Date:         Thu, 09 Oct 97 12:07:05 EDT
From: Alan Davidson <DAVIDSON@UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU>
Subject:      Religion and Higher Education (fwd)
To: socgrad@CSF.COLORADO.EDU
cc: Ronit <rshemtov@siena.edu>, Ted <tmills@UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU>
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----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Date:         Wed, 8 Oct 1997 09:02:19 -0500
Reply-To:     UCSB Religious Studies Forum <ANDERE-L@UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU>
Sender:       UCSB Religious Studies Forum <ANDERE-L@UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU>
From:         Jerry Shepperd <shepperd@AUSTIN.CC.TX.US>
Subject:      Religion and Higher Education
To:           ANDERE-L@UCSBVM.UCSB.EDU

This article is from The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Some of you may
have seen it already, but I had not.  I appreciated it and wanted to pass it
along.

Jerry Shepperd


>September 19, 1997
>
>    A Welcome Revival of Religion in the Academy
>
>    By ALAN WOLFE
>
>    American universities increasingly are finding that a
>    century-old truce between the forces of faith and the demands
>    of knowledge is no longer holding.
>
>    Toward the end of the 19th century, elite universities in the
>    United States -- enamored of modern science, influenced by
>    German standards of scholarship, and seeking students and
>    faculty members from across the country and, eventually, from
>    around the world -- began quietly turning away from their
>    denominational origins. Confessional oaths would no longer be
>    required of professors; Roman Catholic and Jewish students
>    would be allowed to attend institutions that, even when public,
>    had been de facto Protestant; and attendance at chapel would
>    be voluntary.
>
>    Moral philosophy soon ceased to be the capstone course of
>    four-year liberal-arts colleges, and believers were shunted off
>    to divinity schools (whose academic prestige began to suffer in
>    the emerging scientific culture). Denominational institutions
>    continued to exist, but more and more they faced the often
>    bitter choice of remaining faithful to their religious origins and
>    becoming marginalized, or adapting to the predominantly
>    secular culture and losing their distinctiveness.
>
>    Once secularization of the university became a fact, it was a
>    durable one; only with a microscope can one today see the
>    differences between Princeton, whose origins were
>    Presbyterian, and Yale, which was originally Congregational.
>
>    While the truce between faith and knowledge favored the
>    secular side, for a time academics with strong religious beliefs
>    nevertheless took some comfort from the fact that a place, no
>    matter how confining, still existed for them. The contours of
>    what sociologists call "civil religion" -- a vague, generally
>    non-denominational effort to link God with America -- still
>    dominated the United States in the 1950s and provided an
>    atmosphere, even in universities, congenial to people with
>    religious beliefs.
>
>    Today, a vigorous round of criticism of the modern university
>    has been touched off by critics who, arguing in the name of
>    religion, insist that secularization has gone too far. If they had
>    their way, the modern university would change a wide variety
>    of its intellectual practices. Professors would talk openly about
>    how their religious beliefs influence their work. They would
>    apply for academic jobs without fear that making their
>    religious views public would destroy their chances of being
>    hired. Students would be encouraged to speak more in class
>    about their beliefs and to bring a religious voice to their
>    extracurricular activities, including athletics and student
>    newspapers. In general, the academic culture would become
>    more amenable to religion.
>
>    The most sustained attack on the secular culture of the
>    modern university has been launched by George Marsden, a
>    (Protestant) historian at the (Catholic) University of Notre
>    Dame. Marsden starts from the postmodern premise that
>    objectivity is not a neutral standard between true stories and
>    false ones, but a story like any other. If there are feminist ways
>    of knowing, he implicitly asks, aren't there Christian ones as
>    well? Once the epistemological claims underlying modern
>    ideals of disinterested scholarship are challenged, he argues,
>    so must be the compromise that assigned second-class status
>    to religious believers in the modern university.
>
>    Marsden's voice is by no means the only one that has entered
>    the debate over the proper role of religion in the modern
>    university. Some philosophers are giving new attention to
>    philosophy and religion, delving into the spiritual thought of
>    writers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.
>    Literary critics are beginning to explore the fact that, although
>    modern societies may be predominantly secular, the novelists
>    they produce -- John Updike, Harry Mulisch, Robertson
>    Davies, Iris Murdoch -- deal with age-old religious themes,
>    such as the origin of evil or the promise of redemption.
>
>    Among some social scientists, there is a new awareness that
>    supposedly scientific studies of how religion affects society
>    have not, after all, yielded all that much scientific
>    understanding, making at least plausible the claim that those
>    who are religious themselves are in a better position than
>    non-believers to understand why other human beings might
>    find religion valuable. Even the natural sciences have
>    experienced the new atmosphere; Darwinian evolutionary
>    theory cannot explain life's complexity, the biochemist Michael
>    Behe of Lehigh University has argued, concluding that some
>    kind of intelligent design, possibly divine, has played a role in
>    determining how life has developed.
>
>    If and when secular-minded academics notice these trends,
>    they tend to cite them as examples of how grateful we all
>    should be that the universities have parted company with God:
>    Most scholars are deeply skeptical of what they perceive as
>    any threat to the established truce between religion and higher
>    education.
>
>    I consider myself a secular academic; my own field of study,
>    sociology, could not have come into being until thinkers
>    stopped attributing the origins of society to God. I believe that
>    universities are properly governed by the rules of science and
>    the mindset of liberalism, both committed to an avoidance of
>    dogma and a respect for facts. Yet there are at least two
>    reasons to welcome, rather than to ignore, the revival of
>    religion in the academy: Religion can extend the pluralism that
>    liberal values cherish, and it can expand and enrich
>    knowledge.
>
>    As long as most Americans were religious, and as long as their
>    religion was predominantly Protestant, people who advocated
>    such liberal values as academic freedom and a rejection of
>    dogma were on the side of pluralism: The more universities
>    there were, the more diverse perspectives would exist; the
>    more open universities were to different viewpoints, the
>    greater the chances that skepticism and free inquiry would be
>    assigned a high priority. But today we risk a different kind of
>    homogenization -- we have become so secular that we leave
>    little room for religious expression.
>
>    If anything, the secular version of the university has been such
>    a success that its way of doing business constitutes a new
>    orthodoxy. I happen to like much of this orthodoxy, especially
>    its respect for facts and logic. But this does not mean that I
>    necessarily appreciate the sameness that follows from
>    discouraging those whose understanding of the world is tied to
>    their faith from being active participants in university life.
>    Objectivity should never be taken for granted. Those who
>    value it need those who question its premises.
>
>    Nor does it follow that our commitments to secularism ought
>    to be so strong that they preclude a role for colleges that are
>    affiliated with a denomination. As a parent, I would not want
>    to send my child to a church-related institution. The whole
>    point of a college education is to teach an appreciation for
>    skepticism and an exposure to unfamiliar ideas. But some
>    parents do want to send their children to colleges affiliated
>    with their religious faith. Surely a liberal pluralist ought not to
>    denigrate them for doing so -- but that is what many
>    academics do. Too many of them talk and act as though
>    denominational institutions are automatically second-rate. Just
>    as one does not need to be a feminist to recognize a legitimate
>    role for women's colleges, one does not need to be religious
>    to understand the importance of religious institutions.
>
>    George Marsden argues that liberals are tolerant of everything
>    except people whom they regard as intolerant, which includes
>    those who have strong religious faith. On this point, he is right.
>    Academics who respond with contempt to dissenters from the
>    liberal consensus undermine liberalism more than do critics of
>    liberalism such as Marsden. Many people who today criticize
>    higher education in the name of religion are asking to have a
>    conversation, not to make converts.
>
>    For example, the Lilly Foundation is sponsoring a three-year
>    seminar on religion and higher education to study how
>    church-affiliated institutions can play a more visible role in the
>    American educational landscape. The seminar, composed of
>    many of the leading critics of academe's secular culture, has
>    gone out of its way to make liberal secularists -- including
>    David Hollinger, a historian at the University of California at
>    Berkeley; Richard Bernstein, a philosopher at the New
>    School for Social Research; and myself -- comfortable.
>
>    Secular academics also ought to listen more to their religious
>    critics because, at least in the social sciences and the
>    humanities, doing so can enhance scholars' understanding of
>    the world.
>
>    Consider, first, the students. Once, they came to the university
>    sure of their religious beliefs. Many professors -- except those
>    teaching at institutions affiliated with a religious denomination
>    -- took special delight in trying to disabuse students of their
>    faith. These days, however, students often come to class with
>    no beliefs, or with little knowledge of the religious texts from
>    which their beliefs are drawn.
>
>    For a long time, I was envious of my colleagues who taught at
>    Catholic universities because, I thought, their students at least
>    had heard of Augustine and Aquinas. Not so today; my
>    friends tell me that their students, while nominally Catholic,
>    have had the same bland, suburban upbringing as any other
>    middle-class student in America, with the resulting same deep
>    ignorance of religion. Whether they attend a Catholic
>    institution or an aggressively secular one, students today are
>    lacking something that a stronger religious background could
>    provide.
>
>    Today's college students are in desperate need of at least
>    three dispositions usually associated with religious belief: a
>    tragic view of life, grounding in a particular set of ethical
>    maxims, and a sense of wonder. It is not that I long for
>    students to appear in my classroom who can cite chapter and
>    verse from the Bible in defense of positions on which they will
>    never reflect. But I would not mind an occasional argument,
>    backed up by familiarity with at least one historical tradition, in
>    support of a passionately held viewpoint on something --
>    anything.
>
>    The students whom I teach are so tolerant of so many things
>    that I wonder just how deep that tolerance runs. I would like
>    to find an occasional student who, despite my contrary views,
>    would articulate the position that homosexuality is sinful, or
>    that abortion constitutes infanticide, if for no other reason than
>    to make the point that ideas about right and wrong ought to
>    generate disagreement rather than encourage easy conformity.
>    If renegotiating the truce between faith and knowledge were
>    to produce more of a spark in a typical classroom discussion,
>    I would be in favor of it.
>
>    Such renegotiation might also bring a valuable new
>    perspective to our scholarship. We must recognize that
>    scholarship has been affected by the university's secularism in
>    some less than positive ways. This is not an argument that is
>    "soft" on creationism. A scientist legitimately may suggest, as
>    Michael Behe does, that Darwinian theory does not explain
>    everything. But to invoke, as Behe also does, the possibility of
>    intelligent design is a cop-out: When something is not easily
>    understood, a scientist should dig further to understand it. You
>    do not understand nature by invoking the supernatural.
>
>    But even if we accept that the boundary between religion and
>    secularism should not shift all that much in the sciences, this
>    does not mean that all other branches of learning need to
>    include the same boundary. The humanities -- because they
>    deal with texts that explore the mysteries of art, creation, love,
>    evil, envy, meaning, and purpose -- have much to gain from
>    renegotiating the border. English professors in recent years
>    have produced much interesting scholarship on the historical
>    background, economic and political context, and hidden
>    assumptions about gender in many classic texts, but far less
>    about the beliefs, creative urges, and frequent apocalyptic
>    visions of the authors of those classics.
>
>    To study the world's great literary works, many of which were
>    inspired by religious questions, without full appreciation of
>    those questions is like performing Hamlet without the Prince.
>    Critics of academic specialization in the humanities often say
>    that English departments, infatuated with contemporary
>    works, no longer teach enough Milton or Tolstoy. It would be
>    more correct to say that, through the lens of secularism, they
>    are teaching them inaccurately.
>
>    It is in the social sciences, however, that a new settlement
>    between faith and knowledge might have the most-beneficial
>    effects. Religion was central to the investigations of Durkheim
>    and Weber, the great founders of modern sociology, not
>    because of their own commitments to faith, but because of a
>    restless curiosity about all things human. It is precisely that
>    driving curiosity that is missing in so much of the formal
>    modeling and mathematical precision now sought by social
>    scientists.
>
>    To develop laws of social behavior, scholars make often
>    admittedly simplistic assumptions about how people behave.
>    Alas, one of the aspects of human conduct that scholars
>    ignore, because it seems imprecise, is how we attribute
>    meaning to the world around us. By reintroducing respect for
>    human beings as creators of meaning, the rediscovery of
>    religion can help revive interest in all of the ways that people
>    interpret and symbolize their place in the world.
>
>    The value in what the religious critics have to say will be lost if
>    the debate that they inspire takes us back to the days of the
>    Scopes trial. Many who cherish secular values see in every
>    attempt to invoke religion new forms of superstition. They
>    need to be reminded that the secular side, after all, won the
>    Scopes trial. Rationality, logic, and the scientific method have
>    triumphed so thoroughly in the modern university that those of
>    us who live by those tenets could be a bit more generous in
>    welcoming critics of our bedrock assumptions.
>
>    At the same time, religious believers cannot expect much of a
>    hearing in the modern research university unless they meet the
>    standards of open inquiry and liberal pluralism halfway. Some
>    critics of higher education see themselves as minorities,
>    victimized for their religious beliefs just as women and
>    African-Americans have been victimized for their gender and
>    race. Some even say it follows that they should have academic
>    programs in the university based on religious identity, just as
>    universities have programs in feminist studies or
>    African-American studies. Such claims strike me as the wrong
>    way to accommodate religious belief. Ghettoizing religion in
>    separate departments or programs would not fundamentally
>    change the intellectual life of the rest of the university.
>
>    Liberals can find in liberalism plenty of resources for
>    skepticism toward religion. Believers can find support in their
>    religious traditions for suspicion of liberal secularism. Yet each
>    side, to bring out what is best in its own heritage, will have to
>    move toward the other.
>
>    Alan Wolfe, University Professor at Boston University, is
>    the author of Marginalized in the Middle (University of
>    Chicago Press, 1996).
>
>