One part of University President John Jenkins' address on academic freedom and Catholic character that has largely been overlooked is also one of the most challenging and consequential. Jenkins lauded the "scholarly temperament" as one of the highest ideals of the University of Notre Dame, a quality which he described as "a Socratic conviction about one's ignorance, and a corresponding willingness to entertain questions and various answers to them." He went on to note that such a temperament "demands an appreciation of the complexities in any area of reality, high standards of inquiry and inference, a reluctance to settle for the current synthesis, and a resistance to a premature closure of questions."
This should be a serious provocation to each member of our community, as it poses a far greater challenge to the character of this university than does his proposal to adopt more carefully defined limits on the sponsorship of certain events. Taken as seriously as it deserves, and as seriously as I believe it was intended, it is an invitation for us to strive to be a great university, a Catholic university and a much freer community than many of us have imagined to be possible or worth striving for.
Jenkins' words indicate a university which is intensely concerned with a thirst for a true understanding of reality in all of its dimensions and thus, one not settling for half-truths, one continually searching and questioning, one not content with any reduction of our desire to understand things and to grasp their meaning and their interrelation. To this end, Jenkins correctly insisted that, "It is the nurturing of this scholarly temperament that deserves, and indeed demands, academic freedom." That is a much firmer foundation for academic freedom than any based only on thin notions of unrestrained individual interests, because it demands of us that academic freedom be engaged in a deep, uncompromising and inexhaustible quest to comprehend the nature, significance and interconnectedness of all things.
From this perspective, merely the tolerance of diverse views on campus without any authentic engagement of our humanity in its capacity for criticism and judgment is virtually irrelevant to the mission and identity of a great university. If that is what is meant by academic freedom, it is almost trivial and much too uninteresting to the serious questions of our lives to warrant a deep commitment. In fact, an uncritical free-for-all can be worse than insignificant, because it encourages the opposite of freedom: the subjection of our reason to the whims of intellectual fashion; sentimentalism and moralism (whether of the right or of the left); or mere inculcation upon our students of the opinions of others (and the power, money and self-interest behind them). That is why Jenkins was right to affirm that, "Our greatest contribution as intellectuals and scholars . . . consists rather in the cultivation in ourselves and in our students of this scholarly temperament in a world that is often uncomfortable with uncertainties, questions and new perspectives."
But then what is the place of Notre Dame's Catholic identity in this insistence on the freedom of our reason to reach always onward? The intellectual and moral tradition in which we are situated provides a sustained, complex and deep grappling with the mystery of human life and the universe around us, but one that is mostly ignored, and sometimes systematically excluded, from the intellectual life of most elite universities today. Notre Dame can't be a great and Catholic university without a pervasive and serious attempt to propose this tradition as an explanatory hypothesis for understanding the things that we study and teach and for ordering the way we ought to live as a community. To be very clear: in the context of study, teaching and research the Christian tradition is a proposal, not a shield from inquiry or an obstacle to knowledge, but an invitation to verify something, to test it through sincere criticism (in the original, literal sense of "separating" or "evaluating") and thus to arrive at a more mature appropriation of its value. It is an understanding of Catholic character reflective of a dynamic life, not of formal and sterile doctrine. The scholarly temperament in its encounter with tradition is an opening up of reason, not a closure of discussion. This is what I understand to be the real weight - and the attractiveness - of Jenkins' appeal.
Only against the background of those broad premises can we reasonably consider the relationship between academic freedom at Notre Dame and a controversial campus event such as "The Vagina Monologues." Its sponsors' goal of raising awareness of violence against women is necessary and urgent - as Jenkins himself acknowledged. The play purports to serve this laudable end by presenting monologues of women talking about their sexual experiences, which aim to provoke us with their explicit images and language.
The issue isn't - or really shouldn't be - only that some might be shocked by the assertive use of the word "vagina" or that others find the behavior described offensive to their moral sensibilities. The more fundamental problems are, first, that the aggressively ideological manner in which it is pushed as a piece of advocacy, including its ritualistic regularity every year, does not remotely foster the ideal of deep inquiry and critical reflection characteristic of the scholarly temperament, but rather blatantly undermines it. And second, in substance the play seems to reduce the meaning and value of women's lives to their sexual experiences and organs, reinforcing a perspective on the human person that is itself fundamentally a form of violence. In its radically reduced understanding of and love for human dignity in all its richness, the play thus shares the same root as every violation of human rights, including in particular the many grave violations of the human rights of women throughout the world today.
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