I have been a student here at Holy Cross for four years. I have lived and breathed this campus for four years of my life. I have been immersed in various classes, social groups, campus events, and way too many Thirsty Thursdays at Weagle. Even after all this immersion, I still do not know what it truly means to be a Holy Cross student.
However, I do know that I have been inundated with a lot of slogans that tell me what it means to be a Holy Cross student. According to these slogans, a Holy Cross student must be “a man or woman for and with others,” who always seeks “magis” and “cura personalis” above all else. By themselves, these slogans are pretty good. Who is opposed to being a “man or woman for and with others?” Are we going to be men and women for ourselves? Or cura personalis? Are we really just going to care for one aspect of ourselves to the detriment of the rest? Nonsense. The vast majority of people, even those outside Jesuit-sponsored institutions, intuitively understand that these things are good and important.
These slogans allow Holy Cross to escape from answering the big question of “what does it mean to be a member of this community.” The administration uses these amorphous statements as a substitute for answering the tough questions posed at the beginning of our mission statement. These questions, which you might have glanced at in Montserrat (which, by far, is one of the most misguided programs at Holy Cross), are very good. In order to live the good life, we must figure out “how to find meaning in life and history” and “what are our obligations to one another.” It is impossible to live a truly human life without answering these questions.
The sad fact is that Holy Cross has made these questions, which lie at the heart of the College’s current mission statement, impossible to answer. They have made them impossible to answer because, above all else, Holy Cross has made the institutional decision to become a corporate institution.
You might be asking what is the difference between a corporate institution and an educational institution. Well, for starters, a corporate institution seeks above all else the minimization of conflict, the maximization of the endowment, and the growth of the administrative bureaucracy. Can anybody with a straight face tell me that these goals are not the main goals of our administration?
An educational institution does not seek these things. These goals, while sometimes important for the survival of the institution, are not the telos of an educational institution. To Holy Cross, these three corporate prongs are our final end. We have no greater end. Our end is not “in hoc signo vinces” or “ad maiorem Dei gloriam,” but rather it is “make sure that we soothe the concerns of alumni (whether they are progressive or conservative; old or young; white or non-white) enough that they are still willing to remember us, and the endowment, in their will.”
This corporate model has inevitably hurt the student body because it has produced an administration that is fundamentally incapable of giving students anything more than amorphous, relatively subjective, and undefinable slogans. For example, can anybody really define for me what it means to be “a man or woman for and with others?” Or, does it just mean whatever I want it to be?
The scariest consequence of the administration’s corporate approach to institutional management is that they have entrusted these questions to people who fundamentally disagree with the mission of our college: the progressive academic.
Our faculty, composed mostly of very kind and overly generous people, is also stacked with dangerous ideologues. The faculty, by and large, has proposed solutions to these fundamental questions, but many of these solutions are inhuman and drastically opposed to the traditional mission of our college. Their solutions are not grounded in claims of Truth, but rather you will hear plenty of variants of “the truth is whatever you want it to be,” “objective truth does not exist,” or “just live your (undefined, subjective, and constantly transforming) truth, babe” from them.
By grounding their answers in these morally relativistic terms, they have fundamentally destroyed the student body’s ability to answer these questions. Every man, woman, and child who labored to answer these questions in generations past would have been unable to answer them without resting them on solid, morally secure foundations. However, the progressive academics have intentionally destroyed this capacity in order to fulfill their ideological goal–the transformation, and thus destruction, of the liberal arts and humanities.
The modern academic is not a traditional academic, rather they are ideological conquistadores intent on colonizing the liberal arts and humanities in an attempt to “decolonize” and deconstruct them. In their opinion, one does not become a “man or woman for and with others” through living lives of charity and faith; rather, one only becomes a “man and woman for and with others” through actively working to dismantle “systems of oppression” and “recentering” social structures both on and off campus (ideas that would have been very foreign to Ignatius, Fenwick, and Arrupe).
The question remains: what can we, people who are opposed to this ideological colonization and believe that the administration is weak-kneed, do about this institutionally existential crisis?
The answer is honestly not much. Holy Cross has made the active decision to become an Amherst College with a pretty chapel. No amount of complaining, arguing, or writing op-eds in The Fenwick Review will change this fact. As a result, somebody has to lay out a plan for institutional recapture, and the good thing is that, unlike the progressive academic, we do not have to start from scratch. The plan for institutional recapture has been laid out since 1843.
The plan is evident in our campus’ architecture. Holy Cross was built by men who believed in the good, true, and beautiful. And so, they built a campus that corresponded to all that is good, true, and beautiful. There is no greater example of such a building than Dinand Library. Dinand, an intentionally imposing neoclassical structure, tells that our mission is “ut cognoscant te solum deum verum et quem misisti Iesum Christum.” Institutionally, we exist in order for students to be able to “know you, the one true God and Jesus Christ whom you sent.” That is our mission.
Holy Cross also knew that one can only truly know Christ and live this mission through the liberal arts and humanities. One can only truly be immersed within this tradition by studying “religio, philosophia, ars, literae, historia, scientia, medicina, jus.” These disciplines “nourish youth [and] delight old age.” They make us human. They answer these fundamental questions posed in our current mission statement. The works, conquests, and ideas of men such as Aquinas, Benedict, Bellarmine, Columbus, Copernicus, Dante, à Kempis, and Justinian (whose names are all prominently featured in the Main Reading Room) are examples of individuals (and there are many more, including modern, female, and non-Western figures) who show us what it means to be truly human and Christian. These figures have engaged in the Great Conversation through studying and participating in the triumphs and failings of our civilization, the liberal arts, and the Church. They are the models that our administration and faculty should point us toward.
Holy Cross, like much of our world, is in a crisis of meaning. We are unable and unwilling to answer the fundamental questions posed by our very institution because our current corporate administration acts primarily out of fear. As a result, they leave these human questions to the province of ideologues whose intent seems to be the destruction of the institution itself. However, this story does not have to end with Ignatius wishing that the cannonball hit his head instead of his leg, rather Holy Cross can go “ad fontes.” Holy Cross can return to the sources of her heritage, her very self, as evidenced through her very campus. There, she will find the answers that she poses to herself; there, she will be able to tell her students what it truly means to be a member of this college.