American Catholic Higher Education: Essential Documents, 1967-1990.

• Author: Frey, Donald E.

As the title indicates, this collection is not directed to economists; even for education economists these documents would serve primarily as background readings.

The volume contains a set of documents (drafts and final versions in certain instances) written during a period when Roman Catholic institutions of higher learning in America were seeking to articulate their basic nature. This was in response to an initiative by the Vatican to exert greater central control over Catholic universities worldwide. The documents reveal the American Catholic institutions attempting to define themselves in terms of the decentralized and pluralistic pattern of American higher education. On the other hand, the documents reveal a Vatican initially bent on promulgating a new canon law that would have exerted more centralized and hierarchical control, and would have reduced university autonomy. The documents show the softening of the Vatican's initial intent over time.

The book portrays the effort of the American institutions to educate an apparently uninformed Vatican of several realities faced by colleges and universities in the United States. Among these realities is the First Amendment's Establishment clause. The American Catholics argued that the degree of ecclesiastical control over Catholic institutions envisioned by the Vatican could constitutionally jeopardize federal aid to students attending Catholic colleges. (Indeed, among other things, typically tight church control of parochial schools has kept government subsidization unconstitutional to this day.) Evidently, even proposed canon law must be formulated with an eye to economic realities. Other American realities included independent accrediting agencies, not known in other countries, that would object to ecclesiastical interference with the autonomy of the Catholic universities.

The book indirectly points to some larger lessons that researchers in the field of education economics ought to ponder. First, Catholic universities make it a high priority to keep and enhance their distinctive nature; they, like other church-related colleges and schools, seek consciously to be something other than a replication of State U. Lamentably, too many economists writing about private education usually ignore the essential distinctiveness of private institutions, using instead one-dimensional analytical models that miss this key point. A high-profile example of this is the 1990 Brookings volume Politics...