Cross found at Air Force Academy’s Wicca center

Criticized several years ago for Christian bias, the Air Force Academy undertook steps to correct the situation, including building an outdoor worship center for those who practice “Earth-based religions.” The Los Angeles Times reports that a few weeks ago a large cross was found to have been placed in the worship center. The article provides the back story and details how the incident and the subsequent reactions have been handled.

[Los Angeles Times via The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Religion News]

Air Force Academy Says Religious Tolerance Has Improved at Academy

Academy officials say that religious tolerance has improved dramatically since reports five years ago that evangelical Christians harassed cadets who did not share their beliefs. The chief critics agree.

"This is the first time we feel positive about things there," said Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which battled the academy in court over claims that evangelicals at the school were imposing their views on others.

The academy superintendent, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Gould, says the improvements are the result of a topdown campaign to foster respect and a commitment to accommodate all cadets, even nonbelievers and an "Earth-centered" religious group that needed a place for a stone circle so it could worship outdoors.

The story reports on a new Cadet Interfaith Council that tries to be proactive about meeting the religious needs of cadets and maintaining a supportive atmosphere on campus. It also offers background both on the earlier charges and on the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which was formed to combat the alleged harassment.

[The Associated Press via The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Religion News]

Anti-Semitism on campuses around the world

Canada’s The National Post reprints an excerpt on Anti-Semitism on campus in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East from Denis MacShane, Globalising Hatred: The New Anti-Semitism (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009).

[National Post via The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Religion News]

More religious symbols on campus

My colleague at Harvard Divinity School, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., offers a blog post in America illustrating how news of controversy about religion on campus can spur a rethinking of an old either-or choice. In this case, the either-or of crucifixes in classrooms.

Reflecting on the European Court’s recent ruling that crucifixes in Italian classrooms are illegal, and drawing on his own experience of similar debates at Boston College, Clooney suggests that rather than banning Christian symbols we should consider displaying a variety of symbols that reflect the actual diversity found at most universities.

The faculty and student body on our campuses are religiously diverse; the curriculum includes courses on and references to many different religions; the library is full of books about different religions, including the sacred scriptures of different faiths; most Catholic campuses provide proper spaces for worship in accord with other traditions. That the visual art on campus should be only Christian, or indeed Catholic Christian (as a crucifix usually is), seems too narrow, a deficit of spiritual imagination. We do best, I suggest, when we make our religious diversity visible and more prominent as a real part of our lives. To see Hindu and Buddhist symbols on a Catholic campus, for instance, is not a doctrinal claim, but a reminder of the diversity that our universities have opted for, chosen, fostered, for decades, and a respectful recognition of the religious heritage of those we have welcomed into our midst.

If you are intrigued by this shorter post, take a look at Clooney’s longer (and more youthful) reflection on his time teaching in Kathmandu.

Calvin College and trustee ban on “advocacy of homosexual practice and same-sex marriage” (continued)

Christianity Today puts the controversy at Calvin College into a wider context including other evangelical schools and offers more detail about the Calvin situation. See also yesterday’s post.

Calvin trustees will not withdraw controversial memo on homosexuality but will study the college’s CRC relationship and academic freedom

After two days of deliberation and more than eight hours of conversation with Faculty Senate members, the Homosexuality and Community Life Working Group, and a group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students, the Calvin College trustees decided not to withdraw their May, 2009, memorandum that deemed it “unacceptable” for Calvin faculty or staff to teach, write, or advocated homosexuality or same-sex marriages counter to Christian Reform Church (CRC) teachings. The trustees did decide “to create a special committee to consult with faculty, administrators and representatives from several committees to revisit the memo and study the college’s links to the CRC as they relate to academic freedom.”

For details and background, see the report in the Grand Rapids Press.

College bars talk on gay rights

Faculty and students at Hope College in Michigan invited screenwriter Dustin Lance Black to make a class visit to discuss screenwriting and participate in a roundtable on sexuality. Black won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 2008 film “Milk.” After discussions with students and faculty, the Hope administration barred Black’s participation in the roundtable and disallowed the campus screening of “Milk.” The invitation for a class visit may go forward.

Hope College Dean of Students Richard Frost said that from past experience, strongly-opinionated speakers usually don’t further academic discussions about gay, lesbian or transgender issues.

“We had tried to do that in the late ’90s, with little success,” Frost said. “Students and faculty on either side of the campus felt extremely hurt and marginalized.”

“We are willing to do these things, but for the college to do this, we have to be sure it’s educational,”  he said. “It’s back-and-forth and educational. It’s not advocacy.”

The news article makes no explicit mention of religious objections. In its Vision statement Hope describes itself as aspiring “to be a leading Christian college, ecumenical in character and rooted in the Reformed tradition.”

[The Holland Sentinel via Inside Higher Ed]

Religious discrimination against Jewish faculty in American higher education

Discrimination against Jews in elite American higher education is a matter of living memory.

Ponder a striking statistic offered by Dan Orien in his Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (Yale University Press, 1985): In 1950 there was only one Jewish professor in all of Yale College and only a scattering of Jews within Yale’s professional schools.

A symbolic intrusion into the classroom?

A central principle in American higher education is that professors, so long as they stick to their disciplinary knitting and do not indulge in obiter dicta on subjects beyond their professional competence, are the sole authority in the classroom. Not that professors answer only to themselves. They have gone through years of professionally supervised education and testing designed to inculcate the perspectives, knowledge, and good judgment expected by their discipline. That supervision does not end with a diploma. College professors continue to be answerable to the assemblage of their peers for the quality of their disciplinary work, including work in the classroom. Hence outside evaluative letters from senior colleagues in hiring and promotion reviews, peer review for publication in major journals and in the awarding of grants, book reviews, citation indexes, and so on and so forth.

Disciplinary professionals are liberated from outside because they submit to intensive peer scrutiny and review. They are freed because they are subjugated in a special, professional way.

That at least is the ideal.

So what are we to make of the recent news from Boston College?