On Catholic campuses that aspire to Top Ten or Top Twenty status in publicity sweepstakes like the U.S. News and World Report college rankings, one sometimes hears the phrase “preferred peers.” Translated into plain English from faux-sociologese, that means the schools to which we’d like to be compared (and be ranked with). At a major Catholic institution like the University of Notre Dame, for example, administrators use the term “preferred peers” to refer to universities like Duke, Stanford, and Princeton, suggesting that these are the benchmarks by which Notre Dame measures its own aspirations to excellence.
By the current standards of American higher learning, Duke, Stanford, and Princeton are indeed excellent schools. But is their excellence the excellence to which a Catholic institution of higher education should aspire? Are they the benchmarks by which a Catholic university with dreams of glory should measure itself?
Read Full Article »