Our higher-education ecosystem is broken. American universities have become too uniform, too overregulated, and too slow to adapt. What’s more, institutions increasingly look and feel alike. They offer the same programs and courses, prioritize the same goals, and have the same attitude to student life. Religious institutions are not immune to this ailment. And when they lose their distinctiveness, the entire higher-education ecosystem becomes weaker.
This sameness is the predictable result of decades of growing regulation and cultural pressure toward conformity. Federal rules, accreditation standards, and popular ranking systems all push institutions toward a limited set of goals. At the same time, ideological orthodoxies throughout higher education incentivize alignment with prevailing norms and penalize deviation. Over time, these forces have made genuine differentiation increasingly difficult.
Institutions that should be offering fundamentally different visions of education have instead converged on a single model.
The costs of sameness are high. Institutions that should be offering fundamentally different visions of education have instead converged on a single model. As a result, the system loses both variety and the capacity for self-correction. Innovation is limited across the board. Universities are slow to adapt to student and societal needs. Whether in general-education requirements, program offerings, or intellectual climate, institutions tend to move in lockstep rather than experiment. More to the point, the pipeline for developing distinct intellectual traditions is weak. The result is homogeneity. A healthy ecosystem requires just the opposite: variety, competition, and differentiation.
This is where Catholic institutions should play a unique role—but often fall short. Many are Catholic in name more than in substance. In many ways, they resemble, or even intentionally emulate, their secular peers. Mission drift has reduced their distinctiveness. Catholic identity may still be present symbolically, but it fails to be intellectually formative. That’s a shame because, when Catholic universities mirror secular ones, the entire system loses a vital source of renewal.
Authentically Catholic institutions have something distinct to offer. They are an essential part of true intellectual pluralism, especially because they integrate faith and reason in the educations they provide. In this age shaped by materialism, such an idea is truly radical. Faculty members benefit from Catholic authenticity, as well. When they are encouraged to bring their religious sensibilities into their scholarly work, the range of scholarship expands. This strengthens the academic enterprise as a whole by bringing more variety to the marketplace of ideas.
Unfortunately, the system has been ossified for so long that we struggle to imagine a more dynamic future. To change course, we must loosen constraints so that mission-driven institutions can flourish. In a different regulatory environment, new models of education could emerge. Catholic institutions (as well as other faith-based universities) could become laboratories of renewal, benefiting higher education as a whole. The goal should be genuine institutional diversity.
Reviving the higher-education system will require both policy and cultural changes. Some ideas have been outlined in this issue of From the Academy. A few include reducing regulatory barriers that enforce uniformity, protecting institutional mission and autonomy, and encouraging alternative accreditation or accountability pathways. Together, these reforms would make room for a wider range of institutional models, strengthening competition, innovation, and intellectual diversity across higher education. At the same time, university trustees and leaders must recommit to mission clarity. To use a cliché: Institutions must dare to be different.
In short, renewing the higher-education ecosystem requires differentiation. We already have an abundance of comprehensive, multidisciplinary universities. The system will improve when institutions are willing and able to be distinct. Catholic universities can help lead that renewal, but only if they choose to be authentically Catholic. This benefits us all by helping to restore the diversity and intellectual vitality that higher education now lacks.
Jenna A. Robinson is president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and publisher of From the Academy.
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