I am Appalled and Ashamed of my Alma Mater

Notre Dame has decided to open, Fall 2020.

We’re Reopening Notre Dame. It’s Worth the Risk.

Informed by the best medical advice we can find, we believe we can keep our campus environment healthy.

By John I. Jenkins

Father Jenkins is the president of the University of Notre Dame.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/opinion/notre-dame-university-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a distinguished immunologist and an advocate for public health. I have the privilege of sharing with him an education in Catholic schools laden with the study of classical texts, philosophy and theology.

Dr. Fauci credits such an education with giving him his impressive ability to explain complex medical facts to general audiences and present cogent arguments.

He consistently says that he speaks as a scientist, offering us the best scientific information available to guide our response to the coronavirus pandemic. His advice is invaluable. There are, however, questions that a scientist, speaking strictly as a scientist, cannot answer for us.

For questions about moral value — how we ought to decide and act — science can inform our deliberations, but it cannot provide the answer.

At the University of Notre Dame, we recently announced our plans to return students to campus for the fall semester. In order to reduce the chances that students from around the country and the world with multiple departures and returns will carry pathogens with them, we will bring students back two weeks early, forgo a fall break and finish the semester before Thanksgiving.

As soon as students arrive in August, we will conduct orientations to welcome them back in the Covid-19 era. We will also institute extensive protocols for testing; contact tracing and quarantining; and preventive measures, such as hand-washing, physical distancing and, in certain settings, the wearing of masks. This is how we can restore in-person classes safely.

 Athletic competition presents another set of challenges. We believe we can, with aggressive testing, hygiene and careful monitoring, keep student-athletes safe. Indeed, keeping healthy relatively small cadres of student-athletes, coaches and support staff members is a less daunting challenge than keeping safe the several thousand other people in the campus community.

Fans in the stadium, however, are a different matter. Fighting Irish fans regularly fill Notre Dame Stadium’s 80,000 seats. I see no way currently to allow spectators unless we restrict admissions so that physical distancing is possible.

Our focus to this point has been on restarting our educational and research efforts, and we will soon turn to answer the question of how many games we will play, when we will play them and how many fans will be in the stadium.

With these and other steps — informed by the best medical advice we can find — we believe we can keep our campus environment healthy.

Our decision to return to on-campus classes for the fall semester was guided by three principles that arise from our core university goals. First, we strive to protect the health of our students, faculty, staff and their loved ones. Second, we endeavor to offer an education of the whole person — body, mind and spirit — and we believe that residential life and personal interactions with faculty members and among students are critical to such an education. Finally, we seek to advance human understanding through research, scholarship and creative expression.

If we gave the first principle absolute priority, our decision about reopening would be easy. We would keep everyone away until an effective vaccine was universally available.

However, were we to take that course, we would risk failing to provide the next generation of leaders the education they need and to do the research and scholarship so valuable to our society. How ought these competing risks be weighed? No science, simply as science, can answer that question. It is a moral question in which principles to which we are committed are in tension.

We all hope for an effective vaccine that will put Covid-19 behind us. Yet we cannot and should not assume that a vaccine will be available soon, nor, indeed, that another pandemic will not follow close behind. We live in a global society, and it is possible that animal-to-person contact in an open market somewhere may again cause a pandemic disrupting our society.

We may need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are facing not simply a passing crisis, but a new normal. For that and similar challenges, we need moral insight.

We are in our society regularly willing to take on ourselves or impose on others risks — even lethal risks — for the good of society. We send off young men and women to war to defend the security of our nation knowing that many will not return. We applaud medical professionals who risk their health to provide care to the sick and suffering. We each accept the risk of a fatal traffic accident when we get in our car.

The pivotal question for us individually and as a society is not whether we should take risks, but what risks are acceptable and why. Disagreements among us on that question are deep and vigorous, but I’d hope for wide agreement that the education of young people — the future leaders of our society — is worth risking a good deal.

Indeed, the mark of a healthy society is its willingness to bear burdens and take risks for the education and well-being of its young. Also worthy of risk is the research that can enable us to deal with the challenges we do and will face.

We have availed ourselves of the best medical advice and scientific information available and are assiduously planning a reopening that will make the campus community as safe as possible. We believe the good of educating students and continuing vital research is very much worth the remaining risk.

In our classical, humanistic educations, both Dr. Fauci and I came across the texts of Aristotle, who defined courage not as simple fearlessness, but as the mean between a rashness that is heedless of danger and a timidity that is paralyzed by it. To possess the virtue of courage is to be able to choose the proper mean between these extremes — to know what risks are worth taking, and why.

Perhaps what we most need now, alongside science, is that kind of courage and the practical wisdom it requires. Notre Dame’s recent announcement about reopening is the attempt to find the courageous mean as we face the threat of the virus and seek to continue our mission of education and inquiry.

As an alum, I am appalled and ashamed. Fr. Jenkins is no Father Heburgh! He seems to have been reading R.R. Reno in "First Things," and to be catering to the school's Republican donors. This is casuistry, not courage.

In book II of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that virtue (the mean) involves having feelings and actions "at the right times on the right grounds toward the right people for the right motive and in the right way is to feel them to an intermediate, that is to the best degree; and this is the mark of virtue.”

I think Fr. Jenkins fails on several counts here:

1) "on the right grounds"

Jenkins writes, "We are in our society regularly willing to take on ourselves or impose on others risks — even lethal risks — for the good of society. We send off young men and women to war to defend the security of our nation knowing that many will not return. We applaud medical professionals who risk their health to provide care to the sick and suffering. We each accept the risk of a fatal traffic accident when we get in our car." But his analogies fail.

Traffic accidents are not contagious.

Sending young men and women off to war may involve their deaths, but those deaths are not contagious.

Medical professionals do risk their health to provide care to the sick and suffering. But they recognize their potential for contagion and quarantine themselves from their loved ones and those who are vulnerable. Many sleep in their offices, hotel rooms, garages and basements. Some have sent their kids away to live with relatives. Many eat alone, and have not touched or hugged their kids or spouses for weeks. Seehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dad-are-you-okay-doctors-and-nurses-fighting-pandemic-fear-infecting-their-families/2020/03/18/8beefc66-689b-11ea-b313-df458622c2cc_story.html

2) "For the right motive"

Catholic social teaching is rooted in the common good, and God's preferential option for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the marginalized.

Jenkins writes, "the mark of a healthy society is its willingness to bear burdens and take risks for the education and well-being of its young. Also worthy of risk is the research that can enable us to deal with the challenges we do and will face."

The "healthy society" Jenkins describes here sounds more like Enlightenment America than the Kingdom of God. Scripture does not speak of “healthy societies,” but it does have a lot to say about justice. Yes, education is a good; research is a good; but they are not the ultimate good: The God who is Love is Goodness itself.

  Jenkins’ motivation here does not fully connect with Catholic social teaching.  How we treat the least  of these—including the elderly, the weak, the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized—that is also necessary for a just society.  Exactly HOW will Jenkins guarantee protection of faculty, staff, students and neighbors in the South Bend community  who are at risk because of age or pre-existing conditions? We must not sacrifice them on the altar of knowledge. We must not use them as a means to other material, intellectual, moral or spiritual goods.

Frankly, it is difficult for me not to believe that Jenkins’ motivation is financial,.
Of course it is in ND’s interest to reopen: dorms are big money makers, not to mention sports. Forbes ranks Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish football team as the 7^th most valuable program in the country, with $112 million in annual revenue. COvid-19 is going to do serious damage to the university financially, though not to the degree other schools will suffer. With a $13.8 billion endowment, ND is one of top 20 universities with the largest endowments

Jenkin assures us “We have availed ourselves of the best medical advice and scientific information available and are assiduously planning a reopening that will make the campus community as safe as possible.”  But he seems to carefully sidestep acknowledging a critical factor:  the average ND student, who I expect is no different from students at other schools. Alcohol and sex are constant temptations, but in the age of Covid-19, where a person can be asymptomatic but still infected, they can be deadly. What does ND propose to do stop students from keggers and pub-crawling?  To keep them from hooking up?  

3) “the right time...the right way.”

The university does not exist in its own little bubble.  It has nearly 6,000 people, and South Bend has nearly 100,000 people. Sure, that means the school accounts for only 6% of the population, but even if only one person is infected, then it won’t be long until many innocent people are exposed.  Yes, we all are anxious for our schools and churches to reopen, but now is not the right time, and this is not the right way. We need a vaccine or some reliable treatment for the virus before we reopen these institutions. As a biologist friend of mine wrote,  “fighting the epidemic is difficult because of ‘the gap between science and human nature.’”  Father Jenkins needs to take the latter into account.

The pivotal question for us individually and as a society is not whether we should take risks, but what risks are acceptable and why. Disagreements among us on that question are deep and vigorous, but I’d hope for wide agreement that the education of young people — the future leaders of our society — is worth risking a good deal.

Indeed, the mark of a healthy society is its willingness to bear burdens and take risks for the education and well-being of its young. Also worthy of risk is the research that can enable us to deal with the challenges we do and will face.

We have availed ourselves of the best medical advice and scientific information available and are assiduously planning a reopening that will make the campus community as safe as possible. We believe the good of educating students and continuing vital research is very much worth the remaining risk.

In our classical, humanistic educations, both Dr. Fauci and I came across the texts of Aristotle, who defined courage not as simple fearlessness, but as the mean between a rashness that is heedless of danger and a timidity that is paralyzed by it. To possess the virtue of courage is to be able to choose the proper mean between these extremes — to know what risks are worth taking, and why.

Perhaps what we most need now, alongside science, is that kind of courage and the practical wisdom it requires. Notre Dame’s recent announcement about reopening is the attempt to find the courageous mean as we face the threat of the virus and seek to continue our mission of education and inquiry.