Good news is no news

In the last few weeks of mid-semester rush, I have barely had time to do more than pass on the day’s news stories about religion on our campuses. And in my hasty scan of news aggregators for religion (e.g.,  The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life or Religion News Service) or for higher education (e.g., The Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed) I have been struck by how seldom religion on campus actually makes the news. And when it does, the story, not surprisingly, is almost always about conflict: controversial bans on “advocating” homosexuality or abortion, disputes over the teaching of evolution, discrimination against religious or secular minorities, alleged violations of “student”  or “faculty” academic freedom.

Perhaps I won’t have been as bothered if I were not trying to have at least one post a day during the work week with at least one or two “positive” and “useful” posts for those interested in thinking through the appropriate role for religious perspectives on their particular campus. After all, how is it news when things are going smoothly? Who wants to read about successful classes where religious perspectives play a pedagogically useful role? Where is the story in a campus that lives out a religious sense of mission while welcoming and successfully supporting students and faculty who believe and practice otherwise? Good news is no news, but no news about good news helps explain why secular faculty associate religion on campus with controversy! And while stories about conflict can spark useful faculty conversations, it helps to have “success stories” and examples of “best practice”  to talk about as well.

I invite my readers to help flesh out a fuller and more useful picture of religion on our campuses. Please consider emailing me:

• “Teachable Moments”: Anecdotes that illustrate the challenges and opportunities that arise when students or faculty bring explicitly religious considerations into the classroom.
• “Conversation Stoppers”: Anecdotes that illustrate the challenges and opportunities that arise when faculty raise explicitly religious considerations in conversations with each other or with administrators.
• Recommended Reading: Books, articles, postings that offer insight into the question of explicitly religious discourse on campus.

Send these to “markuedwards AT gmail DOT com.” I may not be able to post all that is sent, but I will respond to each email.

Academic Freedom From and Freedom For

In “Two Concepts of Liberty (1958)” the philosopher Isaiah Berlin explores the difference between “negative” and “positive” concepts of liberty or freedom. Negative liberty is freedom from outside interference in the pursuit of one’s goals. Positive liberty is the freedom for self-realization, a freedom that allows “my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind.”

Both concepts of liberty can be applied to academic freedom in today’s America. To take a real world example, some claim that the “positive freedom” of students to realize their “true, God-given human nature” should trump scholars’ “negative freedom” to teach whatever they and their disciplinary community think accords with disciplinary standards. Others claim that a scholar’s “negative” academic freedom should always trump alleged “positive” freedoms, even when the college or university in which the scholar teachers sees itself as an educational arm of a church.

The trade-offs may actually be even more complicated than this either-or  suggests.

Calvin College’s Board of Trustees, advocacy of homosexual practices or same-sex marriage, and academic freedom (continued)

In an earlier post, I  pointed to an article in the Grand Rapid News that reported faculty requests for a campus discussion on academic freedom after being told by the Calvin Board of Trustees that it is “unacceptable” for them to advocate “both in and out of the classroom” for homosexual issues and same-sex marriage. There is now a follow-on article that summarizes some of the response to the first article and offers helpful background to the controversy.

Evidence and God Talk

Anyone interested in the ongoing debate about religion on campus needs to read Stanley Fish’s most recent post, God Talk, Part 2, a meditation on the comments he received regarding his favorable review of Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution. At issue is the (often community-based) assumptions regarding what constitutes appropriate evidence and convincing argumentation. Here’s Fish’s take-off point:

Evidence, understood as something that can be pointed to, is never an independent feature of the world. Rather, evidence comes into view (or doesn’t) in the light of assumptions – there are authors or there aren’t — that produce the field of inquiry in the context of which (and only in the context of which) something can appear as evidence.

And Fish rightly points out that:

While those hypotheses are powerfully shaping of what can be seen, they themselves cannot be seen as long as we are operating within them; and if they do become visible and available for noticing, it will be because other hypotheses have slipped into their place and are now shaping perception, as it were, behind the curtain.

I would stress that these “dependent hypotheses” are normally held by “communities” into which human beings, including academics, are socialized. Among these communities are professional academic disciplines in which we are formed and maintained through out our graduate training and life as academics answerable to our professional guilds.

Reader contributions

This blog aims at fostering conversation among faculty members and others regarding the proper role, if any, of explicitly religious discourse in classrooms or in intra-faculty discussions and deliberations.

Please consider sending in:

• Teachable Moments: Anecdotes that illustrate the challenges and opportunities that arise when students or faculty bring explicitly religious considerations into the classroom.
• Conversation Stoppers: Anecdotes that illustrate the challenges and opportunities that arise when faculty raise explicitly religious considerations in conversations with each other or with administrators.
• Recommended Reading: Books, articles, postings that offer insight into the question of explicitly religious discourse on campus.
• Other: Other matters that have a bearing on this ongoing conversation.

Please send these to “markuedwards AT gmail DOT com.no spam please.” I may not post every suggestion, but I will reply. Thank you!