As Feminized Universities Falter, Faithful Catholic Colleges Flourish

"This institutional drift is even more pronounced within Catholic colleges and universities, where the rapid rise of female presidencies has coincided with a marked erosion of mission clarity."

From Crisis

By Anne Hendershott, PhD

The feminization of higher‑education leadership has accelerated the drift toward process‑heavy, conflict‑averse administrative cultures that impede institutional clarity.

With women now occupying more than a third of all college presidencies, the feminization of higher‑education leadership is no longer a trend but a governing paradigm. It is likely that the shift has accelerated the drift toward process‑heavy, conflict‑averse administrative cultures that impede institutional clarity. It has also entrenched a politicized culture that prizes emotional consensus over academic rigor, leaving campuses more vulnerable to demographic contraction, cultural backlash, and increasingly unable to defend their own mission.

The dynamic was on full display in December 2023, during the high‑profile congressional hearings where U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY)  questioned several Ivy League presidents on their campus cultures. Nearly all of the Ivy League presidents at the table were women, and their halting, hypercautious answers became a national flashpoint. When Harvard’s female president responded that calls for the genocide of Jews would “depend on the context” and that Harvard “embraces free expression,” even in light of hateful and violent speech toward Jewish students, the moment crystallized a broader concern that elite universities—now increasingly led by female presidents—have embraced a conflict‑averse, process‑driven style of governance that leaves them unable to articulate or defend their own standards. 

This institutional drift is even more pronounced within Catholic colleges and universities, where the rapid rise of female presidencies has coincided with a marked erosion of mission clarity. According to the most recent data from the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, the number of female lay presidents of Catholic Colleges and universities rose from just 19 in 2000 to 46 in 2016—a 137 percent increase in only 16 years. Although no newer Catholic‑specific leadership data have been published, the pace of change in the Catholic sector has clearly outstripped that of higher education overall. The result is a Catholic higher education landscape increasingly ill‑equipped to articulate, let alone defend, the very Catholic commitments that once set these institutions apart.

As a result of many of these institutions’ inability to demonstrate a clear Catholic mission, Catholic higher education is now contracting at a pace not seen in generations. When a college no longer offers a distinctly Catholic intellectual or sacramental life, it forfeits the very rationale for its existence—and families quickly recognize that there is little reason to choose a “Catholic” school that is Catholic in name only. In a competitive and shrinking market, institutions that blur their identity simply cannot justify their premium, and the consequence is an accelerating wave of closures.

According to data analyzed by the Cardinal Newman Society, at least 21 Catholic colleges and universities have closed, merged, or announced plans to do so since 2016. The list includes such once-venerable institutions like New York’s College of New Rochelle, Philadelphia’s Cabrini University, Fontbonne University in Missouri, and the College of St. Rose in Albany—all led by women at the time of their collapse and all emblematic of the demographic contraction and enrollment free fall battering higher education. Yet these pressures strike Catholic institutions even harder because so many are small, tuition‑dependent, and increasingly mission‑uncertain. The result is a shrinking sector ever less able to sustain the very identity it was founded to preserve.

Patrick Reilly, the founder and longtime president of the Cardinal Newman Society—a nonprofit established in 1993 to promote and defend faithful Catholic education in the spirit of St. John Henry Newman and Ex Corde Ecclesiae—has spent decades warning that many Catholic colleges have diluted their missions to the point of indistinguishability. As he argues, “most of the closures are once‑vibrantly Catholic, regional colleges that today offer little that can’t be found at a cheaper state university or community college”; and lukewarm institutions “don’t appeal to faithful Catholics any more than they appeal to the ‘nones.’”

In contrast, faithful Catholic colleges—the ones recommended in the Cardinal Newman Society’s Guide to Faithful Catholic Higher Education are not shrinking but flourishing, even as national enrollment continues to fall. Franciscan University of Steubenville, for example, welcomed its largest incoming class for the 11th consecutive year, with more than 1,227 incoming students in 2025. Franciscan is not an outlier: Newman Guide colleges across the country report record or near-record enrollment, with Ave Maria, Benedictine, Christendom, the University of Mary, Thomas Aquinas College, and Wyoming Catholic all posting significant growth in the last decade. The Cardinal Newman Society itself notes that these institutions share both a strong Catholic identity and “enormous enrollment growth,” even as more than a million students have disappeared from American higher education since 2010.

Notably, every one of these faithfully Catholic Newman Guide institutions is led by a male president, whether a priest or a layman—an unmistakable contrast with the broader landscape of Catholic higher education, where women now hold a substantial share of presidencies.

This is not to suggest that female presidents are exclusively to blame for the declines in higher education. The cultural shift we have experienced in higher education—and especially in Catholic higher education—doesn’t require women to be running universities. In any institution, once enough personnel are hired from social science or education fields where therapeutic language, emotional validation, and consensus‑driven norms dominate, those habits begin to reshape the workplace itself. 

As academic departments and student affairs recruit females—often from university programs steeped in those values, the profession inevitably absorbs the softer, more emotionally expressive ethos of those environments. The result is a feminized culture in academia—not because women occupy the presidential suite but because the institutional center of gravity has moved toward the norms of professions where emotional display, consensus, compromise, and mission ambiguity is treated as a virtue.

Last October, Compact Magazine published Helen Andrews’ essay “The Great Feminization,” a piece that quickly became one of the publication’s most widely discussed articles. Her core claim is blunt: American institutions now operate according to a distinctly feminine managerial style—process‑heavy, risk‑averse, therapeutic in tone, and publicly committed to consensus while masking a culture rife with petty rivalries. Nowhere is that shift more visible than in the leadership of a growing number of Catholic colleges and universities.

The very traits Andrews identifies—endless meetings, bureaucratic caution, a preference for emotional language over doctrinal clarity—have become the operating system of Catholic academic life as a misguided commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion enabled women—often unqualified women—to ascend to roles historically held by clergy, lay men, or women religious. 

While Andrews was not writing specifically about Catholic colleges—her point was cultural, not ecclesial—an increasing number of Catholic colleges and universities have become case studies in precisely the dynamic she describes: a once male‑led institution whose practical authority has migrated to a female professional class that governs not through sacramental or doctrinal faithfulness, or even through a commitment to Catholic moral teachings or the mission of the founders, but rather through HR‑style management—always responsive to cultural trends. From campus LGBTQ+ dances and drag shows to student internships at Planned Parenthood, the feminized Catholic campus has become more attuned to prevailing cultural trends than to the Church’s unchanging teaching on the dignity of human life.

Jesuit colleges and universities were once renowned for a robust and unmistakably Catholic intellectual and spiritual life. But the spiritual and intellectual rigor that once animated Jesuit education has, at many institutions, faded into a more generic, culturally conformist ethos. What had been a distinctive formation—rooted in sacramental life, a disciplined Catholic worldview, and a clear sense of mission—now often appears softened, optional, or overshadowed by the same therapeutic and secular priorities that dominate mainstream higher education. 

To be fair, we must acknowledge that the growing number of female presidents leading the 28 Jesuit institutions cannot be blamed for the erosion of Catholic identity on their campuses. This feminization of Jesuit university culture began decades before any of these women arrived. Long before today’s cohort of nine female Jesuit college presidents took office on these campuses, Jesuit colleges had already shifted toward administrative structures and student‑life models that were welcoming to LGBTQ+ activities including annual drag shows and “reproductive freedom” clubs on campus, as academic priorities that mirrored the broader trends of secular higher education—trends that steadily displaced the sacramental, disciplined, and mission‑driven character that once defined Jesuit formation.

The female presidents on Catholic campuses were not the cause of the transformation but the culmination of a cultural trajectory set in motion long ago in a feminized culture that took hold decades ago and continued to grow. Yet the erosion of Catholic identity on these campuses continues unabated, even as an expanding roster of women now lead Jesuit colleges and universities. 

Some of the more recent female presidential hires on Jesuit campuses include Tania Tetlow, who leads Fordham University as its first female president, and Julie H. Sullivan, who holds the same historic distinction at Santa Clara University. In July 2025, Katia Passerini was appointed to be president of Gonzaga University. Linda LeMura, at Le Moyne College, became the first laywoman to lead any Jesuit institution in the country. Jo Ann Rooney, who stepped down as president a few years ago (and was replaced by a male president), broke similar ground at Loyola University Chicago. Tania Tetlow previously served as the first woman president of Loyola University New Orleans. Together, these appointments mark a decisive turn toward female leadership in Jesuit higher education.

Catholic higher education now faces a reckoning of its own making. Institutions that traded clarity for consensus and formation for cultural conformity are discovering that identity, once diluted, cannot be revived by marketing or managerial process. These once-faithful schools need faithful Catholics on the faculty and in key campus administrative roles. Meanwhile, the colleges that have resisted this drift—those that still teach, worship, and govern with conviction and faith—are the ones drawing record enrollment in an era of contraction.