Getting Religion in the Public Research University

Michigan tackles religious diversity at many levels in this Difficult Dialogues project.

By Matthew L. Kaplan

Like most other public institutions today, Michigan conceives of itself as largely secular. Although religion played a defining role for students and faculty early in the university’s history—it was not until the late nineteenth century, under the leadership of President James Angell, that students were released from mandatory daily attendance at chapel—religion lost its central role on campus as Michigan increasingly modeled itself on the German research university and articulated its dedication to academic freedom. The activities of intellectual inquiry and the transmission of knowledge came to be seen as separate from issues of religious faith: dispassionate investigation entails purposefully suspending individual beliefs in the pursuit of knowledge, and a critical perspective on all fixed beliefs became central to disciplinary inquiry. Such a perspective has been particularly important in the sciences, where research sometimes challenges religious explanations of the origins and nature of the natural world.

Today, religion is certainly not absent from our campus. Michigan has a strong academic program in religion that includes several nationally recognized scholars. But these disciplines take an academic approach to religion, not the faith-based approach relied upon at seminaries and universities with strong religious affiliations. Institutional funds do not support the various campus chaplaincies and religious organizations at Michigan, and personal religious views, practices, and identities have been treated as private matters. This tradition of institutional separation from issues of faith is, however, being challenged by growing political and social movements that emphasize the importance of religious faith in all aspects of intellectual life, including the sciences.

On January 27, 2006, the online magazine Inside Higher Ed captured this perspective in an article titled “Faith on the Quad.” The article quoted William M. Sullivan, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who explained why twenty-five scholars from different disciplines and faiths have been working on a new statement about the role of religion on campus. “To live in America is to live in a religiously charged atmosphere,” Sullivan said, “and that includes colleges—whether they like it or not.”

News stories about religion and higher education are now common. Whether they concern specific  incidents (such as when residence assistants at the University of Wisconsin were first denied permission then allowed to offer Bible study in their dorm rooms) or national trends (surveys finding increased  spirituality and religiosity among first-year students), these reports highlight the timeliness of the Ford Foundation’s efforts to stimulate productive dialogue about religion.

Campus Conflicts

Recently, Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching held the first event under the Difficult Dialogues banner, a seminar for faculty titled “Student Religion, Faith, and Spirituality in the Classroom and Beyond: How Do Faculty Respond?” A group of thirty faculty members from across campus showed up to share their perspectives, struggles, and strategies. The problems reported were truly striking. See “Campus Conflicts,” the sidebar accompanying this article, for details.

On a larger scale, the campus climate at Michigan sometimes leads to tensions based not solely on religion but also on the intersection of multiple identities and viewpoints, such as sexual orientation, ethnicity, or political conviction. For example, a 2004 ballot initiative in Michigan to ban gay marriage exposed tensions between and within campus religious communities and those related to sexual orientation. Conflicts have also arisen in connection with the political situation in the Middle East, which is especially fraught at Michigan. The campus has one of the largest Jewish student bodies in the country and is part of a geographical area that is home to the biggest Arab-heritage community outside the Middle East. Like many other universities, Michigan has seen vandalism and hate speech directed against Muslim, Jewish, and Arab students.

The implications for academic freedom are clear. We have already witnessed ways in which campus tensions might have a chilling effect on topics covered in classes and the freedom of faculty and students to express their viewpoints or engage students in critical reflection. For example, one faculty member teaching a course on a sacred text was confronted by a student who disagreed with his approach and wanted to record lectures in order to document “bias.” Conservative activist David Horowitz, who operates a well-funded campaign alleging bias in the classroom, listed several scholars of religion—Marc Ellis ( Jewish liberation theology), Amina McCloud (Islam), and Michael Eric Dyson (race, religion, and African American culture)—in his recent book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

Although such threats of surveillance and exposure to political notoriety may not affect a tenured senior professor, what impact do they have on a junior faculty member, a graduate student new to the classroom, or a student at any level who is considering a field of study? Courses in the life sciences or courses that treat religion from an academic perspective may challenge students’ worldviews and lead them to reconcile their preconceptions and beliefs with new and unfamiliar points of view. How do faculty remain intellectually honest and help students who are struggling to make sense of what they are learning? And what is the position of students and faculty who are not connected to a faith tradition? Do we need to ensure that expanded dialogue about religion and spirituality does not impinge on their freedom from religion, on both a personal and a curricular level?

As a result of such uncertainties and tensions, the role of religion and personal faith in civic and scientific life often remains unexplored, and important learning opportunities are missed. The timing of our Difficult Dialogues grant turned out to be auspicious. When we received the grant, we had just completed a campus-wide “theme semester” that explored the cultural treasures of the Arab Middle East across many disciplines. For the past fifteen years, Michigan has successfully organized theme semesters on topics ranging from conflict and community to Brown v. Board of Education. Theme semesters are sponsored by Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the largest undergraduate college on campus. They consist of course offerings as well as co-curricular activities focused on the chosen topic.

We decided to build on the cross-campus success of theme semesters by embedding grant-funded activities within a planned winter 2006 theme semester titled “Exploring Evolution.” The activities included a university-wide seminar titled “When Faith Meets Science: An Evolving Dialogue on New Choices and New Technologies.” We will incorporate additional grant-funded activities within the theme for fall 2006 and winter 2007, “The Theory and Practice of Citizenship: From the Local to the Global,” including roundtables on the role of faith in prompting community service.

Grant Activities

The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching will take the lead in coordinating the activities funded by Difficult Dialogues. The center collaborates with all nineteen schools and colleges at the university to encourage and support good teaching on the Ann Arbor campus. The grant activities described below will involve faculty and staff members, students, and community members.

The Ford Faculty Fellows Program will bring together faculty members from different disciplines who will pursue projects related to religion in their disciplines. One group will critically examine aspects of religion and faith, a type of inquiry now common for subjects such as race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Many of these projects will involve course development on topics such as the role of Islam in the African American community, ties between secularity and modernity, and the relationship between religion, nationalism, and violence. Other faculty fellows will collect data on the role of religion in professional schools and develop suggestions for pedagogies suited to the examination of difficult issues related to religion.

The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching’s Players Theatre Program, which develops interactive performances on diversity and institutional transformation for faculty and graduate students, will create a sketch about religious pluralism. Research for the sketch will rely on focus groups and interviews with faculty members, students, and community members. The final sketch will be presented to audiences of instructors (faculty and teaching assistants) at campus-wide and disciplinary-specific events (such as departmental retreats).

Through a series of roundtable discussions, the Edward Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning will explore the complex relationship between faith communities and university-sponsored community service. One set of round tables will invite faculty members, students, and community members to discuss the relationship between specific religious traditions and the idea of service. In a second set of roundtables, an invited group will discuss the involvement of public universities with faith-based organizations engaged in community service.

The Life Sciences and Society Program will host forum discussions with students, faculty members, and community religious leaders on ethical and religious concerns associated with advances in the life sciences, such as genetics, genomics, stem cell research, and prenatal genetic testing. Each forum will encourage discussion of the diversity of perspectives and ethical, moral, and ethnic considerations related to the topic at hand. One such forum was offered as part of “When Faith Meets Science,” the seminar mentioned above. The program will create a set of curricular modules on forum topics that can be used in classes as stand-alone presentations.

The Program on Intergroup Relations sponsors dialogues that bring together students across identity groups—race, class, religion, or sexual orientation, for example—to work toward a greater understanding of group identity, explore intergroup conflicts, and imagine ways to build multicultural communities. For the Difficult Dialogues project, the program will create new dialogue courses with an explicit focus on understanding religious pluralism in a diverse democracy. Dialogues might bring together members of different religious groups or those interested in analyzing the intersection of faith and social identity.

Faculty members from the Michigan Community Scholars Program will focus on religion in their monthly seminar, aiming to develop or revise undergraduate courses. They will also sponsor exchanges about pedagogical strategies for facilitating difficult dialogues, navigation of religious differences within the university community, and conflicts between personal religious practice and the demands of academia.

All residence assistants at the university must participate in a ten-week intensive course titled “Social Psychology in Community Settings.” The Office of Residence Education will revise this course to focus more explicitly on religion and sexual orientation so that residence assistants are better prepared to facilitate productive exchanges on these topics.

Since 1994, Provost’s Seminars on Teaching have brought together between 100 and 150 faculty members semiannually for lively and substantive discussion of teaching and learning. In winter 2007, at the end of the Difficult Dialogues project, we will hold a provost’s seminar on the role of religion in teaching and learning to share the results of the project with the campus community and, we hope, to stimulate further activity on campus after the grant period concludes. We will include students and community leaders in this seminar to broaden the dialogue.

Taken together, these activities represent an ambitious attempt to explore the role of religion and religious pluralism at a public research university. Although the time frame of the grant is relatively short, it is helping us to build on the university’s solid record of grappling with difficult issues. Only by engaging with these conflicts can we fulfill the highest aspirations of the university: to prepare students to assume leadership roles on campus and in their communities and to embrace and model respect for diversity,   including religious pluralism.

Note

1. In Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, white students filed class-action challenges to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policies and the admissions processes of its law and undergraduate schools. The students alleged that the university discriminated against them by using different standards to admit students of different races. On June 23, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in a 5 to 4 decision the law school admissions program, finding diversity in higher education to be a compelling state interest. The Court noted the individuality of review in the law school admissions process and held that diversity can be a “plus” factor in admissions if it is considered in the context of a “highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file, giving serious consideration to all the ways an applicant might contribute to a diverse educational environment.” In contrast, in a 6 to 3 decision in Gratz, the Court struck down Michigan’s undergraduate admissions program. The decision upheld, however, the concept of affirmative action and diversity as a compelling interest. But it found Michigan’s consideration of race in its undergraduate admissions not to be tailored narrowly enough to “achieve the interest in educational diversity” that the university claimed as the justification for its program. Back to text. 

Kaplan is associate director of the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan. He is principal investigator for the university’s Difficult Dialogues project, the subject of his Academe article. The project’s Web address is http://www.crlt.umich.edu/DD. Kaplan can be reached at mlkaplan@umich.edu.

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