An acquaintance employed by a Catholic university recently expressed frustration at the lack of a collective response from Catholic higher education to the Trump administration’s assault on academic freedom, due process, and human dignity. Surely a joint statement—clear about convictions and obligations, cosigned by Catholic university presidents—would send a message. I was sympathetic to the idea. Many who despair at the lawless cruelty of this presidency and want it brought to a halt yearn for an institutional intervention—whether from the judicial system, the legal profession, academia, or the Church.
How realistic is this hope? As we’re continually reminded, institutions are the creations of imperfect human beings, and, like their creators, are prone to cowardice, rationalization, and self-interest. So we see the Supreme Court torturously thread procedural needles in rulings that preserve the appearance of the court’s authority and impartiality without actually settling anything. So we see major law firms, including Paul, Weiss and Skadden, Arps, respond to Trump’s shakedowns by promising hundreds of millions of dollars in pro-bono services for causes dear to the president. Universities have been timid in the face of attacks on academic independence for fear of losing federal funding. Columbia University not only agreed to Trump’s original demands, but has since sacrificed its interim president while remaining quiet on Trump’s latest threat to put the school under government oversight. “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” an alumnus of both Columbia and Paul, Weiss wrote in an April New York Times column, quoting Bertolt Brecht. But much unhappier is the land that needs heroes and doesn’t get them.
The common feature among these examples is a failure of will. They choose not to take advantage of their material resources, moral authority, and public profile. The same might be said of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. In April, the USCCB announced that it would not renew agreements with the federal government related to children’s services and refugee support, citing financial constraints following the Trump administration’s decision to kill contracts for refugee resettlement. The USCCB’s anemic statement did not criticize Trump’s policies or explain why they made the cutbacks necessary. Indeed, as Michael Sean Winters observed in the National Catholic Reporter, “one can’t escape the feeling that the bishops didn’t put up much of a fight”—this in contrast to 2012, when they launched the “Fortnight for Freedom” campaign to protest Obamacare’s contraception mandate.
There are heartening counterexamples. Several major law firms are fighting back against Trump’s coercive measures. In mid-April, Harvard University forcefully rejected the administration’s ideological demands, risking billions of dollars in federal funding: “No government…should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard president Alan Garber said. In the diocese of El Paso, Texas, Bishop Mark Seitz—chair of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration and Refugees—continues to impress and inspire with his insistence on the Church’s obligation to defend migrants and refugees and his candor regarding the administration’s attacks. “[The Trump administration] has not hesitated to target groups that disagree, to threaten them with consequences for simply doing things that in any other context would simply be expressing our own freedom of speech and our religious liberty,” he correctly notes.
More of this, please. If institutions often bear the flaws of their human creators, they can also draw on some human virtues. They need not be heroic—only compassionate, honest, and a little bit more brave.
