Campus Religious Conflict Should Go Public
A Barnard project moves debates about religion out of the private sphere.
By Janet R. Jakobsen
These are difficult times for faculty members and others who are committed to academic freedom. Among a number of examples, consider the following:
- In early 2006, Andrew Jones, an alumnus of the University of California, Los Angeles, offered to pay students to report professors who express “wrong” political views in class. According to the February 13, 2006, issue of The Nation, the incorrect views listed on Jones’s Web site included supporting affirmative action and opposing the confirmation of John Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court.
- Over the past few years, state legislatures across the country have introduced bills that aim to restrict faculty activity in the name of protecting student freedom.1 A bill introduced earlier this year in Arizona would have required institutions of higher education to provide alternatives if “the course, coursework, learning material, or [class] activity conflict[ed] with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality, or religion.”
Although such legislative initiatives have thus far failed, they remain a matter for concern, because they use the language of academic freedom in their effort to constrain expression. In so doing, they threaten to turn the meaning of academic freedom away from its traditional sense as the freedom to express diverse viewpoints toward the idea that academic freedom is a freedom from hearing any views that might cause offense. This new meaning is hardly that of a principle supporting free and open inquiry in the academy, nor is it one that supports the enterprise of democracy.
Given this climate, it is vitally important that we defend academic freedom and recall its founding principles. Defense of academic freedom on its own, however, can set up a scenario that has become all too familiar over the past twenty years of “culture wars,” in which attack and defense play themselves out in ways that are highly regularized and almost scripted, with little shift in the terrain and no end in sight. Such an impasse makes for a depressing state of affairs. It seems that those of us who support academic freedom are condemned to defend ourselves ad nauseam and to see our own principles repeatedly used against us.
There is another possibility, however. We could take up the challenge of the current moment as an opportunity to rethink the meaning of academic freedom. Too often, we hesitate to question its meaning for fear that doing so will open the door to even greater demands for self-policing and censorship in the classroom than those we already face. Yet the modern concept of freedom on which our claims to freedom are based has its own problems, even contradictions, all of which can be exploited by those who have little or no concern for freedom of expression. Rethinking freedom can help us address these problems in ways that enrich and strengthen the power of the term.
A Special Case
The inherent contradictions of freedom are particularly acute when it comes to one of the hottest of the hot-button issues now invoked in debates over academic freedom: that of religion. Religious freedom and academic freedom pose an apparent contradiction. The historical development of the concept of academic freedom is one in which free inquiry has often been defined in opposition to religious authority or dogma. If in defending academic freedom, we simply hold on to one side of this opposition, we will have no language for the ways in which academic and religious freedom might be mutually maintained. We leave ourselves open to charges of bias and the abrogation of religious freedom. If, however, we develop a means of talking about religious freedom in relation to academic freedom, we take a major step toward shifting a debate that is currently structured so that one form of freedom can be perpetually posed against another.
Because the relationship between freedom and religion is so fraught, Barnard College chose to make questions of religion, in conjunction with the politics of identity, the focus of its Difficult Dialogues project, which began in spring 2005 with discussions about what makes for “difficult dialogues.” The project, which will continue through spring 2008, will involve a faculty seminar that will extend for the length of the grant, an undergraduate seminar, and an addition to an existing program that relies on role-playing to explore the history of social conflicts.
We began this undertaking by soliciting faculty participation. Faculty members privately expressed strong and often negative views of others’ positions in various campus conflicts, particularly those involving religion. This response initially surprised us, because the faculty had never expressed such views publicly, despite the fact that many had been longtime and active participants in the cultural life of the college. Upon reflection, however, this response did not seem so unusual, because it reflects the current structure of freedom in the United States—a structure that contributes to and maintains the problems that a project like Difficult Dialogues is meant to address. In particular, freedom in the United States is built on the concept of privatization: potentially conflictual differences are privatized—they are removed from the public square—and a patina of tolerance and civility is maintained.
The idea that public freedom should be established through the privatizing of differences is reflective of the modern period and is often narrated in terms of historical responses to religious difference. The modern response to the “wars of religion” in Europe sparked by the Protestant Reformation was to establish public religious “tolerance.” The public peace was enforced by restricting religious differences and the potential conflicts induced by such differences to the private sphere. Public religious tolerance, however, is perfectly compatible with the domination of one particular religion in the way that the Church of England was established as part of the state while all other religious practices were the subjects of public toleration.
Maintaining Civility
This model of maintaining civility through privatization of difference and public expression of tolerance, especially tolerance granted by a dominant majority toward a minority, is often invoked as the best means of addressing social conflicts. Even religious conservatives who oppose gay rights express tolerance for homosexuals as individual (and private) people. But once conflict moves out of the private sphere and into the public arena, it looks irresolvable. There are no public mechanisms for the resolution of such conflicts. The only possibility is reprivatization.
In a community like that of a college campus, the imperative for privatization means that a certain space of protection is created. Controversial and even offensive views are not expressed publicly and hence do not fuel potentially destructive conflicts. But this structure of civility also means that these views are never engaged and, most important, never questioned or changed.
The Barnard project will explore alternative possibilities. Participants in the faculty seminar will consider how particular ideas about freedom structure the available means of engagement and thus the possible outcomes for conflicts. We will ask whether different approaches might allow for different resolutions.
To give an idea of how such a project might yield an alternative approach to difficult dialogues, I will briefly lay out one understanding of the problem and how it might be shifted. This particular model is based on work that Ann Pellegrini and I developed in our 2003 book about sexuality and religious freedom, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance. I present this model because it provides a concept of religious freedom that might be positively conjoined with academic freedom and that provides an alternative method of engaging conflict.
Engaging Difference
The idea of religious freedom as outlined in the U.S. Constitution provides a means of conceptualizing freedom that depends not on privatization but on public engagement with differences. Religious freedom in the United States was supposed to be a step forward from a model in which a single church is the established religion of a state (for example, the Church of England) and “other” religions are granted tolerance. Religion in the United States was to be the subject not of tolerance, but of freedom and equality.
The First Amendment to the Constitution delineates religious freedom in two parts. The first, commonly known as “disestablishment,” guarantees that there should be no single religion established by the government; the second, termed “free practice,” guarantees freedom for all persons to practice their religion (or to refuse to practice any religion) free from government interference.
In practice, however, religious freedom in the United States has failed to live up to the promise of democratic—free and equal—treatment for all people regardless of religious commitment. Christianity, specifically Protestantism, has consistently dominated American public life, including the U.S. government, even though there is not supposed to be any established religion. This reality has led to a situation more akin to religious tolerance than religious freedom.2
It has also been extremely difficult to uphold and hold together the constitutional guarantees of disestablishment and free practice. Instead, interpretations of religious freedom have tended to split between those who favor disestablishment and a strict “separation of church and state” and those who favor the free practice of religion. In battles over religious freedom, supporters of disestablishment often ignore free exercise and tend to argue that religious differences are irresolvably conflictual and so must be removed to the private sphere while the public sphere remains secular. Those who support free practice are rarely concerned with disestablishment and argue that strictures of privatization unfairly restrain religious expression and so put people with religious worldviews at a disadvantage in relation to their secular counterparts.
This split also tends to reflect a division between secularists who support disestablishment and proponents of religion who support free exercise. But disestablishment and secularism are not synonymous; religionists might well support disestablishment precisely to protect the free exercise of their religion. And free exercise can work on behalf of those secularists who seek the freedom not to exercise any religion at all, just as it can protect particular religious practices. Thus we need not have another battle in which each side holds tightly to its single principle with no means of shifting the terrain between the two sides.
Multiple Visions
If the two sides of religious freedom as outlined in the First Amendment are held together, a new vision of freedom emerges, one in which free exercise includes not just the right to privately “hold” certain beliefs, but the public right to enact and embody one’s commitments, while disestablishment ensures that the government does not use its power to establish one particular religion as dominant.
Maintaining the full principle of religious freedom would, however, significantly change the current practice of both disestablishment and free exercise. If disestablishment were taken seriously in this way, the American government could no longer use its power in ways both direct and indirect to maintain Christian dominance in the United States. So, too, public advocates of the free exercise of religion would need to significantly change how they articulate their positions. As matters stand now, most religious advocates argue that their position should be established in law and that it should be so established on the basis of their claim to religious authority. Members of the U.S. Senate, for example, regularly make use of Christian language and quote from the Christian bible in advocating legislation. Were disestablishment in force, public religious expression could become even more profuse, but lawmakers could not make laws by claiming religious truth. In simultaneously respecting disestablishment and free exercise, such expression would have to own itself as religious, and it would also face limits created by other forms of expression.
Taking free exercise seriously would also necessarily challenge the Christian dominance of U.S. public life in so far as free expression is currently claimed most often on behalf of dominant forms of Christianity. As legal scholar Frederick Mark Geddicks reports in his 1995 book, The Rhetoric of Church and State: A Critical Analysis of Religion Clause Jurisprudence, “No Jewish, Muslim, or Native American plaintiff has ever prevailed on a free exercise claim before the Supreme Court.” Truly embracing free expression means that ideas from more perspectives would be available in the public sphere. All religious points of view would be expressed in relation to others, and none could claim dominance simply because it represents the supposed view of the majority or because of the supposed Christian or Judeo-Christian heritage of the United States. Such claims do not take seriously the robust nature of religious freedom when free exercise is conjoined with disestablishment.
The idea of multiple visions of the good life is central to democracy. And yet we have not been able to integrate this idea fully into the practice of American democracy. Rather, we shift back and forth between a commitment to a multiplicity of visions and an assumption that majority rule means that those who don’t share the dominant tradition should assimilate into it. The protection of minorities—not just of minority rights but of minority participation in public debate—is essential, because the concept of freedom itself depends on it.
I have presented only one alternative interpretation of religious freedom, one that might permit more religious expression in public (something desired by religious advocates). This expression would, however, differ from current practice in that it would support a broader sense of free expression, and it would be within the parameters of an actual rather than a putative disestablishment (something desired by advocates of church-state separation).
Such changes would alter the structure of contemporary debates and shift affinities and alliances. They would not, however, make all participants in the debates happy, especially those who desire the establishment of their particular ideas of Christianity in U.S. government. We must ask whether we as a society are willing to embrace the demands of freedom or whether we prefer a version of freedom that is structured to reinforce dominance.
The ethos of public engagement encouraged by this version of religious freedom also brings it more in line with meanings of academic freedom that focus on free expression (rather than freedom from expression). Legislative efforts like that in Arizona seek to privatize views that might offend students’ religious perceptions by offering potentially less offensive “alternatives.” Through these means, the students’ freedom is supposed to be protected, but the view of freedom that I have sketched out suggests that such a move violates both academic and religious freedom. The Arizona proposal would have limited expression in the classroom, forcing controversial discussion out of the public sphere and into the private one. Students would have been protected from conflict, but they would also have lost the opportunity for public engagement with those who hold different views. Academic engagement with religious viewpoints is part of a free and fair public life, but it is not the approach that proponents of the new freedom” seek. They seek to limit expression by privatizing some views so as to establish dominance for their own.
New Possibilities
As part of our Difficult Dialogues project, Barnard will sponsor a faculty seminar that will ask whether there are other ways to envision freedom, ways that might allow us to pursue a broader effort to create new forms of free public expression and, in so doing, create new avenues for defending academic freedom. We hope to bring out differences that have, until now, been privately held, and create change through mutual exchange.
Rethinking academic freedom will not stop those who wish to use the language of freedom for cynical political purposes, nor will it assuage the resentment of those who believe that the academy is fundamentally opposed to their worldview. Rethinking the meaning of freedom can, however, open new possibilities for those who want to promote free inquiry and respect religious commitment.
In its first year, the seminar will explore why religion presents such a quintessential problem to modern freedom and how the predicament it presents might produce different means of approaching the question of freedom. In its second year, the focus of the seminar will expand beyond the question of religion to other types of conflict, such as those arising over gender, race, ethnicity, nationalism, and language. Intellectually, the seminar will provide a new framework (or frameworks) that will allow for changes in the structure of the conflicts themselves.
The participants will drive the content and conversation by exploring cases they have experienced in their classrooms, research, and conversations with colleagues. Have they been attacked by those who would limit their freedom, for example? Do they have questions about how allowing freedom to others might limit their own expression? Which venues are appropriate for exploring which types of questions?
By moving back and forth between the specifics of the cases and the more abstract questions of freedom and religion, the seminar will remain both grounded in the realities of contemporary conflict and open to expansive possibilities that are often hard to see, and even harder to realize, amid conflict.
The seminar will shape both ongoing research projects and the teaching of each faculty member participant, extending the impact of the seminar well beyond those immediately involved. Not only will all of the students taught by the faculty participants benefit from the insights produced through the seminar, but these discussions will also become part of the life of the Barnard community as a whole.
In the end, our project aims to change the culture of Barnard so that civility is seen not as a reason to avoid difficult conversations but as a rule of engagement for such interactions; freedom and mutual respect—not simply “tolerance”—for difference are the goals.
Important curricular efforts that expand the intellectual scope and impact of the project will accompany the seminar. Barnard religion scholars John Stratton Hawley and Randall Balmer will develop and team-teach a seminar titled “Religion Versus the Academy,” which will address the challenges of teaching about religion (specifically Hinduism and Christianity) in an academic setting. Religion professors must apply the same rigorous critical sensibilities to their subject as they would to any other in the academy. At the same time, they must recognize that the classroom will probably include some people (the instructor among them) whose histories, identities, practices, and beliefs are implicated in the subjects being studied.
Educating students about religion in a world where religion matters deeply to many people requires extraordinary sensitivity, and the process often generates conflict. Religion professors cannot, however, shrink from these conflicts, a fact that will be covered in the seminar. Hawley will share with students specific challenges he has faced in teaching a course titled “Hinduism Here,” and Balmer will explore the “intelligent design” debate.
Another key component of the Barnard project will be the development of an addition to a program called “Reacting to the Past.” Pioneered by Barnard, the program consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned “roles” with “victory objectives” informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Existing games in the “Reacting” series include a trial of Socrates, set in fifth-century Greece, B.C.E., with Plato’s Republic as the main evidentiary text and a game about defining India as a nation, set in 1945, with the Koran and the literature of Hindu revival and Islamic nationalism as the main texts. The program’s founder, historian Mark Carnes, will direct a team of scholars, activists, and members of international organizations in developing a new game, “The Founding of Israel, 1947–48.” Student roles will be developed and documents gathered to inform and enrich the game in a safe but challenging environment. The “Reacting” pedagogy will help to break down myths and immerse students in the different politics that shaped Middle Eastern identities.
These curricular efforts take on some of the most difficult dialogues in the world today, but such challenging topics are the necessary testing grounds for any concept of academic freedom robust enough to sustain public engagement in the current climate. As Barnard’s initial explorations around this project showed, mainstream understandings of conflict encourage community members to maintain views that sustain conflicts without engaging in any communal process around them. As a result, issues tend to “flare up” periodically as some incident pierces the patina of civility.
But these flare-ups typically lead to little or no change in either the positions or the relations of the participants. By engaging in conversations around conflicts, the project hopes to move below the surface of civility before another incident makes further conversation more difficult. In addition, the goal is to lay a groundwork for continuing engagement long after the project’s conclusion.
Engaging with difference in a spirit of curiosity, integrity, and courage is basic to the academic freedom that defines the intellectual life of great academic institutions. Such institutions must be spaces within which faculty and students can freely express minority points of view and controversial ideas and engage in difficult conversations in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Graduates of such institutions will, in turn, be better prepared to provide leadership to question—What is the meaning of academic freedom?—we hope to create opportunities for public engagement that challenge this polarization and increase free exchange.
Notes
1. For a list of state bills, see the AAUP Web site. Back to text.
2. See Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, the 2003 book I co-authored with Ann Pellegrini. Many other examples appear regularly in the conduct of the U.S. government, from debates over whether the congressional chaplain can be a non-Protestant, to the Bible reading by Sen. Robert Byrd on the floor of the U.S. Senate to support his vote in favor of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, to U.S. Supreme Court decisions that depend on religious or Christian morality. Back to text.
Jakobsen is director of the Center for Research on Women and principal investigator for the Difficult Dialogues project at Barnard College , the subject of her Academe article. She can be reached at jjakobsen@barnard.edu.
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