Blogs > Cliopatria > Elephant

Oct 2, 2005

Elephant


by Cliopatria


One of the more puzzling things about the current discourse on academic freedom is that it exists in an oddly rarefied atmosphere--to be precise, the higher reaches of the Carnegie Category Definitions. Yes, people occasionally notice that the world does not begin and end with Research I and II universities, but even so, the conversation tends to default to a research university"norm." The problem with this norm is that it is not, in fact, a norm.

This week offered a serendipitous case in point.

On the one hand, Harvey Mansfield, apparently paraphrasing Donald Alexander Downs (their voices run together a bit), has this to say:

Downs notes that the difference between free speech and academic freedom is that the latter, unlike the former, relates to truth. A society can have free speech, pace the ACLU, if it does not challenge its own basic presuppositions, like those in the Declaration of Independence. But a university must, in pursuit of truth, hold those presuppositions open to inquiry. To carry out such inquiry, a university would seem to have greater need of diversity than a society. A university would not want to foreclose questions that a society might consider settled.

On the other hand, Kenneth G. Elzinga, speaking of Christian institutions, claims that

But Christian higher education should be dominated by a faculty who are followers of Jesus.
The majority of faculty at a school of Christian higher education should be Christians. The institution makes no sense if that is not the case. Students are transients; they come and go. Christian higher education is defined by a core of faculty who believe that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:16), that every thought is to be made captive to Him and they are not ashamed of the gospel.

Some time ago, I noted that"[t]he religious arguments justify a moderated version of academic freedom while taking secular versions into account, whereas the intellectual diversity position asks for absolute academic freedom without taking the religious campuses into account. That is, intellectual diversity arguments presume secularity and mostly elide alternative models of higher education." (For a variety of Christian positions on academic freedom, see here, here, here, here, and here.

[1]) The problem is not that these religious critiques of academic freedom contradict Mansfield's and Downs' vision of the quest for truth; what else do academics do besides argue, after all? The real problem is that most intellectual diversity arguments simply pay no attention to the existence of confessional colleges, even though such colleges pose a number of serious stumbling blocks to current theories of academic freedom and intellectual diversity.

[1] I should point out that not all confessional colleges impose religious tests for hiring; moreover, some colleges restrict their insistence on theological orthodoxy to the theologians. These schools are not at issue here.


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More Comments:

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein - 10/2/2005

But I'm not arguing that Elzina needs to change his position; I'm arguing that Downs, Mansfield, and company need to take positions like Elzina's into account. Two different things.

Ralph E. Luker - 10/2/2005

Miriam, I don't know that there's a large problem here. If you're talking about public institutions, from research universities down to technical and community colleges, there's no tension between what Downs and what Elzina argue. And, for the most part, there's no tension between them on Research I & II institutions. It's only a rare place, like Baylor, where that tension exists.
So, if you're talking about percentages of students involved, it's a fairly small percent of undergraduates who are enrolled in institutions (whether an Abilene Christian College or a Yeshiva), where Elzina would argue for a legitimate restriction on academic freedom. I think I'd argue that we ought to allow them to reach their own decisions about what constraints faith commitments mean for academic freedom in their communities. After all, virtually all of our major private institutions were launched by faith communities and it seems to me to be a fair concession to that rich legacy to allow them to continue to educate their young people within their traditions.