An Interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘62: Perspectives, Policy… and the Pardon

During his recent residency at Holy Cross, representatives from the Fenwick Review and the Spire had the opportunity to sit with Dr. Anthony Fauci ‘62 for an on-the-record conversation. We asked Dr. Fauci about the value of the humanities, the impact of COVID-19 policy on education, the role of “experts” and federalism in policy making, and his preemptive pardon from former President Biden.

Liam Murphy: A lot of students today who plan to go into medicine would find having a classics or humanities background inconceivable or unnecessary, because of academic specialization. Do you think something is lost there with that sort of disregard for a holistic, humanities education?

Dr. Anthony Fauci: I think it is… When I went to medical school (I went to Cornell Medical School in New York City), and we had a lot of kids in our class, who took pre-med courses that were purely scientific, I mean, there was nothing in the humanities about that at all. [Those students] were great. They were good guys and ladies. You know, they did well, so I don't think it's a sine qua non, that if you don't do that, you're not going to succeed. But I think for individuals depending upon, you know, your own personality, that there's a lot of value added to that, and I think for some people there would be a loss in that. I know it was extremely helpful to me to go into medicine and have a broader look at things… My interest was always curiosity about people, not formulas in physics, or in chemistry, or in biology… The person who was second or third [in my class at Cornell] was a very good friend of mine, who was here with me at the Cross, who did the same AB Classics, Greek pre-med. So out of the top four people there, two of them were from Holy Cross.

LM: On the topic of education, particularly as it concerns COVID policy: Given the effects of COVID-19 lockdowns and policies on education, such as the backward slide in literacy and mathematics skills, do you think that the extent of those measures was entirely justified? With this in mind, would you recommend the same approach if a similar pandemic were to break out in the future?

AF: Okay. I brought this up last night but I’ll repeat it for you for the record. I think anyone who is thinking fairly and not in that blame-game situation would agree universally, that it was absolutely essential to flatten the curve and, quote, “shut down.” I say “shut down,” not “lock down,” because we did not do what other countries did, where essentially, you couldn't even leave your house, you couldn't go to work. I mean, we did GPS monitoring of where people were going. We were not locked down. Schools were closed, so to do that in March, April, and May, when thousands of people per day were dying, when freezer trucks were lining up in front of hospitals because there were too many dead people, you couldn't fit in the ward. Something had to be done. So I think that's incontrovertibly correct. 

What we need to reexamine as we look forward to lessons learned, is how long you kept things shut down, how long you kept the schools closed, how long you stopped work at different places. People don't remember, and there's a lot of slings and arrows thrown at me, but if you go back, and I ask people to do that and they say, “You closed the schools! And you did that!” Go back and go to YouTube and look at what I was saying in the fall of 2020, what I was saying a thousand times: “Open the schools as quickly and as safely as possible. Open the schools, close the bars…” So, when we go back, and I would hope people do that instead of pointing fingers at the teachers union, or pointing fingers at certain local people who kept schools, and factories, and other things closed, examine what the risk-benefit ratio of that is. And what people do [is] lump it all into one. They say we shouldn't have closed anything. The Great Barrington Declaration, which, conceptually and practically, everybody agrees is incorrect. There would have been thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of more deaths. So you shouldn't lump them together, like shut down and how long you shut down. You should say, we should have paused in the spring, when thousands of people were dying, but we need to examine that risk-benefit of how long you kept things shut down.

LM: What do you think about the policy making role of specialized experts, such as scientists, who are not themselves policy makers nor necessarily experts on policy making? And do you think that this role may have been inordinately expanded during COVID, since there might have been factors relevant to policy making which were not part of their areas of expertise?

AF: What a great question. I’m glad you asked that, because that is the subject of a great deal of misunderstanding. The public health officials and the scientists, myself included, we did not make policy. There was the perception that we made policy. We gave the facts and the information, if you [look at] the Trump administration and then the same thing for the Biden administration (I'm not, you know, saying one versus the other)... there was a coronavirus task force that was headed by Debbie Birx, my colleague (I was on the task force), that had on it the Surgeon General and the director of the CDC. We examined the scientific and public health data and said, “This would happen if you flatten the curve, this would happen if you wore a mask.” That was communicated to the Vice President, Pence, who communicated it to the president, who made the decision about what the policy was. 

Now, since I was a communicator, that goes back 38 years to HIV, I was a trusted communicator in public health. I did it with HIV, I did it with Ebola, I did it with anthrax, I did it with Zika. So I would get up in front of the television and say, here are the kinds of things you should do, you should wear a mask, you should do this. People misinterpreted that I made the policy, and they would ask the same question, Liam, that you're asking: “Should a scientist and a public health person make the policy?” No. The scientific person, the public health person, gathers the data, presents it to the policy maker, and the policy maker makes the policy. It is a major misunderstanding that you have a couple of docs and public health people in a room, deciding, “Okay, we're gonna close your factory.” There isn't a factory in the United States that I closed. There isn't a school in the United States that I closed, and yet there's this prevalent perception that the public health people closed the schools, closed the factories, ruined the economy. That decision was made at a much higher level.

Juan Cortes: Do you believe that federalism, which allows for differences in policy between the states, aided or inhibited the response to the COVID-19 pandemic? For example, states such as New York were more shut down, while Florida was more open. As the pandemic continued, it gave us an observation of how policy variations influence outcome.

AF: Yeah, a very sad observation. Federalism, which, as you know, dates back to the birth of our country, reflects the diversity throughout, regionally, culturally, ethnically. We have an enormous country that you're all aware of. You know, there are a lot of differences depending upon where you live, what the resources are in a particular region of the country. New York City versus Mississippi and San Francisco versus Florida. So federalism or the “states’ rights,” as it were, has an important contribution to being sensitive to diversity. However, when you're dealing with a pandemic that equally kills somebody in Maine as it does in Texas, then, unfortunately, the idea of individual decisions about how you're gonna do things as opposed to taking something that would [be standard, like:] people should get vaccinated. We know vaccinations have saved (this isn't me making it up), clearly saved three to five million people in the United States and 15 to 20 million people worldwide. That's not TikTok. That's not social media. That's a fact, okay? Yet, because of the differences… between a red state and a blue state, it is tragic that… the political association is that if you are Republican, it's much less likely you will wear a mask or get vaccinated than if you are a Democrat. That's not conjecture, that's a fact. Another fact is that if you live in a red state versus a blue state, you will have a greater chance of getting hospitalized or dying from COVID. So here's where you have a situation where what should be a sensitivity to diversity leads to people dying. So when people die because of that difference, then you've got a question that maybe this is a point where the strict adherence to, “Okay, if you're in Wyoming and you don't want to wear a mask, but you're in New York City and you want to wear a mask” [is worse than] saying, “We're going through a pandemic together as a nation, let's do the most scientifically correct and scientifically sound thing.” That did not happen. And that, I think, is one of the contributions to what I mentioned last night, that it is tragic and astounding that the richest country in the world had 1.2 million deaths, and on a per capita basis, we were one of the worst two or three countries in the world in deaths. What is wrong with that picture, you know? But it is the truth.

JC: What precedent do you think your preemptive pardon from President Biden sets? Do you think measures like this are necessary to protect experts from political backlash?

AF: The pardon is a very sensitive issue… Preemptive pardons, there's a potential negative aspect to that. President Biden did a preemptive pardon because there was something that was happening that was unprecedented. And what was unprecedented was a presidential candidate who said publicly, “I am your vengeance, I am your retribution. I am going to punish people who disagreed with me.” He didn't hint that, he said it. So that triggered the idea of a preemptive pardon. 

However, there is an issue, that that could backfire, because then… in subsequent situations people might assume that I can do anything I want in a public position, as long as somebody's gonna preemptively pardon me. So, on the one hand, it's a positive thing because it protects people from unjust attacks on them when they clearly have done nothing wrong. On the other hand, it has the potential to shield people who intend to do things wrong. So it's a double-edged sword. I'm not at all one-hundred-percent comfortable with the idea of pardon. I mean, I didn't ask for a pardon. That's very clear because I said, that could hint to some people that I did something wrong. But the attorneys in the White House said, “In the weight of all things balancing, do it,” and they were very, very adamant about that. It wasn't like two guys said “yes,” and one lady said “no,” it was one-hundred-percent, “do it.” But I didn't ask for it.

Cover image by Christopher Michel, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anthony_Fauci_in_2023_02_(cropped).jpg.

My Interview with Fr. Nguyen

n.b. This interview was held in the Fall 2024 semester.

Last semester, I had the honor of interviewing Fr. Nguyen, S.J., the newest edition to the Jesuit community. Fr. Nguyen was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and grew up in Chicago. He holds a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of St. Michael’s College and an S.T.D from Regis College, both at the University of Toronto, and entered the Jesuits in 1997. Academically, his focus is on the intersection of twentieth-century Christian martyrdom and totalitarianism. He is an expert on the German Jesuit Alfred Delp and the German-Jewish philosopher and Carmelite nun Edith Stein, two martyrs of the Second World War. Fr. Nguyen was on the Holy Cross Board of Trustees from 2017 to 2022, and was a professor at Creighton University before teaching at the College. Spiritually, Fr. Nguyen enjoys giving Ignatian retreats and ministering to students. A fun fact about Fr. Nguyen is that he has a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and in the past he has dabbled in judo, wrestling, and boxing. He feels that his training in martial arts has greatly strengthened his discipline and resilience.

For the first part of the interview, I asked Fr. Nguyen about the classes he is teaching. We decided to focus on one class in particular, an intro-level course called “Theology of Christian Martyrdom. In the first half of the semester, he told me that his purpose was to lay out “the spiritual and logical foundations for Christian martyrdom, which is grounded in Scripture and the early Church martyrs such as Sts. Perpetua, Felicity, and Ignatius of Antioch.” To provide his class with a Scriptural foundation for martyrdom, he used the example of the Beatitudes and showed that the early Church martyrs “embody the Scriptural injunctions to take up one’s cross.”

For the second half of the semester, Fr. Nguyen led students in discussions about the role of martyrdom in contemporary society, with a particular focus on totalitarian regimes. He showed his class that martyrdom becomes “more important and more difficult” in totalitarian regimes because they “take away your capacity to do [what is] good and right, by taking away the capacity to think on your own.” Fr. Nguyen also discussed the essential role of prayer in the lives of martyrs. He hoped to show his class that through frequent prayer,“you have an interior life from which you can draw resources from when times are challenging.” He remarked that if one has an “inner sanctuary,” no one, not even a totalitarian regime, can violate it, thus its importance for those who desire to take up the cross of martyrdom.

Fr. Nguyen’s class also touched on the martyrs of Nazism. The first figure he presented to his class was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom he described as “the most salient example of someone who resisted the fascist regime.” Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor who openly opposed Nazism, started an underground seminary for Lutheran men who hoped to become authentic ministers of God’s Word, unaffected by Nazi censorship. He also taught his class about Edith Stein, a Catholic who was executed by the Nazis due to her Jewish ancestry. Furthermore, he familiarized his class with the White Rose movement, a non-violent, student-led intellectual resistance group in Nazi Germany which originated at the University of Munich. Often, the movement would meet within the basements of professors’ home to read and discuss banned books, an act which Fr. Nguyen compared to contemplative prayer: “You withdraw from the world, not because you want to escape from the world but because you want to keep yourself pure for the sake of the world.” Just as contemplatives pray for the world and bring hope during hard times by holding fast to their faiths, the figures in the White Rose movement helped the world by protecting themselves from Nazi corruption and maintaining their integrity as intellectuals and thinkers unperverted by Nazi censorship.

When Fr. Nguyen and I had finished chatting about his class, we turned to discussing his experiences with students so far. Fr. Nguyen said that during his time on the Board of Trustees, he had some sense of the student body, but that his “understanding of the types of student [at Holy Cross] has grown since this time.” He remarked that he feels “very privileged to be here because [he is] surrounded by students who appear to be motivated by discussing and debating ideas.” He said that he views the class atmosphere at Holy Cross as “formative and not simply transactional.”

However, Fr. Nguyen remarked that he has witnessed some attitudes from students that express quite the reverse: to some, class is only necessary as a means to obtaining a degree.  In his view, this attitude misses the point of a liberal arts education, which ought to be formative rather than solely practical. College ought to be a formative time in one’s life, yet in some cases the formation of the classroom has become secondary to the practical benefits of the college degree. However, overall, his sense of the students at Holy Cross is that they enjoy “soaking up, reflecting, and criticizing ideas,” a refreshing reality.

Fr. Nguyen mentioned that he sees himself as “a scholar, teacher, and priest.” He commented that these three dimensions have created a “fun tension” in his life, but that his identity as a priest is the most important of them all and helps to anchor the others. Fr. Nguyen described his work as labor in the vineyard of academia, ultimately in service to the Church. He said that his different roles intersect in the “formation of students and [in] helping them unfold into the person they are meant to be.” 

I then asked Fr. Nguyen about his process of adjustment to his new Jesuit community at Holy Cross. He revealed that his community of Jesuits is  “very easy-going,” and fondly referred to his brothers as “lovely men.” To him, Fr. Bill Reiser is a figure who emulates wisdom, and Fr. John Gavin has helped him to “enculturate into all things Holy Cross.” As far as Jesuit dynamics go, Fr. Nguyen also offered a glance into his nighttime routine. Being a night owl himself, Fr. Nguyen shared that he enjoys partaking in “second desserts” with Fr. Reiser and Fr. Bill Clark, late night snacks consisting of milk and cookies (and sometimes cake). Another important relationship is the one he shares with Fr. Brent Otto because he is also new to living in the community and teaching at Holy Cross, although Fr. Otto also has past experience with the College, having graduated in 2001. Fr. Nguyen joked that teaching and living in a new Jesuit community here on the Hill is his and Fr. Otto's “first time in the trenches.”  

Furthermore, Fr. Nguyen described the Jesuit community at Holy Cross as being very monastic, since study and research are major parts of the Ignatian contemplative tradition. Concerning the relationship between study and prayer, he remarked, “there's an asceticism where there’s a love for scholarship.” By this, he meant that the life of a scholar-priest is not without sacrifice, and the Jesuits must sometimes forgo enjoyment in order to prioritize their duties. His brother Jesuits focus on transforming their work into prayer, which he believes is essential to the spiritual and intellectual lives of the College. According to Fr. Nguyen, the Jesuits are “scholars, teachers, and priests,” priesthood providing the foundation for the other roles to thrive. 

Finally, I asked Fr. Nguyen about his favorite theologians and saints. We began by discussing his favorite theologians: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Judith Wolfe, and Edith Stein. Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) was a Swiss theologian and priest whose systematic theology influenced the Church in the post-Vatican II era. Fr. Nguyen appreciates von Balthasar’s emphasis on “beauty as a transcendental,” and the idea that beauty is a revelation of God’s divine essence. He admires Judith Wolfe (b. 1979-), a professor in the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, for her work on the importance of imagination in theological discourse. Professor Wolfe’s research focuses are eschatology, the imagination, and how theology, philosophy, art, literature, and psychology interact. Her most recent publication is The Theological Imagination, a book which posits that Christian theology offers a powerful way of imagining the world around us.

Fr. Nguyen’s favorite theologian and favorite saint is Edith Stein because of her challenge to twentieth-century German academia as a woman and a Jew , as well as her emphasis on “the need for an empathetic encounter in the classroom.” Edith Stein, also known as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (1891-1942), was a German philosopher, nun, and martyr. Stein was raised Jewish, became an atheist as a young adult, and converted to Catholicism in 1922 after reading the writings of St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Doctor of the Church and mystic. Stein was one of the first women in Germany to get a PhD in Philosophy, yet she was refused a faculty position in the philosophy department at the University of Münster because she was a woman, and in 1933 was forced to resign from the faculty of pedagogy at the University by the Nazis because she was Jewish.  

In the same year, Stein entered the Carmelites and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. Although her decision to join the Carmelites was not inspired by her German-Jewish identity, the Carmelites’ coat of arms features the Star of David, and the Carmelite Order is heavily inspired by the prophet Eliah, a major figure from the Hebrew Bible. Fr. Nguyen emphasized that Stein “never stopped pursuing truth.” He compared her to Socrates, who was not afraid to die for the sake of truth. Although Stein had many chances to escape her suffering and death at the hands of the Nazi regime, she bravely faced her death because “she was wedded to the Cross.” Fr. Nguyen said that although von Balthasar, Wolfe, and Stein are different, they "all intertwine; beauty, imagination, and empathetic encounter” are meant to help young people perceive the world with values.

Thoughts on Our Jesuit Inheritance, Part II: An Interview with Fr. Keith Maczkiewicz S.J.

In my endeavor to discover what makes us Jesuit, I had a helpful conversation with Father Keith Maczkiewicz, S.J., who serves as Associate Vice President for Mission and Ministry, and is a Jesuit priest on campus. I will include here the comments I found especially helpful.

First, I asked Father Mac what distinguishes Jesuit education from other forms of education, Catholic or secular, and what ways Holy Cross lives out that charism. His first point was the mission-driven nature of Holy Cross.

“Holy Cross has a distinct mission. It’s even different than Boston College down the road, even though that’s a Jesuit university, because of the unique mode of what we’re doing here in terms of undergrad-only, liberal arts… In a place like Holy Cross, the focus on the humanities is a huge aspect of what we’re trying to do here.” He compared our college to other Jesuit universities like Fairfield, where a large portion of undergraduates study things like finance, marketing, and nursing. Holy Cross, on the other hand, maintains the historical tradition of Jesuit colleges to pursue the liberal arts and humanities.

He continued that Holy Cross provides the opportunity for spiritual formation,

“I think that the phrase in the mission statement that carries a lot of weight is the phrase, ‘for those who wish.’ Because we have a lot of non-Catholics here. We have non-Catholic students or formerly Catholic students, that’s a huge number... And I think that in general the College is pretty good about providing opportunities for those who wish. Numbers at Mass the last several weeks have been pretty great. There’s the devotional life here. The fact that you can go to confession five days a week says something. There’s still Mass here twice a day… The fact that you can make the Spiritual Exercises four times a year, that the chaplains make themselves available for spiritual direction, that you can become Catholic while you’re here. There are all these opportunities for formation for students.”

In light of the diminishing number of Jesuits, I asked Father Mac if, hypothetically, Holy Cross could retain its Jesuit charism and identity with no Jesuits present. He reminded me that it is not just a hypothetical,

“The Jesuits on the East Coast are currently involved in a conversation about what they’re calling an “Apostolic Plan…” We [The Society of Jesus] are currently in 11 colleges and universities, 47 high schools and pre-secondary schools, 19 parishes and four retreat houses. We can’t stay in all those places… Every institution is going to have to do a deep dive into what it wants. First of all they’ll have to affirm that they actually want to remain a Jesuit school. There might be some places, I don’t think Holy Cross is one of them, who are like ‘yeah, I think we’re done with the Jesuit thing.’”

He said of Holy Cross, regarding our first lay president, “There is more conversation about mission and Catholicism with a lay president than there was with a Jesuit president, because there’s a recognition that, in some people’s minds it doesn’t sit in the person in the president’s office who is wearing a collar, even though president Rougeau is an active, practicing Catholic… Because of that, there are a lot of conversations about mission here. I think there are going to be gradations of things… could a place be ‘Ignatian,’ inspired by Ignatius and his spirituality, but no longer a Jesuit school?... We [Jesuits] haven’t really wrestled with this totally.”

Finally, I asked Father Mac what I consider to be the most important question. That is, whether Holy Cross could retain its Jesuit charism or identity if the majority of the community no longer believed in or practiced the Catholic faith. He pointed out Pope John Paul II’s imperative that the majority of faculty at Catholic institutions should be Catholic. But, he says, “the horse has left the barn, at almost every Catholic school.” He continued with a clarification of what the mission of a Catholic institution is, primarily,

“The thing about Catholic higher education is that it’s not a parish… When I speak to new faculty, I say to them, ‘we do not relate to you as if you are a parishioner here, you’re not a parishioner at Holy Cross.’ Their job is to teach, to teach well, and contribute to the Catholic intellectual tradition, which says: ‘ask really good questions about your discipline. Let’s bring them to a dialogue with what we believe in the Catholic faith’… That’s how we maintain ourselves as an authentically Catholic place.”

At the same time, he cautioned adamantly against a separation between “Jesuit” and “Catholic,”

“I think we have to be really diligent because we can be very quick to say ‘Jesuit, yay, Catholic, boo.’ And I think we see that in multiple areas… People love the Jesuits, people don’t love the Church all the time, and I would say that Saint Ignatius is rolling over in his grave when he hears that. Because you could not conceive of the Jesuits outside the Church. Even just a few years ago, we said in a document coming out of our General Congregation, that the Jesuits are “for, with, and of the Church.” We can’t conceive of ourselves any other way. I think we run into problems when we try to divorce the two, to try to make people happy.

He brought up the example of the Jesuit response to the Dobbs decision,

“The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a good example. I think people were shocked when the Jesuit Conference of the U.S. and Canada put out a statement in support of the Dobbs decision… I think people felt shocked and betrayed by that. But that would say to me that we, Jesuits, have done a poor job reminding people that we’re also Catholic. These two things can never and should never have been divorced. And if we stress ‘Jesuit’ over ‘Catholic,’ we’re doing a disservice to the Church.”

As a final thought, Father Mac reminded me of our privileged position at Holy Cross,

“I think sometimes in these conversations around identity and mission, what I sometimes want to say to people is that we are in a privileged place to be able to have them. Because if you’re aware of the higher ed. landscape in general, there’s basically one institution closing a month… Three colleges in Pennsylvania closed in one month over the summer. The atmosphere for Catholic higher ed. right now… is punishing. So the fact that we can have these conversations means that Holy Cross is doing really well… It’s a privilege to be able to debate these things. Because many places are worried about keeping the lights on and not having paper in the photocopier.”

We are truly privileged to be in the position that we are in. It is a privilege that Holy Cross can focus on its Jesuit mission at all. Idealist Catholics like myself must recognize and appreciate that. At the same time, with the privilege of our resources comes the responsibility to use them well. This responsibility demands Holy Cross to use its resources in service of its Jesuit mission; service which is not just an exterior decoration or mere good works, but truly flowing from and aiming for the living Catholic Faith. Holy Cross has the ability, and thus the responsibility, not only to produce great scholars and successful alumni, but to produce saints. It can, and therefore must, not only work for academic excellence and social change, but labor ad majorem Dei gloriam, for the greater glory of God.

The Review Reviews: Mania Interview

The Fenwick Review is grateful to publish this interview. The views expressed therein are not necessarily the views of the Fenwick Review or its writers and staff. It should also not be assumed that the interviewee shares or agrees with the views or mission of the Fenwick Review.

In addition to reviewing Mania, I had the opportunity to interview the show’s creator, writer and student Blake Sheridan. This transcript was edited for clarity and length.

Emma: Thank you so much for being here, Blake!

Blake: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for reaching out!

Emma: What was it like to create a musical and see it to production?

Blake: The story started in a very internal space. I was in my room right when Covid was happening, and it was a very personal thing I experienced within myself. Then it was a question of, “How do I communicate this idea so other people understand and experience it in the same way?” I’ve been writing Mania for four years, but that’s a misleading claim because it sounds as if I was writing nonstop for four years [laughs], which is not very true. There were months when I didn’t think about it at all. Every time I revisited it, I had to ask, “Does this impact me in the same way? Does it say what it did when I looked last? If not, how do I edit it to make more sense?”

Emma: Once ACT accepted the script, did it evolve much with their input?

Blake: The heart of the show has not changed since it was written, but the directing team and I did make some changes. Rachel Golden was a big help; she made the script a lot more concise and applicable to ACT. But so many people were involved: Maggie Baum, Wesley Smith, Vincent Sekafetz, Adele Feldberg… So yes, there was a process the script had to undergo. We learned a lot going forward about how to account for that process, because this was the first time we had done an original musical. It was a great learning experience.

Emma: Do you think ACT’s likely to do other original musicals now?

Blake: I think this experience will make ACT more prepared in the future, but I don’t think it will increase the possibility of doing an original musical again. This was a very unique endeavor where a lot of things had to align, and I don’t know if that’s likely to happen again. Although I do hope people feel inspired to write now. I hope they feel they can really explore, and put their work out, and submit it to ACT.

Emma: I read Mania as an exploration of the absence and presence of God. Does that surprise you? Can you give your own treatment of the themes you wanted to explore?

Blake: That brings such a big smile to my face. It’s weird, I wouldn’t say that was a theme I had gone in planning to talk about. But as I created these characters and lived in their world, it was something I found myself thinking a lot about, so I’m very glad those themes came through. In the show there’s no clear representation of God, and there’s not a clear representation of Satan, either, but there is an agent of Satan and there isn’t really an agent of God anywhere. That dynamic’s there; what it means, I don’t know. [Laughs.] But I think it relates to a way the world can be seen. There’s a lot of distractions around us, a lot of agents of chaos, and when we look to agents of God, maybe we don’t necessarily see them visually in front of us. But we have to look inwardly and see if we can become that ourselves. I don’t know how much you can gather that from the show, but that’s one way to look at it!

Emma: If it were only about the absence of God, I’d expect the agents of evil to not appear in explicitly religious terms. But the referee often cants his lines like he’s at a religious service.

Blake: One of the referee’s things is that he’s very outwardly charming. He has showmanship, and he tends to mock religious tropes. Some of his lines are pure puns on popular Christian phrases. This is not something that started with me; in Paradise Lost, there’s the idea of Satan mocking the good, or pointing fun at the good, or trying to shine brighter than the good. That’s definitely part of the referee’s character. He tries to make himself seem like he’s above it, or can make fun of it, or sees it as a joke. It’s one of the really annoying parts of his character because it’s funny, it’s charming, but there’s something malicious behind it.

Emma: Near the end, Lucy tells him, “You’re not going to get away with this.” I felt we were meant to take that somewhat seriously, not see the end solely as a triumph of evil, but it’s ultimately ambiguous. You spoke over email about not wanting to impose interpretations, but I’m dying to know what the ending means to you!

Blake: I’ll try not to give an interpretation, but an observation. Throughout the show, we see this split between parents and children. That’s a very simple reduction, but there’s a gang that gets swept up in the intensity of the plot, and there’s a gang that’s off in their own world. At first it’s very humorous. Then it takes a turn and starts to affect people’s lives. In Act II, there’s a group of Dinosaur and Meteor parents together, and they say, “And the kids, they’re better off posthumous.” It’s this moment of, “I don’t care, I’m only focused on what’s going on right now.” The observation I would make about the end is that we see Lucy over her son, and she’s kind of… giving all she has to him. And she’s, in a way, making a statement to the referee about what she values and what’s important to her now.

Emma: What’s your philosophy of art criticism? The “death of the author” seems somewhat in line with what you’ve communicated about authorial intent.

Blake: It’s very tricky. “Is there subjective or objective truth, which one’s the real truth, who has the power…” These questions have been asked for ages. I don’t know the exact number of people who saw Mania, but that’s how many truths there are of the experience of Mania. Then there’s my truth of Mania, which is how it came to be. I don’t really want to place value on which means more or is worth more objectively. There’s that saying, “Everything in the universe happens for a reason.” Whatever experience you had, that was what was meant to happen for you. I don’t know if some deity gave it to you, or just the spontaneity of random events, but now you have that, and you don’t necessarily need mine, if that makes sense. Unless you want it! You can also look for it and compare. That’s part of the game of humanity, we compare and we discuss and we share.

I have to add something, though. If I’m writing a line, I can be thinking of a play in which I saw that line done, and it means something specific to me, and I’m referencing it or turning it into something new. That reference is a big piece of art. Then let’s say there’s Bob. If Bob has watched none of the media I’ve watched, and Bob sees Mania, he might have one experience. But if Bob watches everything I’ve watched, it might make complete sense. It might be like, “Oh, this is exactly what he was trying to do!” Understanding someone’s history is just as important. If you want to understand what someone’s doing with art, you have to look at their history, and what they’ve learned, and what they’ve experienced.

Emma: What should readers look at to understand Mania?

Blake: Little League games, for one. [Laughs.] Then there’s two references I’ve always cited. Kicking and Screaming is a sitcom from the 2000s starring Will Ferrell. And Black Friday is a dark comedy musical by StarKid. It criticizes — not criticizes, but investigates — consumerism and capitalism. Those are the main references, but there’s plenty more out there.

Emma: Do you plan to get Mania performed again, or published?

Blake: When I started writing Mania, I didn’t know ACT was going to do it. I didn’t even have a conception I would bring it to Holy Cross. That’s important, because if I had written it for ACT, I don’t know if it would have been what it was. There’s something unique about doing it for the sake of doing it. When I first created Mania, I was creating it for the sake of creating it, in a way for God — you know, for what my understanding of God is. There’s something valuable in people creating things in that space and then offering it to the world, because, when expectation comes into play, it can really get in the way. So, in terms of next steps, taking it one step at a time, and just trying to keep finding that space where I can be in communication with my creativity.

Worcester’s “Pill Man” Is Trying to Save Lives

If you’ve eaten at Miss Worcester’s Diner, you may have seen Frank Huntley’s original sculptures, which he displays regularly outside the Cash-4-Clothes store where he works. His piece “Blackout” is a sculpture of a humanoid figure fashioned from liquor bottles, beer cans, and nips. Next to that is “Addiction”, which features a hollowed-out figure filled with soda cans, food containers, cannabis wrappers, condoms, and other items which Huntley has used to symbolize addiction. And last is his Magnum Opus — the work which started it all — a sculpture titled “Pill Man”. 

“Pill Man” is a skeleton made from prescription pill bottles — each bearing the name “Frank Huntley.”  “This was me for fifteen years,” Frank tells The Fenwick Review, “I want people to see my work and think twice about throwing it away for addiction.”  Frank built Pill Man from the skeleton of an old Frankenstein costume, and he believes that to be a representation of the way he rebuilt his life from addiction to where he is now.

Huntley, now age 55, grew up in Chelsea, Massachusetts. His father worked very hard to support his children, and taught Frank how to paint and wallpaper houses. Following in his father’s footsteps, Frank entered the trade and was successful until he was injured in the late 90’s in a small vehicular accident. 

His doctor prescribed him Percocet — an opioid — and when his body built up a tolerance for it, he prescribed him OxyContin — another opioid. When he built up a tolerance for OxyContin, they gave him Methadone so that he wouldn’t have to take so much OxyContin. His addiction to these drugs began to take control of his life. “The drug controlled me, morning, noon and night”, says Huntley. “I used to have panic attacks when I’d misplace my pills, since I’d hide them when my kids’ friends would come visit. I became someone different — someone that wasn’t me.”  

Growing up in Chelsea, Huntley had a lot of peer pressure to try different drugs, but he credits an experience he had at the age of fifteen to opening his eyes to the terrifying effects of substance abuse. “When I was 15,” says Huntley, “A friend of mine came over to my girlfriend’s house, and he said, ‘could I get high?’”

“I thought he was going to smoke a joint. He came in with a needle and a strap, and I said ‘What’s that?’ He told me it was heroin, and to watch, so he tightens his strap and shoots up, and within ten seconds he’s a different guy. Screaming and sweating and shaking. Scares the hell out of me, so bad I never did heroin — never wanted to become something like what I was seeing.”

By his mid-40’s that’s what Frank Huntley had become. He was crippled by his addiction to painkillers, tobacco, alcohol, “and Mountain Dew!” says Frank. “That stuff is nasty, just plain syrup, but just as addictive as a cigarette.” But it was his opioid addiction that largely controlled his life, “You see all these addicts on the street standing around like zombies. That’s where I was, pretending to live a life. At my worst I was 125 pounds.”

Huntley says it took the revocation of his doctor’s medical license for him to start his road to recovery. He was supposed to go to a liquid methadone clinic, but Frank argues that these clinics were just bureaucratic cover-ups for the larger problem at hand. “My brother started at that clinic twenty-five years ago and he still needs it to live his life. Two sets of kids — he’d pack them all into his car and take them with him at five in the morning. It’s like the clinics take away the pain while the drug takes away your life.”

So instead of going to the clinics or to rehab, Huntley stayed at home to take care of his son, Trevor, who lives with severe disabilities.  Frank says that, ironically, it was Trevor who ended up taking care of him during his recovery. “He helped me, he gave me a reason to win the fight. He is a blessing and a miracle.”  

Despite his disabilities, Trevor achieved the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. He received a Key to the City of Worcester in March of 2017 for his award, and Frank is prouder of him than anything else. “I’m grateful for a lot of folks who’ve helped me along the way, but none of them more than my children.”

When Frank’s daughter had a baby six years ago, he felt he had another reason “to find [his] destiny away from drugs”. Unfortunately, Frank wasn’t out of the clear yet. He noticed that he was having severe difficulty walking. Frank stated that he could not even walk with his granddaughter in the park.  Frustrated, Frank went to a doctor, who said the years of smoking cigarettes caused Frank’s main artery to clog, even after quitting several years before.  They immediately rushed him into emergency surgery.

“That doctor must have had miracle hands,” says Frank. “God gave him miracle hands, and I woke up, and bit by bit I started to get better. And now I can take my granddaughter on a walk, and I realize that it was all worth it to get better.”  The long, curved scar left on Frank’s torso is a reminder of the price of addiction but also of the mountain he overcame.  

Since he started taking opiates, Frank saved the bottles. He says he wasn’t quite sure why, but that he’s sure glad he did. His “Pill Man” stands as a powerful symbol for overcoming addiction, and he wants more people to see it because he hopes it will remind them how drugs take people’s lives.

“You see them everywhere, around this part of town. Slumped over and dumb. But people don’t want to do anything about it, it makes them too uncomfortable. These people were others’ family members. They could have been lawyers, doctors, and look at them now. Don’t judge them. They’re our brothers and sisters.”

Frank hopes that more people will see his work, and he is working on a new sculpture focused on spreading awareness about cannabis use.

October 1st is the 9th anniversary of Frank Huntley’s victory against opiates, and August 26th was the 8th anniversary of his victory against tobacco.  Since October 1st, 2013, Huntley has been working to make a better life for himself and others struggling with addiction.  He recently spoke at Worcester State University on the dangers of addiction, and Huntley recalls bringing Pill Man to political campaigns during elections to raise awareness of the Opioid Epidemic to voters and candidates.  Huntley stresses that he does not want to stop people from taking their prescribed medications, but that he simply wants to raise awareness and ensure people are informed about not only opioid addiction, but unhealthy addictions to alcohol, marijuana, food, sex, and the list goes on.

“Don’t let these things control you,” Frank told us, “and you’ll have a wonderful life. It’s not your destiny, and it’s up to you to find that destiny.”  Be sure to say hello to Frank if you ever end up on that side of town. Besides working at Cash-4-Clothes, he sells homemade Halloween costumes on the side. You’ll be sure to find him there if you catch him before he leaves at seven, living his honest, clean life to the fullest.

An Interview With Dr. Vincent D. Rougeau

This interview was conducted on Monday, March 29, 2021. We centered our questions around Dr. Rougeau’s disposition towards more orthodox Catholicism and conservatism. The interview as it appears here in print is not a direct transcription. Some content was removed for the sake of brevity, and other minor changes were made to improve clarity. Despite these modifications, we made sure to reflect Dr. Rougeau’s words faithfully. The full, unedited, twenty-five minute audio recording of the interview will be posted on our website. We would like to thank Dr. Rougeau for taking the time to speak with us - it was a wonderful opportunity.

Students might be unaware about the specific role of the President, could you provide us with a brief explanation of your jurisdiction and your responsibilities as you see them?

Sure, though obviously this is a new thing for me too. I think as a general matter, [the college President] is the chief executive officer of the institution. So, he or she is ultimately responsible for everything that happens on campus. As president I report to the Board of Trustees, but they hire me to be responsible for the college. That means every aspect of what happens on campus, ultimately, falls under my jurisdiction. Now, that’s a lot for one person to do, so that’s why we have talented Deans and Vice Presidents, Associate Deans, Vice Provosts, Provosts, all these people who are working with me to make sure the college is executing its mission.

The Holy Cross administration has come into conflict with Bishop McManus of the Diocese of Worcester in the past. We were wondering how you would plan to navigate the Diocesan- Collegiate relationship, and whether you intend to improve the relationship, or try to improve the relationship with the Diocese?

I think it’s really important for the College to have a good relationship with the local ordinary, with the local diocese, and I’ll do my best to come in and build that relationship with a clean slate, as it were. I also think it’s important to recognize the important role that Catholic colleges and universities play in the life of the Church - and it’s a unique role. It’s not the same as, say, a diocesan highschool or another diocesan institution, that fall directly under the aegis of the local bishop. So our mission as a college, that was founded by the Jesuit order, and that ultimately is part of the Jesuits’ charism and the educational mission of the Jesuit order, means that we have a variety of different responsibilities that we have to execute. I want to do that in partnership and cooperation with the bishop, and not in tension with him. But, I also think it’s important that we all recognize the things that we do that are unique and important and don’t necessarily fall into the same kinds of categories that one might ordinarily associate with things that happen in a particular diocese.

Following up on that, is there a particular instance, or any broader experience, where you at Boston College have had to work with the Bishop of Boston?

Well, absolutely. Cardinal Sean O’Malley, in the Archdiocese of Boston, has been an excellent partner with Boston College, and for the Law School in various ways. And, in particular, with the Social Justice activities and mission of the Law School - the work we’ve done as a Law School to make sure the lawyers we educate are sensitive to the roles they play in the legal system, and the fact that many many people do not have access to legal services. So, that’s just one example of the important way that we work with Cardinal Sean. And of course, he’s a participant in a number of activities that we have on campus - not often, but in ways that recognize the important role he plays for the Catholic community in greater Boston.

Students for Life, an RSO at Holy Cross, sent an email this past year, reaching out to see if the administration would make a comment about abortion on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The administration turned down this request, and we were wondering, would you consider such a request to make such a statement?

Well, I won’t make a statement as president in terms of what I would do or would not do yet, since I still have another job [laughing]. But I do think I would be open to hearing from you regarding exactly what you would be seeking in a statement from the administration in that regard. So, I hope that we would have a healthy dialogue about what would be the best way for us to communicate in that regard.

There are those on campus who might see Holy Cross as not promoting genuine Catholic ideals, through the struggles with the Diocese, and its tacit support for abortion. Do you have plans, broadly, to revive and promote more orthodox Catholic teaching at Holy Cross, or some even particulars you might have in mind?

Holy Cross is a liberal arts college and our mission is one that is rooted primarily in our role as an institution of higher education. We of course have a distinct role as a Catholic, Jesuit institution and we want to make sure we aren’t doing anything to undermine that mission. In the pursuit of knowledge at the highest level, in the pursuit of excellence and rigor in intellectual endeavor, there will be debates, disagreements, challenges. If I am to educate students to be the best at what they do, they need to understand and engage with disputes, with difference, with conflict. We can’t hide from conflict, that doesn’t mean that we try to promote conflict that undermines things that are important to our identity as a Catholic institution, but at the same time we need to be prepared for discussion and debate. I don’t think that we can understand Catholic orthodoxy around one specific issue. It is a network of issues that make up Catholic identity. And I do think there has been a tendency, in this country in particular, for the abortion issue to be seen as a sine qua non of what it means to be Catholic. And I would hate to see that happen at an institution of higher education, where we are teaching students in the traditional liberal arts model. Of course the abortion issue is one that needs to be thought about and discussed. The Church is very clear in its view, and it is not my intention to undermine that view, but at the same time, it is an issue that is causing deep conflict within this country, so we just have to be aware of that - it’s not an issue that is settled in American life. It’s a highly contested issue - as are many others, where the Church has strong opinions and views that don’t often get the same level of scrutiny, and the same level of engagement. I want all those issues to be discussed in a way that respects the role we play as an elite liberal arts college.

Could you provide a few examples of some of these ideas that you think might need more attention.

Absolutely. We have a crisis in this country around economic justice. We have a crisis in this country around racial justice. The Church speaks very clearly about the sin of racism - we need to be a part of that conversation. The wealth gap in this nation and the increasing distress of those at the bottom of the economic scale is something that the Church has spoken to for centuries. The immigration issue in this country is a crisis, and it goes directly to the state of human life - people are dying and children are being subjected to inhumane conditions at the border. The reasons for this are complex, but Catholics have been present in these discussions. What are we calling for in terms of addressing these issues at the highest levels in our nation’s government? Are we demanding change, are we asking people “why?,” in the the same way we are doing so around the question of abortion? I’m not saying that we’re not, but I’m saying that this is something that needs to happen. We need to be present on all these questions. And it’s a very complex set of questions. But they all go to the basic question, the basic issue, of human dignity. The Church is very clear about the person being made in the image and likeness of God. And, if we’re not present across a range of issues on that, then we’re not playing our role appropriately, and we’re picking and choosing based on other commitments we may have.

In the same regard, what do you think Holy Cross can do to help integrate these issues into the conversation?

What I see at Holy Cross is a real attention to a rich Catholic intellectual life, that, you know, we [inaudible] these issues together based on core themes, core intellectual and faith commitments, like the dignity of the human person, like the person made in the image and likeness of God, the idea that we need to be present with the poor and the marginalized. I think if you start at those foundational commitments, these other issues start to come together in a more coherent way. I mean, you can make a more coherent claim about why you need to be on this or that side of, say, a legal question or a policy question because you are promoting some core value in the Catholic intellectual tradition that makes this all come together in a way that is sensible and coherent to, perhaps, people who aren’t Catholic. The other thing that we have to do, if we are promoting a sort of high level, highly intellectual Catholic approach to learning, is that we have to recognize that we are not just speaking to Catholics. Just saying something is wrong or that we don’t believe in it, isn’t necessarily going to get real traction in that kind of conversation. So we need to be able to unpack our arguments, think carefully about what others who disagree with us are thinking and why they are thinking that. What I want to see us doing at Holy Cross is training students to think in the most rigorous way about these issues. And I hope, and I would expect that people trained at Holy Cross would do better.

In 2019 protestors prevented their fellow students from attending and engaging with Heather Mac Donald, a speaker that the Fenwick Review had invited to campus. Further, there have been ongoing talks in the administration of implementing a “Free Speech Philosophy Statement” which might restrict certain speakers from being welcomed on campus. So how would you ensure that students are able to hear speakers, regardless of their political persuasions, as Chapter 8 of the Statutes of the Faculty details: “As an institution of higher learning, dedicated to the pursuit of truth wherever it may be found, the College encourages free access to ideas, as a matter of policy. Accordingly, the College shall extend its hospitality to any speaker invited by a recognized student organization or department.”?

So I am, obviously, very supportive of the notion and the value of free speech, and as a lawyer I understand the constitutional commitment we make in this country to free speech. Now, of course, at a private institution there can be limits on what we think of in terms of the kinds of speakers we have on our campus. But I don’t want to think of it in terms of why we would limit things, I want to think about how we can have the broadest possible selection of speakers on our campus as possible in service of the goal that you just mentioned: the highest level of intellectual inquiry. That said, I do think there are going to be some times when speakers are promoting things or representing things that are undermining our core values, like the dignity of the human person, and if someone has a reputation for stoking hate or for fomenting violence, or they have associated themselves repeatedly with people like that, I think we have to look very carefully at what is gained by allowing that person a platform on our campus. We may have some very controversial speakers on campus from time to time, because it’s important to have that conversation. But, as a general matter, I think we have to be wary of people who are trying to use free speech as a platform for stoking hate, division, and violence. That’s just one example of where you might have to draw the line, but as a general rule, I want to make sure that we can have a lively intellectual debate on our campus, and I want to work with all constituencies on campus to make sure that we do that, while making sure that everyone on this campus can feel safe and a part of this community without feeling that they have to run some kind of gauntlet around racist, or antisemitic, or some other hate filled rhetoric.

As a follow up for that, would someone be allowed to [or] would you support someone coming to campus to speak about the intricacies of the issue of abortion itself, would that be something you would be supportive of?

Well, I mean, as a general matter, I don’t know specifically, I am not going to speak specifically to any speaker, but as a general matter I would think we would want to be able to have a conversation on our campus about abortion - as a public policy matter, as a legal matter, as a moral matter, and all of those things in the context which I described, where we are promoting the highest level of intellectual inquiry on our campus. And so, if people are going to have debates about public issues, they need to be informed of all of the sides of the argument.

Even more than speakers, how will you ensure that students of all political persuasions feel welcome at Holy Cross? And what value do you think conservative students bring to Holy Cross?

It’s critical that people of different beliefs can share a community at Holy Cross, because if we can’t do it at Holy Cross, God help us, we are not going to be able to do it in our country. Now, unfortunately, our country is not doing it very well. We can’t be naive and pretend that we are going to have highly charged political debates on the Holy Cross campus that are highly charged in other contexts outside of campus, and that they won’t create tension and conflict. One of the things we have to be thinking about as a community at Holy Cross is looking more broadly at what is going on in our country. If we are talking about conservative and liberal views sharing a space on our campus and being in respectful dialogue, we may have to spend some time thinking about how that looks - how do we make that happen in the context of our community. We don’t really see a healthy dialogue, for instance, in Congress, in public policy discussions in the United States right now. There is a huge divide, politically, between conservatives and liberals, left/right, in this nation, and the issues are not minor. If we are talking about something like voting rights for instance, people are going to be very passionate about that issue, for all kinds of reasons both historical, personal, and political. So I think that the best way to avoid the kind of dysfunction we are seeing politically in our nation, on campus is to remember that we are a community, and we need to build relationships with trust and respect across difference. So, what can we be doing, initially, to support and to encourage the kind of community where we respect one another as human persons, as people who come from different backgrounds, as people who have different ideas, as people who are joined together in the life of this community for a particular purpose? From that [we can] start to explore and engage difficult topics from a perspective of mutual respect. So, I absolutely agree that we need to have people who have different beliefs, because those beliefs are meaningful and important - they’re the reality of the world we live in, and if we are hiding from them, we are not doing our work as a great liberal arts college.

What is something important that you have learned from engaging with conservative thinkers? Who is a conservative intellectual or commentator you especially respect, and why?

Well, I’ve learned a lot from talking to people who have different ideas from mine. I am trying to think, I have a lot of different perspectives in terms of conservative thinkers who I’ve engaged with over the years. John Finnis was my colleague at Notre Dame for many many years, and I think he is one of the greatest minds of our era when it comes to being a thoughtful, deep thinker, a conservative, in the political sense for many, and in the religious sense. I have gained so much knowledge from my interactions with him, from reading his work - that’s just one example. I don’t think that there is ever a reason not to be in dialogue with people who are [different], engaging in topics from the appropriate position of respect.

One more quick question: Who is your favorite saint and why?

My favorite saint! Well, I got to shout out St. Vincent de Paul, since that’s who I was named for!

"To Take the Risks of Love": an Interview with R. R. Reno

Dr. Reno is the editor of First Things, America’s largest journal of Religion and public life. He holds a Doctorate in Religious Ethics from Yale University, and was for 20 years a professor of Theology and Ethics at Creighton University.  This interview was conducted on September 21st, in connection with Dr. Reno’s lecture, “A Christian Interpretation of the Age of Trump.”  It has been edited for length.

Claude Hanley: What would be, in your estimation, the place of the university in American life now, and what should its task be?

R.R. Reno: Well, the purpose of the university is to provide a community of learning, it’s a place for the formation of a secular society that is committed to the life of the mind, and then obviously most students go on to professional work.  Most don’t become professors, but the educational experience serves as a leaven in society at large. I think especially on Josef Pieper’s wonderful short book Leisure, The Basis of Culture.  The American idea of the four-year liberal arts degree is of a time in your life when you’re not actually pursuing professional activities, but leaves you with something that’s closer to contemplative. Pieper argued that is actually necessary to have culture.

Now our view about the role of the university in the public square is shaped by the fact that after World War II, with the GI Bill, there was a big upsurge in college enrollments. And for the men that were coming back from World War II, the university became a kind of place where they looked at questions about what kind of society they were going to have. Consequently, we have this false view that the university is this kind of crucial place where the future of our society is debated and formed and shaped. I think that that’s distorted. It’s obviously true for some of our universities, but we overemphasize that because of the 50’s and 60’s, when we saw this sort of new, emerging middle class, different people from ethnic backgrounds being integrated into America’s leadership. Universities were the focal point for that process.  So universities would ideally be more nourishing, and less political than they are today.

CH: How do the humanities disciplines contribute to that mission?

RRR: Well, I’d put it more broadly, as the liberal arts. I mean, studying astrophysics doesn’t serve any practical purpose. It’s not clear studying evolutionary biology serves a practical purpose either.  Fossil records, all these sorts of things, contribute to our knowledge of the natural world, which we can perhaps use technically at some point.  Mathematicians also, they’re famous for coming up with things that have no relevance whatsoever, and then a hundred years later, people discover practical uses for their mathematical models. But it’s the wonder and joy of knowing that precedes their practical usefulness. And that’s a liberal education; it’s for its own sake, and not for some other end. That strikes me as what is so important about a liberal arts education.  We are made to know, and it is an intrinsic good to know truth.  Not every project can offer that; the liberal arts humanize us, and they make use more fully human.

CH: How does that humanization translate to society and to politics?

RRR: Whether it’s Shakespeare or astrophysics, you go out into the public square, if you’re liberally educated, and you’re less likely to be swept up in a thousand ideologies of the time. It gives you a kind of independence of mind.  I think it’s important, in any society, that you have people who have this independence of mind. John Henry Newman referred to education leads to an enlargement of mind.  You become more capacious…capable of grappling with a full range of experience. I don’t want to privilege the humanities in this regard.  I started out in physics as an undergraduate. My sister’s a physics professor at the University of Iowa. You have to specialize, you can’t know everything. It’s not like you’re swallowing all this food until your gut gets full and distended. It’s not just the amount of facts.  Instead, it’s developing a kind of mental plasticity, and flexibility, and a capacity that prompts you to think about things in such ways.

CH: It’s said that there is a lack of intellectual diversity, of that independence of thought in universities today. The same people are promoting the same kinds of ideas that are getting preeminence. Do you think that’s a valid criticism of the American university?

RRR: I don’t like to use this new term diversity here. We should have diversity of some things and we should have unity of other things. So, I think it’s not a cure-all. But there is a problem, it seems, where there isn’t independence of thought, there’s too much group think. And I don’t think it’s a matter of, as people often say, “Well, it’s because all the professors are liberals.” Now, I went to a small liberal arts college, not unlike Holy Cross.  The professors were ninety percent registered Democrats, they were certainly liberals.  But it didn’t feel like an environment that was closed or limited. To be capacious, to encourage adventure, to have the security as a faculty member to accept the fact that sometimes your students will go in a different direction -- These are qualities that I think that one hopes for in a faculty, but I see less of them today. It could be that the problem is not lack of diversity, but a kind of careerism on the part of faculty.  Or perhaps people want a cheap emotional payoff of feeling that their work has a great moral and political significance.  As a result, there’s a kind of works-righteousness around our salvation, at least our secular salvation by making sure that our  classes teach the right political lessons. I think we need to dig more deeply.  It’s not just a lack of diversity. That’s a symptom, not a cause.

CH: So, to continue this theme, one of the main challenges now is academic freedom and freedom of speech. I think of the events at Middlebury last year, and similar controversies.  What do you think at least some of the underlying issues are that cause this sort of tension?

RRR: Our society is very divided. Grownups don’t tell young people what life is for, and they’ve rebelled.   Everything is open, you choose your own values, et cetera et cetera.  I think it’s quite natural that students want to find some consensus and stability. The radical schools that want to shut down who they perceive to be bad people, I think are misguided.  But that may not be an altogether unhealthy desire, that they need right and wrong. So, I think we’re seeing these perverse dysfunctions in education because we the grownups have created that need.  It’s being filled by some sort of ideological, imposed consensus, rather than a real, genuine consensus.

CH: And this critique reaches back to the same idea, that we’ve lost the ability to pursue the human good?

RRR: Right. If we’re concerned about academic freedom and free speech (and we should be concerned about these things), we need to be clear about what the education at the institution is for, and why shouting people down harms the proper end of education. We’re a community of inquiry.  In a community of inquiry, if people can’t speak, in that sense there’s an imposed consensus, and there’s not a lot of inquiry any more. I’ve talked with young people, and they’ve told me that they find more and more, that it’s just wise not to say what’s on their minds. It’s too dangerous. Well, how can you make progress in the pursuit of truth if you can’t articulate what you think the truth is, and hear what others have to say in response? The problem with shutting down speakers is that it impedes us in achieving the end of education, which is to refine our ideas and make them more in accord with the truth. So I don’t think that academic freedom is an end in itself, it needs to be the means to the end -- having a healthy medium of inquiry. I don’t think that Holy Cross should invite a creationist to give lectures. It just doesn’t help advance the pursuit of truth.  You and I can come up with examples where “no, that’s not going to help.” The problem again is that then the sort of ideological frame of mind comes into play.  It’s a crazy view that the political opinions of half the country are taboo. How could any reasonable person think that? It’s irrational.

CH:  So we have to balance academic freedom with a duty to truth.  What duty to truth does a Catholic university in particular have, and how should it be balanced against academic freedom?

RRR: I think that a Catholic university has an absolute duty to teach what the Catholic Church teaches. A Catholic university that does not teach that which the Church teaches is not betraying its Catholic identity; it’s betraying its identity as a University. The purpose of a university is to encourage people to pursue the truth, and also to transmit the truth. And we believe, as Catholics, that what the Church teaches truths that are indispensable, not just for our salvation but also for our fuller understanding of the human condition. There’s a question of priorities. It’s not the job of the Catholic university to represent all possible views of what it means to be human; It is absolutely the responsibility to propose to students, and to the world, that the Church teaches what it means to be human. That entails defining priorities: hiring priorities, what kind of courses to acquire, etc. It’s not a violation of academic freedom to say that Catholic theology is required, but a Jewish Studies professor’s course is not required. It’s not a violation of academic freedom; that’s the institution establishing its priorities.   Nor is it a violation of academic freedom for the university not to invite speakers who hold positions contrary to what the Church teaches. Now there could be student groups or others who want to invite those people.  Then the university has to make a judgement about whether it harms the mission of the university, which is to transmit and encourage students to pursue the truth. In many cases, Catholic universities have confidence in their own students. If it is doing what it should be, which is to ensure Catholic teaching is clearly taught, it can tolerate dissent quite easily.

CH: How does that concern influence the other disciplines, outside of philosophy and theology?

RRR: It applies across the board. For instance, one problem we have is that in the sciences, there’s often a materialistic metaphysics that’s operating very close to the surface: that our brains are our minds, and we’re just neurons firing. A university should guard against teaching this. It’s scientism, it’s not science. The same goes for economics.  Economics is a powerful and important discipline that teaches us to think in a critical way about markets.  It models the human behavior in terms of maximizing authority, where that’s understood as maximizing one’s material interest. That’s fine for modelling, but it easily can lead to a generalization that humans are nothing more than utility maximizing achievements. That’s not true for the human person either. So in many different disciplines, there needs to be reflection on how we as an institution can present our view of the human person. Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech dealt with that.

CH: Are there any particular reforms you think should be made, or is it more a change in attitude toward the project of the University?

RRR: I think Catholic universities really need to get a grip on the hiring of faculty. We’ve spent too many decades now trying to imitate secular higher education. We need to return to the wisdom of our own tradition, and recognize that the metaphysical poverty of our time is quite acute, and we need to focus on hiring people, not the people who all agree, that’s absurd, you’re never going to find that [laughs], that’s the whole idea. You can’t even find Thomists who agree. It’s not a question of agreement, it’s a question of whether or not there are faculty members who believe that there’s truth, and that truth transcends a particular discipline. In Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech, he looked back with nostalgia on his years at Regensburg, when faculty members often would gather together and try to talk about the big questions, transcending the specialized knowledge that they had in philosophy or theology or science or literature or history. One has to grope towards these larger theories together, and we have to hire professors who are committed to try to do that together. That’s what it means to be liberal, not having a collection of specialists.  And I think because the Catholic Church opposes a compromise of truth about the human person, both as to our manifold destiny in God, as well as to our natural duties and responsibilities, and because it presents a comprehensive vision of the human person, we in particular have an inheritance that allows us to recognize the poverty of our present age. We should address that poverty by building institutions that pursue a larger vision.

FR: But that would entail first recognizing our inheritance.

RRR: Right.  Catholic universities have a natural excellence of the life of the mind. Most of what goes on at Catholic universities functions in the area of the natural virtues -- intellectual integrity, intellectual honesty and intellectual zeal. This is encouraged and elevated by the supernatural virtue of faith, but these are natural virtues. It’s possible that we can draw upon educational models and experiences at secular universities. It’s not that we only have to hire people with degrees from Catholic universities, etc., etc. But it does require a kind of recognition that higher education in the United States is not in good shape. We see this from this dysfunctional campus environments. And because it’s not in good shape, consequently we should not just be imitating what other, elite, universities are doing.  We should be returning to our sources and asking ourselves, “What is it that the Catholic tradition proposes as a vision of the Truth?”

FR: In conclusion, what piece of advice would you give undergraduates about how to take their four years of undergraduate education?

RRR: Don’t worry about what comes next. Bill Deresiewicz, who wrote a book called Excellent Sheep about today’s college students, said that there are two religions that dominate higher education today. One is a religion of political correctness, and the other is a religion of success. Both of those religions actually feed on each other, because political correctness is a way of baptizing a person to success. So I would say that success is a far more powerful god than political correctness. So beware of that idol. Study the things you love.  One of the great poverties of our age is that it really is a loveless age. People don’t feel that they even have permission to take the risks of love. If you love physics, study physics. If you love theology, study theology. Don’t worry about what you’re going to do for a living right now.  In the United States, we have society set up for people to do well. We don’t have a society set up for people to cultivate the life of the mind. Cultivate it now, and it will carry you through many of life’s difficulties and setbacks, which are inevitable even if you are successful.