This is a book which asks awkward questions about the mission, history, and future direction of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish centres of higher education. It details in particular the response of Catholic and Protestant colleges in the second half of the twentieth century to the forces of post-Enlightenment secularisation, where this is understood as ‘pressures that attempt to remove religious authority and influence over higher education’ and the steady ‘erosion of religious identity and mission of religiously affiliated institutions’ (p.24). Its author draws upon a wide body of research to examine the differing fate of tertiary colleges, the identity of which can be classified as either ‘fundamentalist’, ‘orthodox’, possessing a ‘critical mass’ of religious adherents, intentionally pluralist, or accidentally pluralist (pp. 30–31). The study looks at curricula, governance, staffing, and student membership. What lies behind the rhetoric of diversity and the high-sounding ideals of many mission statements put out by universities and colleges in Europe and North America is revealed as in large part a sorry tale of lost identity, of pluralist institutions that are religious in little more than name only.
Different factors are identified to explain this process: the need to secure adequate funding from secular sources; concerns for academic quality despite the lack of hard evidence that secularization in fact enhances quality (p.73); concerns for academic freedom from what was perceived as unwelcome control by external ecclesiastical bodies; the declining presence of religious sisters and brothers as teachers or administrators within colleges founded by their congregations; and beliefs about the virtues of a pluralist centre of higher education (p.36). James Arthur also notes, however, the resurgence of interest in ‘orthodox’ and ‘critical mass’ institutions that refuse to separate faith from knowledge, and which seek to ground appropriate academic freedoms within the framework of authoritative traditions, teachings, and clerical structures. He examines especially the attempts in the Catholic Church to renew the vision of John Henry Newman's Idea of a University as that has been re-articulated and developed in the 1990 Vatican document Ex Corde Ecclesiae. It is clear that the author's sympathies lie with these attempts and with such ‘orthodox’ and ‘critical mass’ institutions.
Readers may question this account at several points: the diocesan hierarchy and the Roman curia are described as ‘the Church’ (e.g. p.111), which appears to confuse the part with the whole, even if we agree that they are parts with a determining role in what counts as Catholic; and the ‘authoritative teaching’ or magisterium of the Church is assumed to be wholly external to the university, something to which an institution adheres, or measures up to, rather than something which it might help to construct. There is little sympathy for religious orders (especially the Jesuits) as the bearers of distinctive theological traditions, nor much consideration of how orthodox belief develops in part through disputed questions. However, this reader, at least, is convinced by James Arthur's view that religiously affiliated institutions have a positive role to play in the future of higher education and that it is ‘orthodox’ and ‘critical mass’ institutions which will successfully play that role.
