AT their classical best. Catholic colleges and universities are
bountiful providers of sound lawyers, doctors, civil servants,
teachers. A half-dozen schools, besides Notre Dame, are outstanding: Washington, D.C.'s Georgetown University boasts a famed
School of Foreign Service, about half its students non-Catholic, and
graduates officers for the State Department and diplomatic posts
abroad. President: the Very Rev. Edward B. Bunn, S.J. Most famous
former student : Lyndon Johnson.
Also in the “Catholic Ivy League,” and considered by many
Catholics to be academically superior to Georgetown, is Holy Cross, in
Worcester, Mass. Forty percent of its freshmen still pursue the prized
Jesuit A.B. degree. Holy Cross has 88 Jesuits and 60 laymen to teach
1,827 “wall-to-wall Irish” men students, retains compulsory daily Mass. New York City's Jesuit-run Fordham University opened
on a farm in 1841, got engulfed by the spreading city. Among other
things, Fordham is noted for its 51-year-old seismic station, the
Jesuit quarterly Thought, and schools of law and social service. Headed
by urbane, witty Father Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., Fordham is now
building a $25 million campus at Manhattan's Lincoln Center. Notably strong in philosophy and medicine is St. Louis University , founded in 1818 and taken over by the Jesuits in 1827 as
their first college west of the Mississippi. Two-thirds of its students
are from the St. Louis area; one-quarter are first-in-their-family
collegians, including many Negroes. Only half the 427 fulltime teachers
are Catholics; only 48 are Jesuits. St. Louis' new $4,250,000 library
can house 1,000,000 books; it owns microfilmed duplicates of 600,000
manuscripts in the Vatican library. President: the Rev. Paul C. Reinert, S.J. Jesuit-run Boston College is a coeducational
commuter college that has put up 19 new buildings in 14 years, is
currently raising $40 million for more. A rallying point for the Boston
Irish since 1863, B.C. turns out 20% of all practicing lawyers in
Massachusetts. Chiefly a graduate school is Washington, D.C.'s Catholic University
. It operates under the “guidance” of the
Vatican and is governed by U.S. bishops serving as trustees. Strong in
nursing, physics and library science, C.U. has a fine drama department
, the country's only
graduate school of canon law and the biggest Catholic graduate school
of engineering. A number of other Catholic schools fall into the mass-production or
good-small categories. Jesuits run the University of Detroit and three Loyola Universities, named for the order's founder,
in Chicago, Los Angeles and New Orleans. Also Jesuit-controlled:
Wisconsin's Marquette University, though it now has only 60 Jesuits
for 10,300 students; Creighton University in
Omaha, headed by the Very Rev. Carl Reinert, younger brother of St.
Louis' president; and the University of Santa Clara ,
oldest college in California .
