Three books offer authoritative overviews of the changes that Catholic higher education has undergone in recent decades. The President of Boston College, William P. Leahy, S.J. in Adapting to America: Catholics, Jesuits, and Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Georgetown, 1991) takes as his subject how Catholics adapted to the United States and how American culture affected Catholicism and especially Catholic higher education during the twentieth century. Philip Gleason, in Contending With Modernity: Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1995) focuses especially on the changes from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1950s. Alice Gallin, O.S.U. in Negotiating Identity: Catholic Higher Education Since 1960 (Notre Dame, 2000) tracks in some detail the last four decades of change in Catholic colleges and universities and in the world of Catholic higher education administration.
The Governance of Jesuit Colleges in the United States, 1920-1970 by Paul Fitzgerald (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1984) is an intriguing account of American Jesuit higher education from the perspective of the issues the colleges and universities faced and the decision-making processes they evolved to resolve them.
American Catholic Higher Education: Essential Documents, 1967-1990, ed. Alice Gallin, O.S.U. (Notre Dame, 1992) is a reference volume containing the documents that reveal church official's and university presidents' collaborative efforts to answer the questions: What does it mean to be a university or college? And, specifically, what does it mean for such an institution to be Catholic? Among the interesting documents it contains is the so-called Land O'Lakes statement, "The Nature of the Catholic University," which takes its name from the Notre Dame conference center where a gathering of leaders of Catholic higher education was held in 1967. This was the first post-Vatican II document about the state of autonomy in Catholic higher education. In a Boston College Magazine article ( "The Land O'Lakes Statement," 1995), David J. O'Brien recalled the importance of this document thirty years after it was written.