Unwinding Marquette’s unhiring

A leading Catholic university has rescinded a job offer to a lesbian academic, prompting allegations of illiberal discrimination. Who’s at fault?

Early last month, Father Robert A. Wild, the president of one of America’s leading Catholic colleges, Jesuit-run Marquette University, was confronted with an embarrassing problem. Marquette had just offered Jodi O’Brien a position as dean of arts and sciences. Dr O’Brien was a professor of sociology at Seattle University, another Jesuit institution, and she was whole-hearted in her commitment to what she termed “Jesuit values”.

But for some reason, Marquette had overlooked the fact that Dr O’Brien was also a whole-hearted lesbian whose publications include articles like: “Complicating Homophobia”, "Queer Tensions:  The Cultural Politics of Belonging and Exclusion in Same Gender Marriage Debates", and "Wrestling the Angel of Contradiction: Queer Christian Identities".

So, while insisting that his decision had nothing to do with her personal life, Father Wild rescinded Marquette’s offer. The university said that she lacked “the ability to represent the Marquette mission and identity.” “We found some strongly negative statements about marriage and family,” amongst her academic writings, Father Wild told the New York Times.

Unsurprisingly, the abrupt about-face by Marquette has prompted indignation around the country. Faculty from both universities took out a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper, to protest. They insisted that the university should apologize and offer her the job again. The reversal "puts academic freedom at risk at Marquette University," said the ad. "We reject an intellectual 'litmus test' for our faculty, staff, and leaders in the administration."

This is just one of a number of such disputes simmering in the US about liberal values in universities. I’d like to use it as a lens to examine the core problem: if everyone has a right to create his or her own values, how can we arbitrate amongst conflicting values? In other words, disputes like these pose the question: does classical liberalism have a future?

The leading living critic of liberalism today is the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, a one-time committed Marxist but now staunch Catholic who teaches at Notre Dame.  Though it is a notoriously slippery word with a complicated historical and conceptual genealogy, liberalism essentially means the privatization of the good. In political practice, this privatization entails the unimpeachable and unexceptionable priority, theoretically and practically, privately and publicly, of individual autonomy. In liberalism, as MacIntyre explains it

Every individual is to be equally free to propose and to live by whatever conception of the good he or she pleases, derived from whatever theory or tradition he or she may adhere to, unless that conception of the good involves reshaping the life of the rest of the community in accordance with it.

And thus the “good” becomes a private matter:

We are presented, that is to say, with agents as if detached altogether from any conception of or perception of the good or goods… All preferences of all individuals are to be weighed in the same balance and accorded the same respect, no matter whose they are or what their grounding.

For a philosophical liberal, then, the contention that that there exists an objective and non-private human good for human nature is dangerous nonsense. He would also scorn claims that this good might have a definite, knowable nature which transcends personal preference and that it thus has public and even political relevance.

The relevance of this to the Marquette debate is clear. If one holds that there is a good way to exercise human sexuality, a good way that transcends personal preference, homosexuality is unacceptable. But an institution which endorses that view is destined to lose any public debate before it even begins—or even to be barred from participating. Since all preferences are a priori equal in value because purely idiosyncratic, for an institution to deny a candidate a position due to her particular sexual preference must be seen, with the public eye, as akin to denying a candidate a position due to her particular favorite color.

But consistently applying this principle leads one into the quicksands of incoherence.

First of all, it is impossible to take a neutral standpoint. It is liberalism’s opinion, and liberalism’s alone, that the non-existence and/or non-knowability of the human good renders it a private matter, and thus that all individual opinions about the human good are a priori equal and politically non-authoritative, that is, politically privileged above all other opinions and given public authority. In other words, it is liberalism’s quite debatable opinion that has somehow become the unimpeachable, self-evident truth presupposed in public debate. This privileging of one human opinion above all others is, in a word, illiberal.

Second, if, according to liberalism’s dogmatic priority of individual autonomy, Jodi O’Brien has the individual right not to be discriminated against by any institution with regard to her preferred sexual lifestyle, then it stands to reason that Marquette University has an institutional right of autonomy. Surely the individuals who govern Marquette have the right to govern in a way that conforms to their own preferences, even if that means discriminating in hiring criteria.

Similarly, it means that individual students have a right to a curriculum and educational ethos corresponding to their preferences, in this case, the preference to preserve the Catholic mission and integrity of the university. Therefore, according to the logic of liberalism itself, the individual students and administrators at Marquette should have the right to reject for a leadership position a person who, as demonstrated by her scholarship, does not believe in a determinate, knowable human good, one who believes that human sexuality is “socially constructed,” and who practices a sexual lifestyle not in accord with the mission of the institution. Furthermore, if Marquette does not have this right, why does Jodi O’Brien retain hers?

To resolve the issue one preference must be valued higher than the other, but this contradicts liberalism’s preference-neutral foundation.

This leads to a terrible problem. If there is no rational way to decide amongst competing goods, then liberals’ only recourse is to settle it irrationally, through force or fraud. In practice, this means applying intense political pressure and propagandizing. As MacIntyre has often lamented, academic dialogue breaks down into interminable harangues and campaigns for political correctness instead of courteous, open debate.

A recent article in USA Today suggested that gays are facing a stained glass ceiling at American Catholic colleges. "There is no way the current hierarchy will allow a gay person to hold a position of authority unless they are closeted and self-loathing. They will never permit a scholar who publishes a point of view" promoting gay equity to hold a position of real authority, complained a gay professor at Seton Hall University. We can expect more debates as gay and lesbian academics apply for positions. The only way to solve the ensuing imbroglios is to repudiate relativism masquerading as liberalism.

The privatization of the good renders rational debate impossible, and since exclusivist political decisions are, in fact, made, liberalism ensures that under the disguise of such stalking-horses as reasonableness, diversity, and tolerance, we are left with unreasonableness, homogeneity, and intolerance. It would seem that it is liberalism itself that puts liberalism in question. 

Thaddeus J. Kozinski is assistant professor of humanities and philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College and the author of The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It. A version of this article has been published on the Rowman and Littlefield blog.

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