February 17, 2005
Faith and Learning
The forced resignation of Robert Sloan from Baylor University has occasioned some hand-wringing in the evangelical publication Christianity Today. see here and here. Sloan's efforts to integrate faith and learning and to invigorate the rather thin intellectual tradition of Southern Baptists ran aground against inherent contradictions in contemporary university life (and, probably, ran aground because of his leadership "style"--a comparison with Larry Summers' woes at Harvard might be an instructive rhetorical exercise).
I spent about half my life teaching in religious liberal arts colleges. The Lutheran one, by the time I left, was in the process of abandoning its faith commitments, much as most Protestant colleges (Macalester, Drake, and so on, back to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) have done. The Catholic one, which I truly loved teaching at, seemed to me to get it right. There were a set of required courses in Catholic theology and philosophy, and the president of the University, a priest and art historian, was an effective leader. The University tried to keep a "critical mass" of Catholic faculty--some conservative, many liberal--while guaranteeing absolute academic freedom for those of us who were non-Catholic. It worked very well. Higher education in the U.S. would be much less rich without the contribution of Christian liberal arts colleges/universities. Their world is often simply incomprehensible to people in the secular world of Research I universities. An unfortunate byproduct of the Bushies' exploitation of religious anxiety for political ends is that the gulf between the religious world and the secular one is destined to keep widening. The irony for me personally is that I feel much more threatened in my religious freedom at a public university--Texas A&M--than; I ever did at those two church colleges.
Categories: The Profession
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