The Franciscans have a University at Steubenville that seems to be getting along quite nicely. Maybe if the Church had more of them and fewer of these prima donna orders, there would be more Steubenvilles around the country and fewer ND's and Marquettes and Georgetowns.
In another comment I dealt with this. The start-up (or the reverts, like Steubenville) are good. But they are a drop in the bucket in the overall market for “Catholic” higher education. When I said that the market as a whole doesn’t care about pro-life or Catholic teachings, that’s true. And it’s true in part because for understandable reasons, many not all) of those who do care about Catholic teachings pulled out of the older, mainstream Catholic schools 30 years ago when things began to go horribly wrong in those schools. I don’t blame them for a moment for pulling out and starting new, faithful Catholic schools. But it did help to grease the skids for further erosion.
Think about it for a minute. Why doesn’t the Church have more Steubenvilles or Christendoms or Assumptions or Benedictines (Kansas) or Southern Catholics or Belmont Abbeys? Because the market is not there. There aren’t enough Catholics willing to send their children to “no-name” schools (in comparison with the big-name Catholic schools). A certain number are willing and the schools have sprung up in response to that. But the vast majority of self-identifying Catholics (both CINOs and even some faithful Catholics) send their children to the CINO schools.
Some of the faithful Catholics who do this are concerned, understandably, about the hothouse Catholic atmosphere at the startup.
And the university marketing system does not merely concern itself with parents they want to sell their product to. Universities have to market themselves to donors. There just aren’t enough donors with big money out there who give a rat’ rear end about pro-life and Catholic teachings. They are willing to believe the sales job that the CINO development people give them—about how really Catholic yet really tolerant of non-Catholics the CINO schools are. And again, the Catholics with money who know the difference have long since, to their great credit, shifted their giving to the startups and reverts.
That’s why I’ve insisted in these comments that the persuasion challenge is to get through to the donors in the middle, those who might care about the anti-Catholic crap at the CINO schools if they were just informed. Some of them are like Obama voters. They want to believe the best about the CINO schools, they drift along, continuing to donate. If they could be fipped on this issue, it would send a real message to the people who call the CINO college shots.
In any case, universities are businesses. They do marketing research. They’ve pretty much decided that they can get away with this gambit.
And I think they probably are right. Sadly.
I hope I’m wrong.