Thursday, March 17, 2016

Academic Demotion For Steenson?

A visitor notes that on the latest St Mary's Seminary website, Jeffrey Steenson has been moved down from Full-Time Academic Faculty to Adjunct Academic Faculty. In addition, since 2007, Steenson had been listed as "a visiting professor of Patristic Studies at the University of St. Thomas Center for Faith and Culture" and, since 2009, "Carl and Lois Davis Visiting Professor in Patristic Studies, University of St. Thomas/St Mary’s Seminary, Houston, TX". This designation no longer appears on his faculty profile at the St Mary's Seminary site.

A visitor tells me that Carl and Lois Davis are parishioners at Our Lady of Walsingham. The full professorship at St Thomas that became an endowed professorship appears to have been a deal-sweetener that accompanied Steenson's cautious progress to Ordinary from 2007 onward. Once he was out as Ordinary, the deal-sweetener seems to have rather quickly become less sweet.

I misspent several years of my youth in a misguided academic pursuit. In it, I did learn that an endowed professorship (e.g., "Carl and Lois Davis Visiting Professor") is very prestigious. An adjunct professorship, on the other hand, is nearly the bottom of the heap, one step above a graduate assistant, several steps below tenure track, teaching whatever courses become available from semester to semester.

For spring semester 2016, Msgr Steenson is not teaching patristics. A visitor says he's teaching two courses, one in homiletics (with another professor) and one something called a colloquium which seems to be student reflections on their current course of study. (I suspect this is something that was called a "gut" when I was in school.)

Steenson appears to have fallen out of favor beyond his position in the Ordinariate.