“My wife and I hail from small towns, and both view our upbringings in those places as a deeply constitutive part of our worldview. We have sorely missed a sense of community in the DC area, a place where most of our lives’ activities are fragmented, often connected only by long car rides in heavy traffic. It has been a source of great dissatisfaction that our home life is so divorced from my vocation as a teacher and scholar. While teaching at Princeton, we frequently hosted dinners and gatherings of students; it was in the midst of those kinds interactions and colloquy that I wanted to raise our children. But, the reality of the D.C. area is that it is only possible for us to maintain a home relatively far from campus. This sense of fragmentation informs much of our daily lives – we have a set of very different spheres that rarely interact and overlap – home, work, schools, church, and so on. In the waning years that remain in which our children will live under our roof, I would like to give them that experience. This experience is palpably a part of the daily rhythm at Notre Dame.”
I’ve never been to Notre Dame, but I have had lunch a couple of times at Princeton, which, to my mind, is a lot like Cape Cod without all the ocean: everyone seemed to be richer than me, and no one had a job. Coming from the Washington area, I find it amusing that the good professor sees fit to picture little DC as the glamorous, heartless, “imperial city,” where only the mega-rich (and, presumably, mega-heartless) can afford to live in town, while the little people lead sad, fragmented lives, driving endlessly through “heavy traffic” like dry leaves driven before the autumn blast.*
Afterwords
According to Deneen, he’s also leaving because Georgetown doesn’t seem to care much about his ideas about the nature and importance of the “Catholic humanistic tradition,” while Notre Dame does. As a pseudo-Episcopalian secular humanist, I’ll offer a hearty “no comment” on the matter.
*If you’ve never been to DC, believe me, New York it ain’t.
