|
« AAUP Homepage
|
The Value of Limitations
When is a limit not a constraint?
When it's a professor's religious conviction.
By Lee Hardy
I was recently afforded an outsider’s view of the Christian liberal arts college by the American author Wallace Stegner. In his novel Crossing to Safety, the narrator enters the academic job market but finds his initial efforts both meager and unpromising. “A dozen letters had produced only a nibble,” he writes. “It came from a Lutheran college in Illinois, and I might have pursued even that possibility if they had not wanted me, before further discussion, to declare my belief in the Apostles’ Creed, the Augsburg Confession, and the principles of higher Christian education.”
The passage made me laugh for two different reasons. I laughed mostly out of recognition. Having made my academic home at a Christian liberal arts college, I am all too familiar with creedal requirements and the incessant discussion of the principles of higher Christian education. But I also laughed at the apparent incongruity of the Lutheran request. It seemed so quaint and provincial, even irrelevant. Why should a promising young author, recently published in the Atlantic Monthly, have to profess an allegiance to the Augsburg Confession in order to teach English in Illinois?
The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, issued jointly by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Universities) recognizes the right of religious bodies to establish educational institutions that require such professions—as long as the limitations on academic freedom are stated clearly in writing at the time of appointment. In this respect, Stegner’s Lutheran college did well, communicating its requirements up front. But if, as the 1940 Statement maintains, academic freedom is “fundamental to the advancement of truth,” why would any academic institution limit such freedom? Why hamper the search for truth with such extraneous requirements? Apparently, the only plausible explanation is that such institutions are not really interested in the search for truth; rather, they are in the business of imposing religious dogma on their students. They are, in the words of the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles, an “instrument of propaganda” rather than research; they were built for inculcation, not inquiry.
Religion as Academic Liability
Writing in the winter 1992 issue of Faculty Dialogue, a publication of the Institute for Christian Leadership, David Horner, a recent president of North Park College and Theological Seminary, admits that although the principle of academic freedom “presupposes a position of institutional neutrality with respect to all issues of truth,” Christian colleges are “patently not neutral as institutions on all issues of truth.” The Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, for example, requires that all of its member institutions hire only confessing Christians as full-time faculty. This requirement, Horner says, is “a clearly nonacademic consideration.” A Christian college must limit academic freedom because such limitation is “necessary to support the institution’s purposes not only of learning but also of faith.”
Horner suggests that in light of the tension between the demands of free inquiry and the need for religious inculcation, Christian colleges have two options: either redefine academic freedom or limit it and be up front and principled about it. He chooses the second option. But he appears to do so with an uneasy conscience. By maintaining strict neutrality and placing no restrictions on academic freedom, secular universities, it seems, demonstrate that they are utterly serious about the search for truth. By restricting academic freedom on the basis of religious dogma, Christian colleges show that they are not, and they might as well admit it. They have nonacademic concerns that intersect and restrict academic activity on their campuses. In the language of the AAUP’s 1965 “Advisory Letter on Religious Limitations,” cited in the 1967 book Academic Freedom and Tenure, these colleges operate according to “two standards.”
In this article, I propose to explore Horner’s first option, the conceptual reconsideration of academic freedom. I will argue that, in an important sense, creedal requirements may be said to promote, rather than limit, academic freedom. Thus the religious tradition of a church-related college can be seen from the inside as an academic asset rather than an academic liability, as an intellectual resource instead of a restriction. Furthermore, I will argue that all inquiry is in fact constrained in certain ways, that the search for truth is always bound by certain preconceived opinions. Hence, religiously determined boundaries for inquiry need not mean that research conducted at a church-related institution of higher learning is a gross exception to the rule of normal inquiry; such boundaries need not exclude religious institutions from the circle of “authentic seats of higher learning,” as a subcommittee of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure suggested in a 1988 document dealing with academic freedom at religiously affiliated institutions.1
Freedom to Run
As a rule, humans work in groups on the things they care about. To enhance my running abilities, for example, I might join others in a running club. Together, we might agree to submit to a training regimen we think will enhance our ability to run far distances at a decent clip. Perhaps membership in such a club would be conditional upon following the agreed-upon regimen. I may sometimes resent that the regimen’s requirements conflict with my transient desires for junk food and afternoon naps. Yet I stick to it because I judge its effects on my running to be more important than complete and unfocused freedom in what I do and eat.
Few would be tempted to say that I was imposed upon unfairly by the group I joined. I became part of it voluntarily, fully cognizant of the conditions of membership. Some might wonder why I would give up my freedom to do and eat as I please. But I don’t see it that way at all. I am willing to have what might be called my negative freedom constrained in order to enhance my positive freedom, to reduce my opportunities in order to increase my abilities.
Free Association
At the end of my last year in graduate school at Duquesne University, I attended a philosophy department party on the north side of Pittsburgh. With all my coursework behind me, I stood and chatted excitedly under a clear evening sky, a cold can of Iron City in one hand and my infant daughter on the other. I can remember telling one of my fellow grad students—with an air of happy anticipation—that I had just been offered a position at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She frowned. “Well,” she said, “I guess that’s good—if you can put up with the religious dogma.” She was assuming, of course, that because we were philosophers, we had no use for religious authority, that we were committed to basing all our beliefs on the deliverances of pure reason alone, not the dictates of a church, and that, for the likes of us, teaching at a church-related college would be a constant threat to our intellectual integrity.
Had I the time, I would have tried to explain that I actually agreed with the college’s religious dogma—not only agreed with it, but heartily embraced it after a period of religious searching. So the creedal requirements hardly represented a form of external coercion for me. Granted, they were real limitations on my belief. As a member of the faculty, I couldn’t believe just anything in matters religious. But they were limitations consonant with my own convictions. I did not take myself to be entering the academic equivalent of a jail. I looked forward to working with my friends in faith, to operating in a context where I could freely draw on the full range of my convictions in my teaching and my research, a freedom I was not likely to enjoy in an officially secular environment.
Much of the literature on academic freedom at religious colleges and universities seems to miss this point entirely. A religiously affiliated institution of higher learning is, after all, an elective association within civil society. It is not a political society into which people are born willy-nilly, nor is it the only game in town. Faculty members are not compelled to teach at a church-related college or university against their will. Treating the academy as if it were the state and not a free association of the likeminded, the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles refers to “institutions which impose upon their faculties doctrinal standards of a sectarian or partisan character.” (Emphasis added.) Similarly, in the 1993 book Freedom and Tenure in the Academy, philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson and legal scholar Matthew Finkin speak of doctrinal requirements as a form of coercion, where academic institutions “police” their faculties, employing the techniques of terror.
I find this language wholly foreign to my experience as a faculty member at Calvin College—and about as appropriate as charging the Sierra Club with using terrorist tactics for expecting its employees to be committed to a strong environmental agenda. I endorse the idea of a liberal state that is neutral on issues of God and the good in order to accommodate deep cultural diversity, but the free associations of civil society should not be required to adopt a position of neutrality on these issues as well. In fact, requiring such neutrality would be an excellent way to eliminate the cultural diversity that liberal society is designed to protect.
Run with the Lutherans
Creedal requirements do not represent coercive constraints on those who agree with them in the first place, and they are not imposed on those who do not agree with them. But this fact does not in itself spare the church-related college from the charge that it makes use of nonacademic criteria in hiring, promoting, and firing, or that it compromises itself as an academic institution insofar as it makes use of these criteria.
Suppose we had a running club that, in addition to its obligatory training regimen, also required its members to be Missouri Synod Lutherans. Why would a running club do such a thing? Why would it impose nonathletic criteria for membership in an athletic club? The most plausible explanation for this imposition is that the club is really trying to do two different things at once: enhance running competitiveness and provide Lutheran fellowship. Of course, people have a right to form such a club. But if they were serious about running—and about winning—why would they? They could be a more competitive athletic club if they opened their ranks to members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, and much more competitive if they simply dropped the religious requirement altogether.
The reaction we might have to the idea of a Lutheran running club approximates the reaction of a significant portion of today’s academic community to any institution of higher learning that places religious limitations on academic freedom. Granted, religious communities have a right to establish and maintain such academies. But why would they? Evidently, because they have nonacademic purposes in mind.
I would argue, however, that creedal requirements are academic considerations—and important ones at that. A religious community is formed by a creed that affirms what that community takes to be the best distillation we have to date of the truth that has been delivered to us about ourselves and the world in which we live. In it, we derive a sense of our origin and destiny, our condition before God, our status in the universe, the virtues that befit a human being, and the basis of human hope and solidarity. We do not take this body of belief to be the simple product of human reflection, poetic invention, psychological need, or social interests. Rather, we take it to be a response to God’s self-disclosure, delivered to us through the agency of the church, so that our ignorance about fundamental matters might be overcome. We receive it gratefully, as one would receive a map and compass in the wilderness.
Clearly, the acceptance of a creed is not irrelevant to the aims of the academy. The academy is dedicated to the pursuit of truth. In expressing and aligning our beliefs about fundamental matters, the creeds—if they are right—can enhance our ability to track the truth about the rest of the world. That is, they can enhance our positive freedom to know the truth by removing a key internal constraint: our striking ignorance of how things stand concerning the ultimate status of God, ourselves, and the world we inhabit. The creeds can therefore be seen as an academic asset, not a liability, as an intellectual resource, not a restriction.
Yet the objection might still be lodged against the church-related college or university that, however much sense it might make to conduct inquiry on the basis of what one takes to be true, it is nonetheless a deficient mode of inquiry, because certain beliefs are granted special immunity against doubt and question. Research becomes dogmatic.
In the 1972 book The Concept of Academic Freedom, philosopher John Searle notes that the received version of academic freedom follows not only from a heightened appreciation of the value of knowledge, but also from a specific theory of knowledge: the broadly inductive methodology recommended by the Enlightenment conception of science. Recent work in the history and philosophy of science, in hermeneutical theory, and in analytic meta-epistemology, however, suggests that the picture of knowledge acquisition promoted by the Age of Reason is deeply mistaken.
We do not approach the world with blank minds. The search for truth is in fact always guided by background assumptions about the nature of the field under investigation; the most appropriate methods for ascertaining the truth in such a field; and the relevant criteria for appraising theories, laws, explanations, and interpretations. These field-specific assumptions are in turn typically embedded in more general epistemic values and metaphysical commitments that frame the search for truth.
Granted, these preconceived opinions serve as “prior constraints” on the freedom of inquiry, but they also make inquiry possible in the first place. When a field of research is defined, background assumptions open that field for research and set up rails to guard against error. It is simply not true that in serious research everything is up for grabs and nothing is assumed. Without certain assumptions, there would be no research.
Research conducted at religiously affiliated institutions of higher learning is in principle no different when constrained by religious belief. The church-related academy is an elective association of scholars working in a tradition of inquiry according to constraints it believes will assist it in tracking the truth about the world. In any tradition of inquiry, the existence of prior constraints on research is not so much the issue as whether reflection on those constraints is possible under their auspices.
Any tradition of inquiry can atrophy, become rigid and inflexible, or persist as frozen orthodoxy in the face of growing evidence that calls for its revision. The institutions and communities in which inquiry is conducted must provide the appropriate mechanisms for periodic reflection on their operating assumptions. In the broadly Christian intellectual tradition, we have good and definite reasons for engaging in this kind of reflection: we take the human intellect to be both finite and fallen and therefore fallible. Even our best interpretations of the truth we take to be revealed to us may on certain points fall short, distorted by particular social interests, unjustified philosophical assumptions, cultural biases, and the like. Thus our tradition motivates us to reflect on our own tradition of interpretation and to tolerate such reflection for the sake of truth. One can embrace dogma without being dogmatic.
A Suggestion
The AAUP was founded during the heyday of American progressivism, a broad cultural movement that invested its hopes for the future of humanity in the free and untrammeled development of the natural and social sciences. It also posited a conflict in principle between science and religion. In fact, it looked forward to the eventual triumph of science over religion; science was to replace religion as the basis of human public life and culture.
It is unfortunate that the purposes of the AAUP are sometimes expressed in the language of this bygone modernist movement. The AAUP recently sponsored a series of fine conferences on the issue of academic freedom at religiously affiliated institutions of higher learning. It has also produced an impressive track record of context-sensitive casework at religious colleges and universities. These efforts suggest that the language of American progressivism now lags behind the current reality of the Association.
In its 1970 interpretation of the 1940 Statement, the AAUP declared that, “Most church-related institutions no longer need or desire the departure from the principle of academic freedom implied in the 1940 Statement, and we do not now endorse such a departure.” Much of the theoretical discussion of academic freedom and religious identity still revolves around this de-endorsement clause, the meaning of which has been the subject of much debate. In an interpretation offered in 1988, the 1970 de-endorsement clause was taken to mean that an academic institution that requires fidelity to religious doctrine thereby forfeits its right to represent itself as an “authentic seat of higher learning.” The Association’s Committee A published the 1988 interpretation in Academe for comment, but did not endorse it. The stated reasons for not endorsing the 1988 interpretation, however, later failed to command consensus within Committee A. So, to all appearances, the issue remains conceptually unresolved.
My own view is that the AAUP would do best to join the 1940 Statement directly to the recommendations set forth in Committee A’s 1999 report The “Limitations” Clause in the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure: Some Operating Guidelines, and consign the 1970 and 1988 statements on the limitations clause to the archives for future historians to ponder. In this way, the Association could help religiously affiliated institutions of higher learning work on significant due process issues without challenging their academic authenticity or suggesting that they would be better off if they were wholly secular. Many members of the AAUP are people of faith who harbor a deep respect for the religious traditions of those academies in which they have long labored, even if the policies and practices of the academies sometimes give them trouble. Distancing itself from the modernist bias in some of its programmatic statements would make the Association more genuinely representative of the diversity within its own ranks.
Note
1. See “The ‘Limitations’ Clause in the 1940 Statement of Principles” in the September–October 1988 issue of Academe. Back to text
Lee Hardy is professor of philosophy at Calvin College.
|