Potemkin Village at Boston College

The faculty furor that followed the recent placement of 40 crucifixes on the classroom walls at Boston College shows how difficult it has become to maintain even a Catholic façade in the academic life of most Catholic colleges and universities. In published interviews with Boston College faculty members, one professor described the crucifix placement as “insensitive,” while another found it “offensive” and indicative of a “bias toward one way of thinking, elevating one set of ideals above others, honoring one group of people in preference to the rest.”
Although Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn told a reporter for the Boston Herald that the decision to install the crucifixes throughout the campus was an attempt to “reconnect the school with its Catholic mission,” Boston College professor Amir Hoyveda responded in a letter to the editor of the Herald that he “can hardly imagine a more effective way to denigrate the faculty of an educational institution.”
The enraged faculty response from Boston College is yet another reminder of the uneasy relationship that Catholic colleges continue to have with the Catholic Church. In a recent commentary lamenting the loss of the Catholic identity within the culture and curriculum at most Catholic colleges and universities, Notre Dame Professor Fr. Wilson Miscamble wrote that most of these campuses “now possess a certain Potemkin Village quality.” Like the fake Potemkin villages that had been built to create an impression of prosperity during Catherine the Great’s tours of Ukraine and the Crimea, the sacred symbols and saintly statues found on Catholic campuses like Boston College create a false impression of a commitment to faithfulness to the truth of the Church that is presented in campus tours to potential donors, students and their parents. The arrival of the crucifixes must have surprised those on the Boston campus. Most professors likely assumed that campus leaders had made a conscious decision decades ago that in its pursuit of upward mobility, much of the college’s commitment to Catholic teachings would be sacrificed. How else can one explain the annual production of The Vagina Monologues—despite Church teachings to the contrary? How else can one explain Boston College’s annual participation in National Coming Out Week? Last year’s activities included an open mic discussion called “Opening Boston’s Closets” and a “Guess who’s gay” game show themed event “aimed at breaking down stereotypes.” The “Coming Out Week” culminated with a fashion show in which Boston College students were encouraged to express their sexuality through cross-dressing.
The highly publicized case of Boston College theology professor, Mary Daly demonstrates that the anti-Catholicism has reached into the classrooms. For more than three decades Daly refused to allow males to even enroll in her undergraduate and graduate courses—claiming that her classroom had to be maintained as a male free “space on the boundary of the patriarchy.” The self-described “radical feminist, lesbian, and post-Christian hag” claimed that she would “spin covens in the shell of what remained of the Catholic Church.” Author of The Church and the Second Sex, an analysis of what she views as the misogyny of the Catholic Church, Daly rejected the Creed as “mythological,” the Trinity as a “model for cloning,” and the Virgin birth as “rape by the Patriarchal deity. “ A staunch abortion advocate, Mary Daly was allowed to teach at Boston College for more than 30 years until her retirement in 2000. Although Mary Daly may not be representative of all theology professors on Catholic campuses, her theme of a misogynistic Church designed to oppress women is a consistent one that has been adopted by many Catholic college faculty members.
Some Catholic campuses like Boston College have become springboards of advocacy for the legalization of same-sex marriage. Kara Suffredini, a graduate of Boston College Law School land now legislative attorney for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which advocates same sex marriage and strives to “build political power for the Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gendered community” told an alumni gathering of the Lambda Law Students that “I want to begin by saying that everything I know about queer activism, I learned at Boston College Law School. Put that in your admissions brochure.”
Suffredini most likely appreciated the fact that for more than twenty years, Boston College Law School barred military recruiters as a matter of institutional policy. In fact, the very origins of the lawsuit against the military for its reluctance to allow openly gay soldiers to serve grew out of Boston College’s gay rights advocacy. Beginning in the early 1980s, Boston Law School argued that its decision to ban military recruiters from campus was “an expression of Jesuit, Catholic principles and values.” The Boston ban continued until 2002 when the federal government implemented the Solomon Amendment—a federal law barring taxpayer funds to universities that restrict military recruiters’ access to students in opposition of the military’s ban on openly gay soldiers.
But, even after Solomon, Boston College took the lead in the fight against. In an attempt to overturn the amendment, Boston College Law Professor Kent Greenfield was the lead plaintiff in Rumsfelt v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR). FAIR members included representatives of the law faculties of four Catholic universities including Depaul, Fordham, Georgetown and the University of San Francisco. Law Professors from Boston College serve on FAIR’s board.
Most recently, it was Catholic academics—some of them from Boston College—who made the argument that Catholics could vote “in good conscience” for Barack Obama, the pro-choice presidential candidate. And, despite Pope Benedict’s admonition that Catholic colleges must be unwavering in their commitment to Catholic teachings in everything they do, it was Catholic theologians like Lisa Sowle Cahill of Boston College who so distorted Catholic teachings on abortion that they managed to help convince yet another generation of voters that when a candidate supports issues of social justice like the living wage and equality for women, Catholics can support the pro-abortion candidate even when there is an acceptable pro-life candidate running for office.
Fr. Miscamble laments the fact that students emerge from Catholic schools like Boston College “unfamiliar with the riches of the Catholic intellectual tradition and with their imaginations untouched by a religious sensibility.” Although the administration at Boston College should be lauded for the attempt to begin to restore the appearance of a Catholic identity on campus, it may be too little, too late. While the once hallowed ground still remains, the newly installed crucifixes have already become hollow reminders of a time that has long passed on Chestnut Hill.
Anne Hendershott is Professor of Urban Studies at The King’s College in New York City and the author of the newly released Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education (Transaction).