Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education
Review
Anne Hendershott sees–oh, so clearly–all the strangeness, all the weirdness, and all the contradictions of Catholic higher education in America today. It’s a gloomy tale of decline and fall, and yet, Hendershott’s study ends on an upbeat note: The world has changed, and Catholic students today are not the same as the Catholic students who let their patrimony slip away. The solution is works like Anne Hendershott’s Staus Envy, which explain why we really shouldn’t abandon ship just at the moment there is a chance. Catholic universities must not give up on their Catholic identity just at the moment when that identity has the chance to save them. –Joseph Bottum, First Things
Product Description
The debate within Catholic educational circles on whether church sponsored colleges and universities perpetuate mediocrity by giving too great a priority to the moral development of students instead of scholarship and intellectual excellence continues in this book by sociologist Anne Hendershott. She asserts that part of the reason for the crisis of faith within Catholic colleges is due to status envy–the desire to compete with the top colleges in the country. Catholic universities are generally not rated as top-notch. They are viewed as having a lower status than secular institutions, which, of course, creates resentment. Catholic universities, in turn, become more secular as they become consumed with status concerns.
Hendershott, who clearly sympathizes with the original mission of Catholic universities, leads the reader through the earliest signs that Catholic colleges were beginning to lose their way in the 1960s, up through the ongoing issues of feminism and homosexuality and their impact.
In focusing on these secular issues, colleges are denying exposure to the traditional Catholic views on subjects such as homosexuality, women’s ordination, and abortion. Like all culture wars, the interaction among people defines the situation. The campus is a reflection of the greater culture between those who assert that there are no truths, only readings–and those who believe that the truths have been revealed and require constant rereading and application. It is a conflict between those dedicated to the negation of the authority of Scripture and the hierarchy of the church, and those proposing a renaissance of the Catholic intellect and a renewed appreciation of the church itself.
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I would love to read the book with this title. Unfortunately, the work delivered by Anne Hendershott is not it! A true study or reflection on “the politics of Catholic Higher Education” would be truly interesting and is much needed in light of Ex Corde and the threat that many local ordinaries are presenting to academic freedom. This book, however, is a petty attack on almost all of the Catholic colleges which serve this country, with a particular expose of the Jesuit schools, including an attack on education for justice. This is nothing more than a book length diatribe “worthy” of the Newman Society. If you buy it, expect nothing more than that!