[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 49 (Tuesday, April 28, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E680]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               NOTRE DAME COMBINING RESEARCH AND RELIGION

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                            HON. TIM ROEMER

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                        Tuesday, April 28, 1998

  Mr. ROEMER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to draw my colleagues' 
attention to the following December 10, 1997 article in the New York 
Times about the University of Notre Dame.

                [From the New York Times, Dec. 10, 1997]

               Notre Dame Combining Research and Religion

                           (By Ethan Bronner)

       Notre Dame, Ind., Dec. 4.--At the end of a century in which 
     the great American universities have moved from being 
     extensions of churches to centers of secularism, the 
     University of Notre Dame is carving itself an important niche 
     as an institution of serious scholarship with a deeply 
     religious environment.
       Some colleges are religious; others have vital research 
     centers. Notre Dame is rare in combining the two.
       The religious nature of Notre Dame is felt not only in the 
     crucifixes that hang in every class, the Roman Catholic 
     priests who live in every dormitory, the Mass recited nightly 
     and the forbidding of men and women to enter each other's 
     dormitory rooms after a certain hour. It comes as well in the 
     work being fostered here.
       Political scientists are reclaiming Augustine to examine 
     ``just war'' theory. Law professors are focusing on neglected 
     church views about dying in legal debates on assisted 
     suicide. Historians are emphasizing the role of local 
     parishes in understanding urban race relations.
       Some of these approaches would have been dismissed as 
     almost ridiculously retrograde a generation ago, yet scholars 
     here and elsewhere say the American academy seems 
     surprisingly receptive to them today because they bring new 
     or lost perspectives to vital subjects.
       This comes at a time of newfound self-confidence for Notre 
     Dame. Flush with cash from rich alumni and proceeds from its 
     storied football team, the university is discovering it can 
     lure scholars, including non-Catholics, from top institutions 
     by promoting religion.
       ``When I was a graduate student at Harvard 25 years ago, 
     the whole idea of working in a religious framework was 
     bizarre,'' said James Turner, an intellectual historian who 
     moved here recently from the University of Michigan. 
     ``Augustine had become a kind of museum artifact to be 
     studied only by the appropriate curators. But now we are 
     making the case that neglected religious sources can help 
     reconfigure academic discussion.''
       Professor Turner is director of the newly established 
     Erasmus Institute here, a unique interdisciplinary effort 
     that seeks to be a national model for the reinvigoration of 
     Catholic and other religious intellectual traditions in 
     contemporary scholarship.
       He is among recent catches for Notre Dame in a highly 
     competitive academic environment. Others have been lured to 
     the prairies of northern Indiana by the idea of turning a 
     respectable academic institution into a truly fine one.
       Philip L. Quinn left an endowed chair in philosophy at 
     Brown University for one here because, he said: ``In my 
     personal and professional life I take religion seriously. In 
     the secular academy, they are not much concerned with 
     religion. They look at it from the social science 
     perspective.''
       George M. Marsden, a historian of religion and a devout 
     Protestant, left Duke University for Notre Dame because, he 
     said, only here did he feel there was the desire for a high-
     level scholarly discussion within a Christian context.
       While there are scores of small Christian colleges across 
     the United States, none can lay claim to being a center of 
     scholarship outside the Christian world. Notre Dame can.
       One of its sources of pride is its new Irish Studies 
     Institute, financed with a gift of $13 million from Donald R. 
     Keough, an alumnus who was president of Coca-Cola from 1981 
     to 1993.
       The donation has made it possible to attract Seamus Deane, 
     one of the most distinguished Irish scholars and authors, 
     as director. Professor Deane, whose novel, ``Reading in 
     the Dark'' (Knopf, 1997), was received with high praise 
     earlier this year, says that by September 1998 there will 
     be six full-time faculty members and one visiting 
     professor at the institute, making it the biggest such 
     program in the country.
       ``We're not on the scale of Johns Hopkins or M.I.T.'' said 
     the Rev. Edward A. Malloy, Notre Dame's president, ``but we 
     are increasing the intellectual resources so as to make this 
     a great university. With the Erasmus Institute and Irish 
     studies we have identified areas of intellectual engagement 
     where we can make a real contribution.''
       Notre Dame has long had a special place among American 
     universities but not largely for its scholarship. Founded in 
     1842 by a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, it was to 
     American Catholics in the mid-20th century what City College 
     was to New York Jews, a welcoming place to study without fear 
     of prejudice.
       The dominance of its football team under a series of 
     legendary coaches beginning with Knute Rockne--and the public 
     way in which teams recited Mass before each game--focused the 
     loyalty of many American Catholics who tended to regard Notre 
     Dame with almost Lourdes-like devotion.
       In recent decades, the university's endowment has risen to 
     $1.5 billion, nearly 30 times what it was in 1970.
       U.S. News and World Report ranks Notre Dame 19th of 
     national universities and a recent book, ``The Rise of 
     American Research Universities'' (Johns Hopkins, 1997), named 
     Notre Dame as among a handful of top rising private research 
     universities.
       It is the combination of competitiveness and tradition that 
     attracted M. Cathleen Kaveny to join the law faculty here 
     three years ago. Holder of a doctorate and a law degree from 
     Yale University, Professor Kaveny has become an expert on 
     assisted suicide by drawing on Catholic teachings. She is 
     planning a scholarly study of mercy, how a society should 
     feed its hungry and comfort its sick.
       ``These are areas that I could never pursue as a junior 
     faculty member at another law school,'' Professor Kaveny 
     said. ``I would be laughed at. Here they are excited about 
     it.''
       There is some concern that all the talk about rediscovering 
     Christian sources will serve as a pretext for squelching free 
     inquiry. Michael A. Signer, a Reform rabbi who holds a chair 
     here in Jewish culture, says Notre Dame is still grappling 
     with being both Catholic and catholic. The test of the 
     Erasmus Institute, Rabbi Signer says, will be to see how it 
     handles that tension, whether it reaches out to other 
     traditions or barricades itself in.
       Alan Wolfe, who describes himself as a secular sociologist 
     at Boston University, wrote recently in The Chronicle of 
     Higher Education that the revival of religion in the academy 
     at places like Notre Dame was welcome.
       ``To study the world's great literary works, many of which 
     were inspired by religious questions, without full 
     appreciation of those questions is like performing Hamlet 
     without the Prince,'' Mr. Wolfe wrote. ``Critics of academic 
     specialization in the humanities often say that English 
     departments, infatuated with contemporary works, no longer 
     teach enough Milton or Tolstoy. It would be more correct to 
     say that, through the lens of secularism, they are teaching 
     them inaccurately.''

     

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