George Harne was named the fourth president of the College of Saint Mary Magdalen in Warner, N.H., in February.
Harne, who succeeds Jeffrey Karls, served as the college’s academic dean since 2009. He has also taught courses in philosophy, Latin and mathematics.
He holds advanced degrees in music history, musicology and liberal studies, with a Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton.
Harne and his wife have four children ranging in age from 21 months to 10.
From his office on campus, he spoke to Register staff writer Joseph Pronechen by phone and email about his vision and goals for the college.
How do you see your role changing from academic dean?
As academic dean, my focus was primarily on the academic program as an integral and primary part of the college’s life and mission. In my new role, I must consider the whole of the college and its constitutive parts, making sure that the intellectual, spiritual and social components harmonize and receive the appropriate emphasis.
Last October, the college changed its name from Magdalen College to the College of Saint Mary Magdalen. Now that you are president, what do you foresee for change or emphasis in the short term?
This year we renewed and expanded our liberal arts program built on the study and discussion of the Great Books. We will continue this intellectual renewal in the coming years.
We have also sought to renew our approach to student life and our Catholic community. We believe that freedom and the respect for human dignity must be the foundation of any student life and community that is truly Catholic. All of us at the college — the faculty, staff and students — are called to follow Christ without reservation.
As president, it is my job to make sure that each member of the community hears that call and can respond freely. Together as a college, drawing upon the sacramental treasures of the Church and living according to the rhythms of the liturgical year, we will seek to be a part of the vibrant renewal of the Church and the world.
With your advanced degrees in music and musicology, how do you envision Magdalen’s strong music and choral program influencing students and contributing to the Church in general?
As a musicologist — someone who has studied music history and theory — I have a special appreciation for the power of beauty, particularly musical beauty.
If we believe in the fundamental unity of the True, the Good and the Beautiful, then we recognize how Beauty can draw us deeper into Truth and Goodness. Beauty can and must be an integral part of the New Evangelization. There are those who might oppose certain theological or moral teachings of the Church that can be brought much closer to the truth through the beauty of the liturgy or the other forms of beauty.
Beauty also played a role in our conversion. My wife and I entered full communion with the Church a little over five years ago, and one of the turning points came when we attended a traditional Corpus Christi procession. It was there that I came to believe in the Real Presence. The beauty of the procession — musical and visual — overcame my intellectual reservations. From there, my understanding of the Church and the sacrament of holy orders began to change. Beauty can make it easier for a person to accept the claims of the Church and her moral teachings. This is one way that Beauty can be an essential part of the re-evangelization of the West.
The effects of beauty can also be simpler yet equally important — I studied clarinet, my wife is a singer, and our children study music as well. We have seen how musical beauty within our family can make us more fully human and open new perspectives that had been previously unavailable.
Obviously, the liturgies remain a vital part of the college.
Our goal is to celebrate the liturgy in the most beautiful and reverent way possible. Our hope is that our students will take their liturgical experiences at the college back to their parishes and help renew the liturgy there. When teaching our students chant and polyphony, our choir director likes to say that she is not merely training choir members, but future choir directors.
When you were named president, you said, “We will be relentless in our efforts to renew the College of Saint Mary Magdalen as a model of Catholic collegiate life that is faithful to the magisterium and deeply rooted in the Catholic intellectual tradition.” How do you aim to fulfill that vision?
We begin by ensuring that the faith of our students will be strengthened rather than undermined while they are in college. All of our faculty are Catholic and take the Oath of Fidelity to the Catholic Church at the beginning of each year. All of our students take four years of catechesis while deepening and strengthening their faith in a community that strives to think with the mind of the Church and live according to the rhythms of the liturgical year.
In our academic program, we strive to integrate fully the strengths of the Great Books tradition … with the riches and intellectual discipline of the Catholic tradition, both the monastic tradition and that of the medieval universities. At the foundation of our education are the traditional seven liberal arts ordered to the highest considerations of philosophical and theological truth.
We also seek to be faithful to Ex Corde Ecclesiae (On Catholic Universities) and Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason). We seek to be faithful not only to the teachings of the Church, but also seek to help our students integrate their faith with the truth of the scientific and humanistic disciplines, so that they will have a unified and integrated vision of themselves, each other and the world.
Finally, we believe that a truly Catholic college is a place where students encounter Christ in the sacraments and live their faith in their relations with other students, faculty and staff. There must be an active effort on the part of the faculty and staff to ensure that the college is a place where the students can and do have that encounter.
In addition to Pope John Paul II, who else influences your mission?
Three other figures are essential to how we think of our mission. First, Blessed John Henry Newman, who understood that liberal education is the perfection of the intellect, the training of the mind in the fundamental disciplines ordered toward the grasping of the highest truth.
Second, Pope Benedict XVI is a model in two ways. First, he has engaged fearlessly the leading thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Second — and this goes back to Ex Corde Ecclesiae — Pope Benedict recognizes that an essential part of Catholic education is the encounter of students with the person who is Truth itself, that is, Christ.
Our third model is St. Thomas Aquinas. For St. Thomas, education is not merely learning what others have taught, but rather learning the truth of things. Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Fides et Ratio and these three figures are the points by which we orient our efforts and evaluate the fruit of our labors.
Do you envision the college growing?
Yes, by offering a vibrant Catholic student life and the best Catholic Great Books education available — all the while keeping the cost of attendance low — we intend to increase our enrollment significantly.
You’ve also noted another goal: for Magdalen to serve the Church nationally and locally and meet the challenges of materialism, secularization and the dictatorship of relativism. How?
We’re producing priests and religious: 10% of our students enter the priesthood or religious life, and all of our graduates receive four years of faithful catechesis, which they then carry into their families and parishes. Beyond that — and this goes back to John Paul II — we aren’t interested in circling the wagons with respect to the larger culture. We want our graduates to be part of the “creative minority” — to use the term employed by the Holy Father — the creative force that will transform the West. Our graduates will go on to raise faithful Catholic families, and many of our graduates will go on to law school, medical school and business school, where they will integrate their faith with their profession. Having received a thorough and faithful education at the college, our students will help to turn the tide of materialism and secularization, overcoming the dictatorship of relativism. In a world that has lost its way, our students will offer the love and hope of Christ.
Joseph Pronechen is based in Trumbull, Connecticut.
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I appreciate the laudatory effort of the College to teach and promote beautiful, sacred music. I hope that they stand strong against the modern-day rock-style “worship music” that dumbs down our young people. Our current Pope has stood strong against rock music in church. Here is a great quote from Benedict XVI’s address to the 8th International Music Congress in Rome:
“In many forms of religion, music is associated with frenzy and ecstasy. The free expansion of human existence, toward which man’s own hunger for the Infinite is directed, is supposed to be achieved through sacred delirium induced by frenzied instrumental rhythms. Such music lowers the barriers of individuality and personality, and in it man liberates himself from the burden of consciousness. Music becomes ecstasy, liberation from the ego, amalgamation with the universe.
Today we experience the secularized variation of this type [of music] in rock and pop music, whose festivals are an anti-cult with the same tendency: desire for destruction, repealing the limitations of the everyday, and the illusion of salvation in liberation from the ego, in the wild ecstasy of a tumultuous crowd. These are measures which involve a form of release related to that achieved through drugs. It is the complete antithesis of Christian faith in the Redemption.
Accordingly, it is only logical that in this area diabolical cults and demonic musics are on the increase today, and their dangerous power of deliberately destroying personality is not yet taken seriously enough….
In a way which we could not imagine thirty years ago, rock music has become the decisive vehicle of a counter-religion and thus calls for a parting of the ways. Since rock music seeks release through liberation from the personality and its responsibility, it can be on the one hand precisely classified among the anarchic ideas of freedom which today predominate more openly in the West than in the East. But that is precisely why rock music is so completely antithetical to the Christian concept of redemption and freedom, indeed its exact opposite. Hence, music of this type must be excluded from the Church on principle, and not merely for aesthetic reasons, or because of restorative crankiness or historical inflexibility.
If we were to continue our analysis of the anthropological foundations of various types of music, we could render our question even more concrete. There is an agitational type of music which animates men for various collective goals. There is a sensuous type of music which brings man into the realm of the erotic or in some other way essentially tends toward feelings of sensual desire. There is a purely entertaining type of music which desires to express nothing more than an interruption of silence. And there is a rationalistic type of music in which the tones only serve rational constructs, and in which there is no real penetration of spirit and senses. Many dry catechism hymns and many modern songs constructed by committees belong to this category. Music truly appropriate to the worship of the incarnate Lord exalted on the cross exists on the strength of a different, a greater, a much more truly comprehensive synthesis of spirit, intuition and audible sound.”
Magdalen college is a cult. they inspect the student’s drawers daily and students have to fold their clothing in a specific way. Girls must dress in a specified way as not to draw the boys into the “occasion of sin” (specifications depend, to some degree, on the attractiveness of the female student). Women must report menstrual cycles. Personal phones, tvs, computers are not permitted. All phones are in common area and monitored. All students must follow the same schedule and no exceptions are afforded. Students are required to maintain campus and must redo the same job over and over again until it is approved by “monitor” it is acceptable. Girls/boys not permitted to socialize. Close friendships are discouraged and who sits with who @ meals is monitored. Friends who share meals too frequently are chastised, punished and forced to sit with others, monitored by staff employed by college who sit at the offending student’s tables to discourage any new friendships.
I currently attend the college and attest that NONE of the above is true. The atmosphere is one of freedom and trust. If any of the comments of the “former student” above are accurate, I feel sorry for him or her. But if they comments are false, then I feel even sorrier.
As the new president of the College of Saint Mary Magdalen, I can assure all readers that the post above from a former student describes a college that no longer exists. The College of Saint Mary Magdalen has undergone a radical transformation within the last year. It is “under new management” and absolutely rejects and repudiates any and all of the history of the college that violates common-sense principles of Catholic education. Idiosyncratic activities and approaches that may have once been justified as “formation” have no place at the College. Each and every policy and procedure at the College—particularly those that affect student life—have been reviewed and corrected.
To our former students, I can only offer my sincere apology, a promise to pray for them, and an unwavering commitment to never allow the institution to return to any aspect of its past that is not fully Catholic.
We believe that it is essential that our students embrace the call of Christ freely. If we fail to give to our students the freedom appropriate to young adults, we undermine the process by which they can become mature followers of Christ.
The change of our name last fall from “Magdalen College” to the “College of Saint Mary Magdalen” was intended (in part) to signal a re-founding of the College and its reconnection to the traditions of authentic Catholic formation and discipleship. The majority of our faculty and staff have joined the college within the last two-and-a-half years and those that remain from previous years have wholeheartedly embraced our renewal.
I am happy to report that God is blessing this re-founding: our students are thriving spiritually and intellectually. We have not only renewed our approach to student life but have thoroughly recast our Great-Books, liberal arts curriculum. Just as our patroness, St. Mary Magdalen underwent a conversion and transformation through grace, we too are becoming a new institution in the light of Christ.
Though the job of president keeps me busy, I would welcome the opportunity to speak to anyone who has questions about the College’s past, its present, or our hopes for the future. You may reach me at (603) 456-2656. Please visit our website as well: http://www.magdalen.edu
Mr. Harne:
First, I want to give you credit for at least acknowledging the cultist behavior and rigidity embraced and promoted by the founders and most of the staff of Magdalen College. I am actually shocked that an acknowledgment of the approach of John Meehan, Jeffrey Karls’ and other founding/principal members of the College as not appropriate to a Catholic Education. If what you say is true, I am proud of the College. True Catholic colleges like Thomas Aquinas, Moore, Christendon, et. al. have long allowed their students to embrace the Catholic experience without forcing it down their throat. Ex: Magdalen College made it mandatory all students attend daily mass; Christendom had daily mass that was optional. 90% of the student body @ Christendom chose to attend mass daily.
However, Jeffrey Karls and Cynthia Nicolosi, both major players during the time when Magdalen embraced it’s cultist “formative” views wherein students were required to engage in all college activities or face severe consequences, are still active within the staff and administration of the school. Unless and until those staff members and any of the “Karls/Meehan era” have been removed from the college, I will not truly believe that the school has made a change from it’s former ideology.
The new administration is superb! They have the right vision for the future and are sure to stay rated as one of the best Catholic colleges in America. I have only known outstanding graduates from this institution. I would definitely consider this place for my children. They are also located in a beautiful location. Please consider supporting them in the future.
The comments by the (first) former student are true. Hopefully the college has changed for the better, but it is true that dating was discouraged (actually called an ‘unnatural act’ by a former dean of students/graduate; room inspections without warning were common, and the list goes on. Sad. I have life long friends in spite of it all but there were a few way overboard administrators in the past.
Thank you for your comments. As president, I am happy to say that the College has been re-founded and those who established and perpetuated the old system have departed. Virtually all of our faculty and staff joined the College within the last three years and all who currently teach and work at the College are committed to building a new institution.
Our student life policies have been re-conceived and implemented according to the norms of Blessed John Paul II’s teaching in Ex corde ecclesiae. These policies are consistent with what can be found at our sister schools such as Thomas Aquinas College and Christendom. We are committed to building a college that is conducive to growth in intellectual and moral virtue and we understand that students must have the freedom to respond to the call of Christ.
I would ask that those seeking an authentic Catholic education consider us for who we are today and our vision for the future. We cannot ignore or deny the past, but these do not define who we are now.
To learn more about who we are now, please visit http://www.magdalen.edu/
Please keep us in your prayers.
George Harne
President, The College of Saint Mary Magdalen
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