Academic Freedom and Religion
J. Jeffrey Tillman
To the Editor:
I was pleased to see the topic of the January-February issue of Academe. I thought that the various articles as a whole did raise the pertinent issues, but I failed to find a framework from which to organize the competing arguments.
I believe that the ongoing debate is made more clear by distinguishing between two perspectives. One is that of the AAUP, which emphasizes academic freedom at the level of the individual faculty member. Faculty are free to pursue research in whatever direction inquiry leads them, with the only intellectual limit on their practice being the judgment of other experts in the field. No intellectual tenet, no matter how cherished, is unworthy of testing or unable to be shown to be false.
Some religious institutions emphasize academic freedom at the institutional level. The freedom to preserve and propagate the traditional religious teachings of the sponsoring denomination is what must be protected, and for the sake of this freedom, the freedom of individual faculty members can be limited. Intellectual research intends to fill in the gaps of the unchangeable truths already known, and any tenet that contradicts the traditional truths is obviously false.
Interestingly, both perspectives have bearing. The AAUP's approach represents the standards for scientific methodology that have described the mainstream of higher education and American society for over a hundred years. The religious institutions recognize the strength of human religious traditions and, in common with more general liberal arts arguments, recognize that a two-hundred-year-old methodology does not necessarily allow us to escape the power of religious and philosophical traditions stretching back more than five thousand years.
Both perspectives are important to American higher education, and until educational policies are framed that respect the likenesses and differences of the two, the debate will remain burdensome.
J. Jeffrey Tillman
Religion and Philosophy
Wayland Baptist University
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