Pivoting off the CUA-Muslim story today, a Catholic friend e-mails:

When I attended St. John’s University School of Law in the early 1990s, a large and beautiful crucifix at the entrance of the building was replaced by a small rotating mobile of a Cross, Star of David, and Crescent. None of the Jewish students (and there were no known Muslims attending at the time) had requested the removal of the crucifix. A group of us complained to the Dean (a Catholic), and in a meeting with him, he stated: “Crucifixes are outdated and so 1960s.” The Vincentian priest who was President of the university did nothing to change the Dean’s course of action. Two Orthodox Jewish students I had befriended in one of my classes were puzzled by the whole incident. They thought it was religious suicide.

A couple of years ago, some professors at Boston College huffed and puffed when the Jesuit-run private institution decided to take the radical step of — wait for it — installing crucifixes in classrooms.