The status of academic freedom at religious colleges is under new scrutiny as a result of efforts by Wheaton College of Illinois to fire Larycia A. Hawkins, a tenured associate professor of political science who said on Facebook that Christians and Muslims worship the same god.
Wheaton, an evangelical Christian institution, is hardly the first religious college to experience controversy surrounding its treatment of an instructor accused of straying from doctrine. Their struggles to balance academic freedom and religious concerns are discussed at length in a book released this month, The Christian College and the Meaning of Academic Freedom: Truth-Seeking in Community (Palgrave Macmillan).
The Chronicle on Tuesday interviewed the book’s author, William C. Ringenberg, a professor of history at Taylor University, an evangelical Christian college in Upland, Ind. Following is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
Q. You write that most Christian colleges think of academic freedom in institutional terms, rather than in terms of the freedoms of individual professors, but that the best among them value both forms. What hinders Christian colleges from giving their instructors more freedom?
A. The Christian-college community emerged in 1920 from the secular revolution in higher education, which took place from the late 1880s through the 1920s. A lot of denominational schools moved in a secular direction, and that made those that survived as continuing Christian colleges somewhat defensive. They wanted to make sure that that did not happen further.
One understands the Christian college best if one sees it as a voluntary community, people who share a common worldview and prefer to come together to seek truth from that common base. Most Christian-college professors would feel more restricted in secular universities than they do in Christian colleges because they would feel inhibited in expressing how their views in general, and in their discipline, relate to the Christian worldview.
Q. You accuse the American Association of University Professors of having shown disdain for colleges that wish to operate with a Christian worldview. How has it done so?
A. The AAUP has varied somewhat over the years in its approach to Christian colleges. Sometimes it has been fairly free in acknowledging that separate type of institution as valid if it clearly defines its boundaries at the front end for professors. Sometimes it has presented the Christian college as automatically being discriminatory against academic openness and academic freedom and the pursuit of truth.
The AAUP has done a great service to the Christian-college community by insisting upon the Christian college identifying clearly, openly, at the front end, what their identity is so that professors aren’t surprised later on. Due process is very important for Christian colleges, and it has probably been their biggest failure, and the AAUP has held them accountable in that respect.
Q. Your book discourages Christian colleges from getting into what you call “secondary theological and cultural issues” in terms of their requirements for faculty members. Define what you mean when you talk about secondary issues, and how does concern with them cause problems?
A. Primary issues are the heart-of-the-matter issues of the Christian faith — for example, the Christmas story, the incarnation of God in Christ, the Easter story, the resurrection providing hope for the future. Denominational distinctions within the context of the primary issues are called secondary.
I wouldn’t say that a given church didn’t have the right to ask its community to be in agreement on secondary issues, but it is not necessary to be a Christian college, and can be counterproductive to collegiality and campus harmony and unity. If I had my way, a Christian college would ask for concurrence on only the primary essentials. If you get to mixing primary and secondary issues, then you are diluting the primary ones, and you’re causing potential disharmony that is neither necessary nor usually good for the open pursuit of truth.
Q. What long-term impact do you see the gay-rights movement and same-sex marriage having on Christian colleges and how they operate?
A. It is the big issue of the moment, isn’t it? It is threatening not just in and of itself, but also in how it is tied to potential governmental actions that could restrict financial aid and, conceivably, even tax-deductibility of donations, which could be things that could threaten the economic survival of given colleges. The way things are going now, either the Christian colleges will have to adopt less-restrictive procedures or, if they wish to retain the position that probably most of them have — a conservative position on the issue — they will need to begin a serious look for alternate ways of funding their institutions, not to rely on government help.
Q. Based on what you know, what is your take on how Wheaton College has dealt with Ms. Hawkins?
A. The Wheaton situation is unfortunate. It’s unfortunate for Wheaton. It’s unfortunate for Christian higher education. I hope that it can be resolved with less, rather than more, trauma. I wish they could have resolved it in-house in a lower-key way. There is not really a very big difference in substance, if any. It is more of a difference of semantics. The professor unnecessarily inflamed a part of the Wheaton constituency, which, I think, was misreading what she was trying to say.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
