind of a confluence of ideology and bureaucratic interest – that is to say, the administrators who run the university have an interest in hiring bureaucrats that work in their offices, so they’re always very happy to hire another assistant provost for things Hispanic, or associate provost to set up a bias reporting system, which Marquette has now.”

The once-great institution of Marquette has been hit especially hard by political correctness, but McAdams warned there was a general trend of “nonsense in academia” sweeping through institutions of higher learning across the country, citing the example of Emory University students claiming they “felt so hurt and were so unsafe” because someone “put pro-Donald Trump messages on the sidewalk.”

As for his own case, McAdams reported that Marquette University said they would suspend him without pay for the remainder of the calendar year. He would be allowed to return in January, “if I abase myself and apologize” for his blog post.

He also said he would be required to “promise to adhere to Marquette’s guiding values and mission statement… which of course, in my view, I’ve done.”

Unfortunately, McAdams noted the bureaucrats at Marquette seem to interpret their mission statement not as a high-minded commitment to academic inquiry and free expression, but simply as, “you don’t make trouble for the institution.”

Professor McAdams declared he would not make the apology demanded by P.C. enforcers. “I’m not going to sign any ‘loyalty oath’ to Marquette’s mission – since I’m, in fact, probably a stronger proponent of Marquette’s claimed mission than the people running the university,” he chuckled. “But I’m against loyalty oaths. Interestingly, a lot of older liberals remember loyalty oaths in the 1950s, where professors were required to swear they were loyal to America and had no sympathy for Communism… liberals hated that. And now what you have is a liberal administration at Marquette demanding a loyalty oath from me.”

He declared his determination to fight the university, cheerfully noting that his lawyers are working pro bono, so “Marquette can’t run me away by having me build up huge legal bills.”

“I think it’s pretty clear, the odds are there’s going to be a huge lawsuit,” he predicted.

Activism on Behalf of Adjunct Faculty at Jesuit Universities

This came in our e-mail (and presumably, in the e-mail of the rest of the Marquette faculty):

Dear Friend —

This week is Campus Equity Week. On campuses across the country, instructors are highlighting the inequities that exist on our campuses and advocating for faculty voices as the solution. Equity is part of Jesuit values. That is why we are bringing our petition demanding a voice on our campuses to the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU).

Have you signed the petition?

We will be delivering the petition next week and will call upon Father Sheeran, S.J. to support just employment policies on all Jesuit campuses and help facilitate a national discussion with Jesuit school faculty about the need for improved working conditions and student learning conditions.

Add your name to the petition today, and if you’ve already signed, circulate this link to your social network.

Thanks,

The Faculty Forward Network Team

OK, what in the world is that about?

One has to click on the link to find out. It’s about adjunct faculty.

The text of the petition explains:

There are over 218,000 students and 20,000 faculty members at 28 Jesuit institutions across the United States. Once a middle-class job, nearly a majority of college and university faculty are now working part-time for very low pay, isolated from colleagues without job security, benefits or even office space. Jesuit institutions are no different, in fact, more than half (53 percent) of instructional faculty at Jesuit colleges and universities are now non-tenure track.

Because of these striking contradictions between Jesuit mission and practice, faculty and students across the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities have been organizing for inclusion and a voice in the campus community, improved working conditions and job security -- all in service to students and the rich traditions of Jesuit social justice. While some Jesuit institutions like Georgetown have chosen to embrace their mission and allow faculty a voice in the educational decision making, other institutions like Seattle University have chosen to hide behind their religious association to deny faculty their fundamental right of free association in pursuit of justice, standing in stark contrast to the fundamental mission of Jesuit education.

Uh, oh!

That last part of the give away. Faculty Forward is a front for the Service Employees International Union. Their real agenda is to unionize college employees, and they seem to aim at the most vulnerable, those adjuncts, graduate students, and so on.

So that is what is lurking behind that “social justice” rhetoric. The real agenda is not to give faculty a voice, but to give union activists a voice.

Adjuncts

The rhetoric about adjunct instructors does touch on a real issue in higher education, notwithstanding the self-interested union agenda behind this campaign.

The simple fact is that having courses taught by adjunct faculty is cheap. Getting a course taught by an adjunct costs in the low to middle four figures. Getting four courses taught by a new tenure track hire costs in the mid- to high five figures (or more in some disciplines). So the temptation to have a lot of courses taught by adjuncts is huge.

Exploited?

We don’t much sympathize with the notion that adjuncts are exploited. Nobody forces anybody to work as an adjunct. Adjuncts are not expected to publish, nor do the sorts of things (committee work, advising, etc.) that regular faculty do. The job is just going into the classroom and teaching, typically teaching a class one has taught multiple times before with little new preparation needed. Usually, the sections are not large, since large sections are usually taught by tenure track faculty with teaching assistants.

Most adjunct faculty have other jobs, and are merely making some spending money doing something they rather enjoy.

Further, some departments with a large load of “service” courses (required courses that huge numbers of students take) have to use adjuncts, since there is no way to pay for tenure track lines to cover all the necessary sections. (And many tenure track faculty would not like to do the vast majority of their teaching in freshman level courses.)

Also, faculty get grants, fellowships, and so on, and therefore go on leave. So somebody has to be hired to fill in for the absent faculty member.

A Quality Issue

But having said that, a college that relies too much on adjunct faculty is providing a second-rate education. Often you can hire adjuncts who are good teachers. Political Science at Marquette now has a group of adjuncts who are excellent teachers. But in the past, we have had one or two disastrous situations.

Further, with excessive use of adjuncts, students lose the opportunity to take particular faculty members for both freshman and advanced courses, to develop a relationship with one or a few professors, and to ask for recommendations from faculty who know them well.

Finally, with excessive use of adjuncts, the administrative overhead (committee work, student advising, etc.) gets concentrated upon very few faculty. One can reach a point where one group of people are doing the vast majority of teaching, and another is keeping things running.

So would-be freshmen looking for a school would be well advised to check out the use of adjuncts at each of the schools they are considering.  If the number is quite large, the quality of education is questionable.

Understanding the Jesuits

From the late Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. in First Things, a classic essay:

At a press conference one day last summer, a newspaper correspondent asked me how I could combine being a Jesuit with being a cardinal. I at first imagined that she might be alluding to the fact that as a cardinal I might have to compromise on my vows of poverty and obedience to my Jesuit superiors, but then the true meaning of her question became clear. She explained that cardinals are supposed to support the teaching of the Pope, while Jesuits belong to the intellectual opposition, secretly if not publicly contesting the official doctrine of the Church. Are they not cleverer and wiser than the hierarchical Church, the subversive vanguard of the future Church?

I replied that she had been guided by the chauvinist myth about the Society of Jesus, but not by the reality. The Jesuit order, I explained, has been from its origins at the service and disposal of the papacy. With its headquarters in Rome, it has a long and distinguished record of collaborating with the Holy See and of rendering assistance in the preparation of papal and conciliar documents....

Many of the works of the Jesuit order are prospering. Its universities in the United States have larger enrollments and more academic prestige than ever before, Jesuit high schools are attracting large numbers of excellent students, and some Jesuit publications and parishes are very successful. The quality of young men joining the Society is as high as ever, but the number of new recruits is dramatically down, and the decline is bound to have a negative impact on traditionally Jesuit apostolates.

Many blame the dominant “consumerist” culture for the downturn in vocations, which has in fact affected most religious orders and diocesan churches in Europe, North America, and Australia. But some religious orders, even in the United States, are increasing rapidly, and some dioceses are attracting large numbers of seminarians. The vocations seem to be there, but the Jesuits, at the moment, are getting too few of them....

If a wake-up call is needed, we have it in Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits, a new book by Peter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi. It contains an abundance of useful information, even though it is in many respects a flawed study.

The thesis of the book may be summarized roughly as follows. The Society of Jesus is caught in a bind. The hierarchical Church is a rigid institution striving in vain to bring the behavior and ideas of its members into line with traditional orthodoxy. Especially under the “restorationist” regime of Pope John Paul II the Church has stubbornly rejected the democratic reforms that are needed. The bishops are impotent creatures of the Vatican. Jesuits, for the most part, are to be praised for deploring the repressive structures but at the same time pitied for their inability to change the situation. As a religious order, the Society is bound to preserve at least the appearance of conformity. Even among Jesuits, therefore, dissent has for the most part gone underground.

For my part, I can say that I recognize among Jesuits, as among other priests and religious in the United States, the various trends reported in [the book’s] survey. The opinions of traditionalists, moderates, liberals, and radical reformers are dutifully recorded-even to the point of tedium. Some distinctions are made between older and younger Jesuits. But little light is thrown on the inner dynamics of recent decades, which have affected not only Jesuits but other religious orders, diocesan clergy, and laity.

The distinction, I believe, is not between older and younger Jesuits-the categories most often used by the authors-but rather between those whose attitudes were shaped by the ideological revolutions of the 1960s and the rest of the Society. For the most part, the Jesuits who had completed their formation before Vatican II have remained faithful to their previous vision of the Church and the Society, and were able to integrate Vatican II into that vision. But then came a group who belonged to the restless “baby-boom” generation. Like many of their contemporaries, they became wildly optimistic about secularization in the early 1960s, and then in the early 1970s deeply involved in protests against the Vietnam War and in fighting for various social causes. They interpreted Vatican II as a kind of “palace revolution” in which the bishops put limits on the papacy, decentralized the Church, and transferred to the laity many powers formerly reserved to priests. The Council, some believe, renounced the high claims previously made for the Church and put Catholic Christianity on a plane of equality with other churches and religions. It also ostensibly embraced the modern world and the process of secularization.

Armed with their “progressive” reading of Vatican II, American Jesuits of this transitional generation became more committed to the struggle for social reform than to the propagation of Christian faith. They saw little but evil in pre-conciliar Catholicism. Drifting from historical consciousness into historical relativism, some of this generation questioned the current validity of the accepted creeds and dogmas of the Church. At the present moment members of this intermediate age group hold positions of greatest power and influence in the Society, but they no longer represent the cutting edge. A younger group is arising, much more committed to the Church and its traditions.

It is, of course, the younger group that holds out the hope for a vital Catholicism among the Jesuits.

But it’s the “baby-boom” generation that has power today, especially in supposedly Jesuit universities like Marquette.

A few Jesuits in their fifties and sixties believe that the Church “as we know it” is destined soon to collapse. This group tends to be critical of Pope John Paul II and his alleged attempts to silence dissent. Some express perplexity about the sacerdotal aspects of the Jesuit calling. Especially in the theological schools, which have a large enrollment of women students, Jesuit faculty members are reluctant to bring up the topic of priestly ordination. Some formation directors seem to have been infected with a critical attitude toward hierarchy and priesthood. One is quoted as saying:

I see the hierarchical Church’s direction today as different from but not antithetical to that of the Society. The hierarchical Church is often concerned with orthodoxy, clerical advancement, maintenance of church power, univocal thinking, and being right. I think these concerns hurt the whole Church.

Ignatius might indeed want to restrain the craving for clerical advancement, but he could hardly be imagined making light of orthodoxy. He would have swiftly removed any formation director who showed hostility to the “hierarchical Church.”

A new generation of seminarians and religious is arising, not only in the Jesuits but in the nation at large. This generation is not interested in denigrating the past or in liberating itself from the shackles of orthodoxy. On the contrary, it consists of young men eager to retrieve the tradition of former centuries and to serve the hierarchical Church as it exists today. This generation receives little recognition in the McDonough-Bianchi study, but some indications are nevertheless given.

The testimonies of Jesuits under forty are encouraging. A thirty-seven-year-old Jesuit says, for instance, that “our order, by its very constitution, cannot ever separate itself from the Catholic Church.” It must always be in union with Rome. We cannot be a “church within the Church” or an “alternative church.” A thirty-six-year-old theology student has this to say: “I entered to help support the direction that Pope John Paul II has given the Church. The Society has a mixed response to this direction, and the confusion it causes will ultimately hurt the effectiveness of the Society.”

In the same vein a thirty-year-old student of theology is quoted as saying, very perceptively: “If the stance of the Society is widely perceived as anti-institutional hierarchy, anti-Vatican, anti-pope, and if political and politically correct norms are used to select candidates for the Society, most of those who wish to serve Christ’s Church will go elsewhere.” On reflection it should be evident that it makes little sense to take vows and seek ordination in a religious order unless one is committed to support and serve the hierarchical Church.

Besides the cancer of opposition to hierarchical authority, another disease that needs to be cured is the ambivalence about priesthood. A thirty-one-year-old Jesuit complains: “In the two theologates that I attended . . . I didn’t find anyone providing a cogent explanation of ordained ministry and its relation to lay ministry.” Still another, aged thirty-five and already ordained, writes:

I find much of our energy is spent in fighting the battles of the immediate fallout of Vatican II (battles which have left deep scars on many professors but which are not the pressing issues for Jesuits of my generation) or preparing for life in an idealized, politically correct church that does not exist now and is not likely to exist in my lifetime.

Tellingly, the word “priesthood” is rarely mentioned in our classes. In fact, this year when the third-year theologians . . . gathered in Boston, most men from all three centers reported that they had spent the last two years either ignoring or apologizing for the fact that they were preparing for ordination. Such is life in the ideologically insulated and trendy city-states on the self-proclaimed cutting edge of theology.

The authors of Passionate Uncertainty themselves recognize that “the gravest problem is almost certainly disarray over the role of the priesthood as it pertains to ministry. This is particularly worrisome for an activist, apostolic order.” Worry as they may, McDonough and Bianchi do not help to solve the problem.

In addition to the difficulties of some Jesuits with hierarchy and priesthood, a third problem is prominent. Jesuits are conscious of a displacement of religion by psychology and of a move from the apostolic to the therapeutic understanding of the religious life. At least some of the younger Jesuits seem to be more interested in personal fulfillment than in service to the Society and its mission. “Therapists,” one young Jesuit reports, “are accorded the kind of authority and deference that was once reserved for spiritual directors and superiors.” The recent turn toward human affectivity and personal fulfillment may be connected with the alleged increase of homosexual tendencies among younger members in the Society of Jesus as well as in other religious orders and diocesan seminaries.

You may wish to read the remainder of the essay, and Dulles’ rather optimistic conclusion.

Clearly, Dulles’ observations about the “baby-boom” generation of Jesuits explains a lot about Jesuit higher education today. A generation of largely-liberal priests, regardless of their rhetoric, is fundamentally more comfortable with secular norms about things like sexuality than with traditional Christian norms.