No matter how hard the Creighton’s administration may try, Anne Lamott won’t go away.
Last fall, the Rev. John P. Schlegel, S.J., university president, overturned the university’s offer to have Lamott, an author, speak at the annual Women and Health Lecture because of her controversial stance on euthanasia. Even though the bad publicity faded and critics stopped calling for the Omaha Archdiocese to remove Creighton’s “Catholic” title, something more productive has emerged from the controversy.
This week, Schlegel’s task force on Creighton’s guest speaker policy proposed updated guidelines for dealing with controversial speakers. The policy is nuanced and practical, and Schlegel and the Academic Council should look forward to adopting it.
Nevertheless, it should not deter the university from starting debate on Catholic doctrine.
The new policy pays attention to contextual details. The committee argues “no specific belief, publication or public statement disqualifies a visiting speaker.” It correctly balances Creighton’s affiliation with the Catholic Church and its duties as a university.
It achieves this balance by considering two dimensions of the speaker: who hosts the speaker and the audience intended for the speaker.
More sensitivity will be paid to speakers that speak on the university’s behalf – these addresses may come at annual dinners or lectures while student organizations may have greater leeway in choosing speakers.
Most importantly, the proposed policy does not invite itself into the “regular conduct” of the classroom. It leaves the faculty handbook guidelines intact.
Finally, if the event is open to the public, the speaker must understand that he or she now becomes a face of Creighton and the speech shouldn’t attack our school’s Catholic tradition.
The report even gives suggestions on how a host should handle a controversial speaker. These include informing the respective vice president, having a panel to put the opinions in context and preparing an academic defense on the topic.
The proposed policy is not as strict as the Cardinal Newman Society’s policy, a Catholic watchdog group that encouraged the Archdiocese to cut ties with Creighton in 2007. Nor does the policy allow for blatant and irresponsible attacks on Creigthon’s Catholic tradition.
Yet the committee’s report leaves room for interpretation.
In the report, a Catholic university is compared to a building. We, as an institution, can excavate and examine its Catholic foundation. However, to leave the foundation bare to the attack of weather will damage the institution.
We, as a community, must now ask what happens when a piece of the foundation has begun to decay and needs replacement. If the Academic Council does adopt the report as an university policy, they must do so with the explicit dedication of influencing the Church’s progressive future.
We must not shy away from debates on the covering up of priests’ sex scandals, the adoption of female clergy members or the Church’s distribution of wealth. These issues need to be addressed even though they will concern ardent critiques of the Church.
Although the proposed guest speaker policy protects the university’s openness to a “variety of viewpoints,” we wonder if Creighton will ever see the benefit in allowing convictions contradictory to Catholic doctrine and beliefs.
Until we acknowledge that our Catholic tradition can be strengthened under fire, any guidelines for guest speakers will fail to fulfill their purpose at our university.