Category Archives: Higher Education

How the American Education System Became Anti-Family, Anti-Capitalist, Anti-White, Anti-Western, Anti-Christian, and Hopelessly Utopian: A Review of America’s Cultural Revolution (Part Three A)

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Today I will continue my review of Christopher F. Rufo: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023).  In Part III, Rufo focuses on education and gives the Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire (1921-1997) the lead role. As in the previous essays, I will follow Rufo’s chapter divisions.

Introduction

I come from a family of educators and have been involved with education as a student or a college professor for most of my life. I’ve thought a great deal about education and have written extensively about it on this blog. To an extent far beyond animals, human beings are capable of learning from their individual and collective experience and of passing this knowledge and skill to the generations that follow. Culture is that body of knowledge, skills, practices and creations accumulated and passed down through time. Human beings begin learning the minute they are born and continue the rest of their lives. Education is the process of “passing down” human culture to succeeding generations and is an intentional activity involving teaching and learning. Because acquiring the knowledge and skills available in one’s social world is necessary for survival and enjoying the goods of life available in a particular culture, education is valued by parents for their children and by individuals for themselves. For most people, individual and family interests are the driving forces for expending huge amounts of time, energy and money on education, kindergarten through college. But educational institutions often subordinate family and individual goals to other interests. This is especially true of institutions that are in some way (e.g., government funding) insulated from market forces and answerability to parents.

The state has always had an interest in education, and its interests are determined by its understanding of its scope and goals. There is no guarantee that the interests of the state will coincide with those of parents and individual students. As the United States of America transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial, and finally to a technological society, the government’s economic interest in education changed accordingly. But producing skilled workers for industry and technology is not the only reason for state involvement in education. Producing “good” citizens has always been a major goal, and a “good” citizen is defined as one that accepts and supports the basic values that the state holds necessary to its stability and to the general welfare. State funded and administered schools have never been value neutral.

If government schools champion values that are widely held, traditional, and limited in scope, most people hardly notice, because they, too, hold them. A list of such values might include individual civil liberties, economic freedom, hard work, respect for law, social peace, reward for merit, majority rule accompanied by minority rights, respect for marriage and family, religious liberty, etc. There have always been minority groups that dissent from many values held by the majority of people, and in response they’ve founded Christian and other private schools or educated their children at home.  But what if the government with its vast system of bureaucracies gets captured by a small group that champions a value system very different from that held by the vast majority of people? What if the American educational system came to be controlled by a philosophy that taught that the value system that privileged individual civil liberties, economic freedom, hard work, respect for law, social peace, reward for merit, majority rule accompanied by minority rights, respect for marriage and family, and religious liberty was systemically racist, heterosexist, homophobic, colonialist, and sexist? And what if the new education regime taught that the only way to reform this corrupt society was to transform all the values that legitimate it by subordinating them to the New Left’s Neo-Marxist values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Moreover, what if these transformed values were taught to every child in America from kindergarten through graduate school by means of a method called “Critical Pedagogy”?

Dystopian? Nightmarish? Orwellian? Agreed!

But according to Rufo, this nightmare is now our new reality. Whether you send your child to kindergarten or to college, you can expect that your values—the ones mentioned above—will be attacked, subverted, and if possible, replaced by values of the New Left.

Next time we will let Rufo tell us how the nightmare became a reality, how a small group of Neo-Marxists gained almost total control over the American educational system.

Counter-Cultural Christianity for an Upside Down, Inside Out World (Part One)

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Today I will begin a series in which I interact with a new book by Christopher F. Rufo: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (Broadside Books, 2023). The book documents the growth in influence of the radical left, that is neo-Marxism or Critical Theory, from the 1960s to 2023 in American higher education, government, and corporations. Rufo uncovers the origins of the now familiar leftist theories and programs: Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Critical Pedagogy, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Identity Politics, and many others. He introduces us to the most influential theorists and activists of the radical left: Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, Derrick Bell, and their students and allies.

In America’s Cultural Revolution, Rufo describes, analyzes and criticizes the radical left from a traditional and conservative position. I will evaluate the radical left from a Christian perspective. Like Rufo, I am skeptical of socialism and don’t want to live under the rule of neo-Marxist politicians and I lament the destructive impact of the radical left on American education. I am grateful to Rufo for his efforts to inform the American people about the dangers coming from the Left.  In this series, however, sticking to what I know best, I want to warn individual believers, the church as a corporate body and Christian educators about the radical left’s pervasive influence on the cultural air they breathe.

The book is divided into four parts with four or five chapters within each part. The parts cover roughly the same span of time (1968-2023) but from different angles. Each part centers on a theme and a person: 1. Revolution and Herbert Marcuse; 2. Race and Angela Davis; 3. Education and Paulo Freire; 4. Power and Derrick Bell. I will review one part in each post and follow these essays with some applications to the church and Christian education.

Part I: Revolution

1. Herbert Marcuse: Father of the Revolution

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was born in Germany of Jewish parents. During World War I, Marcuse joined the Social Democrat Party, but soon became disillusioned because of the party’s accommodation to the old establishment. He pursued a doctorate at the University of Freiberg, studying under Martin Heidegger and writing a dissertation on the philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel. With the rise of Adolf Hitler, he fled first to Switzerland, France, and then to the United States. He taught at Brandeis University and then at the University of California, San Diego. Marcuse never wavered from his commitment to socialism as the most democratic form of political society and the most fitted to human nature. His main intellectual project for the rest of his life was creating a form of Marxism responsive to the new conditions of the post WW II situation in the Western world. Classical Marxism theorized that the working class, oppressed as they were by the capitalists, was the natural place for the socialist revolution to begin. By the 1950s, however, labor laws, unions, and increases in productivity, had transformed the Western working class into the comfortable and conservative middle class. Bitterly disappointed, Marcuse had to look elsewhere for potential revolutionaries. His “new left” had to be an alliance between the class of (mostly) white “intellectuals” and the black urban population. Race rather than class would be the new dividing line between oppressor and oppressed.

Marcuse articulated his “New Left” theory in a series of books: One-Dimensional Man (1964), Critique of Pure Tolerance (1965), Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (1968), An Essay on Liberation (1969), and Counter Revolution and Revolt (1972). In these writings he argued that the masses of people can be awakened to their oppressed status only by destabilizing the social order. Revolutionaries have every right to use violence to disrupt and protest the systemically unjust order. Generations of revolutionaries from the Black Liberation Army (1970s) to Black Lives Matter (2020) and from the Weather Underground (1970s) to the contemporary Pro-Palestine student protests look to Marcuse and his theories to justify burning, looting and murder in the name of liberation. Marcuse, then, is the intellectual father of today’s radical left.

2. The New Left: “We Will Burn and Loot and Destroy”

This chapter tells the story of the Weather Underground organization and its founder Bernadine Dohrn. Acknowledging Marcuse as her inspiration, Dohrn led the Weather Underground to join with other militants a four-year terror campaign designed to provoke the long-anticipated revolution. The Weather Underground’s part in the campaign began on June 9, 1970 with the detonation of 15 sticks of dynamite in a New York Police Department headquarters. Between January 1969 and December 1970, the Weather Underground and like-minded organizations carried out 4,330 bombings. Forty-three people were killed. Dohrn and her friends gleefully celebrated the murder of police officers (a.k.a. “pigs”). But by 1972, the public had had enough and the FBI and President Nixon had decimated the ranks of the Weather Underground. Their reign of terror was a complete failure.

3. The Long March Through the Institutions

After the failure of the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and other violent groups, Marcuse was forced to rethink his approach to revolution. His German admirer and student activist friend Rudi Dutschke suggested that the New Left movement return to the universities to regroup. Dutschke used the metaphor “the long march” to describe this strategy of retreat and consolidation, borrowing an expression originally used to describe Mao Zedong’s year-long, 5,000-mile retreat to the mountains after his 1934-defeat by the Nationalist Chinese Army. Marcuse agreed with Dutschke and advised his students to join university faculties with the aim of training new recruits and eventually taking over education from within and from there other social institutions. From positions in literature, journalism, and education, these radical professors railed against capitalism, sexism, colonialism, and racism. They invented new theoretical concepts such as “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “neocolonialism,” “patriarchy,” “anti-racism,” and a thousand other terms. Marcuse labeled this process “linguistic therapy.” Leftist theorists generate these ideas out of their Marxist ideology, which explains every less than utopian state of affairs through the lens of the oppressor/oppressed dialectic.* The process of “linguistic therapy” works like this: invent a term useful to the cause of revolution and use it over and over with confidence and people will begin to believe it refers to a real state of affairs. To draw out the social implications of their oppressor/oppressed ideology, the New Left academics lobbied for the creation of a host of new “studies” programs: Black Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, Whiteness Studies, Critical Race Studies, and the list grows every year. In these “studies” programs, theory held dogmatically and applied with methodological rigor determines the meaning of every fact. As a sign of the pervasive priority of theory over fact, consider how frequently you hear the adverbial phrase, “As a (an)…feminist, gay man, black woman, trans man, etc.” used to condition a person’s expression of an opinion in academic and popular speech.

Contemporary diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training can be traced back to the work of Marcuse’s third wife, Erica Sherover-Marcuse. Theory needed to be operationalized in practice. How do you get white people to recognize and confess their racism and privilege and black people to become conscious of their internalized oppression? In the 1980s, Sherover-Marcuse developed workshops designed to facilitate this new consciousness. The most well-known exercise in these workshops is the “privilege walk.” Participants divide into groups based on where they stand in the hierarchy of privilege and oppression. The privileged, then, must acknowledge and apologize for their racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. This exercise has been incorporated into many institutional programs designed to promote DEI. These programs are administered by armies of bureaucrats, adding millions of dollars to institutional payrolls. They act as modern-day inquisitors to sniff out hidden biases, intimidate dissenters, and punish offenders.

4. The New ideological Regime

This chapter documents the culmination of the “long march” through the institutions. The legacy media, government agencies, and most large corporations have adopted the critical theory and DEI programs, hiring thousands of DEI administrators and paying millions to outside anti-racist and DEI consultants.

Preliminary Reflections

I will save my comprehensive critique until I finish reviewing the entire book. But I will make some preliminary remarks. (1) I don’t see how a Marxist or Neo-Marxist theory of social relations can be separated from Marx’s atheism and anti-religious stance. For Marx, and apparently Marcuse, the possibility of thorough revolution depends on completely limiting one’s hope to this life and relying on human power alone to bring about the ideal society. Marxism encourages envy and discontent and justifies violence against the “oppressor” class to bring about its vision of justice. (2) It views evil as residing in systems and thinks human nature can be redeemed through social reordering; that is to say, it is utopian. It can dream and destroy, but it cannot build. (3) It has never worked anywhere it has been tried. (4) Hence Christians, churches, Christian non-profit organizations, and Christian educational institutions should be highly skeptical and very cautious of adopting any theory or program that finds its origin in the New Left: DEI, CRT, SEED, Critical Pedagogy, and the whole series of “Studies” academic tracts. Nor should we adopt the subversive vocabulary of New Left academics: “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “neocolonialism,” “patriarchy,” “anti-racism,” “homophobia,” “transphobia,” and the rest. As I argued above, the truth of these terms depends on the truth of the (neo)Marxist theory out of which the terms are spun. Accepting the terms implies accepting the theory.

*“Dialectic” refers here not to logical contradiction or friendly debate but an intractable social conflict that can be resolved only by establishing socialism as the political order.

To be continued…

Academia’s Double Standard, Or Orthodoxy for Me but Not for Thee (Seminarian Visits Theology Professor #5)

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Introduction

Today we listen in on the fifth conversation between a recent seminary graduate and one of his former professors. The previous conversation centered on clarifying the critical standard academia uses to test knowledge claims. Taking mathematics and logic as the ideal sciences, academia measures all other endeavors to secure knowledge by the ideal of clear, exhaustive, and absolute knowledge. In sciences other than mathematics, however, this ideal is unattainable and can be only approximated to one degree or another. Not only so, the level of success in approximating the ideal is always a matter of dispute. Because it is unattainable in fields other than pure mathematics, it is open to abuse and selective application. Our professor argues that the dominant academic approach to the Bible and Christian faith displays just this sort of abuse and endless debate.

Setting: The seminarian and the professor agree that friendly conversation is better when you are sharing food and drink or taking a walk together. Warm and sunny, today is a perfect day for a leisurely walk.

Seminarian: Thank you for suggesting that we walk as we talk today.

Professor: Like sharing a meal, walking together is an act of friendship conducive to honest conversation. Where did we leave our last conversation?

Seminarian: As I recall, we were going to examine the ways the academic method creates doubt about the Bible as a reliable source of knowledge of God.

Professor: Yes. I remember. Tell me, then, in the most succinct way you can how academia attempted to diminish your confidence in the Bible as a repository of divine revelation.

Seminarian: I can summarize it in four words. On hundreds of occasions, in scores of different ways, and to every belief I brought with me to seminary, academia repeated the same challenge: “How do you know?” How do you know the Bible is true? How do you know that every book, every sentence, and every word is inspired or God-breathed? How do you know the biblical writings are authentic, that is, written by authors to whom they are ascribed, composed at the times and in places they claim, and preserved uncorrupted? How do you know that the events they recount really happened? How do you know that the authors’ theological interpretations of the events they write about are true? How do you know that the Scribes and Rabbis that selected the Old Testament canon and the churches and bishops and councils that selected the New Testament canon did not make mistakes in the writings they included or excluded?

Professor: Asking “how do you know?” seems more like a rhetorical ploy than an academic argument. You don’t have to know anything about a subject or offer any alternative explanations for the data, to ask this question. Did they make any positive arguments? Do they attempt to demonstrate the Bible’s unreliability or provide an alternative history or theology?

Seminarian: Yes. They did. And they can succeed in creating plausible doubt at some points. In my experience, however, the “how-do-you-know” question is the only way to mount an effective challenge to faith in the Bible’s reliability as the authority for Christian teaching, because most of the Bible’s message is untestable by universally acknowledged criteria. The Bible is the only source of information we have for almost all the history it contains. You have to take it or leave it. True, there are some areas where the Bible’s statements may be tested. The simplest way to test the Bible’s reliability is to examine it for internal coherence or compatibility with external sources. If the Bible seems to assert two contradictory ideas or incompatible facts, this would be a mark against its reliability for those ideas and facts. If the Bible asserts ideas and facts that contradict or are incompatible with ideas and facts sourced from outside the Bible, one must assess which source to trust and to what degree. To take one obvious example, the first eleven chapters of Genesis, taken as history or science in the modern sense, seems to be incompatible with some aspects of modern cosmology, archeology, biology, and the modern understanding of the course of ancient history. And there are many other places where the Bible speaks of historical events, natural phenomena, and moral principles to which some people claim to have independent access.

Professor: Indeed, examples could be multiplied. Hardly a biblical stoned has been left unturned. Biblical scholars have been studying the Bible in this academic way for at least 250 years. Some hoped that academic study would confirm the truth of faith and others seemed to take delight in debunking it. Some were cautious and reserved and others prone to speculation and flights of fancy. They examined it from every angle imaginable and set it within every ideological schema that has been developed: Hegelian, Marxist, postmodern, feminist, and gay. I have read widely in this literature for 50 years, and as I asserted a few conversations back, for all their efforts not much of substance has changed. If you want to know what the ancient Jews believed about God, creation, and other faith topics you still have to read the text of the Old Testament printed in your Bible, which is for all practical purposes the same as that read by Jesus and Paul. If you want to know about the life and teachings of Jesus, you have to read the New Testament Gospels. If you want to know what Jesus’s original disciples and the earliest church believed about Jesus, you have to read Acts, Paul, John, and the rest of the New Testament documents. Don’t get me wrong, biblical scholars have been very helpful in providing insights into the biblical writings. But when scholars use the biblical texts plus their vivid imaginations to reconstruct a picture of Jesus or the early church that is radically different from that given in the New Testament texts, what are we to do? Trust modern scholars and their methods? Which scholars? What methods? Surely, it makes more sense to trust the original sources even if there is no independent way, acceptable to academia, to prove them true. No matter how many scholars you read, you will still have to make a choice to believe the biblical teaching or not.

Seminarian: If I am hearing you correctly you are saying that all attempts to go beyond faith in grasping the truth of the Bible—whether to confirm or deny it—are futile and unreasonable. Am I right?

Professor: Yes. The Bible’s truth value cannot be assessed with mathematical methods. It makes historical and theological claims, and the methods by which historical and theological claims can be assessed cannot produce “clear, exhaustive, and absolute” knowledge. Academics who nevertheless attempt to transform biblical faith into scientific knowledge will inevitably reduce that faith to a few meaningless historical facts and a short list of culturally acceptable moralisms. Their edited Bible turns out to be even less plausible than the uninterpreted text. Ironically, their failed efforts to rationalize faith actually renders a service to faith. For if the Christian faith could be refuted (or proved) by academic means, it seems that 250 years of scholarly work would be enough to accomplish this task. From an academic point of view, however, it is still inconclusive. And it always will be, for that is the nature of academia.

Seminarian: And that brings us back to the “How do you know?” argument!

Professor: Exactly! Because orthodox/biblical faith cannot be defeated by positive academic arguments, unbelieving academics often resort to the “How do you know?” argument! Because it contains an element of truth, it often ensnares unwary students. It is true that we do not know the truth of the orthodox/biblical faith in the same way and to the degree of certainty that we know that 2 + 2 = 4. So what? Skeptical academics argue or imply that we ought not to trust beliefs grounded in faith. This act, they say, is a failure of rational responsibility and a loss of courage. We ought rather to hold such beliefs in suspense until we can know their truth status one way or another, which implies that we should never embrace Christian faith wholeheartedly and apply it to every aspect of our lives. For we cannot know its truth clearly, exhaustively, and absolutely.

Seminarian: If academics applied this standard to every belief they cherish, they would never embrace wholeheartedly and live by any belief or principle…except perhaps mathematical or logical ones. And you won’t have much of a life if you determine to act guided only by those abstractions!

Professor: But as we all know, the dominant culture of academia does not apply this rigorous standard to every belief and value! Can you imagine the furor that would be created on most college campuses if a guest speaker or a professor were to turn the tables and apply these standards to modern academia’s sacred cows in the following ways? “How do you know that the world is divided into wicked oppressors and righteous oppressed people? Can you prove that all black and brown people are victims of systemic racism? Can you give demonstrable evidence that racism is immoral? How can you prove that socialism is morally superior to capitalism? How do you know that diversity is a moral and social good? How do you know that seeking equity (or even equality!) is morally superior to rewarding merit? How do you know that inclusion is right and exclusion is wrong? How do you know that LGBTQ+ rights are human rights? Indeed, how do you know there are such things as human rights? So, you don’t know? You can’t answer? Well then, you should to hold such beliefs in suspense until you can know their truth status one way or another. If you don’t know them clearly, exhaustively, and absolutely you should not risk living by them or imposing them on others!”

Seminarian: I suspect that such a person would be silenced and perhaps attacked by a mob, fired from their jobs, and even arrested by law enforcement.

Professor: Higher education, too, has its dogma, its orthodoxy. To question it is to blaspheme, and you don’t argue with blasphemy. You silence it and persecute the perpetrator.

Professor: I see that we have been walking for about an hour and its nearly lunch time. Next time, let’s address directly why holding tenaciously to the faith proclaimed in the Bible and attested and passed on to us by the church is a very reasonable thing to do.

Seminarian: I look forward to it!

Professor: See you next time.

Young Seminarian Visits With His Old Theology Professor (Part Two)

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Introduction

For the full context of this post please read the first conversation posted December 05, 2023. In that meeting, the old professor addressed the question of why seminary training tends to weaken if not destroy the faith and piety that young people bring to the endeavor. In sum, the professor explains, seminaries participate in the ethos of modern academia, which sees as its main task critical examination of all inherited beliefs. Whether intended or not, this relentless questioning replaces the student’s initial certainty of faith with doubt. Many students enter seminary with the naïve belief that the indubitability of the faith is an essential sign of its truth. Hence some students take refutation of the faith’s status as absolute knowledge as disproof of its truth. Or, at least as a reason to refrain from embracing the faith wholeheartedly.

Setting: As our young seminarian approaches the old professor’s office, he notices that his office door is open. Their eyes meet.

Professor: Good to see you again! Come in.

Seminarian: Thank you, professor.

Professor: How have you been? Tell me what you are thinking.

Seminarian: In our last conversation you gave me much to consider. Some of which, I had never before thought about.

Professor: What was that?

Seminarian: That I may have unknowingly identified the believability of a belief with its indubitability; that if I can doubt it, I should not trust it. And in doing so, I may have mistaken the academic method of universal doubt and endless criticism for a livable philosophy. If you don’t mind, I’d like to pursue this issue today.

Professor: I was going to make the same suggestion. Examining this mistaken inference may go a long way to dealing with your concerns about the Bible and the credibility of the orthodox Christian faith.

Seminarian: I look forward to it.

Professor: Let’s begin by thinking about the terms you just used, “believability” and “indubitability.” In my experience, contemporary use of these concepts and their near relatives creates much confusion. I see three areas where we need strive for more clarity. (1) Note first that the words “believability” and “indubitability” diverts our attention away from the person who believes or doubts and focuses on the proposition in question. They speak as if believability and indubitability are properties inherent in the claims being made. I do not accept this attribution. Whereas a proposition’s truth or falsity is not dependent on the person believing or doubting, a proposition’s believability or indubitability is. For a claim may seem believable to one person but doubtful to another. Hence debates about the believability or indubitability of a proposition are a waste of time. It will be helpful here to recall that these terms are derived from the verbs “to believe” and “to doubt.” To believe and to doubt are acts of individual subjects. And one person may believe while another person doubts a claim. A proposition may indeed possess the property of truth or falsehood, but it cannot possess the property of believability or indubitability or doubtfulness, or any other like property. The assertion that a claim is believable means no more than this: “I assent to this claim and can see no reason why others would not do the same.” Likewise, the assertion that a claim is doubtful means no more than this: “I dissent from this claim and can see no reason why others would not do the same.”

Seminarian: This is helpful. It keeps our focus on the place where decisions between belief and disbelief must be made, that is, on the individual’s weighing of the evidence for and against the truth of a claim.

Professor: True. And I will return to examine the acts of belief and doubt in greater detail. But first, there is another area of confusion I want to address. (2) Faith and doubt (the acts of believing and doubting) are often seen as mutually exclusive. More precisely, they are seen as different kinds of actions; that is to say, faith acts and doubt refrains from acting. Faith assents and embraces a claim while doubt refrains from assenting and embracing. Belief moves, but doubt remains steadfast. According to this way of thinking, doubt is conservative and cautious but belief ventures into uncertain waters and risks error. Doubt rests secure until it is moved by evidence it judges compelling. The doubter claims the higher intellectual and moral ground and looks down his nose at the naïve believer.

Seminarian: As I look back on my first year in seminary, I now understand why I was so confused. Up to that point in my life I had thought of the act of faith as responsible and virtuous. Only people lacking true virtue embraced skepticism and doubt. They were clearly looking for a way to escape from the restrictions of morality and religious practice. But when I entered the academic world, these values were reversed. Doubt, skepticism, criticism and avoidance of commitment were viewed as responsible and virtuous. Belief and commitment were signs of fear, gullibility, and carelessness. I suppose I was gradually socialized into academia.

Professor: But it’s all based on a deception. For doubt is not the absence of belief. Doubters can refuse to be moved to belief by arguments for a particular claim only because they hold to other beliefs that exclude that claim. One may justify rejecting Paul’s testimony to the resurrection of Jesus based on their belief that miracles are impossible. A person who rejects the New Testament’s sexual ethics can do so only because they rely on other moral sources they trust more. Doubters can be just as gullible, fearful, and careless as believers! Everyone is simultaneously both a doubter and a believer. Hence debating the relative moral and intellectual superiority of doubt over belief or of belief over doubt is another complete waste of time.

Seminarian: I had never thought of that before! But it’s obviously true. Disbelief in one proposition is possible only because of belief in another opposing proposition. Academia’s critical method won’t work unless the criteria by which beliefs are measured are assumed true, at least provisionally. Criticism without criteria is an absurd idea.

Professor: Well said! Let’s move now to the third clarification. (3) As I said above, “to doubt” and “to believe” are acts of individual subjects situated in a particular time and place. The act of doubting or believing expresses a subjective state, a judgment, a decision, and a mood. (a) To say “I doubt” expresses the present mental state of the speaker. It communicates something like: “I do not find the evidence for your claim compelling.” It says nothing about the properties of the proposition in question or the evidence supporting it. (b) But clearly the subjective state of the doubter results from a judgment, which concludes something like, “The evidence for this claim is not sufficient to justify rational assent.” (c) Because neither expressing doubt nor affirming belief assert infallibility, treating either one as a basis for action involves a decision, a decision to move forward apart from complete clarity and certainty. (d) Many judgments and decisions are accompanied by certain moods: joy, triumph, glee, pride, etc. And these moods often indicate the operations of motives other than desire for truth and commitment to sober rationality.

Seminarian: I did not realize that believing and doubting were so complex. But I should have known this. Human beings are not calculating machines. Their judgments and decisions are conditioned by their multidimensional natures, widely different experiences, and diverse characters.

Professor: Let’s bring this line of reasoning to its point: “To doubt” and “to believe” are acts of situated individual subjects involving judgments, decisions, and moods. Every doubter is also a believer and every believer is also a doubter. The doubter possesses no inherent intellectual or moral superiority to the believer. I think this truth sheds light on your seminary struggles. You may have been beguiled by academia’s spurious claim that doubt is intellectually superior to belief and seduced by the offer of membership in a social class marked by its presumption to higher wisdom.

Seminarian: You may be correct. When I returned home after my first year, I’m ashamed to admit that I felt a bit smug when relating to the “unenlightened masses.”

Professor: I hope I’ve given you something to think about until our next meeting.

Seminarian: You have indeed! But I have many more questions.

Professor: We will take them up one by one. See you soon.

Seminarian: Goodbye.

Academic Freedom and Christian Education (Part Three)

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This essay concludes my series on academic freedom in American universities and colleges. I posted earlier instalments on July 15, 2023 and August 28 2023. As we discovered in the first two essays, academic freedom is a contested concept. Simple appeals to academic freedom soon find themselves mired in disputes about the nature and limits of such freedom. Even in public and private secular colleges the idea is a bone of contention. And this dispute expands inevitably to disagreements about the nature of the teaching profession, the academic ideal, and the place of the university in society. Your stance on these subjects determines how you understand academic freedom. Not surprisingly, then, the nature of academic freedom is also disputed within self-designated Christian colleges and between Christian colleges and secular colleges.

Diversity Among “Christian” Colleges

Great diversity reigns among “Christian” colleges. We must map this diversity before we examine the distinction between academic freedom in Christian colleges and academic freedom in secular colleges. I spoke above of “self-designated” Christian colleges. I did so because there is as much diversity among Christian colleges as there is among “Christian” churches and individual Christians. Some church related colleges have so assimilated to the national culture that only vestiges of Christianity remain. Perhaps they require a course or two in religion, maintain a chapel on campus, and employ a chaplain, but otherwise they differ little from their secular counterparts. Their religious studies departments are very progressive, and there are no confessional requirements for students or faculty. The scope of academic freedom in these colleges tracks perfectly with secular schools.

At the other end of the spectrum are colleges that require administrators, board members, faculty and students to adhere to a list of orthodox beliefs. Christian symbols permeate the campus, occasions for worship are numerous and attendance is mandatory, and faith-affirming classes in Bible and theology are required. Expressions of faith and prayer in the classroom are encouraged. Strict moral conduct by students and faculty is expected. Continued employment is contingent on abiding by these rules in life, teaching, and research. Confessional boundaries determine the limits of academic freedom.

Between these two extremes lies a spectrum of self-designated “Christian” colleges. In his book Quality With Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions (Eerdmans, 2001), Robert Benne lists four types of “Christian” colleges: Orthodox, Critical-Mass, Intentionally Pluralist, and Accidentally Pluralist (p. 49).

The question whether or not a particular college that self-designates as Christian really is Christian is open for debate in the same way a church’s or an individual’s claim to be Christian is open for debate. I am willing to admit that various models of the Christian college are possible, just as I am willing to accept some flexibility of belief among churches and individual believers. But there are limits. Outright denial or malicious neglect of core Christian doctrine or abandonment of Christian morality belie claims to Christian character. A college that designates itself as Christian should maintain a constant internal debate about the meaning of that designation.

When a person claims to be a Christian it is reasonable to assume that they sincerely hold the central beliefs proclaimed in the New Testament and wish to be an active and faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. Likewise, when an institution advertises itself as “Christian” it should embody this very same confession in its institutional mission, policies, and code of conduct. The Christian faith encompasses every dimension of life. It is a way of thinking, feeling, and living. Compatibility with the Christian mission of a Christian college should be a determining factor—equal to technical competence—in administrative, faculty, and staff hiring, and in retention, tenure, and promotion decisions. It is relevant to curriculum, co-curriculum, teaching, and research.

Christian Colleges Contrasted with Secular Colleges

If a self-designated Christian college adheres to the above essential marks of a Christian college, its concept of the nature and limits of academic freedom should differ markedly from that employed in state or private secular, or nominally Christian colleges. To grasp those differences let’s examine ways Christian and secular colleges differ.

The Reason to Exist

As a matter of historical record, at least from 1900 onward, Christian colleges (Protestant) were founded as alternatives to secular colleges and universities. The older private colleges and newly established state schools had come first to tolerate and then promote agnosticism, secular humanism, atheism, social Darwinism, pantheism, and religious indifferentism. The founders of Christian colleges rejected as laughable the claim that these secular colleges were “nonsectarian” or neutral on matters of religion. Christian colleges aimed to protect young minds from being led astray by persuasive presentations of these anti-Christian ideologies. This sentiment is expressed clearly by William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925) in a speech at Taylor University in Upland, IN:

Parents all over this nation are asking me where they can send their sons and daughters to school knowing that their faith in God and in morality will not be destroyed. I find that this is a college where they teach you the Bible instead of apologizing for it, and I shall for this reason recommend Taylor University to inquiring Christian parents [Quoted in William Ringenberg, The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America (Baker,1984, 2006) p. 171]

The Christian worldview served as the intellectual and moral framework to give coherence to institutional policies, curriculum, and co-curriculum.

Christian colleges were not founded as research universities or as instruments to serve the national interest in agriculture, industry, and defense. It was not their purpose to change or preserve the national culture. Their aim was much less grandiose, being a direct extension of the aspirations of churches and Christian parents. It was to educate young people for living as Christians in their chosen professions, as ministers, missionaries, teachers, and others. Christian colleges transforming themselves into research universities and touting their service to the nation is a recent development. This transformation seems always to be accompanied by a loss of Christian identity.

The Profession

As we learned in previous articles in this series, the founding of the American Association of University Professors (1915) was part of an effort by leading professors at America’s elite research universities to consolidate the growing demand for greater professionalization of the professorate. Among their goals were creating nation-wide standards and a nation-wide culture for the profession. Not surprisingly, their professional standards and culture were those most congenial to the secular research university and the self-interests of the professors who teach there. They wished to nationalize and standardize the image of professors as secular saints devoted to discovering truth—courageous, unbiased, and free from all external loyalties that would constrain their judgment.

Teachers that embrace fully the founding purpose and mission of the Christian college do not fit the image of the professor whose highest loyalty is to the profession as secular universities understand it. Ideally, Christian college professors would possess technical mastery of their subject area equal to that of professors in secular universities. Yet they would remain critical of ways in which secular professors in these fields import alien frameworks and anti-Christian philosophical, moral, and political beliefs into their research and teaching. For example, a Christian professor would deny that to be a good physicist, chemist, or biologist one must assert that these sciences refute belief in God and creation. Christian professors see clearly that the social and psychological sciences—insofar as they are truly scientific— have nothing to say about morality. However, because holding such secular views seems to be a requirement of the profession, Christian professors may feel like strangers within the profession.

The Academic Ideal

As we learned in previous articles, even secular colleges debate the nature and purpose of academia: Should academia be driven by the cool, objective search for truth regardless of its practical application? Or, should its goal be to reform society in a mood of urgency and advocacy? Advocates of the truth-seeking approach accuse the cause-advocating group of abandoning reason for political advocacy. In response to this charge, the cause-advocating group accuses the truth-seeking group of hypocrisy. Their high-flown rhetoric of disinterested science hides their intellectual assumptions and socioeconomic agendas. Perhaps these two alternatives are not mutually exclusive. Even so, thoughtful Christian academics will not combine them in the same way that secular academics do. Christian professors value reason and truth-seeking highly and they prize fairness in critical evaluation. In this, they resemble the truth-seeking ideal. But they do not pretend to take a neutral attitude toward the Christian understanding of God, the world, humanity, and morality. This stance of advocacy they have in common with the cause-advocating academics.

The real difference, then, between Christian academics and truth-seeking secular academics is not that the latter value reason and truth and the former do not. They differ, rather, in the guiding assumptions and presuppositions each makes. Likewise, Christian academics and cause-advocating academics do not differ in that one serves non-academic causes and the other refrains from serving any cause outside of academia. They differ in the causes they serve.

Academic Freedom

Academic freedom is about the freedom to teach and learn within the limits clearly defined by an academic institution. This description applies both to secular and Christian colleges. The limits on academic freedom differ according to the ways each type understands the mission of the college, the character of the profession, and the nature of academia. Secular colleges grant professors freedom to teach and advocate agnostic, atheist, immoralist/libertine, and other views incompatible with Christian faith but deny them freedom to teach and advocate Christianity. In contrast, Christian colleges deny (or should deny) professors freedom to teach atheist, agnostic, immoralist/libertine, or any other view it regards as anti-Christian.

Understandably, professors want maximum freedom and secure employment. But there is no college that allows unlimited academic freedom and unconditional tenure. If professors want freedom to teach unbelief and immorality and recruit young people for those causes, they should seek employment where they have freedom to do this. Similarly, if professors want freedom to argue that Christianity is true, good, and beautiful, they may be happier in a Christian college, which allows and encourages such advocacy.

If private and public secular colleges wish to teach anti-Christian views, this is a decision for those institutions and their stakeholders to make. And if Christian colleges and their stakeholders decide that anti-Christian views and values must not be taught and practiced, this is their prerogative. There is no rationally self-evident or divinely revealed law of academic freedom, and there is no academic supreme court to settle disputes among different views. Institutions must discover through dialogue and debate among the interested parties a balance that works best for them.

“Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain” Or Demystifying Academic Freedom and Professorial Privilege

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In my previous essay on academic freedom (July 15, 2023), I reviewed Daniel Gordon’s recent book, What is Academic Freedom? A Century of Debate–1915 to the Present (Routledge, 2022). Gordon argues convincingly that no single definition of academic freedom commands universal assent within American academia. In this essay, I will explore the implications of Gordon’s thesis and lay a foundation for constructing a view of the nature and limits of academic freedom in Christian colleges and universities.

Academic Freedom: Universal Right or Elitist Privilege?

Knowledge is Power

Every ancient society treasured its wisdom, technical skills, and bodies of knowledge. Prophets, priests, and philosophers mastered the received tradition and taught it to the next generation. Some speculated about God and the heavens and others dealt with humanity and earth. But from Solomon to Socrates, Descartes to Darwin, and Newton to Nietzsche thinkers were admired and despised, immortalized and martyred. One person’s saint is another’s heretic. Why would the same thinker be hailed as a savior and persecuted as a traitor? How could an idea be received as light from heaven by some and condemned as infernal heresy by others?

Francis Bacon may have put his finger on the reason: “Knowledge in itself is power.” Technical knowledge enables us to do things that we could not do otherwise.  Knowing how to speak and write well may enable you to persuade other people to buy your product or join your cause. Learning the sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, or biology opens doors to respected and well-paid professions. If people think you know how to fix the economy or win wars, they will place you in high office and put their collective power at your disposal. No wonder professions, unions, and guilds jealously guard their trade secrets and defend their privileges by requiring degrees, accreditation, licensure and sometimes by resorting to intimidation and violence!

Ideas are Dangerous

Knowledge can be used for good or evil, to build or destroy. Ideas, even if they are true, are dangerous things. To a politician that maintains power by perpetuating falsehoods, truth is dangerous and one who speaks it is an enemy. Lies, too, can destroy lives and livelihoods. So can fancies, superstitions, and other expressions of ignorance and conceit. Prophets, liars, and charlatans wield the dangerous weapon of speech.

We should not be surprised, then, that societies from ancient to modern times feel the need to regulate the knowledge industry, that is, to have a say about what counts for knowledge and who is recognized as a reliable teacher.  Sometimes that regulation was enforced with a heavy hand, as in the cases of Socrates, Jesus, and Galileo, and at others, through the subtle power of social disapproval. In any case, for most of human history, those who dared speak their minds understood that they risked losing freedom, livelihood, and life itself.

The Price of Privilege

The modern doctrines of academic freedom and professorial self-governance were designed to buck the trend of history and exempt university professors from hazards braved by their courageous predecessors. But I wonder, can “truth-to-power” speech be institutionalized without losing its prophetic edge? What price must be paid for these privileges? The modern professorate is a self-perpetuating, highly selective group, and the fee for admission is steep. No charlatans and liars, purveyors of fancies and superstitions are allowed to join. But who are the gatekeepers, the ones that decide who is in and who is out? Who determines what ideas are fanciful and superstitious and who the charlatans are?

At the risk of sounding more cynical than I already have, I have to ask a further series of questions: Was professionalizing the professorate and adopting the modern doctrine of academic freedom just a less obvious way for progressive society to regulate the knowledge industry? Might not excluding some thinkers as “charlatans and purveyors of fancies and superstitions” be the way the “profession” colludes with its powerful patrons to shield them from scrutiny? Is “professionalization” a euphemism for “cooptation”?

Even the casual reader of the AAUP’s 1915 General Declaration on academic freedom can catch the disdain in which its authors held “proprietary” colleges, a category that includes any school dedicated to advancing particular political, philosophical or religious causes. As “proprietary types,” devoted to their “propagandist duties,” denominational colleges, seminaries, and what we now call “Christian” colleges, do not rise to the high standards of universities devoted to the “public” good. By making themselves the arbiters of what counts as the common good, the authors of the General Declaration in effect institutionalized their (progressive) political, philosophical, and religious causes as if they were the rationally self-evident norms of academic excellence.

The Profession: Self-Governance or Self-Service?

Who Guards the Guardians?

The modern concept of academic freedom goes back at least to the founding of the University of Berlin (1810). Thousands of Americans studied in Germany during the nineteenth century, and they returned to America eager to raise American universities up to German standards. Establishing the professorate as a self-governing profession protected by complete academic freedom was among the first tasks they undertook. The 1915 AAUP General Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure  is the classic American statement on academic freedom. The Declaration argued that as a profession constituted by a specialized body of skills and knowledge and dedicated to the public good, the professorate has earned the right to self-governance in all academic matters, that is, the qualifications of teachers, tenure decisions, the curriculum, and the range of theories worthy of consideration within each discipline. The original AAUP statement and all later iterations insist that faculty should be free from all external regulation in matters of academic judgment. According to the Declaration, faculty should not be treated as “employees” as are the grounds keeping staff but as “appointees” in analogy to federal judges.

As an insider to the profession, I understand wanting freedom to write and teach as I please. I understand why professors want the public to think that their work is vital to the common good and that academic freedom and tenure, good pay, a light teaching load, and time to study and research are necessary to that end. I can make a good case for all of this. But the AAUP’s General Declaration paints professors with an aura of sainthood. They are portrayed as incorruptible guardians of knowledge and unselfish benefactors of society. In its rhetoric about the glories of the vocation, professors walk on water and open the eyes of the blind, but in reality they stumble along in the same muddy stream as do other human beings. The nobility of the professorial calling must not be carelessly attributed to practitioners of that vocation. In my experience professors can be just as petty, jealous, narrow, envious, hypocritical, greedy, and ambitious as politicians, business leaders, and the cleaning crew. Of course they want complete self-governance in matters of academic freedom and tenure! I want it too!

But who will guard the guardians? The General Declaration assumes that, even if a few of its members abuse their privileges, “the profession” will remain pure; it can police its members. But the history of other associations and organizations makes this assumption dubious. Should we believe that the professorate can escape the gravitational pull of mundane self-interest, ideological orthodoxies, and nepotism when the clergy, labor unions, and police departments have not been able to do so? Shall we, then, appoint an elite group of superguardians to guard the academic guardians? But who would guard them?

There is no substitute for checks and balances that can serve as counterweights to tyranny arising from outside or inside the university. The faculty can be as tyrannical as the government or the administration or the board. Universities exist as cooperative efforts on the part of many interested parties, all of them necessary to the existence and functioning of the school: founders, donors, boards of regents, alumni, students, administrators, the public, and faculty. There is no escaping the messy business of negotiating, if not harmony, at least some acceptable compromise among these parties. The guardians must guard each other in an unbroken circle of accountability in which no one and no area is exempt from the scrutiny of all.

What is “the Profession” and Who Speaks for it?

The General Declaration speaks as if there were a real entity called “the profession.” This way of speaking leaves the impression that every competent college teacher shares the same view about the aims of higher education and agrees on the methods and resources needed to accomplish these goals. This was not true in 1915, and it is not true today. Is the purpose of higher education to pass on the wisdom accumulated by generations past or to train researchers to engage in discovery of new knowledge? Should professors in their research and teaching seek disinterestedly for truth or work to change the world? Professors were divided then, and they are divided now on these questions. Implied in this second dichotomy are two very different views of academic freedom and the professor/student relationship, which we see today in the conflict between the postmodern activist and the anti-political professional views.

Professors in Christian colleges and universities often find themselves on different sides of this debate. But more importantly, thoughtful Christian professors, especially those teaching in Christian schools, understand that they do not fit comfortably in either camp. For they are committed to doing their research and teaching guided by the Christian worldview. In the final article in this series, I will take up how this institutional and professorial commitment to the truth of Christianity changes the way we think about academic freedom and professorial self-governance.

The Many Faces of Academic Freedom*

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As readers of this blog know, I have had a long-term interest in higher education, especially in the nature of the Christian college. Today I want to focus on the theme of academic freedom. I just finished reading Daniel Gordon, What is Academic Freedom? A Century of Debate–1915 to the Present (Routledge, 2023.).** Gordon is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It’s not possible in one short essay to do justice to this excellent study. My goal is to present a very compressed summary of the book and draw your attention to some things I learned from reading it.

It pains me not to recount all the stories, authors, and related issues in this book—the case of Angela Davis ([1969/70] Can the Regents of the University of California fire you for being a communist?), Steven Salaita (Can your offer of employment be rescinded because of your anti-Israeli statements?). What about the work of Stanley Fish on academic freedom or the thought of Alexander Meiklejohn on the absolute nature of freedom of speech or Edward Said on academic freedom and the politicization of the study of literature? And so much else!

Lessons Learned

The current controversies about the presence of Marxism, Critical Race Theory, gender theory, and other forms of “radical indoctrination” in American colleges and universities were initiated in 2003 by David Horowitz. Horowitz began a campaign to get state legislatures to ban (mainly) Marxist indoctrination from university classrooms by adopting the Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) into state law. Horowitz received support from dozens of state legislators and huge pushback from university faculty members. The debate continues today and promises to intensify as the 2024 campaign season progresses. Should academic freedom extend to a professor’s political activism and advocacy in the classroom? Horowitz’s campaign focuses on the academic freedom of students not to be coerced or intimidated into accepting a professor’s political viewpoint. On the other side, defenders of “radical” professors and the politicized classroom claim the academic freedom to teach their views even if unpopular. Both sides appeal to academic freedom.

The genius of Gordon’s book is its historical explanation of how the concept of academic freedom came to be understood in such dramatically different ways. I will focus on Gordon’s documentation of three historical changes that profoundly affect contemporary discussions of academic freedom.

The American Association of University Professors

In 1915, Arthur Lovejoy and others founded the American Association of University Professors. In view of the continuing push toward the professionalization of the American professorate and the desire to forestall governmental interference and censorship of teaching and publication, Lovejoy wrote the 1915 AAUP General Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. The Declaration claims the right of professors to explore issues within their disciplinary expertise with great latitude in view of their noble calling. However, it warns against using the classroom to “indoctrinate” (Lovejoy’s word) young students with the opinions of the professor, especially with partisan political views on issues of current social concern. Additionally, the original 1915 Declaration urges professors to be cautious in their speech in non-academic settings: “In their extramural utterances, it is obvious that academic teachers are under a peculiar obligation to avoid hasty or unverified or exaggerated statements, and to refrain from intemperate or sensational modes of expression.”

However, by 2006 the AAUP had changed its opposition to politicizing the classroom under the presidency (2006-2012) of Cary Nelson. Nelson was the chief opponent of the Horowitz project. Long before the AAUP got on board, the American University had already shifted its understanding of academic freedom. The shift began in the 1960s with the founding of programs in Black Studies, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, and other analogous groups. These programs were from the very beginning unapologetic advocacy groups. By the 1990s postmodernism (Michel Foucault) had convinced many academics that all speech is political. According to postmodernism, those who claim scientific neutrality or objectivity merely hide the power structures that favor their class. Today, two visions of academic freedom compete for dominance, the postmodern activist and the anti-political professional view.

Freedom of Speech

The second historical transformation I had not fully understood before I read Gordon’s book is the change in the jurisprudence of free speech. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution addresses the right of speech: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech….” Originally, this restriction applied to the federal government only. States were free to enact their own bills of rights and laws concerning, among other things, speech. After the Civil War, the United States ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1868). It begins, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…. The bolded lines are taken today as applying to the states all the rights of the citizen listed in the Amendments to the Federal Constitution. What I did not know was that it took the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, until well into the twentieth century to apply “freedom of speech” to the states.

Additionally, I did not understand the federal Judiciary’s evolving theory of what constitutes a legitimate limit on speech. Until the early twentieth century, the courts agreed that speech that tended to create unrest or might reasonably be thought to do so was not protected by the First Amendment. In the 1919 case Schenck v. United States, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, articulated the “clear and present danger” test for when the government may limit the exercise of speech. However in the 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio case, the Supreme Court replaced the “clear and present danger” test with the “imminent lawless action” test. As is clear, the conditions under which speech may be limited by a government entity became more and more restrictive as the century unfolded. Correspondingly, the scope of free speech was expanded exponentially.

The Fusion of Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech

Before the 1960s, academic freedom was distinguished from the constitutional right to freedom of speech. Academic freedom was considered a special freedom to teach based on the unique calling and qualifications of the professor, the nature of academia, and the special role of the university in society. One can see this distinction clearly in the 1915 AAUP General Principles of Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure. In public spaces, controversies over speech rights were focused on the political and commercial spheres, and in the 1915 statement those activities were excluded from the classroom as inappropriate to the profession. Moreover, as we saw in the previous section on the history of free speech, until the 1960s government at all levels could restrict speech for a number of reasons. Hence before that time, appealing to the right of free speech in an academic setting would not have helped one’s case. Moreover, appealing to the First Amendment to protect academic speech would in effect surrender the special status of teaching as a profession and place it on the same level as a political rant or an advertisement for soap.

But within the last 50 years, the courts, the professorate, and the public have come to identify academic freedom with freedom of speech. And since the courts now protect even the most outrageous and radical forms of speech, activist professors that wish to use such speech in the classroom increasingly appeal to the First Amendment to protect their right to say whatever they wish in the classroom–political rants, recruitment drives, and vitriolic, personal attacks on religious and political leaders.

Academic Freedom in Christian Colleges

Though Gordon’s book deals with state educational institutions only, I believe it can be helpful in grappling with the issue of academic freedom in Christian colleges. I want to expand on this at a later date, but let me tell you briefly what I mean. (1) Gordon explodes the idea that there is only one definition of academic freedom that must be implemented in every institution that claims to be true to the nature of the academic vocation. Christian colleges, then, should be free to define academic freedom in a way that fits their mission. (2) Debunking the idea that academic freedom must be subsumed under the more general concept of freedom of speech will help Christian colleges resist encroachments by the state, accrediting bodies, and professors that work against the Christian mission of the college.

*See also my essay of January 24, 2022, “Academic Freedom in Context.”

**As of this writing, the Kindle version of this book is free! And instantly available!

If I Didn’t Know it Was True, I Would Think It’s a Wild Conspiracy Theory

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I just finished reading James Lindsay’s new book The Marxification of Education: Paulo Freire’s Critical Marxism and the Theft of Education (2022). I recommend it to anyone concerned about education in the United States and, indeed, the world. If you are a teacher or a professor, if you have children or grandchildren, if you care about future generations, read this book. Or listen to Lindsay’s podcasts. If you know someone that falls into these categories, share this post with them. If I did not know from forty years of experience in higher education that Lindsay is telling the truth, I would think he was spinning a wild conspiracy theory.

In his book, Lindsay documents the work and influence of the Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire on American schools of education and, through the teachers trained there, on all levels of education. Until a week ago I had never heard of him, but he is one of the most influential theorists in contemporary education. His methods are used in virtually every school in the United States, public and private. Much of the time teachers, administrators, and facilitators have no idea of the theoretical background of these methods or of their aims. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, for I hate to think they know what they are doing.

Background

South American liberation theology—a mixture of Marxism and Roman Catholicism condemned by Pope John Paul II (1978-2005)—was a formative influence on Freire. And the religious aspect of his work comes through quite often. He speaks of his educational method as inducing “conversion,” and an “Easter” experience. He speaks of hope for the coming “kingdom of God,” that is, socialist utopia. Che Guevara is at the top of his list of saints. Freire’s first book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was published in 1970, but the book that made him famous in the United States was his 1985 book, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation. When I say that Freire is a “Marxist,” I am not speculating or trying to discredit him by association. He makes his adherence to Marxist analysis unashamedly clear in his own works.

Educational Aims

In traditional education the goal is to transfer to students the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in the culture in which they live. Freire calls this the “banking” or “nutritionist” view of education. It reproduces the teacher in the student and hence perpetuates the status quo of society. But through his Marxist lens, Freire sees society divided into those who have power and those who don’t, the oppressors and the oppressed. Society should be changed radically in a socialist direction. He offers his method of education as a means to this radical end. Freire redefines what it means to educate, to be educated, and to know. “To educate” means to awaken the oppressed to their status and empower them to take charge of their lives by working for societal change. “To be educated” means to be awake to the power dynamics in society. “To know” is to be attuned to the nuances of your own experience as oppressed. The oppressors, too, need to be awakened to their guilt and complicity in oppression. The “oppressed” become perpetually angry and offended, and the Woke “oppressor” enters a life of self-loathing and perpetual apology. And everyone becomes an activist.

The upshot of all this, according to Lindsay, is that students get robbed of a real education in reading, writing, mathematics, and every other content area. And they become “emotional wrecks” in the process.

The Method

Freire’s method unfolds in three phases: generative, codification, and decodification. “Teachers and students” are replaced by “educators and learners” who learn together through a “dialogic” (conversation) method. In the first phase of the dialogue, the educator generates from the learners information about their “lived experience” in search of hidden relationships of power, privilege, and oppression. In codification, the educator creates an image that pictures these structures of power, privilege, and oppression in an objective way so that the learner can see them from a distance. The learner, then, comes to see themselves in this generalized image, but now they understand themselves as a part of a class of victims in an unjust power structure. Thirdly, the process of decodification applies the Marxist analysis to the codified image. Decodification awakens the learner to the systemic causes of their oppression and to the possibility and necessity of wholesale societal change. It sensitizes them to the subtle ways in which traditional language, rules, traditions, expectations, and norms serve to justify and reinforce the power structures of stratified society.

Applications

The Marxification of Education explores dozens of ways Freire’s educational theory and its offshoots are applied in colleges, universities, and K through 12 schools. I can highlight only two. Read the book!

Race

The Freirean educational model is a perfect way to educate learners in Critical Race Theory. CRT contends that the United States is systemically racist and has been so from its founding. Only a radical reordering of society along antiracist lines (diversity, equity, and inclusion) can address systemic racism. In Freire’s “generative” phase, learners are canvased or surveyed looking for indicators of unequal power between people of color and white people. The next phase encodes those indicators in objective images, for example, a video clip of a white person double checking to see that their car doors are locked after parking in a black neighborhood. In the third phase, the coded images are decoded and interpreted through the lens of Marxist theory, that is, Critical Race Theory.

Sexual Minorities

Perhaps you have wondered why many public schools require young children to read or listen to books such as Gender Queer (written in comic book style) and others that contain pornographic illustrations of sex of all kinds and at all ages? And why would school districts and public libraries sponsor “Drag Queen Story Hour”? I did not understand these trends until I read Lindsay’s explanation of the aim and method of Paulo Freire’s theory of education. Reading Gender Queer and watching a grown man dressed in “women’s” clothes dance provocatively are part of the generative and codification phases of learning. These experiences elicit information from children about their understandings of gender, family, and sex, which can then be used in the decodification phase. The drag queen is a living illustration that rules are made to be broken, that the present social/moral order possesses no real authority but is imposed by those who benefit from it. Drag Queen Story Hour is a defiant and irreverent attack on the “oppressive” societal structures associated with sex, family, and gender identity. Children are thrown into a world without boundaries, they are robbed of their childhood, and their education is stolen from them. And Freirean educational theorists call it “learning.”

Optional Homework

Lindsay discusses many other terms and concepts associated with Freire’s educational theory. You may have heard of some of them without realizing their theoretical meaning. Do a quick search on some of them. Wikipedia usually has the basics even if it tends to sanitize the ideas a bit:

Cultural Competence, Comprehensive Sex Education, Culturally Relevant Teaching, (Transformative) Social-Emotional Learning, Problematization, Knowledges, Critical Pedagogy, Liberatory, Project-based learning, Decolonization, Conscientization, Queer Marxist Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Antiracism, and Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED).

To be continued…

In Praise of Ignorance

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What does it mean to be an educated person? I posted an introductory essay on this topic in June, 2022. I promised to continue this theme, but more pressing issues distracted me. I concluded that…

Acquiring an education is a self-conscious process of learning the inner workings and interrelationships of the major sectors of the society within which we live—economy, politics, art, literature, law, science, technology, ethics, and religion.

I want to continue exploring the idea of education, focusing today on one mark of an educated person, intellectual responsibility.

Learning and Ignorance

I have been an educator for half of my life and most of the other half I was studying to become one. I have read more books than I can count; and I have written a few. I still feel ignorant! Hence, in this essay I want to address the place of ignorance in intellectual life.

I have found it a rule that the more we learn the more we become aware of our ignorance. The deeper we probe a topic the more we realize its connections with other areas of knowledge. And those areas are connected to still others. At some point it dawns on us that the web of mutually conditioning connections spreads out infinitely in all directions. Not only must we admit that we do not know how far our ignorance extends, we must also acknowledge that things we do not know could affect the meaning of the things we believe. That is to say, becoming aware of the extent of our ignorance casts doubt on what seemed certain.

The Skeptic

Let me differentiate what I am saying from thoroughgoing skepticism—the thesis that we know nothing at all. Suppose I gain by close inspection some empirical knowledge of a certain mountain peak. I learn about its resident animals, plants, and many of its physical features. These facts will not change no matter how much I learn later about the rest of the mountain and its setting in its mountain range. These facts would remain the same even if we mapped its entire setting on earth, in the history of geology and biology, in the solar system, in the galaxy, etc. But coming to know this extended web of connections would expand our understanding of the origin, history, function, and significance of this mountain peak. Gaining such information would not convince us that our previous knowledge was erroneous, but it would show its incompleteness.

I believe we could apply this same procedure to almost any assertion of fact or truth whether philosophical, theological, historical, or scientific: that God exists, murder is immoral, the American Civil War ended in 1865, or that knowledge can best be defined as true, justified belief. If a belief is true, no new information can make it false. But new information can deepen our understanding or expand the meaning of a belief.

What does this exercise have to do with being an educated person? An intellectually responsible person knows enough about an area of study to be able to give good reasons why gaining further knowledge about that area and its connections with other areas will not falsify the knowledge they have gained so far. At the same time, however, educated people are aware of their ignorance of other related facts and truths that could deepen and expand their current understanding. Unlike the skeptic, the educated person’s awareness of their ignorance is hard won and productive of further knowledge.

The Dogmatist

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the skeptic is the dogmatist. Dogmatists identify their isolated beliefs with absolute truths, that is, truths whose meaning is fully and unambiguously present in the very words of the assertions. Dogmatists are not open to modification, deepening, and expansion of their beliefs by pursuing additional information. Like the skeptical attitude, the dogmatic mentality is not productive of further knowledge.

Neither the skeptic nor the dogmatist measures up to the ideal of intellectual responsibility. Educated people should know enough about the wider context of their beliefs to defend them against total denials but also be aware enough of their ignorance to learn from their opponents. The attitude of which I am speaking combines intellectual confidence with intellectual humility in a way productive of continued learning.

Hope

Dogmatists fear that admitting the least smidgen of incompleteness in their beliefs will plunge them into complete relativism and skepticism. Skeptics dread making commitments for fear that they will be disappointed. Both lack the Christian virtue of hope. Hope embraces unwaveringly the truth it knows, believing that it is only a taste of what is to come. Hope unites confidence and openness in a way productive of joy. Both dogmatists and skeptics are miserable.

What Does It Mean To Be An Educated Person?

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What does it mean to be an educated person? This question assumes that becoming an educated person is a valuable goal. Also presupposed is the fact that people are not born educated but must achieve this state through a process of learning. What, then, does one need to learn and how may one become an educated person?

Perhaps the first thing on which to get clear is that one does not need to know everything to be considered an educated person. To begin with, human beings cannot know everything. Much about nature, human history, and culture is not known by anyone or has been forgotten. Future human beings may discover and invent many things hardly imaginable today. Additionally, there is too much knowledge available even now for any one person to master in a lifetime.

The educated person of fifth-century B.C. Greece or eighth-century Persia would not be considered educated for life in twenty-first century America or France. Your ability to negotiate life in rural America won’t sustain you in New York City. Nor could the New Yorker make it on the farm. These examples hint at the nature of education and the basis of its value. Education is a process of gaining at least the minimum of knowledge and skills needed to thrive in a particular society and age.

I think it is helpful to distinguish between acquisition of technical skills—brick laying, cooking, farm animal care, or welding—and acquisition of social skills, the so-called “liberal arts.” In our society we don’t consider a person “educated” simply because they are skilled at husbandry or car repair. We reserve the label “educated” for a person who possesses the knowledge and skills that enable them to engage fully and gracefully in all sectors of the dominant society in which they live. Of course we need to understand our subculture as well, but we don’t need a formal education to achieve this goal. We acquire this knowledge in the same way we pick up our local dialect.

(Note: Acquiring “cultural competence” is all the rage in education circles these days. It seems to mean learning about other people’s subcultures–especially “marginalized” cultures–when what is needed is for everyone to learn how to live in the national/international culture.)

Usually, then, acquiring an education is a self-conscious process of learning the inner workings and interrelationships of the major sectors of the society within which we live—economy, politics, art, literature, law, science, technology, ethics, and religion. Since each of these institutions has come to be what it is today over a long period of time, study of their history is an essential part of understanding their present constitutions. Communicating effectively and gracefully with people from different places and backgrounds is an essential social skill. Reading, writing, and speaking well are, therefore, essential marks of an educated person. And no one can learn to write well or speak well without reading examples of well written literature.

The process of education requires some institutionalization: libraries, schools, presses, and publishers. The reason for this is simple: the knowledge and skills needed for education has been produced over centuries by millions of people living at great distances from each other and speaking different languages. This knowledge must be collected, winnowed, concentrated, and, for the last 2500 years, usually written in books. Becoming an educated person is a process of assimilating the knowledge and skills discovered and developed by many other human beings. Becoming an educated person is a social affair, a process of socialization or even humanization.

As a cautionary note, something has gone terribly wrong if education itself becomes a narrow subculture that so alienates students from the major institutions of society that they cannot skillfully and gracefully live within them.

Questions for future essays: What does it take to be an educator? What does it mean to be a theologically educated person? What does it take to be a teacher of theology?