The View from Chapel Hill

Addressing the underlying conflicts between faith and reason in the wake of violence.

By Judith Welch Wegner

“Difficult dialogues” and “Chapel Hill.” Are these words synonymous? It has surely seemed so in recent days. At noon on March 3, a recent Chapel Hill graduate drove a sport-utility vehicle through the center of campus. Revving his car to thirty-five miles per hour, he drove through the free-speech zone near the student union (known as the “Pit”), deliberately striking nine people before speeding away. Police arrived immediately to assist the victims, six of whom were hospitalized for minor injuries. The assailant, meanwhile, called 911 to report where he could be found and to give his name (which the dispatcher had trouble deciphering and which he asked the assailant to repeat again and again). The dispatcher asked the assailant why he had done what he did. The assailant said that he acted to “punish the government of the United States for [its] actions around the world.” His name? Mohammad Taheri-azar, a native of Iran.

The campus stopped, frozen in its tracks. Psychological services were made available to students who were still reeling from the death of a well-loved resident assistant who had fallen through a dorm window just days before. Public safety officials proceeded admirably in providing information as it could properly be disclosed. So, too, did the local courts, setting bail at $5.5 million, after reading out nine counts of assault and attempted murder.

Some students immediately organized a “protest” rally at the Pit—complete with American flags—asserting that the university had wrongly refused to label the Pit incident as “terrorism.” One of the rally’s leaders had sued the university as an incoming first-year undergraduate, challenging the selection of  Michael Sells’s 1999 book, Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations, as the summer reading book for his class. Another had been fired from her position as a columnist for the student newspaper the previous fall after calling for Arab men to be strip-searched. The newspaper covered the March 3 incident heavily, just weeks after it published a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed that it asserted was warranted as part of its responsibility to promote free speech.

In succeeding days, many sought to support Muslim students. Educational programs and panels were presented, and the student government organized a “take back the Pit” event, complete with a bluegrass band. Later in the month, faculty and students gathered for an evening event called “Vigilance Against Hate.” All these travails made one thing clear: we lacked the perspectives, words, and tools we needed to make sense of what has happened at our university.

But even before we experienced our own version of “March madness” this spring, we were seeking ways to improve the potential for respectful exchange of ideas on campus. Last year, I worked with our Faculty Council, leaders in the College of Arts and Sciences, and colleagues in the Division of Student Affairs to craft a proposal for the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues initiative. Ford’s call for proposals noted that college and university presidents had cited worrisome trends on their campuses, including religious intolerance and challenges to academic freedom. Defining these trends as symptoms of the nation’s difficulty in sustaining informed political and civil discourse, the call sought promising approaches for fostering a free and open campus community. Linking academic freedom directly to academic responsibility, the call also pointed to the need to create an atmosphere of mutual respect in which “diversity is examined and seen in the context of a broader set of common values” and means are found to address controversy by “engag[ing] with those with whom one disagrees.” Our proposal built on what we’d learned in our ongoing efforts to grapple with difficult dialogues that had occurred over the past year at UNC. In spring 2004, we had faced an investigation by the federal Office of Civil Rights in the aftermath of an English instructor’s e-mail response to a student who had expressed discomfort with homosexuality on religious grounds. In fall 2004, we had negotiated faculty concerns about a possible gift to the College of Arts and Sciences from a conservative foundation with connections to people who had mocked progressive views.

We proposed a multifaceted strategy for our Difficult Dialogues project, which began early in 2006 and will continue through spring 2008. First, we aim to develop a deeper appreciation for the underlying tensions that fuel conflict on our campus when faith-based convictions and the church of reason come face to face. The UNC Chapel Hill campus differs from colleges and universities in other parts of the country when it comes to religious and spiritual beliefs, partly because 82 percent of entering undergraduates are drawn from North Carolina, a state whose population has strong ties to churches with conservative Protestant views. Not surprisingly, surveys indicate that a high proportion of Carolina students hold religious belief as fundamentally important to their lives. Faculty members, however, are drawn from around the nation and the world, and they often have religious and spiritual viewpoints that differ from the students’. At the same time, the percentage of Carolina students who study abroad is among the highest in the nation, making it imperative for students to appreciate the pluralistic societies they will encounter.

In light of this mix of student and faculty viewpoints, we believed it important to begin by fully exploring underlying views on campus about the intersection of personal belief and intellectual inquiry. These views predicated current controversies, and we felt they needed to be examined before we proceeded to discuss symptoms, be they associated with conflicts about sexual orientation, “intelligent design,” or international events.

We proposed to collaborate with colleagues versed in the powerful approach to deliberation espoused by the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums. That is, we wanted to “name” and “frame” issues as a community on the deeper question of how belief and intellectual inquiry are interrelated in a public university such as our own. (Naming and framing involve choosing an issue to explore, researching it, identifying and categorizing people’s concerns, recognizing the tensions among different viewpoints, and reflecting on the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches to the issue. See www.nifi.org.)

Building on this initial collaboration, we will take several additional steps. Professional development opportunities will help faculty gain skill in constructively shaping discussion of controversial issues in the classroom. In addition, we will enrich our new general education curriculum by incorporating more opportunities for faculty and students to discuss diverse opinions, scientific inquiries, religious and spiritual beliefs, and ethics in a respectful environment. We are also planning extra-curricular student-life activities to stimulate informed discussions of controversial subjects and encourage the exchange of ideas and beliefs.

Scholarly Lessons

We hope that by identifying important scholarly contributions to date, our work will contribute to a national dialogue. We have already learned of notable research that illuminates the culture of higher education and its intersection with religious belief. For example, the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been conducting studies on spirituality among college students and college faculty with the support of the John Templeton Foundation (http://spirituality.ucla.edu).

The study’s findings show how complex the dimensions of religious belief are. Based on information from 3,680 college juniors, the institute reports that 41 percent of students who regard themselves as “highly religious” also view themselves as “conservative or far right.” Forty-four percent identify themselves as “middle of the road” politically, and 15 percent see themselves as “liberal or far left.” African Americans had the highest scores on seven of twelve measures of spirituality and religiousness (religious commitment, religious engagement, ethic of caring, and religious or social conservatism). Whites had the lowest scores on five of twelve indicators (ethic of caring, ecumenical worldview, charitable involvement, spiritual quest, and compassionate self-concept).

More than 80 percent of faculty members surveyed (40,670 individuals on 421 campuses) regarded themselves as “spiritual.” About 18 percent of faculty members at public universities agreed with the statement that “colleges should be concerned with facilitating students’ spiritual development,” compared with 62 percent of faculty members at Catholic colleges. Asked to respond to the statement, “the spiritual dimension of faculty members’ lives has no place in the academy,” about half of faculty at public universities disagreed. Across the whole study population, about half of those in the social sciences, physical sciences, and biological sciences disagreed, as did nearly two-thirds of those in health sciences, education, and business fields.

What do these findings mean in the lives of students? UNC Chapel Hill sociologist Christian Smith, working with sociology graduate student Melinda Lundquist Denton, drew on work from the National Study of Youth and Religion to research the 2005 book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. Smith and Denton found that American adolescents experience and represent in their lives an immense variety of religious and spiritual beliefs. For a significant number of adolescents, religion and spirituality serve as defining features of their lives. For many others, religious practices appear to be important.

Smith and Denton report that many teenagers are inarticulate and confused in talking about religion and spirituality even though they are committed to their religious beliefs. They also found that parents and other adults help to shape teenagers’ religious faith, and they detected a correlation between religious involvement and positive life outcomes for teenagers. In addition, Smith and Denton say that most American teenagers resemble their parents when it comes to religion and that religious youth groups are an important part of the religious and spiritual experiences of a substantial minority of American adolescents.

End to Name-Calling

We have already begun collaborating with colleagues conversant with the techniques recommended by the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums, taking into account the unique characteristics and challenges facing our university. We want to build a capacity for “perspective taking” in sophisticated ways that go to the heart of what we profess. Our most recent work with Margaret Holt, an emeritus professor at the University of Georgia and a Kettering and National Issues associate, has led us deeper into the process of naming and framing the tensions that we have experienced on our campus and that we imagine others have witnessed on theirs.

In exploring the tensions at Chapel Hill, we’ve used words and phrases such as “marginalization,” “academic freedom,” and a range of “convictions” (religious, personal, faith-based, and spiritually derived). In a faculty-student working group, we’ve also discussed concepts like the freedom to express divergent views, tolerance, professional and academic ethics, personal ideologies, intellectual inquiry, and critical thinking. We believe that civil dialogue and the search for common ground are crucial, as are diversity and respect for the “social contract.” Our challenge has been to explore the relationship of powerful touchstones such as these.

At this juncture, we are asking questions such as, Can Chapel Hill faculty and students talk about matters of faith and conscience on this campus? And how should a public university respond to the intersection of faith convictions and intellectual inquiry? We believe that we must explore where, how, and with whom dialogues on these core questions should take place and determine the ground rules that should apply. We want to make deliberation rather than name-calling a habit for students and faculty on our campus.

We take as a given that such deliberation must occur in a context in which academic freedom and mutual respect are accepted as fundamental. These values are integrated into our faculty policies, our student honor code, and our institutional fabric. Now is the time to reiterate their significance and give them renewed life.

We believe we can identify certain legitimate, though disparate, approaches to our core question about the role of faith and conscience in a public university. Some of the approaches we hope to develop and articulate include the following:

• Students in higher education should be familiar with conversations in society about controversies (students will have to identify and engage in difficult discussions once they leave campus and assume their role in civil society, so we need to practice such skills with relevant opportunities while on campus).
  
• Public higher education should separate church and state; church-related institutions are the proper milieu for sacred discussions.
  
• Personal and spiritual beliefs don’t belong in classrooms but should be engaged actively in other settings on the campus.
  

March Madness takes many forms at Chapel Hill, as it does at other institutions around the country. The events of this past March helped us recognize the need to face the fact that we now live in a deeply divided society whose sharp differences often spill over onto our once-tranquil campus environs. It’s time to talk frankly about the problems facing our campuses and our society. We hope that our exploration of the intersection of religious belief and intellectual inquiry in the public square will be a model for further discussions beyond our campus.

Wegner is professor of law and outgoing chair of the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is co-principal investigator with William Andrews, senior associate dean and E.Maynard Adams Professor of English, for the Difficult Dialogues project Wegner writes about. She can be reached at judith_wegner@unc.edu.

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