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By Jeff Horwich, Minnesota Public Radio
April 16, 2001
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A dispute over artistic taste and terminology at the College of St Benedict in St. Joseph has students and administrators weighing the balance between religious values and free expression on a college campus.
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But in cases of bold political and artistic speech, private colleges with a direct religious affiliation can face particular challenges when administrators and students step in to defend the values linked to a school's identity. This issue was at the center of a recent debate at the College of St. Benedict.
"You won't believe how many times I've said the word vagina in the past month," says Sara Willi, a student organizer of a recent program planned for the final day of Women's Week at St Ben's, a small all-women's Catholic college.
But instead of an evening of selected scenes from the Vagina Monologues, a controversial feminist stage play, students got a campus forum to discuss the college president's decision to cancel the performance. Willi said organizers would have to "agree to disagree" with the president's choice to both cancel the play and strike the proposed name for the final day of Women's Week - Vagina Day.
"While there are some parts of the Vagina Monologues that might not fall in line with the Catholic Church, really loving the woman as a whole is part of what the Catholic Church would teach, and God created our vaginas. I know that we don't really want to talk about that, but it's true," Willi says.
The Vagina Monologues has gained nationwide fame and notoriety for approaching violence against women and women's empowerment in a provocative way. Students at St. Cloud State University assembled a production this spring that included a few original scenes, designed to appeal to a college crowd. St. Ben's students hoped to bring this home-grown version to their campus.
President Mary Lyons told students at the campus forum why she said 'no.' "The content clearly did not align with the meritorious, honorable purpose of the week," she said. Every outside performance that comes to the campus is always reviewed by a critic, not to see if they're necessarily just appropriate, but to assure that we are holding to our aesthetic principles and to assure that we have good art on this campus. In this case, we would not have had either good art or good content."
It wasn't the first time the theater stage has been the catalyst for controversy. Students reacted last November when Catholic Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin canceled a scheduled Sexual Diversity Awareness Week and the performance of a play that featured a relationship between a gay man and a minister.
A Catholic community group threatened to protest and withhold support from the school over the planned event. Students eventually staged the play off-campus.
Though administrators get the brunt of criticism in some cases, there is often division within the student body. The campus forum at St Benedict's gave students a chance to discuss the controversy.
St. Ben's and the all-male St. John's University just down the road face some issues unique to Catholic campuses. Whether - and how - to distribute condoms on campus has been a recurring theme, with the shared campus newspaper editorializing in December in favor of selling them in the campus bookstores.
Another controversial topic has been St. John's decision that Catholic teaching does not compel the school to support students who break the law in acts of civil disobedience.
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"An informed conscience is the ultimate guide for a person as far as what they choose to do or not do."
- Martin Connell St. John's University theology professor | |
Martin Connell, a St. John's theology professor who is also openly gay, wrote recently in the campus paper urging students to come out. His column ran opposite those of anonymous gay students who feared the environment of the school was still hostile. Connell says there doesn't have to be a conflict when a religious institution confronts issues that might challenge church morality.
"All morality, on homosexuality or all of these issues, in the Catholic theology, in all Christian theology, I would say, is that a person's conscience is the first guide for morality. So based on church teaching, personal experience, pastor, friends, family, all of those things, an informed conscience is the ultimate guide for a person as far as what they choose to do or not do," according to Connell.
St. John's Associate Dean of Students Jim Hardwick prefers to think of the school or church's role in campus debate as something that adds value and context to a student's education.
"As Catholic colleges, or as private schools, when we look at free speech issues, we don't have the mandate that public institutions have regarding free speech, because as private schools we can provide that values framework that we offer as part of our experience," says Hardwick.
But while private schools have more power than public ones to control campus debate, Hardwick says open dialogue is usually consistent with the school's twin missions.
"Anytime our students are trying to address a controversial issue, or an issue that's controversial within the Catholic Church, we try to look at it as there's an educational opportunity, and we want to make sure that our students, one, know where we stand as Catholic institutions, but, two, where we also stand as educational institutions," Hardwick says.
There remain differences of opinion at the College of St Benedict about the events surrounding Women's Week. Some students claim censorship, others do not. But in the end, Mary Lyons says the public discussion may have added as much to the week as the play that was cancelled.
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