Religious colleges “systematically undermine the most fundamental purposes of higher education.” So argues Peter Conn in a recent opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I must admit I don’t understand him.
He begins by noting that the college accreditation process is terrible. It focuses on “‘inputs’ rather than educational results”, fails “to respond to the challenges of rising costs”, fails at evaluating “new technologies and distance learning” and is secretive and “filed confidentially with the institutions under reviews”. The process is also a terrible burden producing documents of “hundreds of pages” followed by “multiday site visits” with additional meetings for “scores of colleagues in the host institution.”
I was totally following Conn. I thought, yeah, “it needs revision” or, yeah, “the process consumes time that would be better spent on instruction.”
But, no, Conn says the process is invalid so we should only use it to validate a few kinds of institutions.
What?
It is like saying, “yes, I know this soccer ball is flat, but only if you’re a special team, like Brazil or Germany, can you play with it.” Conn believes that this flat soccer ball of a process should not be applied to religious institutions because . . . .
By awarding accreditation to religious colleges, the process confers legitimacy on institutions that systematically undermine the most fundamental purposes of higher education. Skeptical and unfettered inquiry is the hallmark of American teaching and research. However, such inquiry cannot flourish—in many cases, cannot even survive—inside institutions that erect religious tests for truth. The contradiction is obvious.
The contradiction does not seem obvious to me. (It would be nice to have the argument spelled out, especially for us dim, religious types.) I really thought that one of the contributions of post-modernity was to point out that everyone has commitments. Every discipline has commitments. Or, as one of my friends quipped, “you can’t stand nowhere and you can’t stand everywhere.”
Now it is true, religious institutions often make their commitments explicit. But doesn’t making these commitments explicit make you more open to inquiry. Wouldn’t hiding them—like hiding a bias against religion—make you more prejudiced?
I am also confused that Conn only wants institutions committed to “unfettered inquiry” to be accredited. How do you have “unfettered inquiry” by making sure some people and topics cannot be included or discussed? It is like saying, “we can talk about everything, except these things.” Does “unfettered inquiry” mean unfettered by the principle of non-contradiction?
To be sure, Conn seems focused on evangelical institutions that required statements of faith requiring belief in a biblical fundamentalism, but his argument seems so general and universal as to include all religious institutions. And, again to be fair, Catholic colleges and universities experience pressures at various times to do or say certain things and not others, and there are Catholic institutions that agree that you should only say or do certain things. But there are also Catholic institutions that are the exact opposite saying that everything is up for discussion. And there are even Catholic institutions that fall somewhere in the middle, preferring some topics over others. It is a vigorous debate, one that would be warped if one or more of these groups were excluded.
This, I think, is the thing most perplexing to me. If Conn really wants a serious debate and inquiry about the legitimacy of religious colleges as academic institutions, shouldn’t he just make an argument and invite debate? Instead of calling for their exclusion through a bullying, bureaucratic process, mandated by the state, and backed by the power of money? In other words, isn’t it self-defeating to defend the value of “unfettered inquiry” through an exercise of unfettered power?
Although, maybe I am just not smart enough to understand his argument, given that I work at a religious college.
While I am sympathetic to the concerns of this post (after all, I am Catholic and teach at a Catholic college), I think as a general rule religious types of all persuasions need to let go of the idea that postmodernity has given them a get out of jail free card with respect to the critiques of theology that emerged in modernity. If anything, the opposite is the case; the critique has been radicalized and extended. Postmodernity is not the friend of anyone who thinks there is such a thing as ‘revelation’ and that it can be the starting point a rational discipline. Appealing to postmodernity in this fashion does not help the theologically inclined in their quest for legitimacy in the eyes of the post-modern world (imho).
In other words, postmodernity has focused its criticism on final causes, unity and teleology (which are intimately linked), and transcendence. The critique of the foundational nature of subjectivity is aimed precisely at its transcendence with respect to the world it wants to know and by bringing subjectivity back within the world also rejects the world as a unified whole (since, as you note, the world itself becomes constituted by the multiplicity of subjectivities which it produces), making it irreducibly resistance to claims that one has grasped some center that organizes reality (whether this be Christ, or God, or some revelation).
Let us use Kant on space as a quick example. Copernican space, despite the scientific revolution it represented, still had a center to the universe (i.e., the sun), and was still heierarchally organized according as well. Kant (following in the footsteps of those before), instead conceives space as without any center and thus hierarchically indifferent. Now when postmodernity comes along and critiques Kant’s account of space they do not do so in an effort to reinstate some center. They recognize that any center we construct is arbitrary, like defining the 0,0 point on an x-y graph. This arbitrariness does not legitimate a claim that there is an actual center, just because anyone’s center is arbitrary). What they critique Kant for is for thinking that Cartesian space is the only conceivable (3 dimensional) space. Instead, there are multiple, equally legitimate geometries (e.g., polar coordinates). Kant was still too centered, so to speak; too unified in his view of the world. The lack of a center or origin entail much more radical consequences than Kant imagined. But notice that space is still entirely ‘immanent’, for lack of a better world.
Nonetheless, when theology tries to claim that it has access to a center or transcendence or revelation, it remains, for postmodernity, subject to Kantian-esque critiques of “enthusiasm” or “fanaticism”. One doesn’t get to go back Copernican thought.
Finally, one might notice that even with those postmodern thinkers that are sympathetic to religion (e.g., Levinas or Marion… unlike say a Derrida who appropriates but does so in the name of a religion without religion… i.e., he is thoroughly atheistic), they either eschew theology (Levinas) or by their own standards have to fall into a rather old-fashioned dogmatism in order to do theology (or one could point to Milbank who has tried to find a path back to a nearly unreconstructed Romanticism).
All this to say, I do not think that we, as theologians, are well served by invoking postmodernity as cover for our projects (and you are certainly not alone in trying to do so).