Because of the integrative function of philosophy in the Catholic tradition, because of the way that philosophy has to open up and illuminate relations between theology and the whole range of secular disicplines, philosophical enquiry cannot be pursued in isolation from enquiry in those other disciplines. For both reasons its projects require the setting of a university. But the structures of the contemporary research university are, as we have seen, deeply inimical to such projects. So that any Catholic university in which such projects were to be successfully pursued would need to have structures and goals very different from those of the great secular research universities, and not just by reason of the central place given to the study of theology. Both its undergraduate and graduate studies, especially in philosophy, but also more generally, would be very different.

God, Philosophies, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition