JUSTICE, PEACE, AND GOD:

MY SEARCH FOR TRUTH AT A CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY

by Joseph C. Kunkel

   I am grateful that the Thompson lecture provides me the opportunity to reflect on my experiences of Catholic higher education. I have been a philosopher and an activist. As a philosopher I gradually shifted from an Aristotelian-Thomistic orientation to a more contemporary grappling with American pragmatists and Eastern thinkers on issues of social justice, democracy, nonviolence, and spiritual concerns. The catalyst for my truth search was the Second Vatican Council. So strong and parochial were my undergraduate and graduate views that I doubt I would have changed much had Pope John XXIII not opened my eyes. As an activist I have been busy on and off campus. My struggles have been with church, university, and civil authority.

   I came to the University of Dayton for a few years and have stayed thirty- seven. I am thankful for the hospitality that has sustained me. I found a home in an environment that has reached out to me, and over the years I have been touched and molded by the Marianist sense of community. There have always been kind words, appreciative gestures from students, faculty, and staff. We have shared laughs, and experienced losses. When I spoke forcefully, expressed anger, or used words I later regretted, I was allowed to apologize and clarify. My heart goes out to all those, living and dead, who have traveled with me and otherwise influenced my journey.

    Today the church and university are again grappling with the Catholic mission. Ex Corde Ecclesiae and the mandatum may be newly on the horizon but the conflicts they carry in their wake are similar to those of the 1960s. The issues are wider than heresy for they are interwoven with authority, governance, and academic freedom. Who governs the University of Dayton? How does the Catholic mission impact upon this governance? Who establishes educational policies? I cannot answer these questions for 2001, but I think there are similarities with the '60s and '70s. I want to examine the past to raise some issues for the present.

   Let me begin with a caveat. In my years at UD I have taught under only two university presidents. Both these presidents have served the university in an extraordinary manner. While I have disagreed on issues I have always respected their integrity and leadership. When I criticize this university I intend my remarks as a criticism of an institution, not of a person. I am well aware that the administration includes, besides presidents, chairs, deans, senates, provosts, vice presidents, lay boards of trustees, and financial contributors. The authority of the president is constrained by decisions made by other groups. I trust that you will receive my words in the contextual spirit in which they are given. In relating my journey I have chosen three themes: justice, peace, and God.

1. Justice

Justice, for me, means fairness and equity for all. The authoritarian use of power too easily breeds injustice. Pope John XXIII, in an early 1960s move away from authoritarianism and toward equality, convened the Second Vatican Council. Bishops from around the world spoke and the church listened. In a similar vein African Americans were marching against an authoritarianism that sanctioned a U.S. nation divided by race. Change was in the air, along with a deepening understanding of the pervasiveness of inequality in both church and state.

   In New Orleans, prior to coming to Dayton, my wife Mary Ann and I were active members of an integrated adult sodality moderated by the then Reverend Philip Berrigan, S.S.J. We met weekly at a black Catholic high school, and participated in a strong social justice formation based on the Gospels and encyclicals. We distributed food in a housing project and each couple adopted a poor family to aid and guide in moving that family toward a more independent existence. And we participated in some demonstrations.

   A few years before we arrived in New Orleans Archbishop Romell had ordered the integration of Catholic institutions in the archdiocese, including the removal of church barriers between the seating of whites and blacks. A few black Catholics, who had been forced to sit in the back, ventured forward. But parishes and parochial schools remained segregated. Loyola was the white Catholic university and St. Xavier's, two miles away, the black Catholic university. The free Loyola dental clinic was closed to St. Xavier students. The archdiocesan seminary was not open to black students. Black Catholics with a priestly vocation were expected to go to one seminary in the South that exclusively served black Catholics. So there was much inequality to protest.

   After arriving at the University of Dayton, I became concerned about the lack of lay faculty involvement in the academic decisions of the university, and felt Vatican II and other Catholic documents were calling for an enhanced role of the laity. I initiated a faculty committee to discuss the situation. The result of this committee's work was a ninety-five page booklet called Service Conditions Affecting the Life of the Mind that was distributed in September, 1966. The essays on governance described a twofold purpose of Catholic universities, namely, the apostolic and the academic, and called for stronger lay participation in the governance of the university. A chapter of the AAUP was subsequently established, and this was followed two years later by UD's first academic senate.

   In October, Dennis Bonnette wrote his notable letter to Archbishop Karl J. Alter of Cincinnati accusing four members of the philosophy and theology departments of endorsing positions at variance with the Holy See. The heresy affair took center stage. What was at stake was the primacy of Thomistic thought versus a more pluralistic approach to teaching philosophy. The question involved public lectures, classroom teachings, and publications. Should philosophy and theology teachers at a Catholic university be allowed to advocate positions, such as situation ethics, the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, or the moral use of contraceptives, without countering these views with the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas? The conservatives felt the pluralistic presentations of erroneous views were resulting in grave harm to the faith and morals of the entire university community. In the end,after explanatory letters of accusation and defense were sent to the University President, after many groups on campus took positions, after the media got involved, after an archdiocesan fact-finding committee in Cincinnati interviewed participants and reported its findings, Fr. Raymond A. Roesch, S.M., the University President, ruled in favor of pluralism. Father Roesch said as long as professors confine their utterances to their area of competence, as long as they pay due reverence to the Magisterium, as long as their competence is attested to by their colleagues, they are free to teach as they see fit at the University of Dayton.

   In 1968-1969 a second controversy erupted, not unrelated to the first. The emphasis was upon policies and organization of the university beyond the classroom. The question was authoritarianism in the governance of the university. Two history faculty members, disturbed by their inability to have a significant voice in the affairs of the university, began to organize a faculty union. Several months later, they were denied promotion and given punitive raises, against their department faculty's recommendation. One left the university and the other, Dr. Philip A. Grant, Jr., signed his contract, only to be informed afterwards that his contract was terminal. These university actions amounted to union-busting, which I considered not only against academic freedom but at variance with Catholic labor encyclicals. Consequently I agreed to be named president of the union local and to fight Grant's dismissal.

   There was no established procedure for faculty contesting a decision in a religiously governed institution so we invented a process as we went along. We contacted local union leaders and were told we had to start a publicity campaign with informational letters to local newspapers and leafleting on campus. The University refused to recognize the union local in October. The Montgomery County AFL-CIO countered with support for the local. The president, in turn, requested two national organizations, the Association of American Colleges (AAC) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), to conduct on-campus examinations, but only as advisors to himself.

   Meanwhile large numbers of students were organizing in support of Grant, who was a very popular teacher. By December Fr. Roesch, with the AAC report in hand, but never released,Ê apparently decided not to reinstate Dr. Grant; he called a faculty meeting to communicate his decision. Somewhat apprehensivelyBnot knowing how opposing faculty, campus police, and the administration would reactBwe arranged for picket signs and leaflets in the Kennedy Plaza to greet the arriving faculty. Inside, interested students came early and took most of the seats in Boll Theater. Fr. Roesch arrived to find the faculty milling about the foyer. He went into the theater and asked students to sit on the stage so the faculty could be seated. This memorable picture of 200 students on the stage surrounding Fr. Roesch at the microphone made the cover of the morning newspaper. As a result of the student presence, Fr. Roesch merely updated us on his findings to date and announced new rules about faculty participation in departmental affairs.

   In early January the UD Flyer News published the text of the AAUP report, in which the investigators called for a hearing on the issue of academic freedom. There was a problem, however, stemming from the fact that most faculty members and the AAUP at that time,the AAUP later changed its viewBfelt that organizing a union was unprofessional, and doing something unprofessional ran contrary to academic freedom. We therefore asked that this issue be settled before going to a hearing, and the university refused.

   In February, a student leader staged a hunger sit-in in the hall outside the president's office. The issue was the Grant case as an example of the continual violation of the right of students to intelligently determine their educational environment. A week later University Vice President, Rev. George B. Barrett, S.M. negotiated a settlement whereby these eighteen students agreed to an intensive three-day sensitivity session with selected faculty and administrators to be held at Bergamo. Among the few conditions were that Grant and I could not be invited and the Grant case could not come up.

   While there was no resolution of the case by the end of the academic year, the university had agreed to AAUP principles on academic freedom and tenure. Tenure was established independent of rank or age, and standing committees on tenure and faculty grievances were approved.. The academic senate proposal, which had been turned down by the administration a year earlier, was accepted and voted on by the faculty. Grant became the sacrificial lamb. I resigned from being union president the following September, and the union disbanded a short time later.

   The intensity of this political process was costly at home. Mary Ann justifiably felt distressed. During the six years from 1962 to1968 when I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation while teaching full-time and being active in the community, she had on many occasions kept our kids from disturbing me. But then I entered into the year of the union affair, and she lamented my never being home, and my being preoccupied when I was home. At the end of the year she decided to go to work half-time, and leave our three children with me two days a week between 3:00 and 11:00 p.m. Her plan worked wonders; I curtailed my extracurricular activities and improved my relationships with our daughter and two sons,relationships that continue to be a joy for me.

   I will skip over the first four years on the Faculty Board in the mid-'70s, when we hassled the university administration on everything and firmly established a faculty presence, and move to the year-long struggle in 1980-1981 that helped me understand gender discrimination. A female assistant professor had become pregnant twice during her untenured years on the faculty, and then she was denied tenure. She came to me for advice on how to defend herself under the AAUP procedures. When I saw the main issue I agreed to walk with her through the process.

   We were challenging the university that prided itself as being family to embrace a faculty woman's choice of bearing and raising children. Some of her department colleagues felt that she was choosing to be a mother instead of a college academic, and although she had the same number of publications as other tenured individuals they thought she would be unable to continue that pace while raising two children.

   After gathering all the information on the case we wrote a letter to the university president. We received a reply that while addressed to the faculty member had a fixation on dates, including material we had not mentioned in our letter. The reply thus stood out as having been written by lawyers. We had appealed to the Catholic mission and were met with a response of legal rights. I knew I was in over my head. I recommended to the faculty member that we confer with a lawyer. Sure enough we found that we had only a few months before the statute of limitations for legally contesting this kind of case would have run out.

   The case was taken before the Faculty Hearing Committee on Academic Affairs and Tenure, and eventually to the federal court. At the latter point the professor indicated that she preferred to settle the case rather than prolong it in the courts. A settlement was drawn up, and within a month mutual agreement was achieved. She was not allowed to return to her department. Only afterwards, and pushed by women's groups on campus did the university write in a policy that allows untenured faculty women to bear and raise children without professional penalty.

   The university is part of a Catholic inequity problem that affects women as well as people of color. The Catholic Church=s position on women, in my estimation, parallels its view on blacks in previous decades. It has put up a barrier between men and women similar to the previous barriers between white and black seating, or white and black colleges and seminaries. Sure, women may not be constrained to the back pews of an institution, but as they move up they crash into invisible walls and glass ceilings. You all know how gender inequality on this campus has hurt qualified women candidates for professional positions. The same is true for qualified nonwhite candidates. But the climate, at least for women, seems to be improving.

   As I reflect back on justice issues over four decades I find that justice is more than a theory; it is a practice. We cannot espouse justice in the classroom without practicing it in the university at large. Justice is equity; justice is fairness. The university has been open to improvement and that has buoyed my spirit. But traditions die hard, and change has to be an ongoing struggle. For instance, our Catholic Marianist environment has a wonderful mission of community and equality of individuals regardless of race, gender, or class. Yet there exists a class bias that allows us to pay full-time custodial workers, cafeteria employees, groundskeepers, and daycare employees less than $7.00 per hour, which is below the national poverty rate. We have made some advances but still trail behind our mission.

   Our student body remains only 3-4 percent African American and less than 2 percent Hispanic. When I came to UD I was told the percentage of black students was 3 percent. That represents a gain of about one-half of one percent in the past thirty-seven years. Together the two groups represent about 5 percent of the student body, while nationally they represent almost 25 percent of the U.S. population. Nor can we claim that the problem is with our Catholic identity because the Hispanic population is overwhelming Catholic. The ethnicity of the faculty parallels the weak racial diversity of the student body. I do not doubt that we try to improve diversity, but we are not succeeding.

   On gender equality the student body is over fifty percent female while the faculty is under 24 percent female. Some schools are very weak in gender equality, and the same holds for academic administrators. In university policies we have begun to assuage the traditional Catholic stigma against homosexuality, and for that I am gratified. These are not easy questions for a male dominated, white, heterosexual middle-class Catholic institution, but justice is not an easy concept to instantiate.

   Justice is not a static rule or norm. Justice is an ongoing struggle. Mahandas Gandhi says when there is systemic injustice we are all part of the problem. When we do not contest unjust situations we acquiesce in that injustice. John Dewey views inquiry as the process of moving an assemblage of individuals toward a more united and equitable end. We need committed individuals to stand up for justice, to let their voices be heard, to lead us into the 21 century. I believe we have an opportunity to build a more just Catholic Marianist university for our faculty, students, and community, but it is going to take determination and faith. I trust the struggle will go on.

2. Peace

If you want peace, strive for justice is a popular saying that I find incomplete. I believe it is equally true to say: if you want justice, strive for peace. Peace is a way, a process, a means. Hannah Arendt calls for individuals to consent freely through dialogue to group policies. When this occurs, she says, there is power in the group. For an authoritarian leader to impose policies upon resisting individuals is impotence, not power. Peace is mediation of differences. It is compassion for those of different persuasions. It is pastoral as opposed to authoritarian. It is nonviolent so that conflicting voices can be heard without fear of retaliation.

   My first experience with opposition to the Vietnam War came late. My colleague John Chrisman asked me to travel with him and some students to a large demonstration in Washington. Richard Nixon was already president. A year earlier Phil and Dan Berrigan and seven other Catholics walked into a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, and poured homemade napalm on hundreds of draft records. This scene was reported on the national evening news, and I knew I had to face the issue. Chrisman gave me the nudge. But my opposition at the time was only against the Vietnam War. Like most Catholics, I was struggling with the just war doctrine and the communist ideology.

   My Ph.D. dissertation had been on Aristotle's Categories, a work that interconnects ancient logic and metaphysics. This was a fine topic until Vatican II. My brother Gene, who looked over a copy of my dissertation, asked me why anyone would spend eight years working on a manuscript that nobody could read, understand, nor find relevant for today's world? Following the heresy affair I was wondering the same thing.

   Early in 1970 I was asked by a group of students to direct the newly approved Self- Directed Learning program. To my surprise the university accepted their recommendation, and I was given a split contract. This program involved thirty-five students approved for a full load of thirty academic credits for the academic year. The faculty consisted of four professors in the program part- time, an associate director who was a student in the Union Graduate School based at Antioch College, plus myself. We had to set up grading and documentation rules, in conjunction with the students who were already enrolled in the program, in a manner that would be academically acceptable to the more traditional chairs in the College of Arts and Sciences. And we were successful!

   The program was housed on the top floor ofÊ the old women's gym, with the peace studies program down the hall, and the new women's center across the hall. Some of the students from both these programs received credits in our program. We did a variety of group workshops, encouraged student creativity, and were available for hours of student counseling. The emphasis was upon students directing their own learning. We, in turn, had to learn educational theory and humanistic psychology in order to be good counselors.

   I left the program after four years. In interacting with these creative students I had been asked a number of times where my own philosophy was going as an independent learner. I had read existentialist thinkers, and was particularly drawn to Albert Camus. Eventually I settled on the writings of the American pragmatist John Dewey, who integrated the creative educational insights I was experiencing into a more complete philosophical system.

   Back full-time in philosophy I still had not settled with the antiwar views of Phil Berrigan. By this time he had been acquitted of federal charges that while in prison he was leading an East- Coast nonviolent group that had planned to blow up the underground utilities system around Washington DC and to kidnap Henry Kissinger. He had also married Liz McAlister, and was beginning to raise a family. I decided to bring him to Dayton for a two-day faculty discussion of peace issues. Berrigan stayed at our home and Mary Ann and I had a wonderful time getting reacquainted. I felt the pull of activism, but with the Vietnam War over I could not commit. I was stuck in just war theory.

   When Ronald Reagan became president he started to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Our arsenal already contained 25,000 nuclear weapons, each averaging larger than the Hiroshima bomb, but Reagan convinced congress that the United States was somehow behind the Soviet Union. Reagan, like other post- World War II presidents, was pursuing political realism. The prototype philosopher for realism is Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes claims everyone is naturally in a savage state of nature that puts each of us at war with all others; we are enemies to everyone else. The only way to overcome this hostile environment is to enter into a social contract enforced by the military to secure mutual goals through joint agreement. A contract is a promise, and keeping promises is the beginning of morality and justice. Unless there is a contract or law there is no injustice or morality. Peace and morality come through strength, or so the view claims.

   The Christian version of Hobbes is original sin. Christians assert God did not create us as natural enemies, but we became enemies when Adam and Eve sinned. And ever since, except for the few who are saved, we have to protect ourselves from the shadow of evil. Reinhold Niebuhr some years ago called the conflict moral man and immoral society. Presidents line up with the Christian far right to defend the saved against evil empires.

   A few years ago general education brought in a theologian to address the humanities faculty on the underlying meaning of Genesis 1-3, which is required reading for all students. In the discussion I asked the scholar if he would tell us what the sin was that had such terrible consequences for all humanity. Was it a violation of property rights? This is my tree and you eat the fruit of your trees. Was it disobedience of authority? You do what you are told. Was it a sexual violation? Adam and Eve having sex before marriage, perhaps using an early form of contraception. What was it that changed us all from lovers to haters of humanity? He did not say.

   The United States is big on protection. We are opposed to gun control laws and are responsible for half the military arms sales abroad. We are enamored with the death penalty as a form of punishment, and put marijuana and drug addicts in jail rather than hospitals. We train military leaders of Latin America in terrorism and torture, and we advocate prolonged economic boycotts against the innocent civilians of countries such as Iraq and Cuba. And we are about to embark on an expensive defensive missile system to save the United States from North Korea, even though in doing so we may have to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. If that means Russia will withdraw, in turn, from other nuclear treaties, so be it. Meanwhile our corporations are being competitively Hobbesian in paying below poverty wages in sweatshops around the world. So I am concerned lest the university motto Afor God and country put our community at cross purposes with global peace and justice.

   In 1983, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin led the U.S. Catholic bishops in a major statement against the use of nuclear weapons. The statement placed the Catholic Church in opposition to the U.S. strategic doctrine of first use of nuclear weapons, of the use of nuclear weapons on major cities, such as Moscow and Leningrad, of the possible use of nuclear weapons against nonnuclear nations, and of an increased possession of nuclear weapons to deter against the use of nuclear weapons. It also reintroduced for public awareness the principles of just war doctrine, and the possibility of developing a Christian approach to the philosophy of peace. The statement was a breath of fresh air on the nuclear and war dependency of the superpowers.

   As various issues arose on campus I was disheartened by the lack of fresh air on the part of the administration of the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI). I realize that the study of engineering since its inception has had strong ties with war research. I also understand that since just war doctrine allows morally justified wars to be fought it also has to allow research to be done so that justified wars can be fought effectively. My difficulty has been with a UDRI that does $40-$50 million dollars in research annually that is 70-80 percent contracted with the U.S. defense apparatus. In this capacity we have been the only Catholic or Christian research center so heavily involved in military research.

   I am reminded of one of my older son's interviews for his first job after getting his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. The interviewer asked, Would it bother you if you spent all of your time working on better ways to kill people? I apply this same question to administrators of UDRI. I realize that UDRI does not build military weapons, but that is not the point. If we, as a Catholic university, wish to do some defensive work for patriotic reasons, then fine, but could we not broaden out our research agenda so as to spend more than half our research efforts in the furtherance of life?

   Cardinal Bernardin has a number of times promoted a Catholic doctrine of a consistent ethic of life. Such an ethic, he says, goes beyond the right to life of the unborn. Under the sanctity of life we must oppose abortions, the death penalty, assisted suicide, and some modern forms of warfare. To be pro-life, Bernardin argues, we must also favor programs that enhance the quality of life of the powerless: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker. Bernardin quotes Pope John Paul II as calling upon scientists Ato direct their work toward the promotion of life, not the creation of instruments of death. I believe if we are to give a priority to our mission at the University of Dayton we need to do the same with our research facilities at UDRI.

   Peace studies has changed over the years. The approach is more positive with efforts made at mediating peace rather than forcing peace through military strength. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, theorists have focused on societal structures that breed violence. The examination includes perspectives on power; democracy and diversity, and forms of institutional violence including racism, gender oppression, poverty, prisons, the death penalty, and the environment. Mediation of differences is playing a larger role both inside nations and among nation-states. More discussion is centering on changing the international nation- state system into a global federalism. This is along the lines of the emerging European Union, one nation instead of the conflictive separate states of Europe that produced two terrible world wars in the past century. World federalists believe the need for wars will be removed when the leaders of nations create a global democracy of equal states. Nations with major grievances against their neighbors will then take their issues to a world court.

   The University of Dayton offers a host of programs that expose students to diverse cultures, international studies, various summer abroad programs, and third world development. Recently we have added the nation's first program in human rights, and have begun a degree program in India. The Dayton Accords have also been followed up with a series of international conferences on or near campus. So there is growing faculty and student interest in international affairs.

   In the 1970s UD had an incipient program in peace studies under the direction of Brother Leo Murray, S.M.. When he retired and left for Ireland, the program stumbled and was disbanded. While peace studies embraces international studies the focus shifts from just war doctrine to an emphasis on a nonviolent approach to settling disputes. The key issue is whether it is morally justified to kill another human being in order to save yourself or to save some innocent person. The issue is not self-defense. Most pacifists allow nonlethal self-defense. The question is killing another to save a killing, and ending up not saving a killing. Gandhi, or course, argued that self-sacrifice even to the extent of being killed in the process, was more life affirming than killing to save a killing. Jesus preached the same principle in the Sermon on the Mount when he spoke of turning the other cheek, not being angry, and loving your enemy.

   Catholic higher education, in my reading, has always stressed peace and justice. A couple of years ago my wife Mary Ann called Books and Co. and inquired whether they had a section of books on peace studies. The representative asked, Is there some book you have in mind? And Mary Ann responded, Nothing in particular, but since you have extensive book shelves on the study of war I was wondering if you had a section on the study of peace. They still do not have a section on the study of peace. In our culture of violence we do not know peace.

   The university is strongly supportive of Campus Ministry and the Center for Social Concerns. These important services have brought our Catholic identity to faculty and students, to the dormitories and to the student ghetto. The Center for Social Concerns has encouraged students to become active in their greater community, to lead, learn, and serve in Appalachia, the Bronx, the inner cities of Dayton, Cleveland, Chicago, and elsewhere, in Haiti and Latin America, in Africa. The university administration has also pushed to have these experiences become a part of the classroom experience in an innovative service component for a variety of courses. Students can learn about real problems as they put theory into practice. In my ethics class, for instance, I require all students to spend twelve to fifteen hours working with the needy of our society, and producing a journal that relates these external experiences to the ethical concepts we have discussed in class.

   Last November, I was one of the UD staff members who accompanied a group of students to Ft. Benning in Columbus, Georgia. We were participating in a nonviolent protest of the U.S. School of Americas that trains Latin American military officers, a number of whom have been involved in some of the hemisphere's worst tortures and assassinations of civilians. Despite intermittent rain we were a committed group crossing the line onto the base in remembrance of those deceased civilians. We stood together, watched others being arrested, and eventually were told we had two choices: to stay and march forward to be arrested, or to return the mile to the gate and leave the base.

   We huddled and listened to one another. Individuals were in very different places. But some students clearly voiced their faith in what they were doing and why they had come. They desired to stand firm. I was so moved that I said I would stay with any student who chose to stay. We lined up again and were confronted by military officers. This time each of us had to decide individually. As I went forward and looked back I saw all fourteen of us moving in unison to the buses. We were a small part of 1700 arrested, but we had grown in stature. I experienced firsthand what a foundation in Catholic social teachings could do. We were respecting life in the tradition of nonviolence.

3. God

I remarked in the beginning that I wanted to interact with Ex Corde Ecclesiae. The issue is very complicated. A Catholic university in the United States wears two hats. It has a Catholic identity and an American university character, and both are significant. Because of the struggles in the 1960s like those previously mentioned, Catholic universities turned over much of their direction to the facultyBwhich includes the administration. Lay boards of trustees were authorized to control property, financing, and the appointment of university presidents. Accordingly the appointment of the president of a Catholic university is made not by the local bishop but by a lay board of trustees. Catholic universities are thus unlike parishes whose property is owned by the diocese and whose pastor is appointed by the local bishop.

   Catholic universities relate to Catholic bishops like charter schools relate to the public administration of an urban school district. Public schools and charter schools educate the same inner-city students, but the public school administration does not control the activities of charter schools. Similarly Catholic parochial school systems educate Catholics in a diocese under the control of the local bishop, while Catholic universities also educate mostly Catholics but these universities are independent from the diocesan school administration. I agree that Catholic universities to be Catholic need to maintain a Catholic identity. What a Catholic identity means, however, and how such an identity is retained is not clear. Much dialogue is needed with various concerned groups in order to reach some consensus. We are today witnessing an effort by the hierarchy to involve itself in the process of licensing Catholic university theologians. The pope and bishops are requiring individual Catholic theologians, who are already teaching, and many of whom are tenured in Catholic universities to acquire a mandatum or mandate from the Acompetent ecclesiastical authority or local bishop, presumably in order to continue teaching. If this is meant to be similar to licenses or certificates required of physicians, lawyers, psychologists, teachers, and other professions, then there is precedent in the academy and over time little difficulty will ensue.

   However, there is some indication that more is intended. The bishops differ between talking about a mandate covering a general creed and one covering a very detailed catechism of views. Some bishops expect that theologians must adhere to every detail of the catechism in order to acquire and maintain a mandate, and that individual Catholic scholars cannot veer from the catechetical text for adequate reasons. By contrast Fr. Roesch said in 1967 that professors could teach as they see fit as long as they pay due reverence to the Magisterium and their competence is attested to by their colleagues. The bishops currently seem to be saying that a theologian's competence has to be attested to by the local bishop and that theologians can only teach what is in the Catholic catechism. Such a position runs contrary to the American rules of tenure and academic freedom that were adopted in the 1960s.

   Under the American system of tenure, nontenured faculty members are reviewed regularly by their department until they receive tenure, but once tenured there are no university procedures in placeÊ for further evaluating the faculty until a faculty member seeks a promotion. Tenured faculty members can be removed for moral turpitude or incompetence, and competence is currently judged by the tenured faculty. What does loss of a mandate have to do with this process unless the tenured faculty also vote incompetence? For nontenured faculty again it is the department faculty that votes for tenure, although only the university, that is, the board of trustees, grants tenure. Is the university going to deny tenure for a faculty member approved for tenure by his/her department and department chair, but who opts not to seek a detailed catechetical mandate? If so, on what grounds? If the mandate is going to change the university rules regarding tenure, then who under the present system has the authority to change the rules, and who has to vote on these changed rules? My understanding is that the present authority resides with the faculty and administration, not with the local bishop. Changing the rules would need considerable dialogue.

   My second concern has to do with academic freedom. I think having the academic freedom to develop intellectually is extremely important to the vitality of the university faculty. Academic freedom at a minimum allows individuals to develop their intellectual expertise within their disciplines, and much development occurs when faculty members continue within their positions for twenty to forty years. If I had to stay in the area of philosophy for which I was recruited to teach in 1964 I would never have begun to teach courses in American pragmatism, ethics and modern war, or the philosophy of peace. I never had any undergraduate or graduate training in issues of war and peace. I am not alone in significantly changing my areas of expertise. If I had to get a mandate would I have to get new mandates every time I change my area of competence? In addition, some faculty have come as Catholics and become agnostics, some as priests or vowed religious and continued to teach in the married state, and others as married and gotten divorces. Why is coming with a mandate and losing it different from coming as a Catholic and becoming an agnostic? Our competence as professors is not supposed to be judged by these types of changes, but by the quality of the teaching and research that we do.

   My search for truth,and I use the term in the Eastern sense that is more closely allied with wisdomBhas brought me to views that some would posit outside the Catholic tradition. I have never felt I have left the church, and I attend the liturgy at St. Agnes Church, where my spiritual growth has been supported. But fortunately I have not had to apply for a mandate from my archbishop. I doubt that I would have gotten one. I think Catholicism is broader than a bishop. As philosophers and theologians we have to be able to entertain new ideas and follow them through.

   For instance, for several decades I have held for reincarnation. When it was first presented to me at a talk given in the downtown YMCA I thought the argument was absurd. I followed up on the talk with some reading on my own. Soon I was attracted to the justice component. The main principle is: What you sow, so shall you reap. Whatever we do, we do to ourselves. However we exit this life, we take up the loose ends in subsequent lives. The goal is to strengthen our moral outlook. Our learned talents and moral virtues carry with us as well as our faults. We progress over a larger expanse of time, and what seems like injustice in one lifetime is corrected in future lives. So there is justice in the universe, although not the type I had been raised to expect.

   I have always loved meditation. Over time I have been able to let go some of my anger and depression. In the 1970s some of my students had a five minute skit on the number of ways I used to say Ashit. Meditation helps calm my disposition. This too, like reincarnation, puts the onus on me. At least now I sometimes hear the words I use, and can shift in another direction. Mary Ann is grateful for the change.

   Unlike William James I find the experience of meditation confirms my inner sense of freedom. The brain does not control me. Sure it does in some sense. Drugs impact the way my mind works. But when I am meditating in the morning, working a mantra or counting breaths, or just being attentive, the brain induced images slow down. Counting breaths can slow down breathing. The activity of mind is wonderful to behold. A sense of freedom emerges if only for a brief span of time. James describes freedom as holding on to an idea, and I surely do that with mantras in meditation. But I go further: by concentrating on a mantra distracting images dissipate, and I do not think it is because of epilepsy or some brain anomaly. Mind is separate from the brain, but not in the dualistic sense of Plato and Descartes. Mind and body, I believe, are more interacting, and it is the mind that is more in charge.

   James divides empiricism and rationalism as two diverse types of intellectual temperaments. One he calls tough-minded, and the other, Atender- minded. I began in the tough- minded mold of Aristotle and have crossed over to the other side. On the mind side or the side of beliefs James also adds values, freedom, love for another, trust in humanity, and religious beliefs. Gandhi's views would be on this tender-minded side.

   On freedom, Sartre, Camus, and Dewey have helped me to focus my concerns. With Sartre I believe we carve out our future essence, but contrary to Sartre I add a trail and an introduction affecting and being affected by my reincarnating spirit. Camus, in the Plague, adds a nonviolent battling against the death bearing forces that plague so many of our contemporaries. With Dewey I found a philosopher who favors democracy in all institutions, and sees government as regulating the harm done to the innocent by individuals and corporations. Dewey advocates freedom but not unlimited freedom.

   Back with James I was originally puzzled by his view of no inner self. I went through the contortions of the doctrine that he presents and came up empty. Then I read some Eastern thinkers like Sri Ramana Maharshi and his Western disciple Paul Brunton, and I saw the light. The self is ego, created out of the inner source of consciousness. This personal self spins all sorts of interactive webs with external reality, building up habits and a history, and at some point when suffering becomes immense stops the process, surrenders the personal ego attachment, and like the prodigal son, returns home to absolute consciousness.

   Last May I went on a week-long retreat given by Gangaji, who is an American disciple of an Indian disciple of Sri Ramana. I heard Gangaji putting down philosophy and book learning. She really was not doing that, but that is what I heard. I was greatly troubled by her position, until she said, Philosophy is a desire. Previously I had read and taught that the Buddha said in his second noble truth that craving is the origin of suffering. To cease suffering one must stop the craving. I have never before viewed the study of philosophy as a craving. There are many other cravings, I thought, such as, sex, money, personal power, but not the love of wisdom. With one phrase Gangaji had touched the depth of my soul.

   Is there a God? Yes. God is that Absolute Consciousness of which we all partake. God is inside, not outside our beings. We achieve absolute consciousness to the extent we remove egoic attachments. In the Buddhist tradition, we unite with nirvana to the extent that we detach negatively from these attachments. When they are all gone nothing of separate substance remains. In the Christian tradition, we unite with our love center to the extent that we positively spread the spirit of love to all others. In feeding the hungry, tending the sick, welcoming strangers, visiting prisoners, being peacemakers we become the means for the outflowing of God's love. To become such an instrument we have to die to our inner desires. In both the negative and the positive ways we are dropping self and returning to the inner source. Like rainfall dissolving in a river or a river flowing into the ocean we lose ourselves to be united with our creator.

   This may not sound like the stuff of which a mandate is made, at least not as interpreted by some of our conservative bishops. But whether I am right or wrong I think it is important in Catholic universities to allow theologians and philosophers some room within which to develop their views on the nature of soul, afterlife, wisdom, and God. It might be helpful too to come together in joint sessions to discuss among ourselves what faith and reason have to learn from one another. Thank you for allowing me to share my views tonight. Thank you for sharing this beautiful space together. I wish you well for the future.