Catholic hiring at Notre Dame

At Commonweal, my friend and colleague John McGreevy has a piece up, responding to Fr. Wilson Miscamble’s recent essay on Catholic-hiring at Notre Dame in America magazine.  I agree with much of what John says.  As I have already discussed privately with him, though, I was not sure about these few lines:

Framing the problem simply as recruiting Catholic faculty is also ungenerous. Conspicuously absent from Miscamble’s essay are other faculty-Protestants, Muslims, Jews, unbelievers-enthusiastic about the university’s mission. The History department recently hired Mark Noll, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and perhaps the nation’s leading evangelical intellectual. (It has long been the home of George Marsden, another evangelical and the Bancroft Prize-winning biographer of Jonathan Edwards.)

On Miscamble’s abacus they do not count. But they make Notre Dame not just a better university but a better Catholic university. . . .

I did not understand Fr. Miscamble, in his America piece, to be denying that wonderful non-Catholic ND scholars like Mark Noll and Christian Smith “count” as great “mission” hires, but only to be reminding us that — as great as these scholars are — they do not “count” toward the particular goal of maintaining a numerical preponderance of Catholics on the faculty.  Should we care about this goal?  I guess I think we should, even though it is certainly true that the mere fact a faculty member identifies as Catholic does not mean he or she will be interested in, understand, or support, the mission (broadly understood) of a Catholic university.  Numbers are not enough.  But — I take Fr. Miscamble to be arguing — they do matter, as a starting point. 

John also writes:

[S]tudents need intellectual formation too. We can’t guarantee faith. But we can help students learn. And a test of a serious Catholic university is whether we can cultivate the intellectual abilities of our Catholic students so that they become thoughtful, reflective Catholic adults. Most of this is the ordinary hard work of teaching students to write, paint, measure, build, experiment, and think. Some of it is more specific: some students at Notre Dame enter the university unable to locate a Bible passage, much less identify Augustine. They don’t know that Thomas Aquinas immersed himself in Islamic texts, or that the work of Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo is inseparable from his Catholicism. They are unaware that American Catholics are not a majority in American society, or that American Catholics are a tiny percentage of Catholics in a global church.

Here, oddly enough, lies an opportunity that all of us concerned with Catholic education should seize. As institutions that take religion and matters of ultimate concern seriously, in an academic world often content to bracket these subjects as mere matters of opinion, Catholic universities can contribute to the wider world of learning in unusual ways. At the same time, they can attempt to nurture the future leaders that our church, and for that matter our society, so desperately need.

Here, it sounded to me like John was more in agreement than disagreement with Fr. Miscamble.  Wasn’t the latter’s claim — at least, his implicit one — that the “opportunity” John (correctly) identifies is one that a university without a mission-committed faculty — and, more particularly, a preponderance of Catholic faculty — can seize?  That is, in order for a Catholic university to do what John says, in these paragraphs, it should be doing, does it need (as Miscamble contends) a predominantly Catholic faculty?  This, it seems to me, is a hard, but really important, question.  Put differently, a predominantly Catholic faculty is not sufficient for a great Catholic university, but is it necessary?