With ethics at its core
Students at the University of Notre Dame, Australia, are usually dismayed to find that, whatever their chosen subject, they are required also to study philosophy, ethics and theology. But, writes Matthew C. Ogilvie, as they get to grips with this core curriculum, they come to prize what they learn from it
Dame, “the provision of university education, within a context of Catholic faith and values”. It is with this in mind that the university requires undergraduate students to complete three core curriculum units: an introduction to philosophy, a unit on ethics and an introduction to theology. These units are intended to give students
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basic skills in critical analysis, ethical thought and Catholic theologising in an academic context that brings the substance and values of the Catholic faith to the fore and into open and creative engagement with the deeper questions of individual and social life. Students at the university’s Broome Campus, which has a special focus on indigenous students, take a core curriculum comprising an introduction to theology, a course on Aboriginal people and spirituality and one on the challenges of reconciliation. Notre Dame was established in 1989 as
Australia’s first Catholic university and was founded in partnership with the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, in the United States. It now has over 7,000 students enrolled on its campuses in Fremantle and Sydney as well as Broome. Its focus is the education and training of young people for entry to the major professions: medicine, law, teaching, nursing, accounting and finance, physiotherapy, counselling, health sciences and the priesthood. The core curriculum units reflect the
university’s commitment to the liberal-arts tradition. This is conceived by the university not just as a collection of units, but as a world view in which faith and reason are integrated, in which knowledge is not compartmentalised, but integrated by wisdom, and in which students use their education for the common good. We have found that students’ enthusiasm
for the core curriculum varies from mostly apathetic or negative attitudes when they begin their studies to mostly positive attitudes by the middle or end of the units. The negativity they feel at first seems to come from a number of factors, including an all-too-common utilitarian approach to
n act of parliament of Western Australia specifies, among other objects for the University of Notre
education that demands tangible connections to vocations, an almost fideistic approach to religion, a culture of anti-intellectualism and an expectation that these units represent “soft” subjects. For many students, these units are their first exposure to a critical appropriation and evaluation of faith, wisdom and ethical behaviour. During the classes, lecturers and tutors have noticed a clear shift in students’ attitudes. As they come to appreciate the rigour with which the units are taught, and as they are prompted to think critically and ask the big questions that affect their lives, they tend to take their studies more seriously, and report a far better attitude towards theology, philosophy and ethics than at the start of their studies. There are other reasons why students
become more engaged with and enthusiastic about these units. Within theology, students often become interested in “religion gone wrong”, whether it is in their own tradition or in other traditions, such as when religion motivates terrorism. Students are challenged not only to observe what goes wrong, but to work out how to make religion a force for good rather than evil. Students also say that they become more interested in theology when they realise that behind their religious faith is credible intellectual tradition that can be intelligently appropriated and subjected to thorough scrutiny. In philosophy, students comment that
they are challenged, sometimes shocked out of their comfort zones, when they reach that “aha” moment, when they realise that what passes for debate in society is merely assertion of one or more of the logical fallacies. Many students say that they become intellectually empowered by the study of philosophy. Ethics is different from philosophy and
theology in that most students come into the subject with an appreciation for its value. In other words, everyone intends to act for good. What is most enlightening, and perhaps challenging, for many students, is the discovery that good intentions are not enough, that sometimes it is good intentions, rather than malevolence, that gets people into trouble.
Students also become very interested in academic ethics when they realise that the hardest ethical decisions are not between good and bad but between competing goods – or competing evils. As for non-Catholic students, these
usually come to appreciate the study of Catholic theology for one of two reasons. In the first place, the specifically Catholic integration of faith and reason is central to the university’s intellectual mission, and it permeates all that is taught there. The study of theology then integrates and makes sense of the students’ work at a Catholic institution of further education. In the second place, students find that a rigorous study of one tradition equips them to better understand another – be it their own tradition or that of others. Anecdotal evidence from employers
suggests that the core curriculum units are having a positive impact on the students’ attitudes and approaches at work. For example, a local doctor told me that Notre Dame nursing students on placement seemed to be distinctively thoughtful, more reflective and more openly committed to ethical conduct. Intriguingly, the university is finding that
it is graduates who have been in the workforce for some time who have the most positive attitudes towards what they learned at the university. They say that especially when they face a difficult ethical choice, or when they, their patients or clients face a spiritual crisis, they find themselves drawing on what they learned from Notre Dame’s core curriculum. The best evaluations of the core
curriculum’s success will be in the future, as more Notre Dame graduates enter the workforce and apply to the real world the insights and formation they received here.
Matthew C. Ogilvie is dean of philosophy and theology at the Fremantle Campus of the University of Notre Dame, Australia (
www.nd.edu.au).
5 February 2011 | TABLET Education | S3
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