Brian Boyd
Executive Editor
This article is the first in a three-part series investigating the effects, rationale, and importance of President Jenkins’ Address to the Faculty on September 26, 2006, wherein he announced a renewed emphasis on the Catholic mission of the University.
“HIGH NUMBERS of Catholic faculty members who are active in the faith are indispensable to this University, if we are to be successful in fulfilling our mission. For this reason we have sought, and will continue to seek, a preponderance of faculty at the University who are Catholic. Consequently, we must remain vigilant about the percentage of new hires who are Catholic, devise strategies to attract superb Catholic scholars, and explain why we do so.” With these and similarly straightforward words, President John Jenkins, C.S.C. laid out a new policy course for Notre Dame last fall. An office was planned to identify and attract outstanding Catholic scholars; new chairs were created for Catholics at the very forefront of their fields; documents were drafted and a committee was formed.
From all this activity, what resulted?
“The goal of the University is to annually exceed 50% in the hiring of instructional faculty. This year, the goal was exceeded in every School and College except one,” said Fr. Robert Sullivan, Director of the Erasmus Institute and Fellow in the Office of the Provost with responsibility for helping to coordinate the University’s mission hiring strategy.
This means that not only was the overall approximate goal met, but even when the statistics are broken down by College and School, the four largest of these each exceeded 50% Catholic hiring. The School of Architecture did not have any new faculty hires at all last year; the College of Engineering, facing perhaps the greatest difficulty of any discipline in identifying first-rate Catholic scholars, hired two Catholics out of five total new professors. In part because percentages are misleading at such a small scale, the administration has at this time declined to release a full breakdown of the data, instead focusing on the long term.
“It’s a slow process; we’re swimming upstream, we’re trying to be different, and that’s never easy. [But] that’s where we’re going,” said President Jenkins during an address earlier this month (see related story, page 6). When contacted by The Rover, the respective Deans of each undergraduate School and College affirmed their commitment to this vision, in similar terms and often with substantial reflection.
However, there are both practical and theoretical reasons why this is a “slow process.” In an email to The Rover, Dean Carolyn Woo explained the actions taken by the Mendoza College of Business to confront the practical difficulties of finding Catholic business professors:
“Our success did not come from luck and wishful thinking. It came by commitment and buy-in from all [the] department chairs that led to constant attention and creative actions. … To recruit faculty, we had to take risks and went the extra mile for several: i) In the case of a dual career Catholic couple (we were recruiting the wife), we actually for the first time offered a sizeable sum to engage an executive search firm for the husband. The couple did not come but this illustrated how far we were willing to go. ii) For another Catholic candidate, we took a risk because his Ph.D. is not in the discipline where the position is. We were willing to take on and mentor this individual into the area of need. The person, in the end, went elsewhere,” Dean Woo wrote.
Her explanation continued to recount further, similar measures to reach out to current graduate students, particularly Notre Dame alumni who might have a desire to return.
Considerations such as undergraduate college are necessary factors to take into account, because employers face certain social and legal limitations when inquiring about a potential hire’s religious affiliation. Moreover, academics in fields outside of philosophy and theology – in other words, the overwhelming majority of scholars – will rarely have work that clearly implies a religious affiliation.
To deal with these and other issues, the College of Arts and Letters, in its longer-than-duLac “Reference Guide for Arts and Letters Chairpersons and Faculty,” has spelled out a number of strategies for “searching, not sifting.” These include targeting ads with reference to Catholic mission, increased use of statistics to ascertain where Catholic scholars are most scarce, and using special “target-of-opportunity” hiring funds which are reserved for scholars of “extraordinary quality,” “diversity,” or who are “potential contributo[rs] to the Catholic character of Notre Dame.”
(These three sufficient conditions to qualify for target-of-opportunity funds – either Catholic, or a minority, or a truly outstanding academic – offer insight into the weighing of priorities that is undertaken by the College. The Reference Guide devotes roughly equal space to minority and Catholic hiring, and highlights the fact that teaching quality and research capability must not be sacrificed for either goal.)
Yet even when overcome, practical issues are only half of the difficulty, and in some ways the easier half. Explaining to people what, exactly, Notre Dame’s Catholic mission is, and why this is a benefit to intellectual inquiry, not a hindrance, can be an even greater challenge. For this reason, the Reference Guide suggests ways for interviewers to spark reflection on this theme, including giving potential hires a copy of Dean Mark Roche’s booklet The Intellectual Appeal of Catholicism and the Idea of a Catholic University.
One outstanding success in this regard is the most visible of the new Catholic scholars to come to Notre Dame this year, economist William Evans. More than half of economics papers published are cited only by their authors in subsequent studies; Professor Evans’ 41 papers (written in only 19 years) have been cited a staggering 1,700 times. This alone places him in roughly the dozen most-widely-read living economists. Moreover, many of these citations are in external fields ranging from medicine to education, as his research unfailingly examines important social problems, such as the effects of prenatal care on infant health, and the public policy concerning them.
Evans told The Rover that he had found more technical work to be “uninteresting,” and early in his career decided he would limit himself to topics that could be explained to the average person in thirty seconds – namely, those topics that are “policy-relevant.” For these reasons he has reviewed grants for the National Institutes of Health, among other major boards. Moreover, this spring he is to become the chief editor of the Journal of Human Resources, a first-tier economics journal.
For these truly outstanding accomplishments, Professor Evans has been granted the first of an as-yet-unspecified number of Keough-Hesburgh Professorships, which are to be awarded to scholars at the very forefront of their fields who also will be able to serve as role models of lived Catholicism for their students.
Professor Evans’ explanation of why he chose to come to Notre Dame, as told in an email to The Rover, is a model of how this faculty hiring process can go at its best.
Having had no ties to Notre Dame prior to arriving last December for interviews, Professor Evans was initially impressed by “a number of alums [who] all spoke lovingly about the place and encouraged us to move [to South Bend]” (although, he wryly surmised, “many were [only] looking for a place to stay on football weekends”). Personal contact in the following weeks from half a dozen Notre Dame economists who spoke about their Catholicism at Notre Dame “convinced me that the goals Fr. Jenkins has established could be achieved.”
The greatest hindrance to leaving was the upheaval it would cause his family.
“I have three boys, 17, 14 and 10, and they attend[ed] a school called the Heights, located in Potomac, Maryland. It is a Catholic all-boy school with all male teachers and the school does a phenomenal job of assisting parents in guiding boys on their [journey] to be strong Catholic men. There is no other school like it,” said Professor Evans.
Likewise, while there were many boons about Notre Dame, from “exceptional undergraduates” to greater funding, the most important factor to overcome this obstacle was “the ability for my family to be part of the Catholic community at Notre Dame,” he said. Having been convinced “that we could find the same type of environment we enjoyed in Virginia,” he and his family “are looking forward to being part of the Notre Dame community.”
If the rest of the newly hired Catholic faculty have similar stories to Professor Evans’, then there surely are grounds to consider President Jenkins’ new policy a success thus far.
Contact Brian at bboyd@nd.edu.
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