Bernard Shaw's still lingering statement, “a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms,” is a tautology or a prejudice. A tautology if we read it literally to mean: “A universal university is a contradiction in terms.” A prejudice if we supply the historical depth and turn it into a more precise statement, to wit: “A university under such authoritarian strictures by the Church as was the university of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contradicts the notion of free inquiry which our century identifies with the university.”