Awards

• Winner of AERA Division F New Scholar's Book Award in the History of Education 2005 (United States)
• Winner of AERA Division F New Scholar's Book Award in the History of Education 2005.

Overview

In 1893 Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, the father of the modern university, helped implement a policy that, in effect, barred graduates of Jesuit colleges from regular admission to Harvard Law School. The resulting controversy - bitterly contentious and widely publicized - was a defining moment in the history of American Catholic education, illuminating on whose terms and on what basis Catholics and Catholic colleges would participate in higher education in the 20th century. In this book, Kathleen Mahoney considers the challenges faced by Catholics as the age of the university opened. She describes how liberal Protestant educators such as Eliot linked the modern university with the cause of a Protestant America and how Catholic students and educators variously resisted, accommodated, or embraced Protestant-inspired educational reforms. Drawing on social theories of cultural hegemony and insider-outsider roles, Mahoney traces the rise of the Law School controversy to the interplay of three powerful forces: the emergence of the liberal, nonsectarian research university; the development of a Catholic middle class whose aspirations included attendance at such institutions; and the Catholic church's increasingly strident campaign against modernism and, by extension, the intellectual foundations of modern academic life.

Full Product Details

9780801873409

Table of Contents

Reviews

<p> The values were, on both sides, largely unexamined and, as a result, produced many ironies when they were called into explicit conflict. Mahoney's account is particularly good at exposing these ironies in a way that is at once sympathetic and unsparing. -- Daniel M. Murtaugh, Commonweal

Author Information

Kathleen A. Mahoney, formerly an assistant professor of education at Boston College, is president of the Humanitas Foundation in New York City.

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