Sulis Academic Press kindly agreed to make Chapter 12 of my new book available free for download. Chapter 12 summarizes the book’s conclusion and makes four practical suggestions for Christian Universities. I believe reading these nine pages may peek your interest enough to read the whole book. Feel free to download this chapter, read it, and pass it on to others.
I wanted you, my readers, to know that as of yesterday, my book The Christian University and the Academic Establishment is now in print and available. I hope, wish, dream that it will be read and discussed on Christian college and university campuses everywhere. I wrote it because I love the ideal of a Christian college. I believe it would be of interest to anyone who shares my love for Christian education—students, alumni, donors, faculty, staff, administrators, and trustees. Each chapter has questions for discussion at the end, and each theme (sometimes more than one chapter) has “takeaways” at its conclusion. And the last chapter (#12) contains a conclusion and four practical suggestions for Christian universities.
Take a look at the Amazon.com page for the book. Peruse the Table of Contents and the summary Amazon provides. Of course, if you know someone who could benefit from reading it, please recommend it.
In future posts I will quote some excerpts from the book and reflect on them.
Today I want to flesh out an idea I introduced in the previous essay: “Can Christian Scholars (and Colleges) be Academic?” Secular critics of the idea of the Christian college charge that such colleges cannot live up to the ideal of a university. As I observed in that essay, according to the reigning model of academia,
to be a real college or university, that is, to live up to the ideal of academia, the institution must not presuppose the truth of any belief. No theory, hypothesis, belief, description, method, etc., can be given privileged status. Professors must be left completely free to go wherever their minds and hearts take them and share these thoughts with students and the public.
Christian colleges and universities violate this principle by presupposing the truth of Christian faith. Hence, they are not true colleges and universities.
Notice first that the ideal of the university as articulated in the above principle is abstract. It has never been realized in any real university; nor can it be. Every real university embodies a host of value judgments, social goals, methodological principles, and truth claims. And it excludes many theories and truth claims from examination because it considers them false, immoral, irrational, or irrelevant. It seems to me that the “ideal” of a free-for-all discussion fits better in the general space of society governed by the First Amendment right of freedom of speech than in the university where speech is governed by rules far more restrictive than freedom of speech. You don’t have to possess a PhD to express your opinion on the street corner. But possessing a PhD is the minimum qualification to teach in a university classroom; and by the time students complete their PhDs they’ve already been socialized into the elite world of mainstream academia.
Second, academic critics of Christian colleges and universities make a fallacious argument. They apply an abstract ideal to Christian colleges but not to the secular university. Secular universities will not allow the geocentric theory of the universe or the idea that the earth is flat to be taught because they “know” they are false. They will not allow racist or homophobic or sexist ideas to be expressed by professors because they “know” they are immoral. The list of proscribed theories and dogmatic certainties is long. I am convinced that the real reason secular critics reject the idea of a Christian college is that they believe that Christianity is false or immoral. Or, is it that they are afraid it might be true?
Third, no university is universal. No particular university can house research professors from every discipline and study every problem. Nor can any one university create programs and employ teachers in every possible subject. Many significant problems will suffer neglect and resources will be wasted pursuing ephemeral winds of change. Universities possess limited resources and draw on a finite pool of prospective students. They compete with each other for resources, professors, and students. They vie with each other to construct the most appealing “brand.”
Fourth, the idealized principle quoted above makes it seem as if professors work in complete isolation, boldly experimenting with ideas, daring to think for themselves, having no settled opinions, and beginning every morning with a clean slate and a clear mind. This image completely misrepresents how academia really works. Professors work in disciplinary departments—chemistry, sociology, psychology, biology, history, and philosophy. And though there are always inner departmental controversies and rivalries, departments have a tendency to hire like-minded professors. It is sometimes called ideological inbreeding.
Professors also belong to national and international associations devoted to their discipline: The American Chemical Society, The Modern Language Association, The American Historical Association, and hundreds more. These societies develop professional standards and give professors a sense of identity beyond their local universities. Perhaps even more significant, every subject area is further divided into rival theories held by communities of adherents that are often called “schools of thought.” No one is just a philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, language scholar, theologian, biblical scholar, or political scientist. These subjects divide into rival theories bent on refuting each other. Some of these rival communities have existed for decades or centuries and some for over 2,400 years.
An isolated researcher, a member of no community, without adherence to a school of thought can make no progress. Progress in any field of study is marked by extending the explanatory scope of a paradigm or theory held by the community of scholars to which one belongs. People like Galileo or Newton or Einstein come along once in a century. In the meantime, thousands of scientists work out the implications and applications of their theories to new areas of experience. Mathematics, physics, and Chemistry best exemplify the possibility of progress. But every discipline taught in the university imitates these sciences insofar as it can.
Every modern university conducts its business according to this method or pretends to do so. For only in this way can a university claim to advance knowledge, provide a sound education, and therefore justify its existence.
Secular universities as institutions adhere to rules, principles, values, and certain truths that distinguish them from a gathering on a street corner, and research professors and teachers conduct their work within departments, disciplinary societies, and among rival schools of thought. There is no such thing as an uncommitted, neutral academic institution or enterprise. Academia is about testing, extending, and applying theories and paradigms that researchers believe are reliable guides to discovery and progress. Therefore, I believe I am fully justified in rejecting the secular criticisms of the idea and practice of the Christian college based on the abstract principle quoted above.
How may the existence of a Christian college or university be justified in view of the actual practice of research and teaching in American colleges and universities as I described it above? What if we think of Christianity as a “school of thought” in analogy to such philosophical schools of thought as Platonism, Stoicism, Idealism, or Empiricism? These philosophical paradigms can be, and in fact are, taught in state and private secular universities. Many philosophers who teach courses in Plato or Stoic literature argue for the truth of these philosophies in part or as a whole. Why couldn’t Christianity be taught in secular universities alongside these philosophies, some of which are very theological? As long as professors argue in rational ways and deal fairly with objections rather than merely asserting Christianity dogmatically, I can see no rational or legal objection to the practice.
Sadly, state universities appeal to the United States Supreme Court’s decisions about the First Amendment’s prohibition of government-established religion to forbid professors from arguing for the truth of Christianity. But more than that, there is a huge bias against Christianity in both state and private secular universities. Hence Christians need to establish their own colleges and universities to explore the implications and applications of their Christian faith.
The exclusion of Christian theology from academia is an important academic rationale for the existence of Christian colleges and universities.* Because of the bias against and legal restrictions on teaching Christianity as possibly true, beautiful and good in secular universities, theology has been exiled from the curriculum. In my view, this exclusion is a dereliction of duty based on animus—a betrayal of the true academic ideal. Christian colleges and universities are doing for American society what secular colleges and universities culpably neglect to do. Christian colleges and universities serve the Tens of millions of American Christians and other believers in God by seriously exploring the implications of their faith for all aspects of life and in providing an education for their children that takes their faith seriously as a truth claim. And these institutions keep alive for society as a whole a very influential and profound viewpoint on the perennial questions about the human condition.
*There are many other rationales for establishing Christian universities and colleges. I am focusing on one academic reason that secular academics should acknowledge even if they are not sympathetic.
In part one of this series, I summarized the central storyline of Larry G. Gerber, The Rise & Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University (Johns Hopkins, 2014). Today I will venture a brief assessment of the book, after which I will focus on a concept pivotal to Gerber’s argument for faculty shared governance: faculty expertise. Gerber’s book focuses almost exclusively on state and secular private colleges. I will examine the scope and limits of faculty shared governance with Christian colleges in mind.
The Rise & Decline of the Faculty is a very good book. Of course, all history books have a slant, but Gerber strives to tell the story fairly and accurately. As for the “slant,” you can see it in the title of the book. It’s the story of the “rise & decline” of faculty governance. Clearly for Gerber, the “rise” is a good thing and the “decline” is lamentable. He praises professionalism in higher education and condemns commercialism. Maximizing faculty control over the educational and academic aspects of the institution is a desirable aspiration and its diminishment is regrettable. Throughout the book the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities serves as the standard by which to judge an institution’s commitment to faculty shared governance. To quote from the Statement again:
The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process…
Faculty status and related matters are primarily a faculty responsibility; this area includes appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal. The primary responsibility of the faculty for such matters is based upon the fact that its judgment is central to general educational policy. Furthermore, scholars in a particular field or activity have the chief competencefor judging the work of their colleagues; in such competence it is implicit that responsibility exists for both adverse and favorable judgments.
Moreover, genuine “shared governance” should include those rights mentioned in the AAUP Committee T’s 1940 report on the Place and Function of Faculties in College and University Government:
(1) opportunities for direct faculty communication with trustees; (2) faculty involvement in the selection of administrators (president, dean, department chair or head); faculty exercise of primary responsibility for appointing and promoting colleagues; (4) meaningful faculty participation in the budgetary process (Quoted in Gerber, pp. 75-76).
Gerber and the AAUP appeal to disciplinary expertise to justify granting the faculty a share in institutional governance. Professors possess expert knowledge in their area of study that can be assessed for its academic quality only by academic peers. Likewise, they know what students need to study to become competent in their discipline. Having gone through the process of mastering their fields and having years of experience of mentoring students, professors know best how to chart the path from novice to expert. Hence the faculty should be given the “primary responsibility” for the curriculum, faculty hiring, promotion, and granting or denying tenure. They should exercise control over teaching methods.
There is of course a certain plausibility to this argument. Administrators, donors, or trustees would do well to rely on the professors in the chemistry department to determine the quality of a chemistry professor’s research, the curriculum, and teaching methods within that department. Likewise for all the hard sciences. And yet even a non-scientist can tell when chemists, physicists, or biologists stray outside their expertise and begin to express metaphysical, religious, political, or moral opinions. Being an expert in one area does not make you one in other areas. Hence not even professors in the hard sciences should be allowed to use their expertise in science as a license to control other aspects of departmental life.
When you move out of the hard sciences into the social sciences and the humanities, the reign of expertise becomes even more questionable. Because these areas involve reflection on human beings’ free acts and creations, it is almost impossible to separate these subjects from the moral, political, religious, theological, metaphysical commitments of the professor. Your expertise in the descriptive methods of sociology or economics or your mastery of the history of the Roman Republic or knowledge of Buddhism or Christianity gives no greater authority to your opinions on morality or religion than a person without this knowledge. Being a good doctor does not make you a good parent or a good Christian.
Every university accepts the obligation to uphold certain legal and moral as well as academic standards. Plagiarism and falsification of research data are moral as well as academic infractions. Offenders’ disciplinary expertise cannot legitimately be used as justification for illegal or immoral behavior. Christian colleges have codes of conduct, faith commitments, and mission statements that express their Christian character. These moral, religious, and theological commitments are declared or made obligatory for faculty by the college’s charter or official policy statements. They are not subject to revision or revocation or disobedience or governance by way of faculty claims of academic expertise. For they are not academic judgments at all but axiomatic, foundational or legislated values and can be modified only by boards of trustees.
In my view, then, “governance” is the wrong word to describe faculty responsibilities. And its use in university policy statements is misleading. Faculty do not have ultimate authority to do anything. They must pursue the priorities and execute the policies of the university, which is under the governance of its board of trustees. They work under the guidance of the administration, which is also answerable to the board of trustees. Faculty are indeed selected because of their “expertise” in their fields, and in view of their knowledge and skills, they are granted a certain leeway for exercising professional judgment in carrying out their responsibilities. For this arrangement to work effectively, however, professors must use their freedom wisely to fulfill their responsibilities faithfully as befits professionals. For administrators to fulfill their responsibilities faithfully, they must listen to the faculty as it explains what it needs to carry out its duties effectively. And the flow of information must ultimately reach the board of trustees, so that they, too, can fulfill their responsibilities. I suggest dropping the word “governance” and replacing it with collegiality. Collegiality names an attitude of collaboration and mutual respect in working for the same cause.*
Governing is not within the proper scope of the profession of “professor.” Just as such professionals as doctors and lawyers practice medicine and law, professors practice their highly specialized craft. Every profession has its tradition of credentialling, “best practices,” and code of ethics that defines its scope. And usually, professions have some means of regulating themselves. But doctors who work for hospitals or HMOs and lawyers who work for law firms combine the identities of professional and employee. In the same way, professors are professionals, but working for a college makes you an employee also. Employees do not govern the institutions for which they work. Professionals are responsible to the ideals of the profession and employees are responsible to the boards of trustees and administrators who themselves are responsible to seek the long-term welfare of the institution. Only open lines of communication and mutual respect can make this marriage work.
*The term “collegiality” was used by mid-twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologian Yves Congar to describe a relationship of cooperation and mutual respect between the Pope and the bishops. It was designed to soften the hierarchical view of the relationship without denying the ultimate governing authority of the Pope over the church.
Today I continue my series on the contemporary challenges to the viability of the Christian college. In past essays I’ve focused on academic freedom. In this essay I want to explore the concept of “shared governance,” that is, faculty participation in the decisions that determine the academic quality and educational effectiveness of the college. In the literature I’ve read, academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance are held to be the mutually entailed rights that transform college teachers from employees into professionals. Apologists for the profession justify granting professional status and bestowing these three privileges on professors by appealing to their disciplinary expertise and their unique contributions to democratic society.
It should come as no surprise that even professors in Christian colleges desire such privileges. But will giving them such powers tend to preserve or erode the Christian character of the Christian college? I am a professor and have never served as an administrator or on the board of trustees of a college. I am content in my role as a thinker, teacher, and researcher. For many reasons and much bitter experience, I am very clear that the faculty is not a reliable guardian of the Christianity of a Christian college. Boards of Trustees and administrators—especially presidents—must serve as the guardians of the Christian mission of Christian colleges. That is where I am headed, but first we need to get clear on the history of the concept of “shared faculty governance.”
I will get us into this subject by reviewing, analyzing, and applying Larry G. Gerber’s The Rise & Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University (Johns Hopkins, 2014). Gerber is a historian of twentieth-century America with a long-term interest in faculty governance and a career of involvement with the American Association of University Professors. The book contains an introduction, five core chapters, and a conclusion. Typical of history books, each chapter covers a time span marked off from the preceding and the following by a turning point of some kind. The periods are; before 1876, 1870-1920, 1920-1940, 1940-1975, and 1975 to the present.
In the Colonial era and beyond, American colleges were organized under governing boards of trustees and “strong presidents” (p. 15), a pattern that continues to exert strong influence today. Education at these colleges focused on character formation rather than “on intellectual inquiry and discovery” (p. 16). The faculty were usually younger, recent graduates headed for the ministry or another profession with no plans for a lifetime career as a professor. In 1817, Yale president Jeremiah Day took a significant step toward shared governance by inviting the Yale faculty to participate in the appointment of new faculty (p. 17). As more and more faculty studied abroad and came to see themselves as subject area experts, they began to expect more respect from administrators and boards of trustees. Under the influence of the German model of higher education, Henry P. Tappan, president of the University of Michigan, speaking before the university senate in 1861, urge that “no laws or regulations should be made without the concurrence of the faculties; and the appointive power should rest with the University Senate” (p. 21). Even into the 1870s, however, “the idea of a formal academic career was still in its infancy” (p. 25).
Between 1870 and 1920 several factors contributed to the growing professionalization of the professorate and the corresponding demand for greater faculty control over the academic aspects of the university. Over 5,000 American scholars studied in Germany between 1870 and 1900, and they returned intent on implementing the German model in American universities. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins University patterned itself on German educational principles to a great extent. The newly founded universities of Cornell and the University of Chicago as well as the older universities, Harvard, Columbia and the University of Michigan, competed for faculty from the best scholars available. Because of their growth in size and increasing specialization, the university department became the center of day-to-day academic life. Professors began to root their identity more in nation-wide specialty areas of study and professional organizations than in their local college or university. It was in this era that the PhD became the required credential for teaching at elite universities. Under pressure from these forces, boards of trustees and administrators began to acquiesce to professionalized faculty demands for more shared governance, academic freedom, and tenure. Gerber summarizes these changes in words that focus on academic freedom but apply to faculty shared governance:
The more rigorous and specialized postgraduate training required to become a faculty member at American’s emerging universities provided a basis for claiming both the right to, and the need for, a more robust form of academic freedom than had been known in America’s antebellum colleges. Expertise was thus a crucial component of the emerging concept of academic freedom (p. 46; emphasis added).
This era saw the founding of the American Association of University Professors, about which I have written in previous essays.
In this chapter and in the rest of the book the newly founded AAUP takes center stage. Gerber recounts the three stories of what he and the AAUP consider arbitrary and authoritarian conduct by university presidents and boards. These episodes take place at Washburn College, Clark University, and the University of California (pp. 61-65). In 1940, the AAUP’s Committee T on Place and Function of Faculties in College and University Government report highlighted four areas of concern voiced by faculty nationwide:
(1) opportunities for direct faculty communication with trustees; (2) faculty involvement in the selection of administrators (president, dean, department chair or head); faculty exercise of primary responsibility for appointing and promoting colleagues; (4) meaningful faculty participation in the budgetary process (pp. 75-76).
According to Gerber, in 1940 very few faculty in American colleges enjoyed these rights, which are clearly aspirational for the AAUP.
The years between 1940 and 1975 saw unprecedented growth in student population, public financing, and world-wide prestige in American colleges and universities. Demand for qualified professors outstripped supply. By 1973, a “consensus” had developed within higher education of “the advisability of granting faculty primary responsibility for making most academic decisions” (p. 82). One of the most significant landmarks of this era was the publication of the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, a joint statement of the AAUP, the ACE (the American Council on Education, and the AGB (the Association of Governing Boards).
Section 1 introduces the document. Section 2 deals with the “joint Effort” in which the trustees, administration, and the faculty participate jointly. These include general education policy, internal operations, and external relations. Sections 3 and 4 deal with the duties of the governing board and the president respectively. Section five lays out the scope of faculty duties and privileges:
The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process…
The faculty sets the requirements for the degrees offered in course, determines when the requirements have been met, and authorizes the president and board to grant the degrees thus achieved…
Faculty status and related matters are primarily a faculty responsibility; this area includes appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal. The primary responsibility of the faculty for such matters is based upon the fact that its judgment is central to general educational policy. Furthermore, scholars in a particular field or activity have the chief competence for judging the work of their colleagues; in such competence it is implicit that responsibility exists for both adverse and favorable judgments.
The chair or head of a department, who serves as the chief representative of the department within an institution, should be selected either by departmental election or by appointment following consultation with members of the department and of related departments; appointments should normally be in conformity with department members’ judgment.
Agencies for faculty participation in the government of the college or university should be established at each level where faculty responsibility is present. An agency should exist for the presentation of the views of the whole faculty.
For most of its existence the AAUP stood firmly against faculty unionization. Indeed, most faculty at elite research universities shared this rejection, because the notion of professional expertise and faculty shared governance, which focus on quality of education and the common good, seems incompatible with the self-interested goals and adversarial methods of trade unions. In 1971, however, the AAUP relented and accepted collective bargaining as one way to achieve its goals. The debate about the compatibility of the two approaches still rages within higher education.
This era saw the high watermark of faculty shared governance. But by 1975 storm clouds began to darken the horizon: the dramatic rise in the use of “contingent faculty,” the advent of the “for profit” university, and the influence of the market, consumer, and corporate model on higher education.
By the mid-1970s, the flood of students from the baby boom generation slowed to a trickle. Just as the undergraduate student population declined, a glut of new job-seeking Ph.Ds. entered the job market. States like California and Michigan that had poured money into their systems of higher education in the booming post-World War Two era reduced their support by a third. At the same time, states and the federal government imposed a huge number of new regulations, which diverted funds from professors to the ranks of new administrators, compliance officers, and support staff (p. 155).
Responses to these challenges were predictable. Cost-cutting, reorganization, competing for students by appealing to their and their parents’ immediate wants, and turning to lower-paid graduate students and other contingent faculty to teach courses. By the 2010s, when you include graduate students, 60% of teaching was done by part-time faculty (p. 147). Currently, less than one third of faculty in American colleges and universities serve in tenured or tenure-track positions (p. 9). According to Gerber, this shift amounts to the “deprofessionalization” of the faculty (pp. 146-147). Contingent faculty do not have the benefits of tenure, full academic freedom, or participation in faculty governance.
In his highly influential book, [Academic Strategy: The Management Revolution in American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], George Keller argued that American colleges and universities faced “the specter of decline and bankruptcy” (p. 123). This crisis was brought on by a “leadership crisis,” a “breakdown of leadership” (p. 123). Governance must not be divorced from “concerns about an institution’s financial condition and future economic viability” (p. 123). Keller “criticized the effectiveness of faculty senates and the increasing tendency of faculty members to focus on their own individual interests rather than the collective well-being of the institutions in which they worked” (p. 123). According to Keller, the AAUP’s view of faculty governance was “stuck in a historical freezer” (p. 123). Every organization needs “a single authority, someone or some body of people authorized to initiate, plan, decide, manage, monitor, and punish its members” (p. 123). For colleges and universities, this authority naturally falls to the president and the board.
As we discussed above, drives to unionize college faculty seemed to many professors to be at odds with the push toward greater faculty participation in governance. This tension factored heavily in the Supreme Court case NLRB v. Yeshiva University (1980). The Yeshiva University Faculty Association appealed to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for the right to represent the Yeshiva faculty in collective bargaining. Yeshiva University argued that the faculty already enjoyed a share in the governance of the University and therefore it should be considered management instead of labor. The Court agreed with Yeshiva. Private college faculty members are not eligible for collective bargaining under the rules of the NLRB; they are “managerial employees” “involved in developing and enforcing employer policy” (p. 132). This case effectively ended efforts to establish collective bargaining at private colleges and universities in America.
The rise of for-profit colleges and universities (e.g. University of Phoenix), which hire mostly part-time faculty to teach administratively designed curricula, is a huge thread to shared governance and to the ideal of a liberal arts university, which views education to be a service to the common good (pp. 145-146).
To make adapting to changing economic circumstances easier, some administrators wish to shift tenure from being a university-wide status to applying only to a department (p. 153). Should a department prove economically unviable and become subject to reduction or closure, tenure will not protect a faculty member from being released. In another development weakening tenure, and consequently academic freedom, most universities now require tenured faculty to undergo periodic post-tenure reviews.
Recently, the Association of Governing Boards, which joined the AAUP and the American Council on Education in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, retreated from full-throated support of faculty shared governance (pp. 155-156 ff). The AGB’s 1998 Statement on Board Responsibility for Institutional Governance, lamented “academia’s appetite for the kind of excessive consultation that can bring the institution to a standstill” (p. 156). The Statement calls for giving greater authority to the president to reshape the university in situations wherein changes must be made rapidly.
In his conclusion Gerber again laments the “commercialization” of higher education and the threat it poses to “the validity of ideal professionalism—and ideal premised on the possibility of individuals using their expertise in a disinterested way to advance the common good” (p. 165-166). In a final call to action, Gerber urges
If any group is to take the lead in standing up for academic values and the importance of a liberal education and trying to prevent the further degradation of the quality and narrowing of purpose of our colleges and universities, it must be the faculty, who must reassert their commitment to a broad conception of their professional rights and responsibilities…The practice of shared governance that developed in American colleges and universities were thus not simply a privilege and perquisite of the professorate; they were a necessary condition for the development of a system of education that became the envy of the rest of the world. Reinvigorating the practices of shared governance on American college and university campuses will be critical if the United States is to maintain its position of global leadership in higher education (pp. 169-170).
Next Time: How does the concept of “shared governance” apply to Christian colleges?
In this post, I will follow up on my previous essay of January 13, 2025, “Can Christian Colleges Survive.” In that essay, I reviewed and responded to a new book by David Rabban: Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (Harvard, 2024). I want now to explore a connection I noticed when reading Rabban’s book, that is, the connection among the State of New Hampshire’s rationale for rewriting the Dartmouth College charter, the American Association of University Professors’ rationale for asserting its theory of academic freedom, and David Rabban’s argument for making academic freedom a First Amendment right.
As with the earlier post, I hope you will read it and pass it on to other interested parties, especially to trustees, administrators, and faculty in Christian colleges.
Legally, there were two issues in this case: (1) Is Dartmouth’s charter (1769) a “contract” under the “impairment of contracts” clause of the US Constitution (Art. I. 10. 1); and if so, (2) did the NH legislature “impair” said contract in its 1816 legislation changing the charter of the college?
In its legal defense of the legislation, New Hampshire denied that Dartmouth’s charter is a contract subject to constitutional protection or that the legislature impaired the “contract” through its action. The Trustees argued in the affirmative in both cases. In this essay, however, I want to focus not on the legal but on the moral/social utilitarian arguments made by the NH legislature to justify the legislation.
The NH legislature argued that the Dartmouth charter was granted for the public good, therefore Dartmouth is a public institution and falls under the authority of the state of NH to regulate matters involving public welfare. The first paragraph of the New Hampshire law in question reads as follows:
WHEREAS knowledge and learning generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government, and extending the opportunities and advantages of education is highly conducive to promote this end, and by the constitution it is made the duty of the legislators and magistrates, to cherish the interests of literature, and the sciences, and all seminaries established for their advancement—and as the college of the State may, in the opinion of the legislature be rendered more extensively useful ; Therefore…(p. 539).
Then follows a series of changes that amount to confiscation of the college by the State of New Hampshire.
Daniel Webster presented the case for the Trustees against the State of New Hampshire. Webster refutes the idea that a contract among private parties to carry out education and other works advantageous to the general public makes an institution a public institution in the legal sense. Webster emphasizes this point over and over in different contexts:
The granting of the corporation is but making the trust perpetual, and does not alter the nature of the charity. The very object sought in obtaining such charter, and in giving property to such a corporation, is to make and keep it private property, and to clothe it with all the security and inviolability of private property. The intent is; that there shall be a legal private ownership, and that the legal owners shall maintain and protect the property, for the benefit of those for whose use it was designed. Whoever endowed the public? Whoever appointed a legislature to administer his charity? Or who ever heard, before, that a gift to a College, or Hospital, or an Asylum, was, in reality, nothing but a gift to the State? (p. 574).
…
The case before the Court is not of ordinary importance, nor of everyday occurrence. It affects not this college only, but every college, and all the literary institutions of the country. They have flourished, hitherto, and have become in a high degree respectable and useful to the Community. They have all a common principle of existence, the inviolability of their charters. It will be a dangerous, a most dangerous experiment, to hold these institutions subject to the rise and fall of popular parties, and the fluctuations of political opinions. If the franchise may be at any time taken away, or impaired, the property also may be taken away, or its use perverted. Benefactors will have no certainty of effecting the object of their bounty; and learned men will be deterred from devoting themselves to the service of such institutions, from the precarious title of their offices. Colleges and halls will be deserted by all better spirits, and become a theatre for the contention of politics. Party and faction will be cherished in the places consecrated to piety and learning. These consequences are neither remote nor possible only. They are certain and immediate (pp. 598-99).
In sum, Webster’s point is this: charitable institutions (a college in this case) aim to benefit the public. The state has an interest in promoting the public good. But this overlapping interest does not give the state a legal right to assert control and manage the institution.
Mr. Joseph Hopkinson, Webster’s co-counsel, drives the same point home quite vigorously:
It is true, that a college, in a popular sense, is a public institution, because its uses are public, and its benefits may be enjoyed by all who choose to enjoy them. But in a legal and technical sense, they are not public institutions, but private charities. Corporations may, therefore, be very well said to be for public use, of which the property and privileges are yet private. Indeed, there may be supposed to be an ultimate reference to the public good, in granting all charters of incorporation; but this does not change the property from private to public. If the property of this corporation be public property, that is, property belonging to the State, when did it become so? It was once private property; when was it surrendered to the public? The object in obtaining the charter, was not surely to transfer the property to the public, but to secure it forever in the hands of those with whom the original owners saw fit to entrust it (pp. 616-617).
Chief Justice Marshall writes for the Supreme Court in its decision favoring the Trustees of Dartmouth College against Woodward. In his carefully reasoned opinion, Justice Marshall argues that the New Hampshire legislature violated the US constitution’s stricture against the impairment of contracts. Dartmouth is a private charitable institution and not a public institution subject to state control:
That education is an object of national concern, and a proper subject of legislation, all admit. That there may be an institution founded by government, and placed entirely under its immediate control, the officers of which would be public officers, amenable exclusively to government, none will deny. But is Dartmouth College such an institution? Is education altogether in the hands of government? Does every teacher of youth become a public officer, and do donations for the purpose of education necessarily become public property, so far that the will of the legislature, not the will of the donor, becomes the law of the donation? These questions are of serious ‘moment to society, and deserve to be well considered. (p. 634).
Marshall concludes:
But the Court has deemed it unnecessary to investigate this particular point, being of opinion, on general principles, that in these private eleemosynary institutions, the body corporate, as possessing the whole legal and equitable interest, and completely representing the donors, for the purpose of executing the trust, has rights which are protected by the constitution.
It results from this opinion, that the acts of the legislature of New-Hampshire, which are stated in the special verdict found in this cause, are repugnant to the constitution of the United States; and that the judgment on this special verdict ought to have been for the plaintiffs. The judgment of the State Court must, therefore, be reversed (p. 654).
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward for the freedom of private institutions to conduct their business free from state interference. And as we shall see, the principle established in this case is still of great importance today. The insidious logic of the NH legislature is still being employed—under different guises to be sure—to reduce the autonomy of private non-sectarian and Christian colleges. And Daniel Webster’s argument and Justice Marshall’s decision are still the most potent responses to a government’s assertion of a right to control higher education in private colleges.
In the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 “Declaration on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” we meet again, I shall argue, the NH equivocation between the word “public” used to mean “people in general” and to mean “publicly owned and governmentally controlled.” The Declaration argues that institutions that call themselves colleges and claim to promote the public good are “public trusts” and must therefore accept a definition of academic freedom and tenure commensurate with their self-incurred obligation to serve the good of the public as a whole. That is to say, a college’s claim to promote the good of society obligates it to adopt a non-sectarian stance. Like the State of New Hampshire of 1816, the Declaration imposes its own definition of the “public good” on all institutions that lay claim to the title of college or university. All other ways of serving the public are “proprietary” (“private trusts”), not true universities. The Declaration does not argue that a college’s claim to promote the common good places it within the sphere of direct state control (as in the Dartmouth case). It asserts, rather, that “proprietary” colleges are not truly academic institutions and that their claims to benefit the public, and therefore to be worthy of public support, are misleading or false:
Trustees of such universities or colleges have no moral right to bind the reason or the conscience of any professor. All claim to such right is waived by the appeal to the general public for contributions and for moral support in the maintenance, not of a propaganda, but of a non-partisan institution of learning.
Colleges that do not acknowledge “unfettered” academic freedom are not truly academic, not truly a benefit to the public; they are second rate at best.
The Declaration argues that any college that claims to benefit society at large and appeals to members of the public for support is a “public trust” and therefore must become truly “non-partisan” and free from all religious, political, or commercial interests. Hence it must allow unfettered academic freedom to its professors. This is the same argument made by the New Hampshire legislature for its right to confiscate Dartmouth college and rejected by the Marshall Supreme Court. However, in this instance the argument is used not by a state to justify confiscating private colleges, but by an elite professorial class to discredit, intimidate, and shame colleges founded to serve the church or other private causes.
David Rabban in Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right,** intensifies the AAUP’s argument outlined above and transforms academic freedom from a professional norm into a First Amendment right, thus justifying (like NH in the Dartmouth Case) the intrusion of the government into the heart of the university–private as well as state owned .
As I documented in the previous essay,** Rabban argues (1) that the public benefit generated by professors justifies protecting their academic speech as a special First Amendment right; and (2) that since 1957 the Supreme Court has steadily moved toward asserting a First Amendment right of academic freedom.
Without explicitly saying so, Rabban in effect argues that the claim by a college to be an institution of higher learning that provides a good to the public and employs “professors” to function in this role should come under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment. Clearly, Rabban resurrects the utilitarian/quasi-legal reasoning used in the New Hampshire legislature’s legislation in the 1816 takeover of Dartmouth college. Professors, precisely as members of the professorate, Rabban argues, should have the constitutionally protected right of academic freedom against state or institutional abridgment.
The academic speech of individual professors, no matter where they teach, has become legally protected speech as long as it is truly “academic,” which determination must be made solely by the professorial community. Whether or not a professor’s speech is academic cannot be decided by trustees, judges or administrators. Therefore, the authority to regulate professorial expression has been transferred from the trustees of the college to the government, specifically the US government. States may also decide independently to give academic freedom special state constitutional protection.
This theory aims to achieve what the New Hampshire legislature attempted to achieve in Trustees v. Woodward. However, instead of taking a top-down approach, using the sovereign power of the state, opponents of private institutional autonomy start from the bottom, pitting individual professorial constitutional rights against state legislatures and college trustees. By freeing professors from responsibility to the trustees in the use of their “academic” speech, the profession, backed up by the federal courts, takes control of the core activity of the college. It’s a kind of nationalization of a college’s faculty backed up by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Academically, it levels or homogenizes all colleges and universities in the US.
In other words, treating academic freedom as a special First Amendment right accomplishes what the NH legislature attempted to do to Dartmouth in 1816 and failed to accomplish. But instead of handing control to state legislatures, it places it in the hands of the federal courts. It gives constitutional backing to the AAUP Declaration’s utilitarian and moral arguments.
*This hyperlink takes you to the complete, 199-page record of the case, including the original 1767 charter, the full texts of the 1816 New Hampshire law taking over Dartmouth college, the arguments of the plaintiff (Trustees of Dartmouth College) and the defendant (Woodward, New Hampshire’s recently appointed treasure of Dartmouth University), and Chief Justice Marshall’s decision.
**See my previous post “Can Christian Colleges Survive” (January 13, 2025).
This post consists of a review and response to David M. Rabban, Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (Harvard University Press, 2024). PP. 369.
From the founding of Harvard College in 1636 to today, higher education has been of huge concern to American society. And until a hundred and twenty-five years ago, most colleges were connected to the church and in one way or another promoted Christianity. Over the course of the past century, however, colleges and universities have disengaged first from orthodox Christianity to adopt liberal Christianity, then on to promoting rationalistic secularity. Now the postmodern university as an institution no longer pursues truth, quests for knowledge, believes in humanity, or possesses a vision of the good. It’s about the quest for power through ideology and social activism. As I said in a previous post, a university that no longer believes in truth no longer believes in itself. It is lost. Students leave knowing less than when they arrived.
In my view, now more than ever, from a social point of view as well as a religious point of view, we need Christian colleges and universities. These institutions may be, along with the church, among the last refuges of belief in the objective reality of the good, true, and beautiful. Now is not the time for Christian colleges to give up their faith and assimilate to the already lost cause of the secular/postmodern university. And this is the reason I have written so much about academic freedom and other higher education topics on this blog.
This “review and response” is longer than my usual posts, and not everyone will wish to work through it in one sitting. But if you are interested in the future of the Christian college, I hope you will read it and pass it on to other interested parties…especially trustees, administrators, and faculty in Christian colleges.
Review
Rabban traces the transformation of academic freedom from a generally accepted professional norm without a special legal grounding to a First Amendment right. In its 1819 decision in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the Supreme Court adjudicated the case through the “impairments of contracts” clause of the US Constitution (Art. I. 10. 1). In the late nineteenth century, the Court used the “due process” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as a doctrinal basis in some cases, but from 1957 onward it has increasingly used the First Amendment (Sweezy v. New Hampshire). Though in the 1960s, the Supreme Court identified academic freedom as “a special concern of the First Amendment” (Justice Brennen in Keyishian v. Board of Regents), Rabban notes that the Supreme Court has yet to clarify and elaborate its meaning. Because of its unsettled status, “judges sometimes refer to the First Amendment right of academic freedom, sometimes to the First Amendment generally, sometimes to employee-speech jurisprudence, and sometimes to all three simultaneously without differentiating them” (p. 301). Rabban writes this book to clarify this confusion and establish academic freedom as a special First Amendment right.
The AAUP’s 1915 “Declaration of Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” set forth a definition of “academic freedom” that is still used today. Academic freedom concerns the professional necessity for professors to research, write, and teach within their academic expertise (and only that expertise) without hindrance from within or without the university. This special freedom given to professors is justified, the Declaration contended, because it serves the advancement of knowledge and the common good of society. The question of what qualifies as “academic speech” must be settled by one’s peers, not administrators, board members, or judges.
The most famous case dealing with higher education is that of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819). This case established the distinction between public and private corporations, limiting state actions in relation to the latter. In Berea College v. Kentucky (1908), the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Kentucky state supreme court’s decision affirming the state’s right to forbid Berea College from conducting classes with blacks and whites together. Though the Court dealt with the case under the “impairments of contract” clause of the US Constitution, it denied that Kentucky had in fact violated that clause. Justice Harlan’s dissent, in contrast, relied on the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause.
Rabban introduces the chapter with these words, noting a decisive shift in the jurisprudence of academic freedom from conflicts between state and the trustees to the relationship between the state and professors.
Whereas the 1915 Declaration focused on the relationship of professors to trustees, and the earlier application of the Constitution to the university under the impairment of contracts clause focused on the relationship of the state to the trustees, these cases focused on the relationship of the state to professors (p. 52).
Many of the cases of the 1950s and 1960s dealt with the perceived threat of communist infiltration of American universities.
The first mention of “academic freedom” in a Supreme Court case was a dissent by Justice Douglas in Adler v. Board of Education (1952). The first Supreme Court decision in which the majority opinion included academic freedom within First Amendment rights was Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 1957. Chief Justice Warren wrote for the majority. Justice Frankfurter wrote a concurring opinion that speaks of “the dependence of a free society on free universities” (p. 69). Frankfurter (quoting a document written by a South African group of scholars in protest of apartheid) lists four freedoms essential to a university: “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study” (p. 69). This list of freedoms was quoted many times in the subsequent history of Supreme Court and lower court academic freedom cases. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), Justice Brennan “identified academic freedom as a First Amendment right more clearly than had any previous opinion” (p. 76). “Sweezy and Keyishian soon became the starting point for judicial analysis of academic freedom as a First Amendment right” (p. 80).
Rabban puts his finger on the most serious difficulty that arises with giving academic freedom First Amendment status:
Differentiation [between academic freedom as a special and others as general First Amendment rights] would require confronting the argument that a distinctive First Amendment right of academic freedom protects professors more than general First Amendment rights protect everybody else and more than employee-speech jurisprudence protects other public employees (p. 99).
Indeed, this argument was raised as an objection to a special right of academic freedom in a fourth circuit court case, Urofsky v. Gilmore (2000).
In every area of professorial expression (teaching research, publication, intramural speech, etc.), the decisive question about the applicability of academic freedom is whether or not such expression is “academic” and falls within the professional expertise of the professor. Of course, as Rabban discusses later, universities have the institutional academic freedom to determine the curriculum, areas of study, majors offered, budgets, and many other academic aspects of the university. Disputes about extramural speech do not usually fall under academic freedom; they are usually dealt with under general First Amendment jurisprudence.
In his conclusion to this chapter Rabban summarizes the status of the First Amendment right to academic freedom:
As in the cases through Keyishian, the Supreme Court continued to base its decisions on other doctrines even when it recognized and extolled the First Amendment right of academic freedom. But many lower-court decisions relied on this right as the doctrinal vehicle for analyzing and resolving concrete disputes…they generally agreed that the First Amendment right of academic freedom protects the academic content of scholarship and teaching (p. 111).
As we noted in the above quote, even though the courts recognize a First Amendment right of academic freedom, they have not used this doctrine as the basis of their decisions. Instead, they use general First Amendment principles or employee-speech jurisprudence as the doctrinal basis for deciding cases that could have been treated under the First Amendment right of academic freedom.
In cases applying employee-speech jurisprudence, which protects speech by public employees only if it is about a matter of public concern and is not made pursuant to official duties, judges have evaluated whether speech fits within these categories (p. 113).
Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) differentiated for the first time the distinction between the government’s regulation of speech as an employer over employees from its regulation of the speech of citizens in general. It differentiates between “a citizen in commenting upon matters of public concern and the interest of the State, as an employer in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees” (p. 120). Connick v. Meyers (1983) “narrowed the concept of public concern” to avoid a proliferation of constitutional cases. In Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), the Supreme Court limited protections for government-employee speech by excluding speech that pertains to their “official duties” (p. 121).
Highfield Observation: clearly employee-speech jurisprudence does not conform to the professional norm of academic freedom, because academic freedom must cover speech delivered in the course of carrying out the professor’s official duty.
In this chapter, Rabban attempts to show that the only way to do justice to academic freedom is to differentiate it from the general First Amendment right to citizen free speech and employee-speech jurisprudence. The general First Amendment right of free speech is too broad to do justice to the special circumstances of the professorate; it is “egalitarian and individualistic” whereas academic speech is “meritocratic and communitarian” (p. 139). Employee-speech rights are limited at the very place where academic freedom is needed most. Rabban draws on the 1915 AAUP Declaration in crafting his justification for giving professorial academic speech a special status: (1) Professors cannot perform their socially important function, at the heart of their duties, without freedom to teach and write their academic discoveries and theories without hindrance. 2. Academic peers and co-experts alone should determine whether a disputed instance of professor speech is indeed “academic.”
Rabban summarizes crisply:
The distinctive First Amendment theory of academic freedom I propose is justified by the societal value of protecting the expert academic speech of professors whose boundaries are determined through peer review (p. 168).
Highfield Observation: Here we encounter the decisive issues in dealing with academic freedom questions. What counts as “academic” and who decides? Answer: “Academic” is whatever peer professors decide it is. Question: who are these peers? And what academic community are we speaking of and who selects them? These issues become decisive when dealing with academic freedom in Christian higher education. And combined with the institutional side of the equation (institutional academic freedom, the established distinction between private and public, the First Amendment rights of association and religion, institutional autonomy, etc.), it is central to defining academic freedom in a Christian school.
In the 1970s, the Supreme Court extended First Amendment protection of academic freedom to universities as institutions. This extension was anticipated by Justice Frankfurter’s enumeration in Sweeezy (1957) of the right of the university “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study” (p. 171). This list of institutional academic freedom rights forms the basis of the Court’s recent thinking on institutional academic freedom.
In this chapter, Rabban reviews cases in which universities “have asserted their institutional academic freedom to evaluate students and faculty, to regulate scholarship and teaching, and to resist interference from the state” (p. 172). In the famous University of California v. Bakke case (1978), the Court invalidated (by a 5 to 4 margin) the university’s affirmative action program at its medical school. Justice Powell provided the 5th vote for the majority but disagreed with the reasoning of both parties (14th Amendment versus statutory law). Powell recognized [drawing on Frankfurter in Sweezy: “who may be admitted to study”] that a “First Amendment right of institutional academic freedom was the only legal basis for his support of affirmative action for universities” (p. 174).
In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), Justice O’Connor drew on Powell’s brief in Bakke to justify the use of race as a factor in college admissions at the University of Michigan. However, O’Conner used the term “educational autonomy” instead of institutional academic freedom. In his dissent, Justice Thomas argued that the First Amendment does not “authorize a university to do what would otherwise violate the Equal Protection Clause.” (p. 178). In Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), the Supreme Court invalidated Harvard’s use of race as a factor in student admissions on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, a belated victory for Justice Thomas.
As the cases within the last half century demonstrate, institutional academic freedom (or educational autonomy) and professor academic freedom can conflict; and those conflicts are not easily resolved. In truly academic matters universities may assert many rights against state encroachment and in the broad academic policies (qualities required for appointment and tenure, courses of study, etc.), individual professors do not have an unlimited academic right to do whatever they like, even if it could be construed as an academic judgment.
After examining cases wherein institutional academic freedom came under scrutiny, Rabban concludes,
Through numerous decisions about educational issues as well as by protecting the academic freedom of their faculties, universities foster the production and dissemination of knowledge and the education in democratic citizenship that justify First Amendment protection for academic freedom. To qualify for the protection of institutional academic freedom, universities must demonstrate that they have based a decision on educational considerations related to these First Amendment interests. This demonstration depends on convincing evidence that the person or group assessing educational considerations on behalf of the university has sufficient expertise to do so. Assessment of academic quality is the primary responsibility of the faculty, whereas the administration and governing board have a major role in the development of general educational policies…the state may have more legitimate interests in regulating public universities than private ones. To this extent, public universities have less institutional academic freedom (p. 230).
Highfield Observation: Rabban focuses almost totally on public universities. He admits that private universities have more institutional academic freedom (or institutional autonomy) than public ones. He does not attempt to delineate how that greater freedom may be exercised in contrast to state-established universities. Also, he focuses on “academic” institutional freedom and the procedural limits this focus places on universities. But “institutional autonomy,” which includes, but is a broader concept than, institutional academic freedom, may be a better category to protect private, and especially religious colleges, from state encroachment and assertions of professorial academic freedom against the general aims and philosophy of the institution. The reason for this preference is simple. According to Rabban, all things “academic” must be judged so by the faculty. Within this theory, universities possess “institutional academic freedom” only insofar as it facilitates and protects faculty academic freedom. There are no theoretical grounds for the university administration, board, or the state legislature to challenge the faculty’s “academic” judgments.
This chapter focuses on recent controversies over offensive speech on college campuses. May universities create and enforce speech codes censuring hate speech and other forms of offensive expression? Generally, the courts have not upheld university speech codes unless they track with general First Amendment free speech jurisprudence, that is, they limit only speech that fails the “imminent lawless action” test: threats of violence, “fighting words,” etc. And yet, the context of a university as an educational institution places additional restraints on speech. Some speech that would be lawful to utter in the public square would not be appropriate in the classroom. According to Rabban, however, even “offensive” speech should be allowed if it serves a bona fides educational purpose. As an example, a classroom reading from The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn might include the word “nigger.” Rabban argues that teachers should not be compelled to substitute “N-word” for nigger. Institutional academic freedom allows universities more regulation of speech than the government can impose in the public sphere, but it must serve an academic and educational purpose. As one can imagine, there is much danger of subjectivity in defining what speech serves an educational purpose and what speech serves no educational purpose.
The academic freedom claims of individual professors may conflict with academic freedom (or institutional autonomy) claims of universities. These cases often turn on the academic merit of a professor’s research or teaching. The institution’s educational policies outweigh a professor’s academic freedom claims. Abusive, disruptive or “vitriolic attacks” of professors against the administration, for example, are not covered by academic freedom (See Johnson v. Lincoln University 1985). Rabban continues,
Several [cases] concluded that a university cannot balance the loss of funding or other support from a state legislature, alumni, or the public against a professor’s controversial expression on matters of public concern (p. 253; for a list of cases, see fn. 16, p. 353).
Most judges are rightly hesitant to weigh in on the academic or educational merit of an academic freedom claim. But they are free to examine whether or not the parties adhered to the proper procedures or acted in good faith. Judges should rely on peer review for judging academic merit.
With reference to the justification of student academic freedom, Rabban argues,
The societal value of the student interest in learning provides a plausible justification for a distinctive theory of student academic freedom. The student interest in learning, while different from the general rights of free speech, promotes the broadly recognized First Amendment values of disseminating knowledge and promoting democratic citizenship (p. 282).
Student academic freedom differs from professorial academic freedom:
Whereas the protection of expert speech that justified academic freedom for faculty does not extend to political expression beyond this expertise, the exercise of political speech by students in extracurricular activities contributes to the learning process that justifies their academic freedom (p. 283).
Student academic freedom covers “student interests in access to knowledge, in disagreeing with the views of their professors, and in fair evaluation” (p. 297).
Response
What is the distinction between a theory of academic freedom as a First Amendment right and academic freedom as a professional norm? As a professional norm, the academic freedom of professors, colleges, and students is justified the same way other professional norms are justified, that is, the norm inheres in the definition and practice of the profession. The essence of the profession of professor is to think, research, teach, and disseminate knowledge. Subservience to alien authorities within or without the university would redefine the nature of the professorate as a mere mouthpiece of these other parties.
But why define the professorate in a way that includes this type of academic freedom within its definition? According to Rabban, in reliance on the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration, the professorate performs an important service to democratic and progressive society. It serves to advance scientific knowledge and create an informed and critical citizenry. That is to say, its function is to challenge the status quo with a view to progress in all areas of life. To do this effectively, the professorate and the university must be protected from reactionary and conservative forces invested in maintaining the status quo.
However, as a professional norm, an assertion of academic freedom possesses no legal force. It depends on persuasion and soft coercion for its enforcement. It persuades by appealing to the nature of the profession and its service to society. It coerces through mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and rewards and punishments that operate under the control of the profession as represented by the most prestigious universities and the most celebrated professors. This professional elite institutionalizes itself in learned societies, journals, publishers, accrediting bodies, and such advocacy groups as the AAUP and the American Association of Colleges and Universities. Still, academic freedom as a professional norm possesses no legal force, and as we saw in Rabban, most court cases involving censorship or punishment of professorial expression were adjudicated on other grounds, the “impairment of contracts” clause, the “equal protection” clause, or general First Amendment rights.
Rabban, the AAUP, and other legal scholars want the Supreme Court to recognize and clarify a special First Amendment right of academic freedom. This change would add constitutional force to the profession’s methods of enforcement, which at present are limited to persuasion and soft-coercion. It would give the professorate and individual professors the constitutional right to speak freely in the course of performing their professional duties, without censorship, threats or punishments on all academic matters within their expertise. Clearly, making academic freedom a constitutional right would provide more protection for the professorate than other legal doctrines. Within the narrow sphere of their role as professor and within their expertise, it would allow the courts to treat the activities of professors not merely as those of citizens or employees but as those of professors. Within this sphere, the work of professors would be constitutionally protected from censorship, punishment, or threats of the same from within or without the university.
As the above analysis demonstrates treating academic freedom as a special First Amendment right would give professors more protection than would other legal doctrines. But unlike other legal doctrines that have been applied to disputes about academic freedom, this doctrine focuses only on actions that qualify as “academic” and fall within the expertise of the professor. Who decides what speech qualifies as “academic” and falls within the expertise of a professor? Judges cannot make this determination. According to Rabban, this question must be decided by the professor’s peers. In effect, “academic” means whatever a group of peer professors say it means. That is to say, Rabban provides no substantive definition of “academic” speech. To complicate matters even more, we must also ask who qualifies as a peer and who selects this group of peers?
One has to ask why our society would tolerate a profession that demands freedom to exercise its “academic” expertise as it pleases and to be recognized as the sole arbiter of what counts as academic? Isn’t that rather circular? Must society simply trust that the profession as a whole will disregard its narrow self-interests and do the right thing? Moreover, the profession now wishes to have its demands declared special constitutional rights designed just for it. Why would citizens, state legislators, alumni, and donors continue to support such a profession and the institutions within which they work? Will they not demand some say about what counts as worthy of the designation “academic”? Who, then, will guard the guardians?
The demand that academic freedom be treated as a First Amendment right becomes exponentially troubling from the perspective of the Christian college. In fact, it spells the end of Christian colleges. For, if professors who teach in Christian colleges possess the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to teach and write whatever their disciplinary peers judge to be “academic” and within the expertise of the professors in question, the college’s freedom to carry out its Christian educational mission will be trumped by the consensus of the profession and the courts. Professors in Christian colleges would be free to deny and refute cardinal Christian doctrines and basic Christian moral teaching. Indeed, no one could hinder them from teaching atheism, agnosticism, moral relativism or any other view that peers in their discipline considered of “academic” merit. The Christian college’s legitimacy is denied not only by imposition of elite professional norms but also as a matter of constitutional law!
Hence, I reject Rabban’s conclusion on both social/political and Christian grounds.
The plausibility of the theory of academic freedom articulated in the AAUP Declaration, defended and expanded by Rabban depends on accepting its interpretation of three foundational concepts. And these interpretations, I shall argue, are tendentious and disputable.
1. The Profession. The definition of the profession of professor in the AAUP Declaration omits the socially important task of explaining and defending the wisdom of the past in favor of criticism and discovery of new knowledge. The “professional” college teacher must teach students to be critical of the status quo and become more progressive in their thinking. Apparently, there is no place in the profession for conservatives and traditionalists. This is a narrow and elitest view of the profession borrowed in the late nineteenth century from German universities, which focused almost totally on graduate education and research. But there is no rational ground to exclude from the profession college teachers whose main goal is explaining and defending the wisdom of the past to undergraduates. The job of traditioning its young is a necessary educational task of any society, certainly equal in importance and prior in developmental order to developing researchers and critical thinkers. Critical thinking by those who have no foundations and accepted verities and values leads to nihilism in philosophy and radicalism in politics. No society can long exist without shared values, stories, and traditions.
2. The Academic. As we saw above, Rabban argues that “academic” means whatever the profession says it means. And yet, a profession defined as the AAUP Declaration defines it will always view itself as the only authority that understands the true art and science of the profession. If what you say is not progressive and critical of conservative culture and if you don’t adhere to the dominant methods and conclusions of the “academic” disciplines, your work will not be judged as academic. We need a substantive definition of what counts as academic. I propose that teaching and research that occurs in a school, begins with clear axioms, intuitions, or facts and argues logically for its conclusions should count as academic. In this way, what counts as academic does not depend on inbred group thinking.
3. Peer Review. Peer review is central to the modern theory of academic freedom. If the nature of the profession and the concept of the academic are defined as Rabban defines them, then peer review is essential to proper adjudication of any academic freedom claim. However, if in the review process only members of the profession as it is defined by the AAUP Declaration and Rabban qualify as peers, then the outcome is predetermined: the academic nature of a professor’s work will be judged by the elite standards or prejudices or ideologies that constitute the ethos of the peer group. Professors are not saints or thinking machines! They are just as self-interested and tribal as any other group with common interests. In my view, review committees in academic freedom disputes should include members from outside the profession as a check on inbred group thinking and a surround-the-wagons mentality. No group unchecked by a balance of power and interest can be trusted to be fair to everyone concerned. Nimo iudex in causa sua (No one is judge in their own case!).
If the concepts of “the profession,” “the academic” and “peer review” must be broadened beyond the confines of research institutions and scholars engaged in discovery of new knowledge and mentoring the next generation of critical scholars, it follows that the concept of academic freedom must be broadened as well. An undergraduate college that emphasizes the great books or traditional or religious wisdom must embrace a view of academic freedom with a different scope and limits than an elite research university. Professors who desire to transmit, explain and defend traditional wisdom need the academic freedom to do that, and they need institutions that employ such teachers and rewards this kind of teaching. And why shouldn’t students have the academic freedom to study at such a college and to learn from such professors? It would be institutional suicide for a college that exists to provide this kind of education to grant professors academic freedom to criticize, reject, and replace traditional wisdom or religious faith with progressive or radical thought. Nor does it make sense for them to recruit and employ or retain professors with these aspirations. Academic freedom must be broadly conceived so as to be applicable to a wide variety of colleges and universities and a variety of professors. Academic freedom, then, is the freedom to carry out your academic vocation within the scope and limits of the educational philosophy and mission of the college where you teach, be that a research/critical university or a traditional, religious, or classical college. What counts as academic freedom depends on your location within the higher education spectrum. In education as in foot ware, one size does not fit all.
Next time: “Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom: The Cases of Dartmouth, AAUP Declaration, and Rabban, Academic Freedom”
In the previous essay we examined Julia Schleck’s defense* of the postmodern university. Though she admits that the postmodern university no longer believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue in the traditional senses of these terms, she nevertheless argues that society ought to grant professors academic freedom and tenure and generous financial support even though they engage in activities that seem destructive, useless or perverse to most people. My somewhat tongue in cheek paraphrase of her argument goes like this:
Trust us with your children and your money. Give us unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment. But don’t expect us to answer to you or explain why your investments are sound.
With Scheck’s argument in mind, I want to contrast the idea of a Christian college with her description of the postmodern university. As I observed in my former essay,
A university that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue no longer believes in itself. As far as I can tell, its driving purpose is maintenance of a system that provides faculty unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment in exchange for expressing their private opinions in esoteric vocabularies.
By rejecting all presupposed knowledge, truth, and virtue, the postmodern university loses its purpose, forfeits its prospects for progress, and gives up any measure by which we could judge its outcomes. To the casual observer, the postmodern university’s rejection of all “dogmas,” presuppositions, and time-honored truths, and its openness to strange and unpopular ideas may seem the epitome of enlightenment and a fine formula for uncovering new truth. But in this “the casual observer” is completely mistaken. For as described by Schleck, the postmodern university is not about discovering true and useful ideas. It’s about winning a struggle for power and money. The postmodern university replaces knowledge, truth, and virtue with ideology, power, and pretense.
A Christian college worthy of its name believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue; therefore, it believes in itself. Hence it can devote itself energetically to achieving its purpose. Its knowledge is faith, its truth is God and God’s creation, and its virtue is the way of Jesus Christ.
The founding principle of the Christian college is faith, the apostolic faith preached and preserved for us in the New Testament. Far from viciously restricting our search for understanding and truth, faith points us toward truth and away from idols and ideologies. It protects us from evil, immoral, and superstitious paths. The knowledge of faith serves as a foundation on which to build our understanding of God, the world, and ourselves. Faith provides a language within which every discipline and every professor in the college can communicate with every other. Faith, sincerely held by every member of the college community, unifies the Christian college in a way the postmodern university can never achieve.
Because it believes in God the Creator of heaven and earth, the Christian college believes in an objective reality. For God is unchanging and eternal and is the Creator of all else. Truth is the conceptual form of reality and knowledge is the form of a mind in which dwells truth. In faith, the Christian college believes it possesses knowledge of God centrally and principally in Jesus Christ who is the living truth of God manifest in the world. And with respect to this knowledge, its purpose is twofold: (1) to pass this knowledge to the next generation unchanged and (2) to seek deeper understanding of the truth in all its dimensions. Every discipline and every professor is united in this purpose. All seek to know God and God’s works in truth.
A Christian college worthy of its name looks to Jesus Christ as the model for its conduct. There are not two systems of virtue, one for the church and one for the Christian college. Jesus Christ is the Lord of both. The way of Jesus is obedience to the Father; his is the way of humility, faith, love, hope, peace, and patience. The Christian college affirms the teaching of Jesus and his chosen apostles as the normative guide for our relationships to others and the use of our bodies. We are not allowed to do as we please with regard to money, power, sex, and honor. We must bring our words and deeds under the sanctifying and strengthening power of the Spirit. For the postmodern university “virtue” is a mere strategy for attaining power, a Darwinian struggle for money, control, and honor. It should not be so in a Christian college.
At first glance, the postmodern university seems to offer more freedom than does the Christian college. Professors have the freedom to reject Christian faith and traditional morality and to affirm atheism, immoralism, and perversity. They can blaspheme the holy, praise the profane, and parade the ugly without sanction. And they can teach their students to do the same. Christian colleges do not allow professors these freedoms, and true Christians do not want them. On the other hand, postmodern universities do not allow believing faculty to affirm Christian faith and interpret the world under the guidance of the Christian faith. And postmodern universities have their own dogmas, sacred cows, and lists of virtues and vices. They will not tolerate the blasphemies of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; you may not speak against their sacraments: fornication, adultery, and abortion.
The Christian college holds a different view of freedom. There is no freedom in the power to do evil, only blindness and slavery to lust and pride. True freedom is God-given power to know the truth and do the good. Since Christian colleges believe in knowledge, truth, and virtue, they encourage believing faculty to teach and research under the guidance of their Christian faith. Students can learn from faculty who are so guided. Instructed by faith, Christian faculty can pursue the truth of God and creation with confidence, energy, and hope. And this is the freedom I cherish!
*Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
Many of you know that I am very interested in the current state of higher education. Lately, I’ve been reading books about academic freedom. Most of my reading focuses on academic freedom in Christian colleges and universities. Today, however, I want to share my review of a book that sheds light on the present state of secular higher education:
Julia Schleck, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
In this book, Julia Schleck attempts to defend the traditional practice of granting university faculty the special privileges of academic freedom and tenure, which employees in other lines of work do not enjoy. As her book title hints, she describes the challenges that the rise of the “neoliberal” model of the university poses to academic freedom. Her proposal for dealing with these challenges centers on the concept of “dirty knowledge.”
The term “neoliberalism” refers to a late 20th century political philosophy that argues that “a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state” (See “Neoliberalism,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). According to Schleck, neoliberalism subordinates social/moral goods to economic goods and reduces group rights to individual rights. Applied to the university, neoliberalism measures the worth of knowledge production and student learning by their direct and immediate economic impact on society in producing qualified workers, new technology, and goods for the market. The public, politicians, governing boards, and administrators increasingly view the university as a business that should produce a near-term return on investments made by donors, students, granting agencies, and tax payers. University boards and administrators act as CEOs and managers of this knowledge business.
As a result of the university’s assimilation to neoliberalism, academic freedom is no longer understood as a privilege necessary for practicing the profession of professor. It is reconceived, rather, as a right of the individual citizen-professor almost totally assimilated to the constitutional right to free speech. In Schleck’s estimation, the focus on the individual professor weakens the idea of the professorate as a self-governing community of experts. Instead, professors become employees with employee and citizen rights. The turn to individual rights disperses the collective power the professorate traditionally used to protect the professorial vocation against violations of academic freedom. Not only so, in this new environment academic disciplines experience greater difficulty defending competent colleagues from censorship and disciplining incompetent or rogue professors.
Moreover, according to Schleck, one of the greatest threats to academic freedom in the neoliberal university is the division of professors into the tenured elite and the mass of contingent faculty. In theory, the contingent faculty (nearly 70% of all university teachers!) have “academic freedom” conceived along the lines of freedom of speech. But they have limited contracts that expire at designated dates. Hence not only are they underpaid and overworked; they are vulnerable to contract nonrenewal without recourse to the juridical procedures afforded to tenured professors. This practice allows boards and administrators to work around academic freedom rules in these cases. Increasingly, then, academic freedom is reserved for an elite few, not for all who engage in the profession. And sometimes, the elite tenured professors are the greatest threats to the academic freedom of the untenured and contingent faculty.
What can be done to protect academic freedom today? Some urge a return to the original 1915 AAUP rationale for giving professors special privileges (academic freedom and tenure) not given to other employees, that is, society needs a professorate devoted to the public good. To devote themselves to the public good wholeheartedly, professors need to be free from the narrow interests of donors and board members and the fear of losing their livelihoods. Schleck warns, however, against getting too nostalgic about the good ole days. First, the idea of the “public good” will most likely be assimilated to neoliberal culture with its focus on productivity and economic value. Second, the “public good” as understood in 1915 was neither public nor good; it left out women, the poor, people of color, and other “invisible” groups.
A second proposal urges unionizing the faculty and engaging in hard-hitting collective bargaining. Schleck admits that unions can negotiate better pay, benefits and working conditions for professors. But unions still work within the neoliberal framework, treating professors as “labor” and the administration and board as “management.” The unionized professorate falls short of a self-governing profession that can justify its traditional privileges, that is academic freedom and tenure.
Schleck proposes a model of academic freedom fitted to the university as it exists today. According to Schleck, the university of today is thoroughly postmodern. The university does not recognize any viewpoint as “true” or “good” or any one method of creating knowledge as superior to others. Hence academic freedom can no longer be defended with the rhetoric of the disinterested pursuit of truth or service to the highest good. These qualities no longer (if they ever did) describe the work of the professorate. The professors and disciplines of the postmodern university are overtly political, combative, and activist. They are warriors fighting for power to advance their causes.
Hence Schleck proposes that we reconceive academic freedom as “agonistic academic freedom,” that is, freedom to fight for your truth, your good and your knowledge, that is, for whatever helps your cause to achieve power. The university must not be expected to serve any one vision of “the public good.” It is only out of the refereed clash of ideas that society will be shaped and moved into the future. She states succinctly her vision of the postmodern university in her last paragraph:
“The knowledge produced and disseminated at universities has always been and will always be dirty, shot through with the politics and material inequities that characterize our society at large. Providing a special space for those contentions and an especially strong set of contenders is what the university offers to our democracy, and it is why it should continue to be funded by our communities. Like a wild profusion of plants, professors compete for the resources they need to generate the intellectual seeds specific to their form of life, seeds that universities will continue to store in the expectation that someday we as a society will need them to maintain and improve our quality of life, or even to perpetuate our species on earth. Universities should be sure to foster with a deliberate distribution of material resources the strangest, least useful, and most contrarian of these plants to ensure that we have the diversity we need to survive the coming storms. This new grounding for academic freedom gives us a better rationale for the renewal of the special employment protections under which previous generations of faculty have flourished. Such a renewal will enable us once again to reach for the heavens in our pursuit of knowledge, without forgetting that we are firmly rooted in the dirt” (pp. 116-117).
Schleck’s book deserves thorough analysis and critique. But I will limit myself to a few observations.
(1) Her analysis of the challenges to academic freedom and the goals of higher education deserves thoughtful consideration: the commodification and monetization of the university’s contribution to society; the use of contingent employees for 70% of the faculty, and the assimilation of profession-based academic freedom to individual freedom of speech.
(2) I agree that unionization may be needed to secure better treatment for faculty and graduate student teaching assistants, and I agree that unionization falls short of the ideal of a self-governing profession. For it fails to ground its claim to the special privileges of academic freedom and tenure in publicly acknowledge values.
(3) Schleck is correct that there is no social consensus about the public good—at least not a very detailed consensus.
(4) But I am not clear how her proposal differentiates the university space from the public square where everyone is free to say whatever they wish. In her summary paragraph quoted above in full, she urges,
Providing a special space for those contentions and an especially strong set of contenders is what the university offers to our democracy, and it is why it should continue to be funded by our communities.
She attempts here to justify funding a “special place” for a “strong set of contenders” to engage in the clash of interests and ideas and the struggle for power. By what standards are the combatants (professors) deemed “strong,” that is competent? And who decides? Why can’t these functions be carried out in other places and by other people? Why pay and give people job security to do what every citizen is free to do?
Notice that she offers a public-good like rationale for granting a privileged space to the university. In the quote above, she hinted that the university offers something “to our democracy.” Apparently, then, promoting “democracy” is a foundational value she presupposes. And the traditional privileges granted to the professorate is valuable because it supports democracy. I am not sure how this works, because “democracy” itself is a contested concept in the postmodern university.
Using an ecological metaphor in which genetic diversity is of survival value, she outlines the postmodern university’s contributions in greater detail a bit later in these words:
Like a wild profusion of plants, professors compete for the resources they need to generate the intellectual seeds specific to their form of life, seeds that universities will continue to store in the expectation that someday we as a society will need them to maintain and improve our quality of life, or even to perpetuate our species on earth.
Society should support the contentious and seemingly useless discussions in the postmodern university because of their potential utility in the future. Again, Schleck appeals to a vague notion of public good. She urges society to tolerate what may seem to most people useless, ideological, destructive, godless, profane, extreme, angry, and racist discussions in view of the possibility that some of the ideas thus formulated will contribute to our future “quality of life.” One might ask about the scale on which a “quality of life” is measured.
Scheck seems particularly worried that the neoliberal university may not see the social value of such disciplines as her own. She is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, specializing in Woman’s and Gender Studies. She says,
Universities should be sure to foster with a deliberate distribution of material resources the strangest, least useful, and most contrarian of these plants to ensure that we have the diversity we need to survive the coming storms. This new grounding for academic freedom gives us a better rationale for the renewal of the special employment protections under which previous generations of faculty have flourished.
Perhaps Scheck stretches the ecological metaphor beyond its applicability. For it makes sense to assume that nature never produces the useless, redundant and wrong, but human beings often produce nonsense and evil. She here urges toleration and even fostering of strange, useless, and contrarian studies in the postmodern university. I don’t think she thinks these studies are truly strange, useless, and contrary to all that is good and true. She speaks, rather, of the public’s untrained perceptions. But we must ask her this question: might not some ideas, theories, and fields of study generated by the postmodern university be truly strange, useless and contrary to all that is good and true? Should the university tolerate anything and everything? If she answers “Yes,” I return to my previous question about what distinguishes the university from the public square. If she answers “No,” I’d like to know how we judge between the tolerable and the intolerable.
Must the public blindly trust the community of scholars in a specialized area to judge between bad and good academic projects? Can we rule out the possibility that whole disciplines, subdisciplines and communities of scholars may be engaged in that which is truly “strange, useless, and contrary to all that is good and true”? Might not some disciplines simply be manifestations of mass kookiness? I don’t see in Schleck any rules for what counts as sound academic teaching, learning, and research and what does not. She seems to be saying to the public something like this: “Trust us with your children and your money. Give us unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment. But don’t expect us to answer to you or explain why your investments are sound.”
What, then, is the purpose of a university that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue? Julia Schleck tries valiantly to answer this question. She fails. And I am not convinced that anyone else could do a better job. Because, a “university” that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue no longer believes in itself. As far as I can tell, its driving purpose is maintenance of a system that provides faculty unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment in exchange for expressing their private opinions in esoteric vocabularies.
Today I want to apply the line of thought I began in “A Time for Orthodoxy” (August 17, 2024) to a situation shared by many of my readers to one degree or another. Much of my life’s energy has been devoted to two institutions, the church and the Christian college. I grew up in a conservative wing of what American church historians call the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement [from now on I will abbreviate it as S-CM]. This religious movement began in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Its main aim was to remedy the tendency among Protestant denominations to engage in interminable disputes and divisions over ever more subtle doctrinal points. The early leaders of the movement hypothesized that these disputes were generated by adherence to theological opinions that go beyond the plain meaning of the New Testament texts and get lost in logical labyrinths. Partisans enforced their doctrinal opinions with creeds, confessions of faith, and catechisms and other documents to which they demanded adherence by clergy and laity. These confessions served as the standards of orthodoxy for their party.
The leaders in the S-CM combined two strategies already present within Protestantism in their efforts to bring peace to the warring Protestant parties: (1) emphasis on Scripture as the sole authority for Christian doctrine and life and (2) the distinction between essential and indifferent matters. If we follow strictly the words of Scripture, reject all mere human theological constructions (ecclesiastical creeds, confessions of faith, etc.), and require adherence only to a small number of “essential” teachings that are clearly taught in Scripture, all right-thinking believers will agree and unite in the great work of evangelism and service.
This strategy made sense to the first generation of S-CM leaders for two reasons. First, the Bible was viewed by the great majority of nineteenth-century Americans as the final court of appeal in religious disputes. Even denominational creeds and confessions of faith were in theory to be judged by Scripture. Second, along with most Americans the S-CM leaders adhered to commonsense (or Baconian) philosophy, which made a radical distinction between facts and theories in natural science. Applied to biblical interpretation, the Bible could be viewed as containing many plain facts that require no interpretation. Biblical facts (assertions of truths or events) like empirical facts can be known by everyone alike whereas elaborate combinations and logical constructions composed of facts and truths provoke disagreements.
The S-CM leaders hoped to create unity among Christian believers by requiring acceptance of only those doctrines that are plainly taught in Scripture and relegating all theories and speculations to the realm of opinion on which we may allow diversity of thought. That is to say, Scripture itself serves as the confession of faith and makes additional documents superfluous. In its own day this viewpoint possessed some plausibility for the reasons mentioned above.
In our day, the naiveness of the anti-creed view has become obvious. The two historical conditions that made it plausible in the nineteenth century have disappeared. We no longer live in a culture where the Bible is widely accepted as true and authoritative. Moreover, our culture has replaced commonsense philosophy with postmodern relativism wherein each individual has their own “truth” and all “facts” are subject to contextualization and interpretation. Taking account of this new historical context explains how someone could expect the argument I discussed in “A Time for Orthodoxy?” to be persuasive:
In a case wherein many thoughtful Christians disagree on an issue, the church ought to tolerate diversity of belief, expression, and practice.
If you combine the anti-creed tradition with postmodern relativism, the argument above makes perfect sense. The Bible may very well be acknowledged as the sole authority for Christian faith and practice, but according to the argument everyone must be left free to interpreted it in their own way. In my previous essay, I made a reductio ad absurdum argument by showing that the argument implies that all views are equally true. And if all views are equally true, the distinction between truth and falsehood is meaningless. The identity of the church is obscured and its unity is shattered.
How can churches and Christian colleges guard their identity and unity in face of this absurd argument? Attempts to reassert the S-CM’s commonsense distinctions between obvious facts and truths and obscure theories won’t persuade the postmodern Christian. And reasserting the necessity of creeds and confessions of faith as standards of orthodoxy will evoke cries of intolerance and authoritarianism. What to do?
I do not claim to know a sure-to-work solution. However, I believe that in the current postmodern climate anti-creed churches and Christian colleges must rethink their opposition to creeds and statements of faith. In spite of complaints of intolerance and authoritarianism, we must be willing to state publicly what we believe, practice and teach, and in some cases, what we reject. The details of such statements, the level of conformity expected of community members, and enforcement mechanisms will need to be worked out by those communities. The alternative is gradual erosion of institutional identity and unity. Our age is, I believe, “A Time for Orthodoxy.”
ifaqtheology 