Tag Archives: Christian colleges

“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.

Woke Dictionary Entry: “Inclusion” Means “Exclusion

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As I pointed out in the earlier essays in this series, one of the most effective strategies employed by change agents is commandeering words with familiar and positive meanings and redefining them so that the same word carries a very different meaning from the one it previously carried. Like a designer virus, its external familiarity and traditional authority disguises its alien nature long enough for it to infect and reprogram the genetic code of the institution. It is the preferred method of hijackers and heretics.

Inclusion as a Feel Good Word

Today I will examine the third member of the Woke trinity. The word “inclusion,” perhaps even more than the other two members of the triad —“diversity” and “equity”— resonates positively with most people. However, set within the context of social justice theory its meaning changes radically. In this essay I will contrast two different understandings of inclusion.

Most people understand the word “inclusion” in contrast to the word “exclusion.” Inclusion resonates with other such positive words as compassionate, generous, kind, caring, accepting, and loving. Exclusion connotes harsh, arrogant, cruel, rejecting, and disparaging attitudes and behaviors. All of us remember disappointing and humiliating experiences of being excluded and rejected from a sports team, a college, a club, or a set of friends. And we have experienced the affirming feeling of being included and recognized by peers and friends. Hence in everyday language and apart from critical analysis, “inclusion” designates a good act and “exclusion” points to a bad one. But critical analysis tells a different story.

Inclusion as Exclusion in Disguise

Don’t They Teach Logic Anymore?

In my experience inclusion is used in social justice talk as if it were an absolute value, an axiomatic foundation to which every subsequent idea must conform. Policy changes become morally imperative as soon as it becomes clear that they facilitate greater inclusion. Acts of exclusion are always wrong and acts of inclusion are always right. In institutions that accept the inclusion axiom, whoever can sustain their claim to the more inclusive position holds the moral high ground in debates over policy, and whoever represents the less inclusive position bears a huge burden of proof. Indeed, since the axiom declares inclusion to be good and exclusion to be evil, the discussant defending the less inclusive position will be pictured as defending immoral policies.

But inclusion is not and can never be an absolute value. It is logically impossible because the categories of insider and outsider mutually define each other. They are correlatives; you cannot have one without the other. You cannot include someone in an institution, school, club, or church unless there are boundaries that distinguish between those inside and those outside. Groups are defined by what they are not as well as what they are. In fact, this is true of every finite thing. Only the Absolute itself escapes the relativity of all other concepts and things.

Inclusion as a Rhetorical Ploy

In actual practice advocates of social justice theory are very exclusive. Five minutes in a faculty meeting in any contemporary university will teach you that. They use the rhetoric of inclusivity when they wish to break through boundaries they do not like and the rhetoric of demonization and the practice of cancelation to exclude those who defend those boundaries. And it is no mystery where those boundaries lie. As I argued in a previous essay, social justice theorists apply “inclusion” only to people who have been rejected, overlooked, condemned, or marginalized by traditional society. It does not apply to political conservatives of any ethnicity, to traditional Christians and Jews male or female, or to anyone religious or non-religious who defends traditional sexual morality. White men are automatically excluded unless they signal that they are among the woke*and confess their original sin of being born into the dominant group in a systemically racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic society.

The Bottom Line

The real issue to be decided, then, is not whether to be inclusive or exclusive. Every institution is both. The question that must be answered concerns the identity and mission of the institution being discussed. Clarity about the identity and mission of the college or church or business or club or service organization will settle the question of boundaries and hence of who may be included and who must be excluded.

*One currently popular way to signal your wokeness is placing your “preferred pronouns” in parentheses after your name in your email signature.

Next Time: I have now finished the analytic and logical critique of the DEI philosophy. I can proceed to my Christian response to it.

Where Christian Colleges Go to Die

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Faith and Beginnings

Most Christian colleges were founded by people of great faith. The original faculty and administrators believed wholeheartedly in the Christian mission of the college as the decisive reason for its existence. Many colleges founded within the last hundred years began as a protest and an alternative to the dominant culture of academia. Students, faculty, and donors were attracted to these colleges because of their distinctive Christian identity. They unhesitatingly confessed Jesus as Lord and Savior, crucified and risen from the dead. And they expected every teacher and administrator to adhere to this faith and to live consistently with this confession. Students, too, were required to attend worship and to live by the community’s moral code. Beyond this basic evangelical confession, some colleges required adherence to denominational confessions or expanded evangelical confessions, and they expected community members to live according to a strict moral code. Why, then, do so many of these colleges fall away after such a faith-filled beginning?

Warnings

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever (1 John 2:15-17).

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matt 4:1-4).

The Logic of Survival

Christian colleges face many of the temptations individual Christians confront. Of course, just as colleges do not have hearts and tongues with which to believe and confess, they do not experience bodily lusts that can lead them astray. However, colleges have a character formed by a combination of its tradition and its current community. It is a kind of collective personality we can call a “soul.” And this soul can be tempted by certain threats and allurements to abandon its founding principles. Holding true may prove costly:

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul” (Mark 8:34-36).

The instinct for survival is basic to every human being. When the Lord bragged about Job’s faithfulness, Satan replied, “Skin for skin! A man will give all he has for his own life. But now stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face” (Job 2:4-5). Christian colleges, too, want to survive, and that urge can drive them to compromise their Christian mission. Colleges are expensive operations, and the roadside of history is littered with bankrupt colleges. They need tuition paying students and gifts of money and property. In its efforts to attract students and resources, it will be tempted to broaden its base of support to include people whose priorities do not align with the Christian mission. The college survives but at the cost of its soul.

Ambition and Assimilation

Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets (Luke 6:26)

If a Christian college survives, it faces a second temptation. Colleges are driven by ambition to achieve ever greater prominence. They move beyond the narrow circle of their denominations to gain a regional reputation, and then, they set their sights on national prominence. How does a college gain national prominence? Of course, a college can become well known for its winning athletic teams or its beautiful campus. But I am speaking about its academic ranking. Many factors contribute to academic standing, but one stands out as essential: the academic accomplishments of its faculty. Colleges ambitious to climb the rankings ladder must recruit highly trained, talented faculty and provide them with time and resources to conduct research that gets noticed nationally and internationally. Accomplishing this goal requires a change of priorities. (1) Academic potential becomes the number one qualification for faculty recruitment and retention. A college with national ambitions cannot hire and tenure Christian teachers if they are mediocre researchers. (2) It requires lots of money. Nationally ranked colleges and universities must build huge endowments to support reduced teaching loads and research. Seeking grants from government agencies and industry becomes part of faculty job descriptions. (3) The research faculty members produce must be impressive to the national and international community of scholars working the same fields.


Embarrassment

If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels (Mark 8:38)

These academic changes will produce a dramatic transformation in college culture. The outstanding faculty will demand the freedoms and privileges enjoyed by their colleagues at “peer” and “aspirational” universities: virtually unlimited academic freedom, near unconditional tenure, and complete control over the curriculum. Having been recruited and tenured for their research prowess, they do not devote their primary loyalty to the Christian mission of the college but to their disciplines and their peers in the academy. Hence they find themselves embarrassed by remnants of the old Christian college culture that still remain, which, when measured by the ethos of the national academic culture, appear quaint and unenlightened.

The Kingdoms of the World

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.  “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only’” (Matt 4:8-10).

The college’s new national profile will expose it to scrutiny by the dominant academic culture. Gradually, social pressure from without and from within will force it step by step to conform to the national culture. What began as a protest and an alternative to secular academia becomes celebration and assimilation to that culture. Politics replaces faith, social activism displaces evangelism, and self-expression crowds out moral conscientiousness. The college has gained the world but lost its soul. A poor bargain indeed!

Series Ends. Although there is more to say, this post concludes the four-part series on “open letters” to higher education. I will probably feel the need to revisit the topic, since I have spent all my adult life studying or teaching in colleges and universities.