George Nauman Shuster

Background

George Nauman Shuster was born on August 27, 1894 in Lancaster, Wisconsin, the son of Anthony Shuster, a contractor and bridge builder, and Elizabeth Nauman.

Education

He attended Catholic parochial and boarding schools and graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1915.

American entrance into World War I ended his work as a journalist in Chicago. Perhaps because of his German heritage, he was unenthusiastic about the war; but, unwilling not to participate in a defining American experience, he enlisted and served in France as a sergeant in Army Intelligence. Before returning to the United States, he was in the army of occupation in Germany and studied at the University of Poitiers in France; European institutions and culture would fascinate him for the rest of his life.

Career

From 1920 to 1924, Shuster was chairman of the Department of English at Notre Dame. His first book, The Catholic Spirit in Modern English Literature (1922), was aimed at the public rather than the scholar. Nevertheless, he passionately believed that Notre Dame had an obligation to produce scholars and scholarship, and he was disappointed at the unwillingness of a new group of college administrators to commit themselves to that goal.

He resigned in 1924 and, the next year, published an angry article, "Have We Any Scholars?", in which he concluded that in Catholic colleges there were too many students and too few teachers for scholarship to flourish. And he observed, in passing, that lay teachers were treated as "necessary evils or cheap benefits. " For many years thereafter Shuster did not feel welcome at Notre Dame.

For the next thirty-five years Shuster lived in the New York area. He taught English at St. Joseph's College for Women (1925 - 1935).

In 1925 he became an editor of Commonweal, a journal founded the year before by a group of laymen to review, from a Catholic perspective, literature, the arts, and public affairs.

In 1936, Commonweal urged that America boycott the Olympic Games in Berlin; for this, Shuster was criticized by some American bishops. Shuster was forced to resign from Commonweal in 1937.

Most American Catholics wholeheartedly supported General Francisco Franco's rebellion in Spain. Shuster, in an article titled "Some Reflections on Spain", found it "shocking" that "Catholics are ready to ignore the manifest brutality, reactionary political method and intellectual simplicity of the Francoites. " The ensuing uproar convinced Shuster, he later reported, "that for Catholic New York the world outside the United States was either Communist or Fascist, and that therefore they had opted for Fascism. " Unable to persuade his colleagues that fascism was as inimical to Catholicism as Communism, Shuster felt obliged to resign.

He returned to the graduate work in English that he had begun at Columbia in 1924. In 1940 he published his dissertation, The English Ode from Milton to Keats, which late in life he declared the most enduring of his many books, because the most scholarly.

But instead of becoming a professor, in 1939 he became acting president (in 1940 president) of Hunter College in New York City, at that time the largest public women's college in the world.

Very early in his tenure he became convinced that "you ought not to educate a woman as if she were a man, or to educate her as if she were not" - a paradox he sought to resolve by urging that Hunter's traditional liberal arts curriculum be complemented with a "vocational inlay" of domestic science and office skills.

More important, perhaps, by his ready availability to students and his enthusiastic participation in student activities, he helped convey his confidence in them as young adults and as women. He encouraged and went out of his way to reward distinguished faculty scholarship.

And, though he was obliged to battle both Communist party members on the faculty and McCarthyites in the community, in 1952 he publicly commended junior faculty members who, as advisers to student clubs, shared in student enthusiasms and risked sharing in student mistakes.

Shuster was especially delighted to claim that Hunter, partly because of its location on Park Avenue, had become "the greatest community center to be found anywhere in the world. "

He strengthened its adult education program. He believed that its concert series and its many visiting lecturers, including friends like Heinrich Brüning, Jacques Maritain, Georges Bidault, Stefan Zweig, and Sigrid Undset, could effectively educate the whole city.

Shuster retired from Hunter in 1960 and the following year returned to Notre Dame, where he founded the Center for the Study of Man in Contemporary Society. The center sponsored a series of conferences titled "Family and Fertility, " in the hope of developing in the church respect for the "complexity" of the role of sexuality in human life.

Naturally, Shuster was disappointed with the blunt proscriptions of the papal encyclical Humanae vitae (1968). Shuster's center also sponsored a study of Catholic elementary and secondary schools, which concluded with the recommendation that Catholics concentrate their limited resources on the secondary schools. It also recommended that more laymen be given leadership positions in the parochial schools.

Shuster resigned as director of the center in 1969. He had been a trustee of Notre Dame since 1967; he resigned in 1971.

He died in South Bend, Indiana.

Achievements

• He served with distinction for twenty years. During his presidency Shuster found time for many civic duties. He served on the Enemy Alien Board during World War II. He attended the conferences that established UNESCO, and served as the American representative on UNESCO's executive board until 1962. For eighteen months in the years 1950-1951, he was deputy for Bavaria to the high commissioner for Germany, responsible for promoting American policies in politics, economics, education, and law. From 1954 to 1964 he was a director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He also wrote Religion Behind the Iron Curtain (1954) and In Silence I Speak, a biography of József Cardinal Mindszenty (1956).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Catholic Spirit in Modern English Literature

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • The Catholic Spirit in Modern English Literature - Primary Source Edition

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Catholic education in a changing world

    (Examines Catholic education in the 20th Century.)

  • The hill of happiness, (Short story index reprint series)

    (Short story collection, 164 pages.)

  • In Silence I Speak

    (In Silence I Speak by George N. Shuster. The Story of Car...)

  • The Ground I Walked On: Reflections Of A College President

  • book

Politics

Shuster's early contributions were epitomized in The Catholic Spirit in America (1927), in which he attempted to show that the "Catholic intellect" is different from the "American intellect, " and argued that the republic would benefit from more extended commerce between the two.

He was particularly indignant at the anti-Catholicism engendered by Al Smith's presidential campaign in 1928. Shuster admired German culture and sympathized with Germany's economic problems after World War I.

In The Germans (1932), he glibly dismissed the "ideas" of Adolf Hitler as "no more commendable for wisdom or practicableness than are the notions of the average United States Senator. " But in his Strong Man Rules (1934), he apologized for his lack of prescience; thereafter he eloquently denounced the Nazis' assaults on individual and religious freedom.

Connections

On June 25, 1924, he married Doris Parks Cunningham; they had one child.

Father:

Anthony Shuster

A contractor and bridge builder

Mother:

Elizabeth Nauman

Spouse:

Doris Parks Cunningham