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 (6,269 students) 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 (law): 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 (10,750 students) 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 (8,847 students), 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 (enrollment: 8,500) 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 (4,700 students). 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 (one former teacher: Broadway Critic Walter Kerr), 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 (10,957 students) 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 (and 420 lay teachers) 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 (1,400 students), oldest college in California (1851 ).