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Seeing the Light

Thomas Aquinas College profiled in a new book about Christian higher education

Chapter 3:
Three Roman Catholic
Colleges and Universities

In the following three discussions we continue to examine the contexts of contemporary evangelical Protestant, Christian colleges, by taking a careful look at three Roman Catholic institutions. Catholic colleges and universities are by far the largest cluster of religiously grounded American higher educational institutions after the Protestant ones, more than all non Christian schools combined. Their history is a long and rich one. Today, many Roman Catholic colleges and universities enjoy high academic reputations, selective admissions, and diverse student and faculty populations. This has not, of course, always been the case. Early in the past century, when public higher education was still relatively provincial and unabashedly Protestant, Catholic students (and teachers) tended not to be warmly welcomed there. Thus, the Catholic institutions became, in effect, the quasi public "open door" schools for members of the faith. Walking through that door were members of working families of relatively recent immigrant communities such as the Irish, Germans, Italians, and Eastern Europeans. Not surprisingly, these colleges and universities did not originally have high stature within the larger academic community.

In many respects the issues, challenges, and victories within American Catholic higher education mirror those in the Protestant realm. For example, the question of whether Catholic schools have lost, or abandoned, their Catholicism parallels exactly the concern that Protestant institutions have gone down the path toward secularization. Indeed, arguably the most vigorous and influential attack on collegiate secularization, James Burtchaell's The Dying of the Light, takes aim at both, with particular harshness in its treatment of the Catholic sector, from which Dr. Burtchaell emerged (see Essay on Sources). On the other hand, of course, some of the issues at Catholic colleges and universities are idiosyncratic.

Some of the recent debates about Roman Catholic higher education can be traced to July 1967, when a group of twenty six Catholic educators gathered at the Land O'Lakes Center in Wisconsin to discuss the implications of the Second Vatican Council (which had ended in 1965) for their institutions. President Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame was a major leader of this conclave. From this conference emerged the "Land O' Lakes Statement," which affirmed the independence of Catholic universities from direct church control. Academic freedom and institutional autonomy were seen as "essential conditions of life and growth and indeed of survival for Catholic universities."

To some, this statement was a breath of much needed fresh air in Catholic education. To others, it was a catastrophic error. The latter claimed that "the signatories of the Land O' Lakes statement, by refusing to be shepherded by the Church's bishops, set the sheep free to roam into whatever error academic freedom might lead them. Nearly forty years later, the shepherds are still trying to gather their scattered flocks."

In 1990 Pope John Paul II issued a document entitled Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church), which reaffirmed the close link between the church and its colleges that, to some, the Land O' Lakes Statement had brought into question. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the current pope, Benedict XVI, was a key drafter of this document. In 1999 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued "Application of Ex Corde Ecclesiae for the United States." A particularly controversial aspect of this effort is the mandatum, the process by which a local American bishop validates that specific professors of theology are teaching as individuals within the full communion of the church and are therefore guided by the church hierarchy or Magisterium. Some Catholic institutions and professors of theology, and some local bishops, have complied with the mandatum, some have not. Those who fear that American Catholic colleges and universities have lost their Catholic identity tend to believe that only those individuals and institutions that subscribe to this process are genuinely committed to a truly Catholic education. There has been considerable writing around this subject: for example, Wilcox and King's Enhancing Religious Identity collects essays from a variety of authors and sources about the nature of collegiate Catholic identity and how to promote it with a particular emphasis on the guidance of Ex Corde Ecclesiae.

Another (unrelated) issue is the challenge of transforming institutions that had depended upon female clerics as teachers and administrators at a moment when there are dramatically fewer nuns and expanded opportunities for careers and service for those who remain.

The three institutions studied in this chapter can hardly be said to encompass the entire span of American Catholic higher education, but they do represent three widely divergent strands of that tradition. Villanova University grew from the men's college sector into a significant research university, with a variety of graduate, professional, and undergraduate programs. The College of New Rochelle is a historically single sex women's liberal arts college, located in a major metropolitan area, which today serves a largely non Catholic, coeducational, interracial student body, with a religiously diverse faculty, in both its traditional liberal arts mission and its professional and continuing education enterprises. Finally, Thomas Aquinas College began as a reaction to the perceived loss of religious clarity and academic rigor elsewhere in the world of Catholic institutions and is today a very small, rural institution with a vigorous universal curriculum and a very strong, uncompromising Catholic culture: a "new Catholic" college….

Everything Old Is New Again: Thomas Aquinas College,
Santa Paula, California

Thomas Aquinas College is a "new" Roman Catholic college. It is new in several senses: the college offers a curriculum and a college life program that are radically different from those of virtually all other American institutions of higher education, Catholic or not. Thomas Aquinas is physically new, occupying a recently constructed campus in Santa Paula, California. And it is new as an incorporated entity, having come into existence less than a half century ago. But Thomas Aquinas College is perhaps most radically "new" in its overt passion for the old. The college describes the vision of its founders who sought to return to an earlier philosophy of higher learning: "They wanted not to return to some earlier form of education in America, but to something that resonated with the kind of academic excellence that flourished in ancient Greece or in the great medieval universities in Europe. Simply put, they wanted to return not to the 1950's, but to the 1350s."

How did a college that overtly aspired to return to a six hundred year-old ideal and model of learning come into existence, and what does it look like today, about four decades after its founding?

The history of Thomas Aquinas College is deeply revealing. It tells the story not just of this small, fascinating place, but also of much of the discussion of the nature and direction of Catholic higher education in America since World War II.

In the 1960s a group of lay and clerical Catholic faculty was teaching at St. Mary's College in Moraga, California, across the bay from San Francisco and not too far from the University of California at Berkeley, where other memorable events were also taking place at the same time. These professors were linked to a program called the "Integrated Liberal Arts" that was offered, as an option, to some of the (all male) students at St. Mary's. It was overtly modeled upon, and had several links to, the Great Books curriculum at St. John's College in Annapolis, which had, in turn, grown out of curricular engagement with primary texts of primary importance in Western civilization at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. This small group of faculty members combined a keen interest in the Great Books approach with an equally sharp sense that Catholic education in America was increasingly secularized, and losing its devotion to a valued and unique Catholic tradition of higher learning. The group began a series of discussions that took the form of seeking to define an ideal Catholic and liberal arts college.

St. Mary's College, perhaps not coincidentally, is one of three Catholic colleges excoriated in James Burtchaell's The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches. Noting the foundation of Thomas Aquinas College by disenchanted faculty from St. Mary's, Burtchaell says of St. Mary's that its "definition of [academic] excellence denied any essential place to the Catholic Church or its faith."

From these conversations came a draft of a statement of educational principles entitled "A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic Liberal Education," which came to be known as the "Blue Book." In this document, the case is made for the link between faith and reason, between Catholic collegiate instruction and liberal education. It proposed a curriculum based on the St. John's model and the Great Books. Classes would all be small tutorials conducted in the Socratic discussion mode. All students would cover the same materials, all primary texts, in the same order: there were to be no electives, no majors, no minors. Thus, each class could presume an identical set of predecessors and successors, and the instructional program could be seen as an integrated whole. Faculty members would teach across the curriculum: they would not be affiliated with specialized academic departments such as English, philosophy, physics, and psychology.

This program, however, differed from the St. John's model (still, of course, practiced in both Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico) in an important way: it was overtly linked to Roman Catholicism. The Great Books were to be selected from a Catholic perspective - both great Catholic writers, such as St. Thomas and St. Augustine, and authors who overtly challenged the Catholic tradition, and whose arguments, therefore, needed to be understood in order to be rebutted - for example, Machiavelli. It is assumed that students will discover for themselves the falseness of these authors. Theological and philosophical works would be central to the curriculum. Moreover, a Catholic style of living would prevail: Catholic worship would take place on campus and a strong code of Catholic morality would be firmly enforced. The proposal in the "Blue Book" is startling in its willingness to envision moving in a radically different direction from other American colleges and universities. It is extraordinarily shocking in that its creators were willing to hazard their professional lives to actually put it in place. The result of that powerful commitment is today's Thomas Aquinas College.

It did not happen overnight. In 1968 the group that would become the college was incorporated as the Institute for Christian Education, and a relatively small but important major gift came for the start up of the incipient college from a conservative businessman and philanthropist. (With its firm code of conduct, classical curriculum, and vigorous religious life, Thomas Aquinas has always had a strong appeal to individuals on the political right: in spring of 2007, for example, the college was selected as one of the "Top 10" institutions by the Young America's Foundation, a conservative group headquartered at the Ronald Reagan Ranch.) A gala founding dinner was held in San Francisco in 1970 at the Fairmont Hotel, at which the keynote speaker was Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. The college was offered use of the campus of Dominican College of San Rafael, but before Thomas Aquinas actually began operations, Dominican College retracted its offer. The cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles was persuaded to help the institution relocate in Southern California, and facilitated the leasing of facilities at the former novitiate and seminary of the Claretian order. In September 1971 thirty three pioneering students registered, with four faculty members, and in 1975 the first class graduated.

By then, Thomas Aquinas was seeking a campus of its own and, among other options, came to investigate a property in an isolated and lovely canyon outside the town of Santa Paula. Complex negotiations followed, given greater urgency by the sale of the Claretian property in 1977. Major funding was needed, and seemingly miraculously, substantial gifts were forthcoming. Ground was broken in January 1978. The campus operated from temporary, modular buildings during the 1978 and 1979 academic years, but construction moved forward, and a campus took shape. The college incurred substantial financial obligations in making this move and in building a whole new campus from scratch. During the 1980s, the college matured, winning full accreditation in 1981. A campaign to recruit more students was given a boost by the appearance of Mother Teresa as graduation speaker in 1982. The college began a pattern of steady growth that took it from about 120 students in the early 1980s to about 350 today - the maximum the physical campus and the character of the academic program seem to permit. In the early 1990s the founding president, Dr. Ronald McArthur was succeeded by his former student from St. Mary's College, Dr. Thomas Dillon, who remained chief executive until his death in 2009.

The campus of Thomas Aquinas College today is harmonious and integrated. Buildings are generally of modest dimensions, in the California mission style.… One particularly stunning feature of the physical plant is the seventeenth century Spanish ceiling of the St. Bernadine of Siena Library, which was donated by William P. Clark Jr., former secretary of the interior and national security advisor under President Reagan, and whose father was the real estate agent for the sellers of the property on which the college is now sited.

Students and faculty at Thomas Aquinas College are as distinctive in their personal style as in their academic program. Unlike, for example, nearby Westmont College, where students appear indistinguishable from middle of the road collegiate peers at other Southern California institutions, Thomas Aquinas students look different. Not all the men wear neckties to class, but I noticed some with ties in every class I visited. All were extremely neat and conservative in personal appearance. T Shirts are not permitted in class, nor are sandals without socks. Women students wore skirts, of a more than demure length. Male faculty members tended to teach in coats and ties and females in equally traditional garb. When I asked students about the dress code (e.g., skirts, collared shirts), they affirmed that they understood, and endorsed, the notion that respectful dress was a way of indicating their respect for their teachers and the classroom work of the college. Similarly, in class, students refer to each other as "Mr." or "Miss," as in "Miss Jones, do you think Shakespeare might have meant something else by that line?" The students with whom I spoke affirmed that the college's seminar methodology taught them to carry the classroom discussion and to grill each other rigorously.

I attended several classes at Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, more than any other college I have visited, Thomas Aquinas is eager to put guests into the classroom to watch students interact with each other and with their instructors. The Socratic method remains pervasive: faculty tutors ask questions, sometimes clarify the implications of answers, but do not lecture or adopt an authoritarian stance. When asked a direct question by students, some faculty will respond with an answer, others will frame a question in return that will move the class toward an answer. It is clear to a campus visitor that not every faculty member at the college is always a perfect Socratic tutor, nor is every student equally prepared and articulate. The standard, however, is remarkably high. Clearly, expectations that students will have done the reading thoroughly and carefully and will have grappled seriously with it, are extremely high. Of course, not every student is equally comfortable with, for example, Archimedes and Aristophanes, or with Dalton and Dante. The classroom atmosphere is challenging but always respectful, usually fairly formal. I noted that in many classes, there are often fairly long, contemplative periods of silence following questions: students (and faculty) are comfortable giving each other time to think through responses.

Of thirty seven individuals listed as members of the faculty in 2006, fifteen hold the BA degree from Thomas Aquinas College and five from St. Mary's College. In addition, six hold the PhD (or are candidates for that degree) from the University of Notre Dame, six from the Université Laval (Quebec), and five from the Catholic University of America. Catholic members of the faculty take an "Oath of Fidelity" upon beginning their service to the college. They affirm that they shall always maintain communion with the Catholic Church in word and action; preserve the faith, hand it on, and make it shine forth; look after the observance of all ecclesiastical laws; and act with Christian obedience to that which is expressed by the Church's rulers. Prospective faculty members are asked to provide a thoughtful essay detailing their philosophy of collegiate education. All faculty members are called "tutors": there is no additional rank or formal tenure.

Because the curriculum at Thomas Aquinas is universal and nonelective, the entire curricular program of the college can be listed in a very few pages: the complete list of four years of readings fills six pages of the college bulletin. Schematically, it consists of two years of language tutorial (Latin), logic (one year), four years of mathematics, a year of music, three years of philosophy and four of theology, four years of laboratory science, and four years of seminar (literature, history, philosophy, more philosophy, and theology). As a sample, here are the authors read in the sophomore year by all Thomas Aquinas College students:

Seminar - Vergil, Lucretius, Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Epictetus, St. Augustine, Boethius, Dante, Chaucer, Spencer, St. Thomas Aquinas

Language - Wheelock (Latin: An Introductory Course Based on Ancient Authors), Martin of Denmark, Horace, Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas

Mathematics - Plato, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Apollonius, Kepler, Archimedes

Laboratory - Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Lavoisier, Avogadro, Dalton, Gay Lussac, Pascal, miscellaneous scientific papers by various authors

Philosophy - Pre Socratic philosophers, Aristotle

Theology - St. Augustine, St. Athanasius, Gaunilo, St. Anselm, St. John Damascene

This is not a curriculum for either teachers or students who are faint of heart. The college, moreover, makes an unremitting effort to approach these authors and their most important works from a Christian, Catholic perspective. Theology is acknowledged as chief among the academic disciplines. The truth, the college teaches, is discovered, not invented. It is illuminated always by faith. Thus, the catalog affirms, "Christ is the truth, revelation tells us, and it is in the wisdom of His words that men are made truly free. The truth we glean from nature is truth seen through a mirror darkly compared the Light from above. The Christian orders his mind and soul to supernatural truth. Christian liberal education has divine wisdom as its ultimate objective."…

(President) Michael McLean, as well as other student, faculty, and staff members of the Thomas Aquinas community, are thoughtful and articulate about their belief in the compatibility of reason and faith. Faith leads one to truth; scholarship leads one to truth. If faith and scholarship seem incompatible, a seeker is misunderstanding one or both of them. The dean stressed that the college's confidence in the unity of the truths derived from faith and from learning is the inheritance of its namesake, St. Thomas Aquinas. He affirmed his belief that that which is true is also that which is beautiful and good. The College Bulletin (2007) begins with a portrait of "St. Thomas, Our Patron," noting that "in him is the consummate union of sanctity and intellect."

Not all Thomas Aquinas College students are Catholic, nor is there any regulation that all faculty be. As the Bulletin notes, "Faith is a gift. We rejoice with those who have it and we welcome those without it." Non Catholic faculty members cannot teach theology at the college. Both the president and the faculty with whom I spoke estimate that perhaps three current faculty members and ten to fifteen students are not Catholic. There is some emphasis and pride across campus constituencies on the frequency with which students who come to Thomas Aquinas College as non Catholics embrace the faith during their undergraduate careers. There is a firm belief that this happens with far greater frequency than the opposite. Similarly, the college takes great pride in the number of its graduates who choose a religious career - as of 2006, 11% of its graduates. In the grand commemorative volume published in 2006 to commemorate the thirty fifth anniversary of the college's founding, a section profiles selected individuals who have entered fields such as law, education, medicine, journalism, or business. But it lists each graduate who has entered a religious profession.

Thomas Aquinas College offers mass three times daily, as well as other liturgies, devotions, confessions, and spiritual exercises. None of these is required, but all seem well attended. Social regulations are unambiguous, rigorous, and enforced. As the Bulletin notes, "Time honored Christian values, not contemporary permissiveness, are the basis for these rules." Thus, men's and women's residence halls are always off limits to the opposite gender, and alcohol and drugs are strictly forbidden on campus. Students who violate such proscriptions are expelled. I asked a group of students with whom I met what they thought would happen to a student who openly advocated for abortion rights. They were quite clear that such advocacy would not be tolerated: such a student would be counseled regarding the church's position on this issue, urged to adhere to that position, and, if intransigent, told she or he must leave the college community. President Dillon gave exactly the same answer to a similar query. In both cases, it was clear that the understanding was that the college was in a position of moral instruction, not one of eagerly policing student life. President Dillon and the students with whom I met agree that moral standards are high and share the perception that happiness is to be found in living the virtuous life.

Campus life at Thomas Aquinas College is certainly not dour, although the prevailing tone is surely serious. The arts, especially music, are encouraged and cultivated both on campus and through occasional field trips. A recent issue of the Alumni News focused on music and included a discussion of the four to six annual "Schubertiades" at which members of the college community, as individuals or in ensembles, perform." There is a lively and apparently near universal program of informal, intramural sports, although there is no interscholastic athletic program. The college's setting encourages hiking and other outdoor recreational options. There are dances, picnics, movies, drama and poetry readings, and the like.

The comprehensive cost of a year at Thomas Aquinas College in 2007 is $25,300, and 72% of the students receive some form of financial aid. The current student body of 359 is evenly divided between men and women, with 129 students from California, and a very even spread of students from forty additional states (Virginia, with 14 students, has the second greatest number). Students come from several foreign nations, with Canada sending 23. The ACT average of Thomas Aquinas students is 27; the SAT is 1293, with the middle 50% running from 1220 to 1390. The college sponsors a thriving summer program for high school students, giving them an introduction to the methods and materials of the collegiate curriculum. When asked about comparable institutions, the faculty noted some of the other smaller, "new" Catholic institutions such as Christendom College. Faculty and President Dillon cited St. Johns, and the latter added the University of Dallas as an institution that sometimes competes with Thomas Aquinas College for students.

In the context of our discussion of Roman Catholic colleges and universities, Thomas Aquinas is, perhaps, at a polar opposite of the College of New Rochelle. The latter institution has expanded into several areas overtly outside the liberal arts, has sought to manifest its Catholic heritage by embracing a diverse faculty and student body and championing social justice, and imposes few personal behavioral standards beyond those of safety and civility on its constituents. Thomas Aquinas, on the distinct other hand, has chosen to remain very small, has a rigorously unitary liberal arts curriculum, and is unabashed in promulgating a strict, and strictly Catholic, style of living.

Thomas Aquinas College faces an admissions challenge that many colleges, large and small, would love to have. It believes it should be able to offer its unique program to any and all students who seek it and who have the intellect and the character to complete it with success. But in recent years there have been two such applicants for every spot available in the entering class if the college is to remain at 350 students, which all agree is the desirable size. This paradox has led to some initial and very preliminary contemplation of the possibility of creating another campus or campuses. This option seems more desirable than any serious additional growth at the Santa Paula site. Thomas Aquinas College is a "new" Catholic college, but soon it may find itself generating even newer offshoots.

Schuman, Samuel. Seeing the Light: Religious Colleges in Twenty-First-Century America. pp. 50-53, 70-78. © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.