We need to talk about Benedictine College

Yeah, I went there (literally)

In 2018, I graduated from Benedictine College. I was joint valedictorian with another female student. I stood behind a podium that will probably now be familiar to many of you and gave a speech about Walt Whitman that did not get posted on Benedictine’s social media because the other valedictorian gave a speech about Jesus, so they posted that instead. 

Shaking my fist prophetically

This past Saturday, six years after I did, Harrison Butker spoke at Benedictine’s graduation. Butker’s speech went viral for being a whistle-stop tour of the general culture war bullshit that the BC administration has decided will be its ticket to relevance as a university, rather than any sort of emphasis on, oh, I don’t know, academics. If I get onto the soapbox of the niche internal politics of a tiny liberal arts college in a tiny town in Kansas that no one had ever heard of before this week, I will never get off. So instead, I want to focus on the section of Butker’s commencement speech that has gained the most online traction. Butker’s remarks were as follows:

For the ladies present today, congratulations on an amazing accomplishment. You should be proud of all that you have achieved to this point in your young lives. I want to speak directly to you briefly because I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you are going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world.

I can tell you that my beautiful wife, Isabelle, would be the first to say that her life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.

People are rightly up in arms about this! And I keep seeing people pointing out how demoralising and dismissive it would feel to reach this achievement in your education and, yes, your professional life, and have someone say to you, ‘Why did you even bother?’ But as I and literally any other female graduate of Benedictine could tell you, this is not the first time any of the women in that audience will have received that message. In fact, when I started at Benedictine, receiving essentially this exact message was scheduled into your orientation activity – if you were a girl, anyway.

My first week at Benedictine, before classes started, the men and women were split off for gender-segregated talks. The men got a lecture on who knows what, I was not there – I heard it was about, like, managing your finances at college – while the women went to a talk given by a wife of one of the men Butker specifically shouted out in his speech. This talk covered dating at college, and how important it was to not go Boy Crazy, and how we needed to make sure we dated intentionally, and how the most surefire way to attract a man was to be a virtuous, Catholic woman. (Never mind that your faith might have more personal meaning for you than its ability to wife you up.)

This talk was obviously baffling to me. On the surface it seemed like the woman giving it was trying to tell us to focus on studying (and ‘virtue’, obviously), over our love lives, but the fact that we were being separated off to be told that in the first place – and then explicitly told that the reason to do those things was to eventually catch a man – seemed to reinforce that our love lives were actually the main thing to worry about. If I hadn’t come to college thinking I needed to spend the next four years trying to find a husband, well, now I was! If the majority of women receiving Butker’s address on Saturday were ‘most excited’ about getting married and having kids, well, they didn’t get there by themselves. That excitement was created by a suffocating and frankly sexist emphasis on marriage as a woman’s ultimate achievement, which is so tightly interwoven with the culture of Benedictine College that you could almost overlook it – until someone like Harrison Butker gets on stage and says the quiet part out loud.

As with any small, religious college, jokes about ‘MRS degrees’ and getting your ‘ring by spring’ at Benedictine were pervasive. But they weren’t really jokes. The pressure to get engaged before you graduated was so intense that every romantic rejection took on the weight of failing to actualise your very destiny. By sophomore year, I had a designated place to cry when the guys I was interested in revealed themselves to be uninterested in me. The spectre of immediate post-graduation marriage was so pervasive that students bemoaned the absence of ‘casual dating’, because asking someone out was only a few degrees removed from getting down on one knee, given the expected trajectory of any relationship. 

That the atmosphere of Benedictine College equated marriageability with one’s very self-worth is evident in the fact that a friend of mine who graduated the year after me bemoaned feeling like an ‘old maid’ at twenty-three. I personally spent years of my dating relationship with my now-husband feeling completely inadequate because in the eyes of the people I went to college with, my relationship of five years was less valid than that of a girl I knew whose husband posed with a football in their wedding photos because he was twenty-one and that is the kind of bullshit people do when they get married at twenty-one oh my god. Even male friends of mine were affected. Years after graduating, these guys felt insecure because they still weren’t married, which as we all know, is the only thing you will ever do that will ever matter.

The agonising irony of Butker’s discussion of ‘the women’ is that the faculty of Benedictine College comprises a slew of incredible women professors – across the political spectrum, some of whom probably largely agree with the rest of his comments! – who are unmarried or married later in life. That Benedictine offers anything in the way of academic value is in not a small part because of them.

They also, by the way, suffer under the weight of the misogyny that pervades the college. Once, arriving early to a philosophy class, I wandered into the middle of a conversation between a male student and a female professor. The professor was explaining how she’d fallen in love with philosophy in college, so decided to go on to grad school. She concluded by saying (clearly the student’s original question had been to this end), that getting married had just never come up. ‘But,’ she added, ‘it’s kind of great because my sister has kids, so I get to spend a lot of time with them and still get to spend my life doing philosophy.’ The student responded, ‘I bet you’re jealous of your sister, though, huh?’

Another male student once said of the same professor, ‘She’s a quick grader, but then she isn’t married, so what else does she have to do.’

These are the kinds of things men say when they are told that the idea of women having careers is a ‘diabolical lie’.

During one of my many undergraduate (Lack of) Dating Crises, a professor who’d had a successful political career in the Bush administration before joining the college’s political science department told me explicitly, ‘You can’t wait to get married for your life to start. I thought that once and then I didn’t get married until I was forty, so where would that have gotten me.’ Ultimately, even if it’s what you want most in the world, getting married and having kids is not actually absolutely in your control. Your life can’t start when someone else decides they want to marry you. Your life has to start with you – my professor knew it, and she wanted me to know it.

I am willing to bet there were women graduating from Benedictine last Saturday who agreed entirely with what Butker was saying, who also feel completely and utterly worthless because they aren’t engaged, marriage is not on their immediate horizon, and therefore their lives haven’t started yet. It’s a miserable way to exist and it’s, dare I say it, explicitly not a Catholic thing to believe. It’s an insane belief for a Catholic college – a college formerly made up of two campuses, one named after an unmarried female saint – to explicitly espouse. (Note that the Benedictine Sisters of Mount St Scholastica, many of them former professors at the college and its sister school, issued a statement denouncing Butker’s remarks. But then none of them are married, so they’re probably just bitter.)

I’ve been embarrassed to be an alumna of Benedictine College before. I was embarrassed when they invited the President of Hungary to speak. I was embarrassed when they didn’t give tenure to an outstanding and beloved professor because his politics didn’t line up with the image the college wanted to project. I was embarrassed when the college banned yoga and the story got picked up in Teen Vogue. I am more embarrassed now than I’ve ever been, partly because this story is bigger than any of those, and worse, and as it’s gained traction, I have become more worried that friends and coworkers will make the connection between it and me and I’ll have to talk about it.

In the end, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and write about it. Whatever I do, I’m irrevocably associated with Benedictine. It will forever be on my resume. A couple years ago they put my face in their branded calendar (and misspelled my name). Once a Raven, always a Raven (sad caw). And while I believe the institution is fundamentally flawed because of the poor choices of its administration, amidst the (absolutely deserved) bad press I wanted to say some things about Benedictine I am proud of:

I am so proud of the amazing female professors – married and unmarried – who made me the woman I am today. I am especially proud of Dr Bowen and Dr Young, two professors in the English department who mean so much to me that I dedicated my PhD thesis to them. Whatever I managed to achieve in my postgrad degree I did for them, truly. They have given their lives to teaching students who often do not care about learning; what they do is hard but matters more than I can articulate. I truly miss them and I am proud of them for their continued devotion to their work and their students in an environment where they are not supported nor appreciated as they should be.

I am proud of my best friends – one married with a child, one unmarried – who made my life at Benedictine both bearable and whole. I am proud of their commitment to their careers and the way they devote themselves to others in their work. Their lives were meaningful when they were undergrads with me and they are meaningful now. I am proud of the way they live with intelligence and tenacity. I am proud of what a great mom my friend is to her daughter, whom I am so excited to watch (alongside her can’t-arrive-soon-enough sister!!) grow up. 

I was so proud to have both these women next to me at my own wedding, reminding me of how full and meaningful my life was before marriage, and how full it would continue to be afterwards – in part because they would remain in it.

I am proud of all the women I went to college with. I am proud of the women who graduated with me and still aren’t married, who maybe still feel terrible about that, but who know their lives began a long time ago. I am proud of the women who, in my first week of college, pointed out that splitting us off from the boys to talk about dating felt kind of sexist – did it feel that way to you too? We were in it together then, and we are still now. 

And finally, I am proud of the women who graduated from Benedictine on Saturday. To the 2024 graduating class of Benedictine College, let me just say:

In the real world, none of this matters. Your self-worth isn’t, and has never been, determined by your perceived marriageability. The sooner you let go of that idea, the happier you will be (ask me how I know). Your life won’t begin when you get married, because it already started. Your life from this point on is a journey of self-discovery and self-actualisation, and if you feel unmoored and disoriented now: that’s normal. And it goes on for years. But I promise that underneath it all, it feels exciting and empowering. When you leave the BC bubble, you’ll realise none of it mattered as much as it felt like it did. Nobody else gets to determine the validity of your own achievements or the metrics of your own success – genuinely. It’s all on you. It’s amazing. You’re amazing!

Also, getting married at 21 is so young. You have time. You have so much time – for so many other things, too.

I am so proud of your accomplishment in finishing your degrees. You worked so hard. You’ve earned this.

Now go on – you’re free.