Some reflections and questions about Notre Dame’s “refreshed” staff values

I’ll begin these reflections with an upfront affirmation of my love for the University of Notre Dame. My wife was an undergraduate there (class of 1988), our nephew (and my godson) recently graduated from Notre Dame, and I have many dear and wonderful friends who teach there.

I believe that the theology department is one of the very best in the world. I have attended conferences at Notre Dame sponsored by the De Nicola Center (run by the excellent theologian, Dr. Jennifer Martin) that I would rate as the best I have ever attended anywhere.

There is a vibrant Catholic student culture on campus as well as many fine Catholic faculty members teaching in a variety of departments. There are also many excellent non-Catholic faculty members who support and promote the Catholic identity of the school without reservation. Not without reason, therefore, did one of my intellectual heroes, the late David L. Schindler, choose to be buried at Notre Dame.

In short, there really is no place like it in the Catholic world, and I cherish every opportunity I get to go there.

“Refreshed” staff values

I begin with this resounding endorsement to underscore that the following criticisms are motivated by a love for Notre Dame and not any animus against it.

Recently, the President of Human Resources (Heather Chrisophersen) released a new set of “refreshed” staff values that will guide the evaluation of the many non-faculty staff members who work there. Most noteworthy is that the new values delete any specific mention of supporting the Catholic mission of the school. For comparison’s sake, here are the old values followed by the new guidelines (as listed in the CNA article):

Old staff values:

— Accountability: Takes responsibility and ownership for decisions, actions, and results. Accountable for both how and what is accomplished

— Teamwork: Works cooperatively as a member of a team and is committed to the overall team objectives rather than own interests

— Integrity: Demonstrates honest and ethical behavior that displays a high moral standard. Widely trusted, respectful, and honorable

— Leadership in Excellence: Demonstrates energy and commitment to improving results, takes initiatives often involving calculated risks while considering the common good

— Leadership in Mission: Understands, accepts, and supports the Catholic mission of the university and fosters values consistent with that mission

Here is the new set of staff values:

— Community: Treat every person with dignity and respect.

— Collaboration: Work together with honesty, kindness, and humility.

— Excellence: Pursue the highest standards with a commitment to truth and service.

— Innovation: Embrace opportunities with creativity and dedication.

In an interview, Heather Christophersen says that the entire category of “Leadership in Mission” was deleted, including the specific reference to Catholic mission, to highlight that every one of the values speaks in its own way to the school’s mission. The CNA article summarizes as follows:

According to the Notre Dame Observer, Christophersen said in an interview that the former Notre Dame values “had only one value that pointed into mission” and that the decision to remove the “Leadership in Mission” value was motivated by a desire to reframe the school’s Catholic mission as all-encompassing. She said the old values had caused confusion in staff evaluation processes during annual performance reviews and that the school does not monitor religious affiliation for staff in the same way as faculty and students.

What sort of “global” institution?

This “clarification” hardly clarifies anything and raises several troubling questions.

First, it is indeed strange that there is no mention of a specifically Catholic mission that guides all the staff values if the goal was to emphasize that all the various values fall under that Catholic umbrella. A neutral observer, ignorant of Notre Dame’s Catholic status, if handed these values would have no inkling from them that they were animated in some way by a Catholic missional identity.

Ms. Christophersen states that the goal is for Notre Dame to be a “global Catholic Research University.” One can perhaps detect here a whiff of tension between the desire to be “global” and the Catholic mission of the school. One hopes that in the near future, Ms. Christophersen can define with greater specificity what she means when she says that the goal is for Notre Dame to be a “global university” even as it eliminates any mention of Catholicism from its staff values. Specifically, does she think that there is a conflict between a strong emphasis on Catholic identity and the desire to be global?

In other words, is there some meaning in the use of the term “global” that goes beyond the basic empirical fact that the school’s reputation and influence extend far beyond its campus borders and into the wider world? If the term had been combined with a robust reaffirmation of Catholic identity and that Notre Dame expects all of its employees to, at the very least, respect that identity and to do nothing to impede it, then there would be no issue. But the absence of the latter—indeed, in light of its explicit removal—raises a serious red flag about just what kind of global presence Notre Dame seeks.

The fact is, there are competing models for what it means for an institution to be global. The dominant model of our culture is mostly secular and emphasizes a kind of political Liberalism that positions itself as the great, allegedly value-neutral, cultural Esperanto of denatured parochialisms, where all specific identities are equal in the sense that they are all equally trivial in the big picture. And that “big picture”, or in common academic argot, that “metanarrative”, is that a truly global culture will emphasize our freedom to be whatever we want to be or to worship however we please, which is all well and good, but only so long as it is understood that such particularisms are merely the epiphenomenal exudations of an atomized, choosing self.

A self that bears no intrinsic meaning or value in itself and whose “inherent dignity” is largely a merely stipulative legal fiction, the contents of which are largely determined by a combination of parasitical borrowings from a dying Christianity and various secular sentimentalisms of the moment. It is ultimately, therefore, a vision of “globalism” that is rather metaphysically vacuous, grounded in nothing of real intellectual substance, unmoored from all traditional concepts of value, and held together by the thin, diaphanous thread of economic affluence and digital tech enchantments. In other words, bread and circuses brought to us by Apple, Microsoft, and trillion-dollar deficit spending.

By contrast, Catholicism has always embodied a radically different kind of globalism. It is a globalism grounded in the paradox of an absolute particularism (the Incarnation), which alone can ground a true universalism of a global solidarity of all human beings in God. And unlike modern secularism’s parochial anti-parochialism, which corrosively dissolves all genuine particularisms in the acid of a purely materialistic uniformity (the most parochial vision of all), Catholicism embraces the good in all cultures and peoples wherever it is found as manifestations of grace, even as it purifies them and thus elevates them into a heuristic liberation that makes them, not less than they were before, but more.

This is why the powerful elites of modernity so fear a robust and revivified Catholicism and seek to domesticate it wherever they cannot just overtly destroy it. This, too, is why the current debates in the Church over this and that topic cannot be resolved without first reaching a resolution on which model of globalism it seeks to champion. Both so-called traditionalism and garden-variety Catholic progressivism miss the point of Vatican II insofar as they both read it as an essentially globalist enterprise in a modern Liberal register.

In reality, the Council, in many obvious ways too numerous to mention here, promoted the ressourcement vision of folks like Henri de Lubac and Karol Wojtyla et al., all of whom sought a truly universal (global) Church but from within the framework of a radically Christocentric theological anthropology and a Christian humanism grounded in the same.

Returning then to the question of Notre Dame and its “refreshed” staff values for a truly “global” Catholic university, one does wonder which model of globalism is operative here. This might seem like making a mountain out of a molehill, but it is not. Notre Dame is too important to just ignore this change as “no big deal”. It is the flagship Catholic university in America, and perhaps globally as well, and “what happens in South Bend does not stay in South Bend.” Or, as my friend Dr. Rodney Howsare would put it, “Dadgummit, this is important.”

Restoring Catholic mission

As I said, this is perhaps all a bit of a stretch and somewhat unfair, but in light of the decades-long trend among American Catholic universities to downplay Catholic identity in the name of being more “inclusive”, it is a legitimate question to ask. All of us who have worked at putatively Catholic schools can attest to the fact that the standard model for campus tour guides when speaking to prospective students is to tell them, “Don’t worry, it is a Catholic school, but that doesn’t affect your education here very much at all.” At my former university, I once asked an administrator (a priest) why Catholic identity was not more heavily promoted in our recruiting literature. He responded by saying, “Because we aren’t Steubenville, that’s why”. Well, QED I guess.

This trajectory is real and has attenuated the Catholic identity of most Catholic universities to such an extent that the hiring of faculty and staff who are openly opposed to Catholic identity is taken as a marker of how “truly Catholic in our inclusion of everyone we are!” And those who object to this trend are branded as “uncatholic” in their “hateful exclusionism”.

So, wither Notre Dame? It is interesting to note that Ms. Christophersen dropped a small hint of things when she said that the old values, which emphasized supporting the Catholic mission of the school, caused “confusion” at evaluation time. She further states that staff are not hired with any emphasis upon religious identity, like faculty are.

However, we have all seen how this dynamic works. You hire people without any care as to their religious views, but later, when a conflict arises that involves a topic pertaining to the Catholic mission of the school, evaluators are paralyzed with embarrassment that the issue is even being raised at all. They say, “What does it matter?” whether the counselors in our student services office or the library staff, or our maintenance workers toe the line on “Catholic dogmas”?

That problem is now “solved” at Notre Dame since the staff values no longer mention Catholicism at all. However, at a school where Catholic identity is truly valued and where there is a proper theological vision for a true Catholic humanism/globalism, instead of eliminating the Catholic mission bits, there should instead be a series of sub-statements that make it very clear what adhering to the Catholic mission of the school means and, most importantly, what it does not mean. This would give employee evaluators and the staff members the specific and concrete criteria they need for adjudicating expectations.

For example, the nettlesome question of morality clauses could be dealt with by making it clear that, barring criminal behavior and/or boundary violations with students and other employees, no employee evaluation will take into consideration the “lifestyle” situation of anyone. I would not favor such a clause, but it is an example of how things can be nuanced to avoid “confusion” about what adherence to Catholic mission means.

But to just summarily remove the offending Catholic bits because of “confusion” speaks to what is most likely a cavalier annoyance at the whole question of Catholicity by those in charge. I hope that Notre Dame will reconsider these “refreshed” staff values and will restore Catholic mission as a specific category worthy of the importance it possesses.

Finally, Go Irish!

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