Philip Gleason's interesting history of American Catholic higher education reveals the extent of organizational and ideological change that has taken place in Catholic universities and colleges since the turn of the century. Writing from what he refers to as an "internalist" perspective, Gleason describes the transformation of Catholic universities in the context of the emergence of the modern American university, two World Wars, and the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. His narrative draws us into the Catholic religious and intellectual debate and the controversy that surrounded the founding and growth of such well-known institutions as Georgetown, Notre Dame, Fordham, and Catholic University of America. Gleason reveals how Catholic educators and intellectuals in the United States made the transition from a "cold war" struggle that challenged modernity to an accommodation and acceptance of modernity. He invites us to consider how that transition influenced the growth of research and graduate training, university prestige, curriculum and classroom instruction, student activism, and academic freedom for faculty.

In Part One of Contending with Modernity, Gleason outlines the organizational "revolution" that arose at the turn of the century in response to both Catholics' aspirations for economic and social mobility and to competition from rapidly developing and, in the public mind, "superior" public high schools and state universities. Catholic educational reformers developed a comprehensive professional association, the Catholic Education Association (CEA), to address the extensive institutional fragmentation that some Catholic observers described as similar to a "boiler explosion" (p. 39). These educators fundamentally reformed the articulation between secondary schools and colleges, clarified the relation between colleges and universities, and, stimulated by progressive developments during and after World War I, established principles of accreditation in line with national norms, as well as ideals of research and faculty dedication to scholarship.

In Part Two, Gleason turns to ideological challenges. Here he describes the congruence between conservatism in Catholic higher education and the intellectual revival of scholastic philosophy and theology. The nineteenth-century "Scholastic Revival" was built primarily on the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and held that the evils of the modern world had their origins in the misuse of human reason as a system of thought. Gleason argues that subsequently, between World War I and Vatican II, neoscholasticism, supported through organizational modernization, dominated and shaped teaching, curriculum, and intellectual life in Catholic higher education. This developmental movement raised educators' hopes that they could create within their colleges and universities a culture that would overcome the flaws of secularism and the culture of modernity. This was "a period in which Catholics challenged modernity by proposing an integrally Catholic culture as a superior alternative" (p. 114). Colleges and universities became centers for the diffusion of this countercultural perspective among Catholics and in American public life (p. 146).

In Part Three, Gleason asserts that Catholic educators of the thirties were convinced that advanced study and research could continue to grow within the framework of a Catholic worldview. But Catholic involvement with secular agencies during World War II and participation in the organization of federally sponsored research "reinforced the assimilative tendencies that had long been at work in their adjustment to prevailing norms in educational practice and in other more subtle ways" (p. 215). As one example of this "assimilative force," Gleason describes how organizational innovation and ideals of professional autonomy eventually reached the training of the teaching sisterhood, "the most religiously withdrawn segment of the Catholic educational world" (p. 232). Nevertheless, Catholic educators continued the challenge to modernity unabated into the 1940s and 1950s. This challenge found expression in critiques of scientific naturalism, reaffirmation of agitation against birth control, involvement of the International Federation of Catholic Alumnae in Legion of Decency film boycotts, and the suppression of academic freedom.

Gleason concludes his narrative with the transition to a new "Era." As reasons for the shift, he names an emergent Americanism (an enthusiasm for national values) among younger scholars, increased Catholic receptivity to charges of anti-intellectualism, "backwardness" and ghetto mentality in Catholic higher education, and the dismissal of a dessicated and formalistic Thomism (St. Thomas Aquinas's scholastic system) as the center of liberal arts education. Turning points include the defeat of a speakers' ban at the Catholic University of America in 1963 and academic freedom cases at St. John's University, the University of Dayton, and Catholic University of America (the Curran tenure case). Freedom manifested itself in the laicization of boards of trustees and the "Land O' Lakes Statement" proclaiming that a Catholic university must enjoy "true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself" (p. 317). Thus, according to this author, we have witnessed the end of an era. Gleason writes, "Although the dust has still not fully settled, it was clear from an early date that the old ideological structure of Catholic higher education, which was already under severe strain, had been swept away entirely" (p. 305).

This is not, however, the final chapter in Gleason's story. That chapter, he suggests, is yet to be written by Catholic educators. Their challenge now is

[the] lack of consensus as to the substantive content of the ensemble of religious beliefs, moral commitments, and academic assumptions that supposedly constitute Catholic identity, and a consequent inability to specify what that identity entails for the practical functioning of a Catholic colleges and universities. (p. 320)

The question Catholic educators have yet to answer as our century closes is whether they will be able to forge and build upon a new rationale for their existence as a distinctive element in American higher education.

M.G.C.