“Catholic colleges and universities in the United States are quite good at volunteerism, do fairly well at service learning, but haven’t scratched the surface on education for justice,”comments David O’Brien, historian from the College of the Holy Cross. How is the Catholic Social Tradition (CST) is being transmitted in the more than two hundred twenty  American Catholic institutions of higher education_ They present a complex and varied landscape to survey. Beneath that terrain pressures generated by shifting cultural forces are at work, which like massive tectonic plates are moving it in directions difficult to predict, let alone control. The major forces are historical tendencies towards secularization of religiously based universities, academic professionalism that strives for institutional independence from external control, the drive towards increasing specialization of academic disciplines, market forces that make employment rather than wisdom the goal of education, and the assimilation of most American Catholics into the cultural and economic mainstream.^[i]

The landscape for Catholic higher education has changed from the 1930's when many Catholic colleges and universities responded to Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno by establishing labor-management institutes that trained a generation of Catholic leaders in unions and business. If a Catholic president could have inserted papal social encyclicals into a required undergraduate curriculum in the 1940's or ‘50's, that would be impossible in the more complex academic structures of today. At the same time, these colleges and universities are more actively concerned about their Catholic identity than at any time since the Vatican Council, a movement which some read as a promising response to the call of Ex Corde Ecclesiae but which others describe as “the dying of the light.”^[ii]  

Some caveats are in order.  I cannot adequately describe the differences of institutional culture and regional diversity across the United States.  CST will not play the same role in the curriculum of a relatively centralized  undergraduate liberal arts colleges that it might in a complex research institution with relatively independent colleges and professional schools.  In addition,  different geographical regions are more or less receptive to positions designated as officially “Catholic.” A strategy for transmission that would work in Minneapolis-St. Paul is probably not appropriate in the Bronx. Finally, rather than reporting empirical assessments of the impact that various programs have on students, I will offer some promising examples.^[iii]

  I will offer an overview of typical programs in Catholic higher education using O’Brien’s three categories: volunteerism, service-learning and education for justice. The first two will be treated more briefly because I agree that the greatest challenge is found in education for justice. Teaching and research are the heart of the university enterprise. If a Catholic vision of culture and social responsibility does not arise from serious scholarship and find voice in the curriculum, it will be peripheral to the life of the university.  Student volunteer groups and service-learning programs cannot bear the full weight of education for justice and faith if they remain extracurricular. In short, the transmission of CST in higher education will occur through the faculty or not at all.