He thought he had a good chance. Last year Mike S. Adams, an associate professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, applied for a promotion to full professor. He had been at the university for 13 years. In that time, he had published 10 peer-reviewed papers and won three teaching awards. Not that there weren’t bumps along the way, but his record, he believed, was better than most.
So when he was turned down, Mr. Adams started asking questions. The official word was that he hadn’t measured up in any of the three crucial categories — teaching, publishing, or service. He didn’t believe that for a minute. The real reason he wasn’t promoted, according to Mr. Adams, is that he’s a Christian.
Are Christian professors discriminated against? Absolutely, says David A. French, director of the Center for Academic Freedom at the Alliance Defense Fund, whose stated mission is to “aggressively defend religious liberty.” The center is suing the university on behalf of Mr. Adams. “I certainly get reports of discrimination from evangelical professors,” Mr. French says. “Most of them want to remain confidential.” What’s unusual about Mr. Adams, according to Mr. French, is not that he was treated unfairly, but that he was willing to speak out.
But other Christian professors contend that academe is actually a pretty welcoming place, regardless of one’s religious persuasion. And some of them wonder whether claims of discrimination have less to do with God and more to do with politics and personality.
When Mr. Adams was hired at North Carolina in the mid-1990s, he was an atheist. Over a period of several years he became a Christian. There was no epiphany, no road-to-Damascus moment. “Mine was a steady shift,” he says.
After he “came out as an evangelical,” as he puts it, Mr. Adams detected a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) change in how he was regarded. It was more a feeling than anything else — a sense that he was on the outside.
His lawsuit is short on smoking guns: It’s not as if the head of his department wrote an e-mail message saying, “We’re not promoting you because you’re a Christian.” But he says it has been made clear that his department does not look favorably on his beliefs. (University officials would not comment because of the lawsuit.)
Mr. Adams cites one specific incident a few years ago that he considers evidence of bias. He wrote a column for AgapePress, a Christian news service, titled “Campus Crusade Against Christ,” in which he bemoaned anti-Christian sentiment at colleges. That sentiment is everywhere, he says. Even the proliferation of “Darwin fishes” — the Christian symbol made to look like an evolving fish, with feet added — is evidence of the casual way religion is dismissed by some academics, according to Mr. Adams.
After the column was published, he says, other professors in his department became upset. “My God, how can you be in such an uproar?” he wondered. “It’s Christophobia, in effect.”
About the same time Mr. Adams became a Christian, the former liberal also became a conservative. He joined the Republican Party in 1999. He later started writing columns for townhall.com, a right-wing Web site. He has been a guest on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, among others.
The examples of discrimination mentioned in his lawsuit tend to be about his political views rather than his faith. He claims, for instance, that a former department head asked him to tone down his columns, to make them less caustic.
It can be difficult to untangle political and religious views. A person’s stand on a controversial topic — abortion, say, or gay marriage — may very well have roots in his or her faith. Where does politics begin and religion end?
Of course not all Christian professors are politically conservative. Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College, is an ordained Episcopal minister and a self-described evangelical. He is also a liberal. He published an article in The Chronicle Review last year titled “Jesus Is Not a Republican.”
He has certainly heard people say that Christian professors are discriminated against. But he has never, in his 22 years of teaching at several universities, seen evidence of that. “The picture that has been painted on the right is that the academy is hostile to faith and is a bastion of secularism,” Mr. Balmer says. “I simply haven’t encountered that hostility.”
He does believe there is a liberal bias in academe. “And thank God for that,” he says. “I’m glad there is a bunker against the tide of conservatism that has overtaken every other corner of our country.”
It can be tougher for younger Christian faculty members, according to C. John Sommerville, an emeritus professor of English history at the University of Florida. “When people meet resistance, they begin putting off identification of themselves as Christians until they feel more secure,” he says.
Mr. Sommerville is the author of The Decline of the Secular University (Oxford University Press, 2006), in which he argues that academe tends to trivialize religion. As a Christian, though, he says, he has never felt discriminated against, and he doesn’t know of any Christian colleagues who have, either. “I think it would be rare to feel overt hostility,” he says.
George Marsden largely agrees — which is, honestly, something of a surprise. Mr. Marsden, a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford University Press, 1994), in which he contends that religious viewpoints have been crowded out by feminism and multiculturalism. One might expect him to argue that academe is rife with anti-Christian bias.
But, as a rule, Mr. Marsden believes that colleges are fair to Christian professors. “It’s certainly not the case that there’s a prejudice that eliminates people with strong religious perspectives from the academy,” he says.
That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions. He has heard of discrimination against professors because of their religion — usually, ironically enough, in religion departments. But, like Mr. Balmer, Mr. Marsden sees politics as the primary factor. “Conservative religious views can be a strike against you if you’re early in your academic career,” he says, “but it can depend on how those views are presented.”
A professor intent on proselytizing may run into trouble. “People who are evangelical Christians can come in with an aggressive attitude that can cause a backlash, and then they do feel discriminated against,” he says.
Is that what happened in the case of Mr. Adams?
He is not shy about stating his opinions; he has, after all, written more than 400 columns expressing his thoughts on nearly every hot-button topic around. He is also the author of Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel: Confessions of a Conservative College Professor (Harbor House, 2004). Where he falls on the ideological spectrum is no mystery.
Some of his columns are, to put it mildly, conversation starters. In one recent online article, he made a proposal that colleges actually start offering M.R.S. degrees. “Our young men need good wives more than anyone needs another degree program teaching women how to become lesbians, feminists, and man-haters for life,” he writes.
He is a “lightning-rod type guy,” says Mr. French, the director of the Center for Academic Freedom.
Most of the other professors Mr. French deals with are not nearly as outspoken. But they have similar complaints, such as failing to get tenure or a promotion because of their faith. “They usually want to get advice behind the scenes,” he says. “There’s often a lack of a support network for Christian professors, particularly at large public universities.”
And while it’s hard to prove widespread discrimination, Mr. French points to a 2005 study published in The Forum, an electronic political-science journal, which found that “women and practicing Christians teach at lower-quality schools than their accomplishments would predict.” A survey released last year by two scholars — titled “How Religious Are America’s College and University Professors?” — found that while most professors believed in at least the possibility of God’s existence, they were more than twice as likely to be skeptics or atheists as the general population (The Chronicle, October 20, 2006).
For his part, Mr. Adams doesn’t need a survey. He says he’s seen it firsthand. “The hostility was always there,” he says, “but you don’t really understand it until it’s directed at you.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Diversity in Academe Volume 54, Issue 5, Page B6