The future of religious colleges is bright, concluded dozens of scholars and administrators who convened at Harvard University this month to debate the topic.
Representing a range of Christian denominations -- from the extensive network of Roman Catholic colleges to the tiny contingent of Anabaptist-Mennonite institutions -- the educators portrayed the cultural climate as increasingly welcoming of religious scholars and hospitable to religious institutions.
Even George M. Marsden, a historian at the University of Notre Dame whose 1994 book, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, noted the decline of faith-based institutions, found cause for optimism. “The general consensus is that there’s no reason to have to continue along the slippery slope toward secularism,” he said. “This is a moment of opportunity for religious colleges.”
The optimism was tempered, however, by practical concerns:
* The decline in the number of people who identify themselves with particular denominations worries mainline Protestant institutions that have historically relied on them for both students and financial support.
* A commitment to hiring faculty members who profess to support the religious beliefs of an institution can open the door to charges of bias and subsequent litigation.
* The pressure to hire faculty members who engage in cutting-edge research can work against an institution’s goal of strengthening its religious identity.
* Demands from students for practical training that will lead to well-paying jobs force some religious colleges to choose between being financially viable or staying true to their liberal-arts heritage.
The conference was sponsored by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Despite those real threats, the speakers said, religious institutions, and faith-based scholarship, are in vogue. Mr. Marsden attributed the rise of such scholarship to the decline in “progressive secular humanism.”
“No longer is it widely held, as it was especially from about 1865 to 1965, that the more one applies scientific models to human behavior or society, the better place the world will be,” he wrote in a paper accompanying his talk.
Mr. Marsden and others were quick to argue that modern religious scholars differ from their predecessors, who would defend their views with Scripture. Modern scholars use the same accepted scientific methods of inquiry as their secular colleagues, but allow their faith to inform the types of subjects they study or the ways in which they interpret facts and events.
As evidence of the resurgence of religious colleges, speakers cited the rapid increase in enrollments at evangelical Christian colleges, the efforts of Catholic universities to infuse their course work and research institutes with Catholic values, and the determination of Baptist institutions -- most notably Baylor University -- to retain their Baptist heritage even as some cut ties with their more conservative state Baptist conventions.
Many at the conference said that it’s especially important today for leaders of religious colleges to commit to retaining their religious ideals, because they can no longer expect a majority of their students or faculty members to come from the same denomination.
Monika K. Hellwig, executive director of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, noted that that is a particular problem for Catholic institutions, most of which were founded by religious orders. While lay faculty members can clearly carry on the values of those priests and nuns, she asked: “Is the capital being used up if it is not constantly being replenished by people who have roots in these living traditions?”
When it came to defining how their institutions embody religious ideals, the speakers converged on the same themes: The colleges are committed to service, to cultivating students spiritually as well as intellectually, to a sense of community on campus, to the liberal arts, and to the belief that knowledge is about more than just knowing facts.
But those very ideals are also under constant threat, some said.
Joel A. Carpenter, provost of Calvin College, in Michigan, criticized “the culture of credentialing” that pervades academe. Students, he said, focus more on racking up degrees than on expanding their minds. And some colleges, particularly small, poorly endowed ones, are too quick to accommodate students with vocational or adult-education programs, according to many of the speakers.
“I’m afraid some of the colleges see these as cash cows,” he said. “But the problem is, those kinds of priorities can come to dominate the values of the institution.”
Perhaps hardest to resist, some speakers said, is playing “the academic game” -- hiring and promoting scholars based on their ability to generate the freshest research instead of rewarding them for their ability to inspire students in the classroom.
“The hiring of professors because of their status or because their research is published in top journals takes professors’ attention away from broad human issues,” Mr. Carpenter said.
Michael Beaty, a professor of philosophy and director of the Institute for Faith and Learning at Baylor, spoke about the struggle at Baptist institutions to reject what they see as the fundamentalist views of the Southern Baptist Convention while retaining their Baptist identity. Many Baptist colleges, such as Baylor, have opted to sever ties with their state conventions to preserve their academic freedom and guard against the “anti-intellectualism” that they say has sometimes characterized Baptist thought.
“There is a change in the model, but on balance this change in charter has not led to the diminishment of Baptist identity,” he said. “I would argue that it has enhanced it.”
Lawyers for religious colleges encouraged those institutions to clearly identify their missions in order to protect themselves against litigation. Courts are more likely to be sympathetic to an institution that makes judgments based on religion if it does so consistently and clearly, not arbitrarily, said Kent M. Weeks, a Nashville lawyer and a professor of education law at Vanderbilt University.
Joseph M. Herlihy, the general counsel at Boston College, said Ex corde Ecclesiae, a Vatican document that calls for greater church control over Catholic colleges, could open the door to federal litigation.
The document, which encourages Catholic colleges to hire a majority of Catholic faculty members and requires theologians in academe to seek approval from their local bishops, could be used as a “general profile” for opponents seeking to prevent Catholic colleges from receiving federal funds on the grounds that they are pervasively sectarian institutions, he said.
http://chronicle.com Section: Money & Management Page: A41
