CV NEWS FEED // The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture (dCEC) at the University of Notre Dame, known for its legacy of promoting research in the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition, celebrates its 25th anniversary this academic year.
The Center, founded in 1999 by philosopher David Solomon, focuses its efforts on Catholic moral doctrine both on campus and in the public square “through teaching, research, and public engagement, at the highest level and across a range of disciplines,” according to the Center’s website. Initiatives include the Sorin Fellows program to form students in the Catholic tradition, which currently numbers nearly 700 undergraduate and graduate students.
The Center has published numerous award-winning academic works through Notre Dame Press. It also sponsors visiting fellows, including Georgetown ethicist John Keown.
The Center’s silver jubilee, however, is also marked by a controversial move at Notre Dame earlier this year, when the university established a rival institute to the de Nicola Center.
On April 9, the university announced the creation of a new center for research in ethics, called the Jenkins Center for Virtue Ethics, named after outgoing president Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C. Some at Notre Dame saw the move as an effort to undercut the 25-year-old de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.
David O’Connor, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, said it appeared the Jenkins center would begin to replace the famed de Nicola Center, commenting in April to the university’s student publication the Irish Rover, “The de Nicola Center, ever since it was founded by David Solomon, has always had a distinctively confident Catholic identity. … I think of the Jenkins Center as subsuming the institutional space that has been occupied by the de Nicola Center.”
The naming of the new center after Fr. Jenkins has also raised questions, as just last year Jenkins defended allowing a drag show on campus, citing “academic freedom” as grounds for allowing the performance.
The Jenkins Center takes its vision from the university’s “Ethics Initiative,” which makes its aims to establish Notre Dame as “a premier global destination for the study of ethics.” However, critics of the new center contend that the school’s ethical vision is not sufficiently rooted in a Catholic understanding of man and instead focuses on questions made popular by secular universities.
At the time, O’Connor commented to the Irish Rover on the need for a specifically Catholic perspective in ethics.
“For Notre Dame to be a prominent public voice in ethics, it has to be countercultural,” he said:
[The dCEC] was a very specifically Catholic initiative; [the Jenkins Center] is a very specifically academic initiative. While it’s true that many Catholics who are interested in academic philosophy have been interested in virtue ethics, as a paradigm virtue ethics itself doesn’t get its primary meaning from any Catholic orientation.
Virtue ethics, O’Connor argued, “shifts the center of gravity from a specifically Catholic initiative in the dCEC to a specifically neutral paradigm within the academic study of philosophy and, indeed, within the philosophy department.”
Renowned Notre Dame philosopher emeritus and author Alasdair MacIntyre, who is largely responsible for renewing contemporary interest in virtue ethics, serves as one of the “Distinguished Senior Fellows” at the de Nicola Center. Now in his mid-90s, the famed philosopher’s only public appearances at the de Nicola Center’s annual Fall Conference draw an estimated 1,500 participants and remains Notre Dame’s largest annual academic event.