Seton Hall University: A History, 1856–2006 by Dermot Quinn (review)

Reviewed by: Seton Hall University: A History, 1856–2006 by Dermot Quinn Patrick T. Mcgrath Seton Hall University: A History, 1856–2006. By Dermot Quinn. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 559pp. 42. 95. "What is Seton Hall trying to be? " Lawrence Murphy, then Seton Hall University president, queried in 1980. "It cannot be Harvard, but it is also not a county college" (341). Such concern about Seton Hall's institutional mission and cultural status was, in Dermot Quinn's telling, hardly unique in the university's history. Founded in 1856 by Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley, a genteel New York-born convert and nephew of the saintly Elizabeth Ann Seton, Seton Hall was, from its origins, defined by what it was not. It was not in New York End Page 66 City, that booming metropolis across the Hudson home to the nation's largest Catholic population. A diocesan college, its teaching staff lacked the cachet of the Jesuits or Dominicans. In terms of social class, it was neither a charity school nor a college for the better classes. "Seton Hall's problem, " Quinn writes, "was that is was neither one thing nor the other"—a crisis of mission and identity that persisted well into the twentieth century (70). In this beautifully written and deeply researched history, Quinn captures an institution in perpetual state of reinvention. He describes efforts in the 1920s and '30s to "modernize" Seton Hall into an accredited university based on national academic standards; the wholesale transformation of the university after 1945, propelled by the infusion of new students under the GI Bill; the expansion of schools for nursing, business, dentistry, and the law; and efforts in the late 1990s, during the presidency of Monsignor Robert Sheeran, to "de-parochialize" the university and elevate its international reputation. Equipped with a novelist's eye for illuminating detail, Quinn burnishes this account with finely drawn character sketches of administrators, faculty, and alumni, enriched by delightful anecdotes and turns of phrase. The imperious Monsignor Thomas McLaughlin, president from 1922-33, "spouted information like water from a tap: hot, cold, muddy, clear, unstoppable" (92). John Sweeney, professor of English, "played the bagpipes, talked of toy trains, and provided the model for the label of Dewar's Scotch Whiskey" (370). That said, the book is not without limitations. Seton Hall University is a traditional work of institutional history, one that rarely ventures off campus into the social world of suburban New Jersey out of which Seton Hall was made. Based on scrupulous archival research, the book foregrounds the experiences of founders, presidents, administrators, and faculty, with side glances into campus culture. But the distinctive cultural geography of Catholic New Jersey recedes into the background. Indeed, Quinn asserts that "Seton Hall survived because the Catholics of New Jersey wanted it to survive" (84) and that the school, in many respects, was "a social and philosophical extensionn" of local Catholic "households and parishes" (259). Rarely, however, does he take the reader into those households and parishes, relying instead on more generic understandings of immigrant, suburban, or postconcilar Catholicism. What was distinctive about the "Catholics of New Jersey, " or New Jersey Catholicism? Given that such much of the narrative is about the desire of school presidents and administrators to transcend Seton Hall's "local" or "parochial" roots, Quinn may have done more to sketch out that social world and take the reader beyond a generalized understanding of suburban Catholic culture. Scholars of Catholicism will be particularly interested in the book's coverage of post-1960s debates over Catholic "mission" and "identity"—"the endlessly debated question, " Quinn writes, "about which everyone End Page 67 had an opinion, intelligent or otherwise" (385). Incorporating diverse perspectives from university administrators, faculty, clergy, students, and alumni, Quinn recounts how various institutional actors sought to balance Catholic values and identity with respect for diversity and pluralism in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The book's analysis of U. S. Catholic education in the nineteenth century, by comparison, would have benefited from deeper engagement with recent historiography. For instance, Quinn treats it as an "axiom" that Seton Hall "was in the business of employing Catholics to teach Catholics" (24. . .