Anti-Catholic Bias at a Catholic College

With increasing frequency, it is getting harder and harder for conservative Catholics, no matter how well credentialed they are, to get hired in academia, particularly in Catholic universities.

When he was still teaching at SUNY, author Thomas E. Woods, Jr., told me that his enthusiasm for the Latin Mass was met with more hostility in Catholic colleges and universities than at the State University of New York, where they thought it was exotic.  In the latest issue of Modern Age, a quarterly review, English professor Anthony Esolen recalls his own experiences a quarter century ago when he went to work in the Development of Western Civilization (DWC) program at Catholic Providence College.

“It was well known that if you happily admitted to a search committee in sociology or political science that you were a Roman Catholic, they would happily oblige you by showing you the door,” Esolen writes. “The odium set roots even in those departments that staffed the DWC program.”

“When one of my colleagues in English, for many years now the head of the Honors Program, was applying for a job in our department, the chief of the opposition led a whispering campaign against him, advising another professor that the man was plainly unacceptable – ‘He’s a Roman Catholic!’ He did not know that the recipient of this dreadful information was himself a lector at his Catholic parish.”

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