Peace Studies at Catholic Colleges -- A Fragile Foothold

By Colman McCarthy

At St. Michael’s College, Colchester, Vt., it’s called the Peace and Justice Program. At Georgetown University, Washington D.C., it’s the Program on Justice and Peace. At the University of Portland, Portland, Ore., it’s the Peace Studies Program. At Rivier College, Nashua, N.H., it’s the Peace and Social Justice Studies Program. At the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn., it’s the Justice and Peace Studies Program. At the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass., it’s the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. At Catholic University, Washington D.C. it’s the Peace and World Order Studies Program.

By whatever name one school or another chooses, the purpose of what generically can be called peace education is roughly the same: administrators--the sellers--are offering to students--the buyers--courses on the methods, philosophy, history and politics of effective nonviolent solutions to conflict. Within that broad definition are large numbers of specific interpretations. Peace education at one school may emphasize the practical elements of dispute resolution. At another, diplomacy and security issues are the focus. One school may be intent on stirring students to become the next Dorothy Days or Berrigans. The next school sees its role as a training center for professional conflict solvers. A few are still groping for a direction.

In paragraph 97 of their 1983 pastoral letter, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,” U.S. Catholic bishops were generalists: “We urge universities, particularly Catholic universities, in our country to develop programs, interdisciplinary research, education and training directed toward peacemaking expertise.”

While visiting each of the above campuses, and dozens of others, in recent years to give lectures on nonviolence. I was energized by the deep commitments of individual professors to the often lonely calling of peace education and by the gratitude of students to be in a school that offered courses relevant to creating the peaceable society.

Although each peace-teaching school has a different tale about its origins and current program, most were linked by shared realities:

--early on, one or two professors had to lobby persistently and strenuously a department dean or curriculum committee merely to get an initial course approved.

--peace studies professors had to defend themselves against faculty carpers who dismissed the program as intellectually soft, ideology-driven or a ruse for reliving the ‘60’s.

--scrounging for off-campus grants was as wearying as begging for departmental funding to expand the program.

--students majoring in peace studies were forever being told by perplexed parents that there are no jobs in peace.

--students at schools with only a concentration or minor in peace studies were told to be happy with those crumbs, or come back in five years when a new college president might be sympathetic to a major.

--students wonder why their schools routinely confer honorary degrees on the famous, wealthy and secure but seldom on peacemakers and agitators.

Much of what I have seen and heard about peace education at Catholic colleges confirms my own experiences in teaching courses on nonviolence since 1982 at both Catholic and secular schools in the Washington area. As an adjunct, I have taught at Georgetown. Catholic, and Trinity College. Currently I have courses at a juvenile prison, Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Maryland, Catholic University and American University, as well as a D.C. inner city public high school and a Catholic girls school. In all, I’ve had some 5,000 students in fall, spring and summer semesters.

To learn more about the state of peace education in U.S. Catholic colleges—serving more than 600,000 undergraduates—I sent inquiries to some 20 directors of peace studies programs. All were members of the Peace Studies Association, a national group based at Earlham College, Richmond, Ind. Out of 85 member schools, 23 are Catholic. Of the 10 members of the Board of Directors, one is from a Catholic college.

As the numbers suggest, peace education is far from flourishing on U. S. campuses. Well less than 10 percent of the nation’s 3,000 colleges and universities are offering any courses at all in peace studies, with fewer than 100 offering degrees. Typically, Catholic colleges offer far more courses in warmaking than peacemaking. The University of Notre Dame undergraduate course catalog uses four pages to describe 34 ROTC military courses ranging from amphibious warfare I and II to the evolution of warfare I and II. Peace Studies receives less than a fourth of a page.

In the mid-1980s, John Dear, a Jesuit priest currently directing the Fellowship of Reconciliation helped found the peace studies program at Fordham University. “The program is alive today,” Dear reports, “but I wish it was promoted more strongly. Meanwhile, military training and recruiting continues at Fordham. The problem remains that Catholic schools readily teaches people how to kill, through ROTC programs. How can we teach peace and uphold the peacemaking life of Jesus on one hand, while on the other support the Pentagon and train our young people to kill in future wars? We need to abolish all ROTC programs, and then develop and build our peace studies programs.

When speaking at colleges, I often do a spot quiz halfway through my talk. I hold up a $100 bill and offer it to any student who can identify six people whose names I call out: Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant, Paul Revere, Dorothy Day, Jeannette Rankin and Helen Green Balch. All hands go up on the first three, rarely a hand on any of the last three. In 20 years, and before hundreds of audiences, no one has won the $100. Whether at Notre Dame, Georgetown or Holy Cross--the big leagues of Catholic higher ed packed with faculty Ph.Ds and boasting of accepting only the brightest high school seniors—or at the Spring Hills, Mercyhursts and St. Scholasticas, it’s always safe money. Peace illiteracy is rampant. Students have been well educated about men who are peacebreakers but not about women who are peacemakers.

A fair number of the program directors in peace studies to whom I wrote responded with lengthy and detailed accounts of their efforts. All were grateful, and some surprised, to be asked about their work, as if it should be a rare day when anyone from the media has the curiosity and time to flush them out.

What emerges from the responses are three realities: (1) the peace studies programs—whether they offer majors, minors or concentrations—are small, low-budget operations, (2), professors tend to be idealistic citizens whose commitment to peace extends well beyond the classroom, (3), professors and students hold few illusions that administrators or boards of trustees will soon--or ever—give the kind of financial support that will make the school be celebrated as a champion of peace education.

These are among the schools that responded in depth to my queries:

University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn. Planning for the program began in 1985, with approval for a major coming in 1991. Since then, 50 majors have been awarded and 55 minors. Course offering include “Hunger, Justice and Peace,” “Jesus and the Circle of Violence,” “A Vision of Nonviolent Social Change,” “The Catholic Worker in America,” and “Theology of Economics.” The course texts range from “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion” by Marshall Rosenberg to “Hell, Healing and Resistance” by Daniel Hallock.

At St. Thomas, Father David Smith, a professor of theology and director of the program, reports that his main “satisfaction is seeing students transformed and committed to making a difference in the world. The main frustration is lack of time. I do not have a secretary assigned to the program. I have been using extensive work-study students instead. The theology secretary helps when she can.”

Father Smith, who is exploring the possibilities of creating a master’s program in peace and justice studies, is a pacifist “but with the proviso that it is better to resist evil with violence than not to resist it at all. I agree with Gandhi that the best way to resist evil is with satyagraha.”

Of the Air Force ROTC presence at St. Thomas, Father Smith says that his faculty and students “differ on whether such a program should exist on a Catholic campus. My position is that eventually Catholic campuses should support trained, well-resourced politically supported organizations for active nonviolence as a replacement for armies. But so long as the Catholic community believes there is a place for military defense, it is hypocritical to say ‘not in my backyard.’”

Iona College, New Rochelle, N.Y. The yearly budget for the Peace and Justice Program is $10,000. Out of a student population of 2,600, an average of eight students annually receive minors in Peace and Justice Studies. Michael Hovey, the program director, has a full-time paid position in the Center for Campus Ministries. After five years in the Navy, including a stint at a base near Nagasaki, Hovey sought and received in 1976 an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector to war. Since then, he has been an active member of Pax Christi.

A Peace and Justice minor at Iona requires 15 credits. Primary courses include “Introduction to Conflict Resolution,” “War and Peace in American History,” “Peace Movements in America,” “Catholicism: Peace and Justice.” Among the course texts are

“A Peace Reader” edited by Joseph Fahey and Richard Armstrong and “Justice and Peace: A Christian Primer.”

Iona’s program began in 1977 when it and six other schools were nudged by the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities to host pilot programs in peace and Justice Education. Despite the smallness of his academic program, Hovey states that Iona’s administrators have plans to create both a major and an autonomous Department of Peace and Justice Studies. He exults: “I think Iona has one of the very best atmospheres for peace and justice programs that I know of! The administration and faculty are far ahead of the students in both understanding why peace and justice is so integral to our mission and in supporting the programs we run. It is the clear consensus of the Iona community that peace studies and related programs are a key element in the college’s Catholic identity.”

Christian Brothers University, Memphis, Tenn. In his fourth year as director of the peace studies program, Peter Gathje, an assistant professor of religion and philosophy, says that “the overall budget for the program is zero, unless one would pro-rate faculty salaries based upon the teaching of the courses designated as part of the peace studies minor. So, we have no college funds to bring in outside speakers or sponsor student activities off campus.”

In the 20 years of the program—begun by Gerard Vanderhaar whose books on nonviolence are regarded in the field as troves of practical wisdom--approximately 40 students have chosen peace studies as a minor. Additionally, about 40 students have taken one of the core courses in the minor, either “Christianity and Peace” or “Peacemaking.”

Gathje is a pacifist, as is Vanderhaar, the retired previous director. At the core of the Christian Brothers program is Vanderhaar’s enduring message that nonviolence must be embraced as a positive way of life, not simply be a negative tactic to oppose war, weaponry and violence.

Gathje is heartened every semester on seeing that “the peace studies courses are regularly filled to the maximum.” One frustration is that “we have yet to develop and offer a course specifically dealing with conflict resolution. I think those skills and the theory of conflict resolution need serious attention by our students.”

St. Michael’s College, Colchester, Vt. In the first semester of her first year, Anne Femenella took a four credit seminar from Father Michael Cronoque, an Edmunite priest, on peace and justice. The course stirred her intellectually and spiritually. It also aroused her appetite for more. Why, she wondered, isn’t St. Michael’s offering a major, or at least a minor, in peace studies?

When I interviewed Anne Femenella last spring at the college—she was then a sophomore—no satisfactory answer had been given. “It seems,” she said, “ that the academic powers are not interested in expending the resources and energies to help students create an environment that helps their learning through peace education.”

Not your ordinary campus agitator with more mouth power than staying power, Femenella dug in and took the time to write in Nov. 1999 a detailed outline for creating a major. She submitted it to the school’s curriculum board. Femenella found an ally in her faculty advisor, Father Cronogue. He has also written a proposal for what would be needed academically to fulfill the requirements for a peace studies minor. While adminstrators ponder and mull, Femenella won’t be around. She has plans to take her junior year abroad through Vermont’s School for International Training—to study peace and justice.

Georgetown University, Washington D.C. The Program on Peace and Justice has roots in the 1960s when Father Richard McSorely’s courses on nonviolence were packed to capacity. McSorely, an uncompromising pacifist in the tradition of pre-Augustine Christianity, regularly rebuked Georgetown’s Jesuit administrators for paying only flickering attention to peace education while proudly hosting an ROTC program.

McSorely, author of “Kill For Peace?’ and who ardently supported students who bured draft cards in opposition to the Vietnam War, is now in his 80s and not teaching. But his work is carried on by others, though of tamer spirit and milder tongue. Georgetown’s program—revived seven years ago—does not offer a major. It’s budget of $60,000 is “almost nothing compared to a real department,” says Mark Lance. He is the only professor specifically appointed to teach in the program, with most courses staffed by teachers who have a passion for peace education and who do it as extra work. With more than 100 students pursuing minors, three core courses are offered, along with such electives as “Community Conflict Resolution” and “The Ethics of Nonviolence.”

The latter is taught by Lance. The course readings, he says, “focus on the sorts of social injustice that lead people to form movements for positive change. For me, to think only about the techniques of dealing with conflicts, apart from the social problems that cause them, is both intellectually and politically irresponsible. If people took nonviiolence seriously, and the optioins it provides, it would lead to profound changes in all levels of society.”

College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Mass. Begin in 1988, the concentration in Peace and Conflict Studies attracts between 15 and 20 students a year, out of 2,700 undergraduates. The concentration re quires a one semester intro course, three electives, and a research paper, or internship or a capstone course.

According to David O’Brien, the director, out of 10 faculty members involved with the program, “only one, or perhaps two, are pacifists.” Two of the realities that undergird the program’s creation was the strong presence of ROTC at Holy Cross and, at the other end, an attempt to meet the needs of students who were pacifists or had ties to the Catholic Worker, either in Worcester or their home towns.

In March 1997, O’Brien, well-known beyond Holy Cross for both his teaching skills and his persistence in trying to wake up church leaders, wrote a forceful report for the Catholic bishops task force on Catholic education and social teaching. In it, he stated that among colleges and universities “there are few programs which offer students the chance to pursue questions of social justice in a systematic way. Peace and Justice Studies programs are generally small and beg for faculty and institutional support.”

An idea of what Holy Cross leaders take pride in can be seen in the current 52-page glossy magazine published by the admissions office. Two full pages are devoted to “Alumni/ae of Distinction.” On one full-color page is Christopher Matthews, ’67, the noted television shouter and interrupter. The following page of role models is filled with photos and bios of more alums, including the deputy director of the CIA, the publisher of Glamour magazine, a sportswriter, a vice-president of Goldman-Sachs, and two executives of investment firms. Missing was Philip Berrigan, ’49, the one alumni whose peace-based life could well serve as a model for Holy Cross students seeking to confront American militarism. In his autobiography, “Fighting the Lamb’s War,” Berrigan recalls that during his years at Holy Cross, he was taught nothing about pacifism or nonviolence.

Manhattan College, Riverdale, N.Y. Going back to the late 1960’s when he was a young instructor in theology and actively opposing the Vietnam war, Joseph Fahey has been the steadfast nurturer, coordinator and defender of Manhattan’s Peace Studies programs. It granted its first degree in 1973 to three students. The peak year was 1976 with 14. Then interest waned. From 1981 to ’95, only 29 peace studies degrees were awarded. Fahey is now retired,, with Margaret Groarke the current director.

In 1990, Fahey wrote in the Spring issue of “Peace Review,” a long article titled “Peace Studies and the American Ethos.” It began: “ In the late 1960’s when a handful of professors from various disciplines were meeting at Manhattan College to plan the Bachelor of Arts program in Peace Studies, a former dean of our college said to us, ‘you don’t want these kids to be peacemakers. You want them to be troublemakers!” Our response was to assure him that peacemaking was at heart a reconciliatory process and that, in fact, we were trying to teach our students not to be troublemakers. But the dean was more perceptive than we were. At heart a peacemaker is a troublemaker.”

Catholic University, Washington D.C. In one stretch during the 1980s, the Peace and Justice Studies program was well-promoted and popular. By the mid-1990s, administration support flagged and course offerings dropped. This year, with momentum returning, between 60 and 70 students are expected to take one or more of the three core courses that are part of the 18 hours needed for a minor.

With no peace studies department, and a budget of only $2,000, peace education exists on the margins at Catholic. Without the doggedness of Prof. William Barbieri, who runs the program from his department of religion, and a few other persistent professors, peace studies might vanish altogether. Barbieri agrees wholeheartedly with the 1983 bishops’ pastoral letter on peace: “It’s hard to imagine a more pressing responsibility than to teach students how to both analyze and respond constructively to conflicts of all sorts. This should be a high priority, however much it might cause financial sacrifice or overcoming deep-seated disciplinary prejudices.”

A group of C.U. students interested in founding a campus organization to work on peace and social justice issues recently approached Barbieri for help. “Here and elsewhere,” he says, “the potential is emerging around which successful peace studies programs might be built or expanded--provided they receive the institutional support they deserve.”

St. Bonaventure University, St. Bonaventure, N.Y. For the past two years, Barry Gan, the director and a pacifist for 30 years, has been redesigning the peace studies program so that it focuses more on the philosophy of nonviolence and less on international diplomacy and conflict resolution. The result is the Center for Nonviolence. Last year it sponsored two courses—the first time that university officials allowed more than one course a semester to be offered. One class had 25 students, the other 15. When the small peace studies program began in the 1980s, the budget was about $2,000. “When our university fell on hard time six years ago,” Gan says, “the budget was slashed to zero and it has not been restored since despite improved conditions and despite my pleadings.”

What Gan relates about his program is the pattern, not the exception. Michael True, a long-time teacher of peace at Assumption College and author of several books on nonviolence, summarizes: “There are few academic appointments in peace studies, per se, so the programs have been built around people with appointments in other departments. And now, many of those who initiated programs are retiring, often with schools uncommitted to replacing them. So it’s a continual struggle to keep the programs strong, unless someone donates money for them.”

If it’s any comfort for those who have reformist hopes for Catholic education, the same reality holds for peace studies programs throughout the country at state, secular and private colleges from Colgate and Colorado College to Berkeley and Earlham. What exists now for peace studies is a foothold. Twenty years ago, it was a toehold. That’s progress.

To have any chance at all for a long-term decrease in violence—in whatever form, from wars between nations and tribes to violence in families to violence against animals by killing them for food—academic courses in the literature of peace and the techniques of nonviolent conflict resolution need to be taught at every level of schooling. Every gunman mass spraying bullets in classrooms or workplaces, every spouse abuser, every politician voting to increase weapons spending or calling for more executions on death row: they were all in first grade somewhere at sometime, then second grade and on up. Had they been exposed to the literature, methods, history, theories and practitioners of nonviolence, perhaps they would have second thoughts—rejecting thoughts—about violence.

Every semester, I call on my students to go beyond merely asking questions. Do something bolder and braver. Instead of asking questions, question the answers—those given by anyone who says the answer is violence. That requires courage, because it means taking on nearly an entire culture long conditioned to accept, even celebrate, violent solutions. If the nation’s Catholic colleges could marshal their educational power for peace education, and back it up with money and not more task force recommendations, what a positive force that would be.

Colman McCarthy, who wrote his first article for NCR in 1966, is a former Washington Post columnist. He is the founder and director of The Center for Teaching Peace, 450l Van Ness St., Washington D.C., 20016. His textbook, “Solutions to Violence,” is widely used at U.S. high schools and colleges.