Reexamining Academic Freedom in Religiously Affiliated Universities

Transcending Orthodoxies

Kenneth Garcia, Kenneth Garcia

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319397870
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Religionssoziologie

Kenneth Garcia presents an edited collection of papers from the 2015 conference on academic freedom at religiously affiliated universities, held at the University of Notre Dame. These essays reexamine the secular principle of academic freedom and discuss how a theological understanding might build on and further develop it.
The year 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the leading advocate of academic freedom in America. In October 2015, the University of Notre Dame convened a group of prominent scholars to consider how the concept and practice of academic freedom might evolve. The premise behind the conference was that the current conventional understandings of academic freedom are primarily secular and, therefore, not yet complete. The goal was to consider alternative understandings in light of theological insight. Theological insight, in this context, refers to an awareness that thereis a surplus of knowledge and meaning to reality that transcends what can be known through ordinary disciplinary methods of inquiry, especially those that are quantitative or empirical. Essays in this volume discuss how, in light of the fact that findings in many fields hint at connections to a greater whole, scholars in any academic field should be free to pursue those connections. Moreover, there are religious traditions that can help inform those connections.

Part I
Overview and Historical Background

© The Author(s) 2016

Kenneth Garcia (ed.)Reexamining Academic Freedom in Religiously Affiliated Universities10.1007/978-3-319-39787-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Transcending Academic Orthodoxies

Kenneth Garcia¹

(1)

Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

This presentation is a modified version of the author’s essay in the September 2014 issue of The Journal of Academic Freedom. Some of the material draws on the author’s book Academic Freedom and the Telos of the Catholic University (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

End Abstract

Academic freedom is universally acknowledged as a principal foundation of higher education and is the sine qua non of a mature university. The year 2015 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the leading advocate of academic freedom in America, and the 75th anniversary of the AAUP’s 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” The year 2015 also commemorates the 50th anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council, which acknowledged the legitimate autonomy of culture and insisted that the unique methods and techniques of the sciences must be respected as long as they are consonant with moral norms and the common good. ¹ Finally, the year 2015 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, which declares that a “Catholic University is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man, and God” and is “dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in the essential connection with the supreme Truth, who is God.”

Most academics will agree, though, that the principles of academic freedom and the confessional commitments of religiously affiliated universities do not always mix well. Tensions go back centuries and continue today. American scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries forged principles of academic freedom during a period characterized by acrimony and mutual hostility between the secular sciences and religious authoritarianism. Most of the principal advocates for academic freedom in the early twentieth century were secular humanists, some with a strong antipathy toward religion ² —an antipathy matched with equal vigor by authorities in religious colleges and universities, who considered academic freedom to be little more than a “false liberty leading to license” ³ and “a pretext to teach [false philosophical] systems which destroy all freedom.” ⁴ Although discord continues today, the antagonism is not nearly as broad-based as in the past. Fortunately, acceptance of intellectual and academic freedom has advanced significantly during the past half century, and most, if not all, religiously affiliated universities now adhere to principles of academic freedom and tenure, even though uneasily at times.

The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council admitted that the Church has not always greeted novel scholarly findings with enthusiasm. They even acknowledged that many scholars feared that “a closer bond between human activity and religion will work against the independence of…the sciences.” During the Council, the Catholic Church’s leadership changed course. Let me cite section 36 of Gaudium et Spes (or “The Church in the Modern World”) in some detail:

If by the autonomy of earthly affairs we mean that created things and societies themselves enjoy their own laws and values which must be gradually deciphered, put to use, and regulated by human beings, then it is entirely right to demand that autonomy.…For by the very circumstance of their having been created, all things are endowed with their own stability, truth,…proper laws, and order. Humans must respect these as they isolate them by the appropriate methods of the individual sciences or arts. Therefore if methodical investigation within every branch of learning is carried out in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, it never truly conflicts with faith, for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God. Indeed, whoever labors to penetrate the secrets of reality with a humble and steady mind, even though he or she is unaware of the fact, is nevertheless being led by the hand of God.… Consequently, we cannot but deplore certain habits of mind, which are sometimes found among Christians, which do not sufficiently attend to the rightful independence of science and which, from the arguments and controversies they spark, lead many minds to conclude that faith and science are mutually opposed. ⁵

While acknowledging flaws within the Christian community, the Council Fathers also cautioned against the agnosticism fostered by many of the sciences when their methods of investigation are “wrongly considered as the supreme rule of seeking the whole truth.” Further, they recognized that “by virtue of their methods these sciences cannot penetrate to the intimate notion of things.” Because of the limitations inherent in the sciences, there is a need to “harmonize the proliferation of particular branches of study with the necessity of forming a synthesis of them, and of preserving among men the faculties of contemplation and observation which lead to wisdom.” The search for integration, then, must involve a continuous interaction among academic disciplines, including, I argue, philosophy and theology. Finally Gaudium et Spes goes on to say:

If the expression, “the independence of temporal affairs,” is taken to mean that created things do not depend on God, and that humans can use them without any reference to their Creator, anyone who acknowledges God will see how false such a meaning is. For without the Creator the creature would disappear. For their part, however, all believers of whatever religion always hear God’s revealing voice in the discourse of creatures. When God is forgotten…the creature itself grows unintelligible. ⁶

Now, consider the idea expressed in the penultimate sentence of that citation: God’s revealing voice can be heard in the discourse of creatures. Creation—the natural world—reveals something of the sacred. Catholic thought, if not all Christian thought, has traditionally recognized “two books of God”: Scripture, or Revelation, and Nature. Both point to and reveal a reality beyond themselves. So it’s no wonder some mathematicians and scientists have said that their research findings help disclose something of the mind of God. I’ll come back to that point later.

The Council acknowledges the necessary autonomy of the scholar as an element of academic freedom; it also insists on the freedom to listen for the divine voice in the discourse of creation; of pursuing the theological dimension of all fields of study; of scholars having the right and in some cases, the positive duty, to pursue the connections between knowledge in their discipline and theological insight. By “theological insight” I do not mean pronouncements by religious authorities; nor do I mean adherence to dogmas or to literal interpretations of religious texts that must be accepted without skepticism and critical assessment; instead, I mean this: a subtle awareness that there is a surplus of knowledge and meaning to reality that transcends what can be known through ordinary disciplinary methods of inquiry—that findings in many fields of study hint at connections to a greater whole, and that these connections should be pursued.

Not all scholars experience such awareness, of course, and not even those who do have to pursue the connections between their discipline and theological insight. In fact, most scholars will not, but everyone—no matter what their academic field—should be free to do so, and that freedom should be enshrined in the policies of every religiously affiliated university.

In proposing this, I’m offering a friendly critique of our customary understanding of academic freedom because our understanding of it is incomplete. This incompleteness leads to shortcomings in the practice of it, in both religiously affiliated and secular institutions.

I’ll make my case in three steps: (1) I’ll examine sectarian obstacles—both religious and secular—to academic freedom; (2) I’ll show why academic freedom is not always as freeing in practice as the ideal of it suggests; and (3) I’ll propose a theological understanding of academic freedom that not only builds on and incorporates existing principles but also completes them, leading to a fuller understanding for the twenty-first century.

Before I do that, though, let me clarify two matters. First, the approach to academic freedom this volume will address. Whenever the concept of academic freedom arises in religiously affiliated universities, what normally comes to the reader’s mind is the issue of whether or not scholars, especially theologians, have the freedom to dissent from religious orthodoxy, or at least to advocate for heterodox positions. During the past these issues have been continually contentious, with good reason, and there is a vast literature on the topic. This volume, however, is not about that topic specifically. Rather, it focuses on whether all scholars should have the freedom to transcend secular disciplinary orthodoxies (as well as religious orthodoxies) and move toward theological insight. No other volume has undertaken this approach, even though there has here has been a spate of books published during the past decade claiming to examine academic freedom anew. ⁷ With the exception of Kenneth Garcia’s Academic Freedom and the Telos of the Catholic University (2012), ⁸ none of them challenges the prevailing secular understanding of academic freedom with a theological understanding that enhances the secular. Indeed, the few references to religion in most of these books repeat conventional stereotypes from the past: the regrettable cases of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, for example; or from the present, such as Creation Science. While those examples demonstrate the very real danger religious orthodoxy poses to academic freedom, they fail to take into account more subtle and sophisticated understandings of religion’s role in the academy.

Second, let me explain what I mean by the unusual phrase “transcending orthodoxies.” The word orthodoxy is normally used to mean traditional religious doctrines to which adherents of a faith tradition must assent. It means correct teaching and right thinking about certain things. That’s a legitimate meaning, of course, but there can also be what I will call orthodoxy with a lowercase “o” that runs contrary to the “upper case” Orthodoxy that it claims to champion. For example, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a form of Neo-Scholastic theology and philosophy gained dominance within Catholic intellectual circles, universities, and the Church hierarchy, to the near suppression of other legitimate schools of thought within the Catholic theological tradition. This Neo-Scholasticism purported to be based on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, but in reality it was a narrow interpretation of some aspects of Thomas’s thought, and an even narrower understanding of what Yves Congar called the Great Tradition of Christian philosophy, theology, and spirituality. By suppressing much of the Great Tradition, it became a lowercase “orthodoxy,” posing as the uppercase orthodoxy of the Great Tradition.

Lowercase orthodoxies are not exclusive to Catholic or Christian thought. They can characterize any ideology, whether religious or secular. There are all kinds of lowercase orthodoxies—secular, postmodern, Marxist, materialistic—that attempt to become uppercase Orthodoxies and to suppress rival ways of thinking and understanding. That’s what we mean by orthodoxies in this volume and we will discuss whether the principle of academic freedom should enable us to transcend them.

Let me now say what I believe is the best definition of academic freedom, and then discuss how lowercase orthodoxies impinge on it. The American Association of University Professors (the AAUP), in its 1915 General Report of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, claims that academic freedom is the freedom of scholars to teach, to conduct research, and to present the results thereof, in the following words: “Scholars must be absolutely free not only to purse their investigations but to declare the results of their researches, no matter where they may lead or to what extent they may come into conflict with accepted opinion.” ⁹

To the above definition I would add only that all research must be conducted in accord with moral norms. This statement is so germane because knowledge discovered through free inquiry is sometimes unsettling: in some cases to ecclesiastical authorities and religious believers; in other cases to political and governmental authorities; and sometimes to business interests. And, I must add, it is sometimes unsettling to secular academic ideologies. After all, that which constitutes “accepted opinion”—based on certain philosophical and ideological assumptions, whether explicit or implicit—changes over time, for good or ill. What was once deemed contrary to accepted opinion may later become the new conventional wisdom, a new orthodoxy. Then we may have the situation where adherents of a new status quo attempt to silence or censor dissidents from their own orthodoxies. The practice of academ...