Earlier this month, the great Sycamore Trust created a website called NDCatholic.com which would assist Notre Dame students in finding those professors and courses on campus that could be counted on to deliver an “authentic Catholic education.”
Great idea, right?
On top of that, they had the great Fr. Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C., making his very well informed recommendations to students on the website.
Great idea, right? In fact, so many students thought it was a great idea that the website reportedly crashed on the first day.
Well, it seems to me the university’s administration didn’t like the idea.
The Sycamore Trust sadly sent out an email yesterday saying that Fr. Miscamble “is no longer associated with the website NDCatholic.com.”
“I regret that I can say only that I am required to end my involvement with the NDCatholic site and am not at liberty to say why,” Fr. Miscamble told The Sycamore Trust.
Now, to be clear, he doesn’t say the administration got to him but it would appear that’s what occurred. (I could be wrong but who else would be against such a website?)
The Sycamore Trust reports:
On November 9, 2015, we unveiled the NDCatholic.com website, which is designed to assist students seeking a Catholic education at Notre Dame. They need this sort of help because of the alarming reduction over recent decades in Catholic representation on the faculty. The faculty no longer comes close to meeting the University’s own Mission Statement test of Catholic identity: a majority of committed Catholics on the faculty. Perhaps 25% to 30% of the faculty fit this description, as we will show again in a coming bulletin using the most recent data available.
The consequences of this steep decline in Catholic faculty have been described in concrete terms by Professor Emeritus Walter Nicgorski, who retired recently after more than forty years as one of Notre Dame’s most highly regarded teachers and scholars:
It is increasingly the case today that a young person going through the critical and formative years of a Catholic education at Notre Dame might not encounter a practicing Catholic informed and engaged by the Catholic intellectual tradition.
The Trust will continue the work of the website and vows to build on their success.
So much for free speech on campus, right?
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