Faithful and Free: A Call for Academic Freedom

The distinctive moral traditions of faith-based colleges and universities can help them resist corporate demands on academia—but only if their faculties are allowed to question institutional policies.

By Mary A. Burgan

I begin with Dyson’s secular definition of religion as involving the conduct of life because I believe that it encompasses a view held by many faculty members who do not consider themselves particularly religious. When the complexities of what we know, what we believe, what we desire, what we doubt, overwhelm the intellect, many intellectuals fall back on what sociologist Robert Bellah has called "the habits of the heart"—an assent to the sacredness of human community.

As Bellah pointed out in an article in the January–February 2000 issue of Academe, this informal belief system was there at the beginning of American higher education. It may have been replaced theoretically by forms of positivism and postmodernism, but in practice it tends still to underlie our faith in one another in our common pursuit of learning. Academic life, in its joining of the cognitive and the ethical, is something of a "way of life." It is so in the connections of trust that faculty make with one another, with students, and with the larger society as they pursue not only truth but also the ethically informed principles that Bellah denotes as "judgment."

It is along these lines that I want to discuss the communal aspect of academic freedom in religiously affiliated schools, because the social may get lost in ordinary discussions of the epistemological dimensions of academic freedom. In so doing, I want to link the cognitive with the forensic, knowledge with community, and the dissemination of knowledge with the building of cooperative structures in which knowledge can flourish.

In making this link, I find myself in tune with the founders of the AAUP. In one of his last books, Our Common Faith (1934), John Dewey distrusted the notion that knowledge is the "accomplishment of a lonely mind." Rather, he said, "we should now be aware that it is a product of the cooperative and communicative operations of human beings living together." The late-nineteenth-century American philosophical tradition that laid the foundations of our notions of academic freedom are implicit in this statement—not only in its appeal for tolerance, but also in its notion that intellectual discovery involves our finding ways of "living together" professionally.

A. O. Lovejoy was a historian of ideas rather than a philosopher, but his magnum opus, The Great Chain of Being, noted the relationship between structures of medieval and Renaissance thought and their societal practices. In his ardent activities as the Association’s leading figure in its formative years, Lovejoy struggled with the connection between knowledge and collective behavior in institutional arenas where the lived ramifications of academic freedom had to be investigated and judged.

In 1915 Lovejoy investigated conditions at the University of Utah after seventeen professors resigned in protest over the administration’s conduct in dismissing some of the faculty. As historian Walter Metzger noted in "The First Investigation," published in the August 1961 issue of the AAUP Bulletin, the infractions that Lovejoy found in the firing of professors at the university involved failures in community more than "the great intellectual combats which the founders had in view." Nevertheless, these "wrangles over pride and precedence were the very stuff which academic wars were made of." In the form of disputes about university governance, they would become central concerns in the Association’s monitoring of academic freedom.

Shared Governance

By the time On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom was issued in 1994, it had become clear that "a sound system of institutional governance is a necessary condition for the protection of faculty rights and thereby for the most productive exercise of essential faculty freedoms. Correspondingly, the protection of the academic freedom of faculty members in addressing issues of institutional governance is a prerequisite for the practice of governance unhampered by fear of retribution." As the history of religion illustrates, it is difficult to pursue a way of life without structuring that pursuit to encourage mutuality. After faith comes the church. And then come issues of the distribution of power.

Nicholas Wolterstorff articulates elsewhere in this issue of Academe a conviction that academic freedom is a condition for the individual’s "personhood," and that personnel policies must be structured to respect the integrity of faculty members. Without such care, the variety and creativity of persons become suppressed. Current managerial theory has extended this concern for creativity to the realm of running institutions. The notion of a "learning corporation," for example, posits the need for a certain autonomy, a liberty to experiment with new procedures, and most important, an ability to comment on the conditions of work critically. The question of freedom within the bounds of academic governance is how to encourage this autonomy while channeling its energies into cooperative rather than destructively individualistic activities.

In fostering such a concept, the AAUP’s formulation is surprisingly deferential to a nice discrimination of authorizations. There is a sense of hierarchy—that the president and her administration must be a source of overview and articulation of the overall mission of the institutions in which faculty serve. There is also near reverence for the board and its mission to help direct the central mission of the institution and to bear the liabilities for its efficacy. I am sometimes reminded of the pope and the College of Cardinals. But the Reformation reminds us that many of our more democratic institutional structures have been founded upon the criticism of such hierarchies.

A proper sharing of knowledge and goals, burdens and rewards, is what is necessary to make any structure of community work. Community, or way of life, demands such social faith. In some circumstances, religiously affiliated colleges may have more problems with this kind of secular faith than do secular institutions. I am not referring here to doctrinal matters; I am talking about governance in religiously affiliated institutions that proclaim through their handbooks, contracts, and committee structures that they adhere to collaboration in governance. Do religiously affiliated schools have special problems with faculty governance?

By and large, it seems that there are indeed some special temptations against shared governance for faith-based schools. In a tendency to identify the practical with the doctrinal, it is all too easy for such schools to interpret professional acts and gestures as outward signs of heresy. Let me suggest five of the main sources for such governance problems in religiously affiliated schools.

First, the presidents of such schools may also be ordained clerics—ministers or priests or rabbis or nuns. Thus the aura of ordination may surround such officials; consequently, their roles may be colored by notions of infallibility or inerrancy. Faculty objections to the policy decisions of administrators who carry so much religious authority can seem a questioning of the entire denomination. Walter Metzger has noted the invocation of such hierarchical loyalties in early institutions administered by clerics: "The president of the college, as a pastor in the sponsoring sect and usually a highly placed churchman, had been the paterfamilias of the institution." Faculty who object to the decisions of clerical leaders can seem unfilial. Indeed, in some schools faculty are routinely viewed as children. (I suppose that the undergraduates are therefore grandchildren? They seem to be allowed more affection, at least!)

Second, the minority status of some religiously affiliated institutions makes for an extra-sensitive fear of scandal. Thus surveillance of regularity in doctrinal matters may merge into a watch over conformity in all other behavior. Under such sensitivity to scandal, the faculty member who raises concerns about fiscal or instructional practices may seem insensitive to the institution’s vulnerability. Further, he may be accused of washing the dirty laundry before the eyes of a hostile public. Such protectiveness can lead to the kind of suppression that can harden into self-delusion—or even prevarication. And it is common for a final, more devastating scandal to erupt from suppression of problems.

Third, religiously affiliated institutions that dominate a particular region or culture may presume that managerial perfection is part of their role in the secular order. In some such schools, outlanders are suspect, even if they are of the same denomination. Local, secular politics and religious faith may, for example, so coincide with one another that faculty are expected to vote the party line. And the party line is incapable of discriminating between faith and politics.

Fourth, pleading poverty, a religious college or university may justify suspending basic principles of equity in working conditions and procedures. Faculty pay may be kept low and workloads high. Single women may receive less than family men. Adjunct and part-time faculty may be assumed to be working for charity. The agitation for better working conditions can seem a rejection of the institution’s lofty mission. The demand for sacrifice may seem so natural to religious leaders who have devoted their lives to a cause that they lose sight of justice as one of their commandments in dealing with faculty members.

And finally, there may be a skewed definition of the norms of virtue inculcated by an institution’s traditions. Many religious traditions have special regard for the exercise of restraint. They may pay lip service to the need for professional freedom, but they also expect this freedom to be professed modestly, with due humility. Indeed, they may define virtue itself as a form of inwardness that never raises its voice in public. Faculty, then, may be expected to censor all criticism. Charity, the greatest of all the virtues, is invoked as the only operative guide in governance. Such an expectation overrides the fact that if humility is a gift of the spirit, so is courage. This intermixing of private with public virtue is perhaps the greatest temptation in the restraint of faculty freedom in governance at religious institutions.

Special Virtues

theories do apply to ourselves, and they have tests that are both empirical and ethical. Often, it is impossible to tell where the cognitive leaves off and the ethical begins. Scholars live in the world, and the world we live in right now is dominated by money. If we believe that the struggle for strategic advantage is the truth about human beings, then we should realize that we are not just teaching a scientific truth; we are preaching a gospel. We have done that before in our intellectual history, and we decided that it was wrong. . . . So if we don’t think that the struggle for strategic advantage is the whole truth about human beings, then in our scholarship and our teaching we should begin consciously to accept that our work is governed by the virtue of judgment, at least in aspiration.

I believe it is worthwhile to transpose Bellah’s concerns about the state of secular higher education to the religious sphere. It may be that secular schools, not only in theory but also in activity, have succumbed to the lures of Mammon.

The forms of Mammon that now present themselves to higher education as inevitabilities that must override the freedom to act or to choose are many. The two that religious schools may be called on to discipline in ways unavailable to public schools are "genomics" and "informatics"—neologisms struck to give a title to one of the "millennial evenings" held at the White House in 1999. "Genomics" refers to the mapping and engineering of the human genome; "informatics" denotes the whole spectrum of information technology. These two new fields of study and endeavor can overtake our power to govern their role in higher education for two reasons. First, the difficulty of interpreting them gives rise to a new class of academic experts whose expertise blocks oversight. Second, the money behind them glitters with promise for personal and institutional benefits.

As far as genomics is concerned, the difficulty, the technological expansiveness, the requirements for networking with the business community, and the lure of profit have swept universities with big science into the mapping of the genome and the attendant power to engineer the gene. With the complexity of all that knowledge, and the competition to possess it, who can dare to give pause to think about results or moral ramifications? Universities have also been swept up in the promise of informatics. The Web both promises and threatens. Only invest, and all will be well. The Virtual University is going to "eat your lunch" if you don’t join the party. And those who object are Luddites who simply don’t know enough about technology to participate in deciding how to use it.

In the sweep of these new disciplines, the latest skeptics about faculty governance tell us simply to get on board or perish. Do it quickly. Assume that all advances in knowledge betoken eventually a just distribution of benefits. At the White House millennial evening I attended on these issues, however, the discussants eventually did come up against the question of the moral choices that attend informatics and genomics. President Clinton, almost as an afterthought, murmured that we must train more ethicists, theologians, and the like to help answer the questions of justice, both in the morality of engineering genes and in the disparity of access in the digital divide.

Our governance structures must allow philosophers to question, to deliberate, to act in opposition, if they are to respond adequately to these issues. Limitations to such rights cannot be mandated by the managerial culture that now dominates our institutions; it cannot be allowed to substitute commercial expedience for shared governance. Since the new technology costs so much, freedom to look at the budget is very close to the liberty to critique the new research and pedagogy. Even though deals with technology may be sweet, administrations cannot automatically force the faculty to go online. Members of boards, prospering from the go-go economy, might urge the institution to qualify its values by making its education virtual. But faculty must help the board understand that professional ethics could mandate resistance.

The power of money is real, and I understand how severe its threats can be to vulnerable institutions. And yet it seems to me that in questioning entrepreneurial policies and commercial ventures, the professoriate is called again to its mission of insisting on academic and professional freedom. Further, given their history of resistance to material values at the expense of spiritual ones, religiously affiliated institutions may now be situated to assert their distinctive moral traditions as essential to academe’s freedom to resist corporate demands. Perhaps the power of religious institutions lies in their humility of status? Certainly it lies in their mission to investigate the ethical implications of the reasons we teach and do our research.

But no matter where we work, the current situation calls us all—secular and religious, private and public—to act as candidates for the Templeton Prize. We must engage in a way of professional life that may, indeed, be "religious." The value of the diversity that faith-based colleges and universities add to our higher education system is in their power to model new virtues and new understandings. They may be able to judge the moral import of our research and teaching. But they must judge always in the spirit of academic freedom. And so I conclude with the words of William James, whose thinking about academic freedom helped to form our academic culture:

[W]e act, taking our lives in our hands. No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless; . . . then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as practical things. (From The Will to Believe.)

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