Teaching and Living Practical Reasoning:
The Role of Catholic Social Thought in a CatholicUniversity Curriculum
Todd David Whitmore, University of Notre Dame
My task is to address the role of Catholic social thought in a Catholic university curriculum. Stated in brief, my response is that the role of Catholic social thought in such a setting is to provide a tradition-centered context within which students can learn and engage in practical reason. Now, that sounds very erudite, even stuffy. However, I submit that it concerns even the smallest and seemingly mundane of our actions in everyday life. In what follows, I aim to show how this is the case.
I will do so first by giving a brief account of a tradition of practical reason that extends from Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas to modern Catholic social teaching. This is the tradition-centered context that is most fitting for Catholic universities. Then I will set out what I think are the primary obstacles to this tradition of practical reasoning being engaged at Catholic colleges and universities. This will allow me, in the final section, to discuss avenues of programmatic and pedagogical response that might overcome or at least partially offset the obstacles to practical reasoning.
I. The Aristotelian-Thomist Tradition of Practical Reason
It may seem odd to begin by talking about a mode of reasoning when addressing Catholic social thought. Most persons have in mind a constellation of substantive concepts likethe common good, human rights, and the option for the poor. These concepts are indeed crucial.
I would argue, however, that to teach and learn Catholic social thought at any but the most superficial level requires teaching and learning practical reasoning. Without the engagement of the concepts via this way of thinking, the substance of Catholic social thought can only be sustained via ecclesiastical and curricular fiat, and we have seen the negative repercussions of such an approach with regard to the sexual teaching.
It is best to begin with the distinction between theoretical or speculative reason on the one hand and practical reason on the other, which is foundational in Aristotle’s thought.[5] Speculative reason involves demonstrative knowledge of things that do not change through analysis of first principles or causes and deduction from such principles. Practical reason seeks to guide variable human practice or action (praxis) through a mode of analysis which is more dialectical in form and does not have the same precision (akribeia) as theoretical reason.[6] The primary audience of practical reason is the ordinary educated citizen who is involved in the various fields of civil society, and the mode of reasoning takes account of this fact. Dialectics both traces and addresses the patterns of political and economic conversation in civil society far better than the demonstrative syllogism. The task of civil society -- the polis -- itself is to facilitate lives of arete – variously translated “goodness,” “virtue,” and “excellence.”[7] Much of Aristotle’s Politics is taken up with the identification of which regimes – which patterns of civil society – best contribute to the practice of virtue. In short, practical reason is that form of reason best suited for reflection in civil society on how to arrange society itself such that persons and society can flourish.
Following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas also distinguishes between theoretical or speculative and practical reason. Speculative reason regards “necessary things, which cannot be otherwise than they are,” and its conclusions “like the universal principles, contain truth without fail.” Practical reason, in contrast, “is busied with contingent matters, about which human actions are concerned.” In “matters of action, truth or practical rectitude is not the same for all, as to matters of detail, but only as to the general principles.”[8] Thomas also engages practical reason to pose the question of which forms of civil society foster the practice of virtue.[9] Where Thomas differs from Aristotle is in his location of the quest for goodness in the theologically interpreted neo-platonic context of exitus et reditus, all things coming from (created in the image of) God and returning to God.1[0]
Pope Leo XIII made Thomas the official theologian of the Roman Catholic church in Aeterni patris (1879). With Rerum novarum (1891), Leo is also responsible for initiating what is commonly referred to as “modern Catholic social teaching,” and it is primarily in the social documents that he continues the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition of practical reason. Shifts towards a more dialectical model in the teaching since Leo has brought with it even greater felicity to this tradition.1[1] One finds all of the identifying marks of practical reason. The aim is to direct human praxis. In Sollicitudo rei socialis (1987) John Paul II recalls words uttered by Paul VI in Populorum Progressio (1967): “The social doctrine has once more demonstrated its character as an application of the word of God to people’s lives and the life of society, as well as to the earthly realities connected to them, offering ‘principles of reflection,’ ‘criteria for judgment,’ and ‘directives for action.’”1[2] The reasoning in the social documents addresses areas of life that are subject to change and to less precision than speculative reason, areas of life where there is, in John XXIII’s words, a “pronounced dynamism” such that the “requirements of justice is a problem which will never admit of definitive solution.”1[3] Like Thomas, modern Catholic social teaching sets practical reasoning in the context of the quest for the good society -- one that facilitates the practice of virtue -- understood in terms of all things being created by and returning to God. In Pius XI’s words, “Society is for man, that he may recognize this reflection of God’s perfection, and refer it in praise and adoration to the creator.”1[4]
Obstacles: The Eclipse of Practical Reason?
The next question is that of what obstacles there might be to integrating Catholic social thought and teaching into the curriculum. My comments here reflect the experience of two programmatic efforts that I direct. The first is the University of Notre Dame’s own Program in Catholic Social Tradition.1[5] In 1994, a small group of faculty began to meet to discuss the possibility of developing a program. Our concerns were twofold. First, Notre Dame, too, was marked by the lack of knowledge of the tradition. Second, Notre Dame graduates go on to assume positions of significant power and authority. Such positions include National Security Advisor, Secretary of the Interior, congressional representative, Judge of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, New Mexico, and Attorney General of California. There are also Chairs, Presidents and/or CEOs of numerous companies, including Texaco, Motorola, Bank of America Illinois, Haggar Company, Leo Burnette Advertising Agency, Mobil Corporation, and Dean Witter. The question which concerned us was this: How do our graduates understand their public responsibilities?
In 1996 the faculty group asked me to direct both the effort to see the program proposal through the necessary university committees and the program itself once approved, and I agreed to do so. The center of the program is a fifteen credit interdisciplinary minor or “concentration.” We are now in the second year, and have twenty-six students committed to the program and twenty-one more that have indicated serious interest. At this growth rate, we will soon be one of the three largest interdisciplinary minors at Notre Dame.1[6]
The second programmatic effort that I direct is a project, funded by the WabashCenter for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, titled “Teaching Catholic Social Teaching.” The aim of the project is to facilitate the development of programs in Catholic social teaching at twelve Catholic colleges and universities. The project had fifty-one serious inquiries and thirty-seven applications for the twelve openings. In addition to quality, I selected participants based on diversity with regard to region, location (urban, suburban, rural), ethnic and racial make-up, wealth of the school, size, charism (for instance, Jesuit, Franciscan, Augustinian), and academic discipline (e.g., sociology, psychology, law, political science, business administration, and economics as well as theology). The schools are representative of Catholic colleges and universities in the United States generally. Persons applied by submitting proposals of the programmatic efforts they plan to undertake at their own schools. Villanova, with a proposal from Jack Doody and William Werpehowski, is a participant.1[7]
The Teaching Catholic Social Teaching project is built around two summer meetings. The first, held in summer 2000, consisted of discussion of the just-mentioned proposals. In 2001, we will gather again to discuss which aspects of the proposals worked well and which did not, and attempt to discern if there are any patterns that can be addressed in a directed way. The primary outcome of the project will be the programs themselves, but I, in consultation with the participants, will write a white paper detailing our findings that will be sent to the American bishops and made available to educators at Catholic colleges and universities across the United States.
Already in the first meeting of the project participants, patterns of both problems and possibilities began to emerge. In what follows, I will draw upon what I have said thus far about practical reason to provide an interpretation of the key obstacles to the teaching and learning of Catholic social teaching in Catholic higher education. Here, I hope to show how resistance or non-responsiveness to the introduction of Catholic social thought and teaching into the curriculum is more a matter of competing modes of reasoning than the specific substance of that teaching. I organize the obstacles typologically: practice without reason, reason without practice, and practice for the wrong reason. No school is a pure type; indeed, there are universities that combine the types.
– Practice without reason: Unlike early Catholic primary and secondary schools, many Catholic colleges and universities served not only to provide a separate school system, but also to facilitate Catholic assimilation into American public life by training students for specific professions. The modes of reasoning taken on were the modes assumed by the professions. Segments of these schools taught and continue to teach what ancient Greek philosophy called techne, where the concern is technical accuracy, sometimes at the expense of a broader civic mindedness.
The University of Notre Dame was an early participant in the formation of such professional schools and remains active in it today. It therefore provides a helpful lense through which to provide a bit more detail on this type. The Colleges of Engineering and Business are good examples both for their similarities and for their differences. The engineering majors are so extensive in the number of courses they demand that, depending on the precise major, once students have completed general university requirements there is insufficient room in their curriculum to do an interdisciplinary minor if the student wishes to graduate in four years.1[8] There is, to be exact, one elective left once university and major requirements are met. This is in contrast to majors in the College of Arts and Letters. There are Arts and Letters students in the Catholic Social Tradition interdisciplinary minor who are double majors. There are also students who are pre-med -- that is, in the College of Science -- in the CST program. There is one pre-med student in Notre Dame’s “Arts and Letters Pre-Professional” program who plans to work with the poor and has crafted a self-designed major in “Social Justice and Poverty Issues” by supplementing the Catholic Social Tradition interdisciplinary minor with courses in economics on the causes of poverty.
Much of the design of the engineering majors comes from external pressure in the form of accrediting boards. If the role of the College of Engineering is simply that of the assimilation of students into the way that engineering is understood and practiced in the United States, then the demands of the accrediting boards remain unquestioned. In Notre Dame’s case, however, there is more than pressure from external agencies. Indeed, the accrediting boards are re-examining their requirements and asking if, in light of the importance of a broad education, they need to be so extensive. In Notre Dame’s case, the university’s requirements exceed those of the accrediting boards. At the request of a student who wanted to do the Catholic Social Tradition minor, I met with a dean in the College of Engineering to determine if there is any give in the requirements of the major, either in the case of this particular student or more generally in the future. He responded that there is not because “excellence” as an engineer requires more courses than the accrediting boards demand. He described interdisciplinary minors as “extra-curricular,” that is, “like marching band.” What I believe we have represented in this conversation is the internalization of the external values to such an extent that it outstrips even the original recognized representatives of those values. It raises the question of whether this is the result of a larger pattern of a Catholic drive to succeed on American terms, in this case by exceeding what those terms require.
When classical thought refers to “excellence,” it means arete, which, again, is also translated as “goodness” or “virtue.” This kind of excellence requires active knowledge of and participation in the life of civil society. When excellence is reduced to techne, then the question of the broader “goodness” of the student -- even the student as engineer, asking, for instance, where and for whom to build bridges and rockets -- becomes irrelevant, even intrusive. For Spring 2001, of the five majors in engineering, only one offers a course in the ethics of the profession. Chemical engineering offers the elective, “Corporate Ethics and Values.” The other majors do not even offer an elective. Classical philosophy has a term for the person who spends so much time learning techne that he has no time for learning phronesis or “practical wisdom”: idiot. The term idiotes translates both “private person” and “ignorant person.” An idiot is a someone who has so little knowledge about the way society functions that he is unable to be an active citizen in the polis. This is technical assimilation without civic participation. It is practice without reason. In the tradition of practical reason, techne is crucial for professional performance, but it must be subsumed under phronesis.1[9]
When techne rules in colleges of business, cost-benefit analysis, profit maximization, Pareto-optimality, and the calculation of supply and demand dominate to the exclusion of other questions. Notre Dame’s College of Business is an interesting case because, under the direction of Dean Carolyn Woo, there has been a concerted effort to introduce normative inquiry not only through specific courses, but throughout the curriculum. There is a core of faculty that takes ethical questions quite seriously. The College hosts an annual “Ethics Week” that brings normative questions to the fore. Unlike in the College of Engineering, the requirements of the majors allow room for students to do interdisciplinary minors. Business Week ranked Notre Dame number one among business schools regarding the teaching of ethics.
Examination of the Schedule of Classes for Spring 2001, then, is sobering. Of the five majors in the College, only one -- business administration -- offers courses in ethics, and at present these are electives. The other four majors do not appear even to have courses with normative content. An ad placed in the university student newspaper announcing the ethics courses -- one course each for sophomores, juniors, and seniors -- leads with the heading: “DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT!! ETHICS COURSES FOR SPRING 2001."2[0] What this indicates is that the effort to create a professional school culture that subsumes techne under phronesis is a demanding one in the American context even when there is administrative leadership.
It should be pointed out that it is not only the richly endowed schools that have this problem. On the contrary, there is a pattern where less well-off schools are expanding their professional studies curriculum and enrollment in order to survive financially. RegisUniversity is a case in point. RegisUniversity is also a participant in the Teaching Catholic Social Teaching project, and I quote from their proposal:
“Regis presently educates over 11,000 students (7,000+ undergrads; 4,000+ grads) in three academic schools: RegisCollege, the School for Professional Studies, and the school for Health Care Professions. In the early 70's, Regis was a small (1,000 students), primarily residential co-ed Catholic undergraduate college facing serious financial problems. Since that time, we have experienced explosive growth both in complexity of schools and programs and in the numbers of students. We officially became a university in the early 90's, but remain primarily a teaching institution. RegisCollege, which still serves around 1000 traditional-aged college students with a full-time Ph.D. faculty and a fairly standard array of disciplinary and pre-professional majors, is the residential core of the university. The School for Professional Studies began in the mid-70's as an undergraduate degree-completion program for working adults staffed primarily by an adjunct faculty of working professionals. It has grown to serve more than 9,000 students in undergraduate and graduate (professional MA) programs at several campuses in Denver, regional campuses (in Colorado, Wyoming, and most recently in Phoenix), and through distance (TV & on-line) programs. It also has partnership arrangements (sharing its model of adult, professional education) with more than twenty other (primarily Catholic) colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad (in Asia and Latin America). The School for Health Care Professions began in the late 80's as Regis took over an undergraduate nursing program when LorettoHeightsCollege (the only other Catholic college in the region) closed. It has grown to serve almost 900 students in undergraduate nursing programs as well as graduate (Masters) programs in nursing, physical therapy, and healthcare management.”