A Baptist, a Catholic, and a Jew walked into the National Press Club—or so went the joke some made at a forum here this week on the role of faith-based institutions in today’s challenging environment for higher education.
Kenneth W. Starr, president of Baylor University; John H. Garvey, president of the Catholic University of America; and Richard M. Joel, president of Yeshiva University, gathered on Wednesday with an audience of policy makers and alumni to discuss religious and academic freedom, government regulation, and, in what seems to be an increasingly secular society, the special “calling” of faith-based colleges like their own.
“That’s a loaded word, isn’t it?” said a wry Mr. Starr, who moderated the event, seeming to hint that the panel would get into controversial topics quickly.
Certainly there was plenty to talk about: the tension between the priorities of a liberal president and a conservative legislature, the struggles colleges have had with drinking and sex, the acceptance of gays and lesbians in mainstream culture, and campus dialogues about race, income disparity, and the environment, all of which have stirred discussion in religious organizations.
But at least initially the three presidents sounded much like any educators advocating for free inquiry, research, and the liberal arts, resisting the reductionist drive to measure the value of college by graduates’ jobs and earnings. Mr. Joel, who inspired the forum with an essay last year on a “university’s soul,” said that faith-based institutions had been tested as much as any by what the American consumer is hoping to get out of higher education.
“Do we teach them that they are supposed to do more than graze and make money and go shopping?” he asked. “It’s very important that our children compete in the global economy, but we need to teach them what are the rules of engagement, what values do they bring to the competition, and, once they succeed in the competition, what is their responsibility.”
“Of course, they need to learn how to make a living,” Mr. Joel added. “But they also need to learn how to live a life.”
Some Roman Catholic colleges have responded to secular trends in society by connecting their religious mission to topics of broad interest, like developing a meaningful philosophy of life or pursuing social justice. And small religious colleges of all faiths frequently express their commitment to serving low-income and first-generation students.
But a persistent problem, the panelists said, is that a secular society is skeptical about the role of religion in higher education, and conversations often assume that faith is a barrier to learning. (To be sure, there are examples in both distant and recent history when that has been the case.) The impulse, said Mr. Garvey, is to cut religion out of the college setting entirely. But he cited Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest who first proposed the theory of the Big Bang, and Gregor Mendel, an Austrian friar who founded the science of genetics, as two examples of religion’s having advanced knowledge.
“It is faith that inspires art, music, literature, and poetry. It is faith that gives us a way to understand history, to make laws, to govern the economy,” Mr. Garvey said. “I don’t think that we can have a full university if we leave it out.”
Out of Sync
In turning to academic and religious freedom, the discussion got thornier, with the presidents asserting that people at faith-based institutions generally enjoy more academic freedom than do those at, say, public colleges, but that some religious tenets are threatened by federal regulation. The conversation grappled with some hot-button topics: decisions to hire employees from particular faiths, to offer or bar various forms of birth control, and to present a certain view of morality.
Catholic University’s perspective on premarital sex, for instance, is out of sync with federal guidance on gender-equity law, Mr. Garvey said. “The kind of regulations that we are seeing from the Department of Education about Title IX view sex as a healthy, everyday activity that students ought to be engaging in, so long as it is not coercive,” he said. “The new mantra is ‘Yes Means Yes’—you need affirmative consent before you can engage in sex. But at Catholic University, I am fond of saying to our students that ‘Yes Means No’—this is something that we see as more sacred than the culture does, and should be attended to in marriage and not outside of it.”
Such issues are simmering at religious colleges around the country. Even leaders of relatively liberal institutions say they should be able to make decisions without government intervention.
One wrinkle is that the National Labor Relations Board recently tightened its definition of a faith-based college or university, Beck A. Taylor, president of Whitworth University, a Presbyterian college in Spokane, Wash., said in an interview. Whitworth and other Christian colleges have a commitment to hire Christian faculty and staff members, but rule changes and union organizing among adjuncts, he said, could erode that policy.
“That itself could threaten, going forward, the ability for institutions like Whitworth to hire the people that we need to hire to faithfully live out” their missions, he said.
Policies on sexual orientation are another controversial area. Whitworth accepts and supports gay, lesbian, and transgender students, said Mr. Taylor, “but that’s our choice, that’s the way we’re living out our mission.” Space to set priorities is necessary, he argued. “Other institutions ought to have the right to make decisions that they feel are in best compliance with their understanding of their religious missions.”
At the forum here, one got the sense that some members of the audience wanted to highlight a cultural war between the faithful and the agnostic, between right and left—a direction the presidents seemed reluctant to follow. During a question-and-answer session, one attendee asked, “What is lost when an aggressive secularism tries to marginalize faith-based institutions?”
The dominant secular culture is not “targeting” religious people, Mr. Joel responded. Instead, given the lure of the mainstream, “we might be casualties of the culture,” he said. “It’s important to think that, rather than have an enemies list.”
Aggressive secularism is fine at colleges that are not faith-based, said Mr. Garvey, but would be terrible if pushed on all institutions. That still seems like a remote possibility, he said, as the real threat has more to do with general apathy and superficiality in society.
“The greatest danger I see is not an aggressive secularism,” Mr. Garvey said, “but a sort of Twitter culture where our deep thought on things is limited to 140 characters.”
Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.
