I would like to ponder a number of issues relevant to the recent Presidential address, "Academic Freedom and Catholic Character." These are the topics of (1) doctrinal pluralism at a Catholic University, (2) the special status of various performing and visual arts (staged plays, film, art shows and the like). The President of the University also discussed (3) the academic freedom of students, but I formulate a reasonable alternative to current and prospective policy in that area. As a University community we must also give more attention to (4) criteria for fair procedures of dispute resolution and adjudication, as well as the accountability required if executive power is not to be absolute.
These issues will be split up into two parts. Today I will discuss doctrinal pluralism and special status of various performing and visual arts while continuing on Thursday with academic freedom of students and criteria for fair procedures of dispute resolution and adjudication.
(1) Pluralism. Notre Dame has clearly become a place where a full range of options on the most controversial topics can be fully and fairly discussed. These topics range from atheism or "naturalism" to various creationist alternatives to evolution, as well as challenges to orthodox views of the place of women in the Church, the morality of war or the death penalty, and the morality of abortion, contraception, and homosexuality, to name just a few. At Notre Dame, the finest scholars of Sacred Scripture can and have contested the views of leading philosophers of religion. Neither doctrinal authority nor presidential wisdom and prudence has imposed litmus tests of orthodoxy as requirements limiting the range of inquiry or the array of viable conclusions presented for public debate.
Although this circumstance is not fully understood or even recognized by many friends of Notre Dame, on or off campus, it has been a mainstay of the status quo here for nearly 40 years.
The practices of an irreducible plurality of approaches to research, pedagogy and publication which have prevailed here for so long they are part of the air we breathe are fully compatible with an array of student, faculty and administrative initiatives intended to "enhance the religious identity" of Notre Dame in areas of scholarship as well as broad sections of student life.
Everyone at Notre Dame should be aware of the essential role played by Catholicism and Catholics at the core - the heart, blood and brain - of this University. Executive functions are reserved for priests of the order of Holy Cross by our statutes. With this status comes the privilege of assigning very high priority to a full range of initiatives which deepen and broaden the influence of Catholicism on campus and in the world at large. This is surely a huge part of what it means for a university to be both Catholic and pluralistic.
(2) Performing and visual arts. It should surprise no one that performing and visual arts are at the center of the current controversy on campus. Presentation of such work to a wide and public audience is as essential to the role of our Departments of English and Film, Television and Theatre as it is to our Department of Athletics. As we have seen over the last ten years, the public performances of the University's most prominent athletic team are capable of stirring a perfect - and image-shattering - storm of controversy. No one expects Notre Dame football to be played on Cartier field for the instruction of small groups of students of the game.
Shakespeare's audiences included a broad spectrum of the citizens of London. The theatre did not thrive in the United Kingdom during and for a few years after the Puritan Revolution. Plays, films and the visual arts generally engage the full range of articulate human passion in a way that monographs of Galileo or Descartes, or even those of Darwin and Freud, do not. Both artistic and athletic presentations at academic institutions may, and often do, both instruct and offend a much broader range of spectators than do conferences on academic freedom or abortion and public policy.
As a result, the politically liberal principles of the American Association of University Professors' statement on Academic Freedom and Artistic Expression insist that "Academic institutions are obliged to ensure that regulations and procedures do not impair the freedom of expression or discourage creativity by subjecting artistic work to tests of propriety or ideology," and that "Since faculty and student artistic presentations to the public are integral to their teaching, learning and scholarship, these presentations merit no less protection." At the root of these propositions is the core insight that "essential as freedom is for the ... judgment of facts, it is even more indispensable to the imagination." The threat posed by artistic performance, whether on the stage or in film, is its unparalleled ability to stimulate empathic or abhorrent passion.
A basic question we must continue to pose and try to answer is "Does our Catholic identity require departure from politically liberal principles, including those articulated by the AAUP? Should executive privilege on this campus include the authority to withhold, unilaterally, "sponsorship" of artistic presentations to the general public on the grounds that they are offensive to Catholic moral principles?"
Ed Manier is a professor in the Department of Philosophy.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
