Conference Looks at Religion and Academic Freedom

"All educational institutions attach qualifications to academic freedom; none allows professors to teach whatever they wish," Wolterstorff argued. "State universities, for example, have severe restrictions on what a professor may or may not teach with respect to religion." At religiously affiliated institutions, he said, conflicts often occur "when religious qualifications are applied unjustly, that is, when they are never fully stated, or not stated clearly in advance, when their application is arbitrary and irregular, or when there’s no recourse available to the victim."

Martin Snyder, the Association’s program director for academic freedom and professional standards, addressed some of Wolterstorff’s concerns in his presentation on the "limitations clause" in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The clause maintains that "limitations on academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of appointment." Snyder said problems sometimes arise when an ecclesiastical authority or another outside constituency accuses a professor of transgressing limits not stated at the time of hire, and the university administration fails to support the professor.

Carmel McEnroy, a theologian formerly at Saint Meinrad School of Theology, told conference participants how she had been dismissed from the Catholic institution after signing an open letter to Pope John Paul II asking for continued discussion of women’s ordination to the priesthood. Church officials asked Saint Meinrad’s president to terminate McEnroy’s tenured appointment, accusing her of publicly dissenting from the church’s teaching. The president complied, even though the institution’s faculty handbook incorporated the full text of the 1940 Statement and did not specify any limitations on academic freedom.

June Hagen, a professor of English, recounted how students and parents at Nyack College, a Christian liberal arts institution, complained about her attaching a "support gay rights" button to her briefcase. Her appointment came up for renewal shortly afterward, and the institution’s board of trustees declined to renew it, refusing to provide her with a reason. The trustees also removed the college president, who had supported the renewal of Hagen’s appointment.

The AAUP censured the Nyack administration in 1995 and the administration of Saint Meinrad in 1997 for violations of academic freedom and failure to afford due process.

Unlike McEnroy and Hagen, Michael Mikolajczak, chair of the English department at the University of Saint Thomas, reported receiving strong backing from his university president and the chair of the board of trustees when he came under fire. For fall 1999, the university’s English department unanimously selected Heaven’s Coast, a book by poet Mark Doty about the death of his partner from AIDS, as a common text for first-year students. When an editorial in the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune attacked Mikolajczak for asking students to dig through the "lamentations of the latest victim group," he defended the book in terms of the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Although people wrote letters demanding his resignation (one letter went so far as to threaten him with death), the university president and the board chair continued to support the department’s decision, and Heaven’s Coast was taught. "Mikolajczak and his colleagues prevailed," explains Snyder, "because they educated the entire academic community—board, administrators, faculty, and students—about the fundamental importance of academic freedom."

Several conference participants stressed how strong mechanisms of faculty governance help their institutions remain "faithful and free." George Monsma of Calvin College explained how faculty members there had formed an AAUP chapter in 1997, shortly after some of them had participated in an earlier Association-sponsored conference on academic freedom at religiously affiliated institutions. Since then, the faculty has continued to work with the administration in support of a system that clarifies at the time of initial appointment the commitments, including the religious obligations, required of faculty and administrators.

Barbara McGraw of Saint Mary’s College of California talked about how her college’s AAUP chapter recommended revisions to a proposed institutional statement on academic freedom the chapter considered overly vague. McGraw said clarity about academic freedom is especially important given the approval last November of implementation norms for Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Vatican document that aims to strengthen the authority of Catholic bishops over affiliated colleges and universities. "There’s an open question now," McGraw said, "of where Catholic universities will draw the line between freedom on the one hand, and Catholic identity and the promotion of Catholic moral values on the other."

The conference concluded with the panelists in the final session recommending a role for the AAUP in continuing to be sensitive to all voices in higher education, including those of the religious.

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