Catholic Professors Who Chose Conscience Over Comfort
By Colman McCarthy
Models of academic longevity, the threesome of Peter Walshe, Michael True and Tom Lee has a combined 114 years of teaching at Catholic colleges and universities. Transitioned from full-time classroom toil, they are now among the emeriti: seasoned and serene veterans buoyed by the satisfactions of the professorial life that each treasured semester after semester through the decades.
Convivial and opinionated, they are the kind of old hands you would hunt down for reflections on the state of Catholic higher education. They’ve tasted both its sweet and sour flavors. Going back awhile, I’ve had many conversations with each of the professors on their campuses: Peter Walshe at Notre Dame, Michael True at Assumption in Worcester, Mass., and most recently in early October Tom Lee at St. Anselm in Manchester, N.H. I can imagine that stashed somewhere at their schools are student evaluations brimming with praise: “the only professor I’ll remember 20 years from now.” “Best class I ever took.” “His love of learning was infectious.” “He jarred my intellect and touched my soul.”
For this article, I asked each of the three to focus on the positives and negatives they came upon at their schools.
Peter Walshe, South African-born and Oxford educated, came to Notre Dame in 1962
and began teaching Department of Government courses ranging from “Third World Development” to “The Politics of Tropical Africa.” In 1985, he and his wife Ann were the founding editors of “Common Sense,” an independent campus monthly that gives space for students and faculty of progressive bent to rake the campus muck, grind sharp axes and, in Virgil’s words, “plow an unfamiliar patch.”
“The major advantage of teaching at Notre Dame the last 47 years,” Walshe believes, “has been the fairly widespread if often inchoate acceptance of the Exodus, Covenant and Gospels as a basis for hope, for a sense of linear history with which there is an on-going moral challenge to build more compassionate and egalitarian societies. In short, I have found an openness to value issues, matters of charity and deepening our understanding of ‘justice.’”
Have there been disappointments? “The university’s sense of mission has faltered on at least three fronts. It has not reached out in a decisive way to invite members of other Christian denominations to join us, particularly in sharing insights on matters of theology, history and justice. We do not have a mosque or synagogue on campus. Notre Dame, in tandem with recent popes and the Vatican, has also frowned on liberation theology. Unions are still not tolerated on campus.”
In a 1996 piece in “Common Sense” that remains relevant 13 years later, Walshe wrote of the “monied power” and “pro-capitalist leadership” that Notre Dame nurtures: “Take
our governing body the board of trustees, weighted with extravagantly paid corporate CEOs and their lawyers. Where are the doctors serving in our inner cities, the devoted social workers, trade unionists and leaders of service-oriented NGOs? Notice, too, how the corporate caste, rather than making their financial contributions to the university in a discreet manner line up for honorary doctorates, give their names to buildings, have their portraits installed and present themselves as models for our students.”
Six years after joining the English Department at Assumption College in 1965, Michael True published “Should the Catholic College Survive?” “Probably not,” he wrote , and then went on to become one the school’s most revered and student-centered professors--and thereby helping mightily to assure that Assumption endured. In addition to writing books, including “An Energy Field More Intense Than War: the Nonviolent Tradition and American Literature,” Michael True gave full effort to diversifying his school’s curriculum and mission. “In one sense,” he wrote in the 1971 essay, “we can see the old ‘Catholic’ liberal arts college become extinct with some pleasure, trusting that it will be replaced by something better: a college that is first of all intellectual and liberal in the best ‘non-Catholic’ tradition.”
Has it happened? Yes and no. “Fortunately several Catholic colleges and universities have kept the palsied hand of the Vatican or particular local bishops at bay, even as the hierarchy tried to impose ecclesiastical governance on the community of scholars. They--Holy Cross for one—have done so with skill and without rancor.”
The no: “Parochial Catholicism, uninformed by the best in theological writing of the past 50 years, continues to endanger the academic freedom of teachers and students at some schools. Some religious orders, particularly men’s orders, once committed to the Second Vatican Council…have adopted an attitude of retrenchment. Then they hire lay administrators who also embrace and promote a pre-Vatican II style of Catholicism. Assumption, where I taught for 32 delightful years among students and faculty I loved, retiring in 1997, is suffering from this kind of crisis at the moment.”
Like Michael True, Tom Lee at St. Anselm is grateful for having had a long-lasting and supportive academic home. As with True, who tangled with the Assumption fathers who run the school, Lee, who taught biology, has had his tensions with the St. Anselm Benedictines: “Over the years I did try to drum up some student activism about a number of causes, often relating to questions of war and peace. I had very few takers, with some wonderful exceptions, and while the school administration was adamantly against abortion, they cared little for the seamless garment argument for protecting all life by choosing nonviolence over war.”
Among his colleagues, Lee, whose 2005 book “Battlebabble: Selling War in America” was published by Common Courage Press, had a habit of asking newly hired professors how St. Anselm students compared to those at secular schools where they had been teaching. “The answer,” he said, “was usually along the lines that the St. A students were ‘wholesome,’ ‘respectful,’ ‘cooperative’ and ‘good kids’ who scored higher in those categories than students they had taught in other schools. I think this has to do not with any ability of our students to get excited about whether the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds’ from the Father or Son, or that some sins are ‘mortal’ or ‘venial.’ It is just they have grown up in Catholic families where the above mentioned qualities are infused by example.”
Students and deans at Notre Dame, Assumption and St. Anselm were fortunate to have Peter Walshe, Michael True and Tom Lee in their classrooms. So was American Catholicism. Any one of the three could as easily have settled in at a state or secular school at higher pay and shorter hours. Instead they chose to be Catholic educators, however more difficult it often was opening the minds of their clerical rulers than stirring the minds of their students.
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, teaches courses on nonviolence at four universities and two high schools, and directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington DC. He has lectured many times at Notre Dame.