I am speaking as someone who is neither a theologian nor even an academic, but merely a journalist.

And so everything that I take, everything that I say will be said with a certain casualness,

lack of precision and rigor, and all the other qualities to which readers of newspapers are accustomed to from their columnists.

But I'm going to sort of make some generalizations about what I see is the trajectory

of the modern university in the West and particularly the United States over the last

100 to 150 years and use that to sort of briefly try and illuminate some of the present controversies on campus,

most of which seem to have very little to do with Roman Catholicism, but in fact do, I think, have something to do with religion.

And that, of course, is not an idea that's at all unique to

myself. I'm stealing it and stealing it from others, but hopefully I'll give you an interesting

spin on it. And then I'll conclude by trying to talk about where and how the Catholic

university can and should position itself in response to these developments and

also sort of the both the promise and the opening, but also the particular challenge facing

the Catholic University as it tries to sort of deal with this larger academic reality.

So I think it's fair to say that if you look back over sort of the course of the development

of the modern university system that has become sort of the engine of meritocracy that

we all know and love, what you see is a kind of period of extended secularization,

proceeding across the second half of the 19th century

and continuing, obviously, into the 20th,

first affecting Protestant colleges and universities in such a sweeping way, in fact,

that most, if not all of our prominent universities have forgotten that they were once Protestant

at all. I went to Harvard, and our official motto is, of course, Veritas.

And if you look very carefully at the corners of certain plinths and monuments around Harvard's

...