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My Religious College, My Secular Profession
When the guidelines of your professional association conflict with those of your college, whose ethics win?
By Peter J. Hill
My business and economics department is hiring for a tenure-track position, and I wanted to advertise it on Job Openings for Economists (JOE), a listing sponsored by the American Economic Association (AEA). I ran into a roadblock, however, on the JOE Web site.
“All members of the American Economic Association,” it indicates, “have a professional obligation to list their job openings in JOE.” So far, so good. The policy makes sense: having a central clearinghouse of all job opportunities lowers search costs and levels the playing field between well-known and less-famous departments, so we should all agree to advertise in JOE.
However, later on the same page the AEA says, “Listings that indicate discrimination on the basis of religion are not permitted even if the employer is eligible to discriminate on the basis of religion under Sec. 703(e) of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” My institution does fall into that category; Wheaton College in Illinois, where I am employed, is an explicitly Christian school that hires and retains as employees only those who fully identify with its institutional faith commitment. The primary focus of that commitment is a belief in the deity of Christ and his atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Wheaton is legally allowed to set religious standards as conditions of employment. Our job advertisement contains an explicit statement about our faith position and the requirement that employees agree with that position. The advertisement reads, “Wheaton College is a highly selective Christian liberal arts college in the broad evangelical Protestant tradition whose faculty affirm a Statement of Faith and adhere to lifestyle expectations. The College complies with federal and state guidelines for nondiscrimination in employment. Women and minority candidates for this position are welcomed.”
We had an interesting problem. Several members of our department, including me, belong to the AEA. We would like to fulfill our professional obligations, but we would also like to advertise our job opening as widely as possible. But, evidently, the AEA regards colleges that require a religious commitment as beyond the pale in terms of acceptable conditions of employment.
Professional Police?
Now, I don’t want to pick a fight with the AEA. I have been a member for almost thirty years and have found it to be a useful professional association. And I believe the AEA, as a private, voluntary organization, should have the legal right to determine which job announcements it accepts and which it rejects. Still, the larger question of the relationship between professional academic associations and their members who teach at sectarian colleges is an interesting and troubling one. Is it appropriate for the AEA to police the ways in which private academic institutions organize themselves? Is academia well served by a policy that refuses colleges like Wheaton access to the regular job listings for economists?
I recognize that many types of discrimination are invidious, but aren’t attempts to eliminate all discrimination fraught with problems? Don’t most institutions have some starting points to which they ask all faculty to adhere? Many secular colleges begin with the idea that there are no moral absolutes or organizing principles for life and, therefore, faculty should not allow their own moral or religious frameworks to stand in the way of good scholarship and teaching. But such a position is a particular view of the world. What about another perspective that says there are some moral or religious truths that serve well as starting points for academic endeavor? Both positions are value-laden, and I think both should be options for organizing academic life. Having secular and sectarian colleges is a type of diversity in education that we should encourage or at least not actively discourage.
We in higher education accept wide differences in perspective among individuals. We don’t categorically rule out particular positions just because they aren’t the dominant ones in society. Why isn’t it also useful to have groups of individuals who voluntarily join together around a particular truth claim, such as a set of religious beliefs, engage in academic pursuits? I don’t expect that most colleges and universities will want to use Wheaton’s organizing principles. But shouldn’t Wheaton be allowed to participate in debates starting from its own assumptions about the world and how it operates?
Other meta-assumptions or background conditions are allowed, but ours are ruled out. The founders of this country found religious freedom—both individual freedom and freedom of association—crucial enough to codify in the first article of the Bill of Rights. That is the basis on which the exemption granted to religious organizations in the Civil Rights Act makes sense. Is religious freedom a reality if the law (or the actions of groups like the AEA) prohibits religious organizations from perpetuating their existence by finding and gathering like-minded people who share their perspective on the world?
Any discussion of religious colleges and academic freedom eventually gets around to the question of how a faculty member’s religious or moral perspective affects how he or she does scholarship and teaching. For example, when I posted an earlier version of this essay on a blog, one respondent asked how I could possibly teach a different perspective on demand curves than the standard one of neoclassical economics. I do not. At that level, my “Principles of Microeconomics” class resembles others at religiously pluralistic colleges and universities.
But the technical aspects of demand curves are not all that the discipline deals with. Every time economists use the terms “optimal” or “efficient,” they introduce value statements, in particular ones about who and what counts in the valuation of human well-being.1 Making such decisions involves complex moral and ethical judgments. One cannot enter into that debate without some moral commitments. My theology (and the theology of Wheaton College) gives me a basis for answering such questions. The concept that all human beings are created in the image of God gives a strong egalitarian flavor to policy prescriptions and also means that societal calculations of human well-being must recognize the dignity and worth of all members of the society.
Not Value-Free
Mine is clearly an ethical or value-based perspective. Other economists have a different grounding for their perspective, but their positions are not value-free, either. Of course, many economists arrive at egalitarian value commitments by way of other assumptions (it is not only Christianity that safeguards human dignity), but different starting points have different consequences. Most economists are utilitarians, ranking policy by the sum of human satisfaction generated by that policy. But what if certain policies maximize welfare but violate basic human rights? The utilitarian calculus has to be defended against such charges. There are reasonable defenses of the utilitarian position, but these defenses involve normative claims at many levels.
We at religious colleges also believe our relationship with students is deeply influenced by who we and they are as people. Wheaton is a residential college with much professor-student interaction. We are clear about our worldview and values when we recruit students. Thus we have a community of students and professors who are voluntarily engaged in an educational mission, one that involves more than just transmitting classroom knowledge. We don’t think it is useful to say that professors communicate only value-free facts and that other issues are outside of our purview. We want to educate the whole person. We also want our students to be fully informed about our approach to education to ensure that all participants in our community are there voluntarily. Therefore, requiring a creedal statement of faculty seems to be a reasonable way for us to organize our college.
So, back to the issue of the American Economic Association and JOE. Because Wheaton is acting within its legal rights in demanding that its faculty adhere to a particular set of beliefs, I think the AEA and the larger society would be well served to let our advertisement run. I also believe the fair and honest way to conduct the academic enterprise should be to allow a diverse set of commitments and values to be embodied in different institutions. No education is value-free, and no college’s explicit statement of its values should disqualify it from full participation in the academy.
Note
1. For a discussion of many of the issues in measures of well-being, see Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer, “What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research” in the June 2002 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature.
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Peter Hill is professor of economics at Wheaton College (Illinois).
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