Academic Freedom and Christian Scholarship

Anthony J. Diekema. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000, 214 pp.

Reviewed by Schubert M. Ogden

Rightly recognizing that the practical problems connected with academic freedom are "usually the result of theoretical and conceptual problems," Anthony Diekema takes pains both to formulate an adequate definition of academic freedom and to argue from principles on the crucial issue of "academic freedom in the context of worldview." If his success in these more conceptual and theoretical efforts is problematic, his practical suggestions are often wise and helpful, and his inventory of the threats to academic freedom, like his proposals for "policy development in the Christian college," attests throughout to his extensive experience as an academic administrator, including his twenty years as president of Calvin College.

There is no question, then, that Diekema’s book is worth the attention not only of readers who share either of his concerns, but also of others who must in some way come to terms with the same basic issues. And this is the more so, I think, because of the strategy he pursues in redefining academic freedom and arguing for the legitimacy of Christian scholarship. If this strategy is successful, he has reason for claiming that his proposals are applicable in principle not only to Christian colleges and universities, but to all others as well.

It belongs to his strategy to exploit the lack of consensus about just how academic freedom is to be understood and practiced, and to cast doubt on the understanding that the AAUP, notably, has represented and sought to implement, which Diekema sees as simply a hangover from an outmoded and discredited Enlightenment. More fundamentally, he holds that the academic freedom of all scholars, Christian or not, is inevitably and legitimately limited by their context. It is limited not only by their immediate end to pursue and teach only the truth and by the canons of their respective academic fields and disciplines, but also, and above all, by some underlying worldview and by the ultimate end sanctioned by its core beliefs and values.

In support of his contention concerning the legitimacy of worldview in any understanding and practice of academic freedom, Diekema maintains that "[c]ognition, or knowing, is now more commonly viewed as a human practice in which truth is seen as subjective, mediated, and contextual," and "[w]orldview makes a difference." "This does not mean," he insists, "that there is not truth, but only that the true, like the real, is always encountered from and defined by a particular perspective."

But it is just here, at the point of the basic philosophical principles from which he argues, that his position is weakest. He not only offers no argument for his principles, he even fails to clarify their meaning, never clearly explaining, among other things, how his analysis of "the true" avoids collapsing it into what is believed, as distinct from what is worthy of belief, or why his own perspective can consistently avoid the complete relativism of the postmodernists, as he claims it can. Perhaps the reason is that, in his view, unlike that of the postmodernists, evidence and argument, and so the ideal of objectivity, are still given a real, if sharply limited, role in strictly empirical matters, regardless of perspective or worldview. Even so, he leaves no doubt that that worldview itself, being a matter of faith, is not subject to objective argumentation and that any question about its truth or the truth of the faith underlying it cannot arise within the pursuit of truth whose parameters it sets.

As Diekema redefines it, then, the academic freedom of scholars to pursue and teach the truth is always and legitimately relative to some worldview, Christian or otherwise. "For the true academic," he writes, "truth is the end and academic freedom the means. . . . Truth, and its pursuit in the context of a clear worldview, is the highest value." But, then, academic freedom is merely an extension of such freedom as the worldview may allow to pursue any questions still left open by commitment to the faith underlying the worldview. So the academic freedom of Christian scholars is simply an extension of their Christian freedom, their "freedom to serve the kingdom of Jesus Christ and to be free to do so in every area of human endeavor. . . . It is a freedom anchored in a worldview."

As for the practice of academic freedom, the implication is clear: "compatibility of individual faculty worldview and institutional mission is the most critical factor in protecting and promoting academic freedom." Consequently, much depends on "the existence of a clearly stated mission on the part of the college or university and a well-articulated personal worldview on the part of the professor." And if this means for the institution that its mission statement should always include "any required worldview components" for its professors, it means for faculty members that they should always be willing to resign in the event that changes in their individual worldview would preclude satisfying these requirements.

Readers will obviously differ in critically appropriating Diekema’s argument. For my part—as one, incidentally, who thinks of his own efforts as, in a proper sense, Christian scholarship—two conclusions are unavoidable. First, when all is said and done, Diekema’s redefinition of academic freedom really succeeds only in changing the subject. Valuable as what he means by it may be to individuals and institutions committed to the worldview and faith that limit it, it is not academic freedom in anything but the name. In any proper sense of the term, academic freedom exists in a college or university only where there is freedom to critically validate all claims, including the claim to truth made or implied by all faiths and worldviews, whether those of faculty or students or any that may inform the mission of the institution itself. Then, second, the proper relation between Christian freedom and academic freedom is more indirect or dialectical than Diekema takes it to be. Being but a special case of the secular freedom that is the gift and demand of God’s good creation, academic freedom is at once radically different from Christian freedom and from any direct extension of it, and, yet, always to be protected and promoted by it, not in some mere caricature of itself, but as academic freedom in the strict and proper sense of the words.

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