Among today’s postings is an article asking whether hiring professors strictly by excellence isn’t a way to guarantee that Catholic colleges will, in time, lose their Catholic character and become secular. The article, “Academic Excellence Is Not an Excellent Criterion“, is by Georgetown University associate professor of government Patrick Deneen and it appeared in the campus publication The Hoya. Deneen serves as director of the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy. If affirmative action allows veering away from excellence to raise the number of women and minorities on campus, he asks, how is it wrong to actively and consciously recruit Catholic faculty to safeguard Georgetown’s religious tradition? Reader reactions to Deneen are worth reading too.
