State of the Profession: Academic Freedom and Religion

By Martin D. Snyder

Faculty members and administrators from around the country came together in March on the beautiful campus of the University of San Diego to discuss some very thorny issues: the legitimacy of doctrinal limits on academic freedom, the preservation of the identity and mission of faith-based higher education, institutional autonomy and faculty governance, and the perennial hot topics of sex and science. If definitive solutions were hard to come by, at least the participants' understanding of the intellectual complexity and emotional depth of the issues was expanded.

For the Association, the key issue of the conference was the limitation of academic freedom. The AAUP's position was made unequivocally clear. Any limitation to academic freedom must be clearly stated at the time of appointment, and the statement of limitation does not absolve an institution from the requirements of due process. Few participants in the conference took exception to the policy, although many voiced objections to the Association's rhetoric, finding it condescending and dismissive.

The religiously affiliated institutions continue to wrestle with the issue of their individual and collective identities. They are keenly aware of the trend toward secularization that has characterized the history of many religiously founded colleges and universities in this country. They aspire to educational excellence and they recognize their need to prepare an often diverse body of students for life in a secular society, yet they desire to retain their core values while avoiding parochialness.

Many of the religious institutions represented at the conference maintain strong spiritual, monetary, and administrative ties to their founding churches. Achieving a proper balance between church authority and institutional autonomy remains an evolving and continually nuanced process. How decisions are made and by whom are often complicated questions. In particular, how the faculty carries out its responsibilities in its appropriate spheres of governance (curriculum, subject matter, methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life that relate to the educational process) can be jeopardized or compromised by the existence of an authority structure external to the college or university. Collegial decision making and ecclesiastical hierarchy are at best uneasy companions.

If the conference participants were prone to deal with abstract topics like academic freedom, mission and identity, or institutional governance with a measure of dispassionate objectivity and historical perspective, they responded rather more warmly to the hot-button issues of sex and science. In these two areas, the abstract becomes concrete, the general becomes particular, the theoretical becomes political.

If a psychologist at a Baptist institution shows a film to her class sympathetic to the plight of gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews, is she protected from reprimand or reprisal by the administration under the principles of academic freedom? Will the institution defend her right to show the film if external church members or ecclesiastical authorities attack her decision? Does an administrator at a Catholic college contravene academic freedom when he bans a well known prochoice speaker invited by a recognized student group? Does it matter if the speaker's topic has nothing to do with reproductive rights? How does an evangelical biologist present the theory of evolution to his class without violating his institution's creedal requirements or his own scientific integrity? Must a nonbelieving physicist at a religious institution include in her syllabus a discussion of "intelligent design" and creationist theories about the origins of the universe? May she appropriately segregate such considerations as "non-science" and ignore them? What if fundamentalist students in the class complain to the administration? Such questions reveal the tensions inherent in religiously affiliated higher education.

Clearly, the Association's San Diego conference did not settle all issues to everyone's satisfaction. No conference could. But, at the very least, it was able to put a human face on the issues and to deny the possibility of dehumanizing and demonizing those with whom we disagree. Perhaps that is as much as any conference can hope to achieve.

Martin Snyder is AAUP director of planning and development.

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