The School of Human Ecology must end its discrimination now and hire conservative faculty if they really want intellectual diversity.
By Prof. Richard A. Baer, Jr.
Over the past ten years an increasing number of students in the departments of Human Service Studies and Human Development and Family Studies in the College of Human Ecology have complained to me that they have been discriminated against because of their religious beliefs.
Other students in other issues of The Cornell American have provided details of such discrimination, so here I shall try mainly to Interpret what is happening and then make a number of recommendations.
Religious discrimination in HDFS and HSS takes two forms: First, professors not infrequently make inaccurate, depreciating, and insulting comments about Christians and Christian beliefs—particularly conservative Christians. Second, the curriculum in these departments is exceedingly one-sided, typically ignoring first-rate scholarship written from a religious perspective on issues relating to families.
The second point is by far the more troubling. To put the matter bluntly, HDFS and HSS engage in what I would describe as massive censorship by omission. Overall, the curriculum in these departments is narrow in scope, politically and socially extremely liberal, and out of touch not only with much first-rate scholarship relevant to understanding the family but also with the religious beliefs and values of a large section of the American public.
These are strong charges. If they are true they merit early and decisive remedies from HUMEC if educational justice is to be realized.
Some discrimination against Jews and Christians stems from sheer ignorance. The education and the life experiences of many faculty simply have not given them significant contact with Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Conservative Catholics. One student reports hearing a professor describe conservative Christians as the enemy of human liberation and sexual freedom. Another professor argues that fundamentalist Christians are sexually repressed. The abandonment of the traditional family is a positive outcome, according to still another professor. Just within the past month, a faculty member in HSS told his class that his approach to family studies was factual and scientific, whereas the facts which HDFS student presented in a recent piece in The Cornell American—an article critical of her HUMEC education—were distorted by myth and ideology!
The response of at least one HUMEC administrator to such reports of religious discrimination has been to propose urging HUMEC faculty to be more careful not to make disparaging comments about religious students and their beliefs.
To be sure, faculty members should be urged to maintain reasonable standards of civility and openness to dissenting views. But there are at least two good reasons that weigh against making such an expectation into a formal policy. First, academic freedom is central to the life of the university. I want no part in fostering politically correct speech. If a professor believes that Christians are a menace to society, I want her to be free to say so—publicly. The dangers of censorship are serious and real.
But the main reason I oppose developing a set of rules in this present situation is that if HDFS and HSS professors were to be nicer to Christians (in the sense of refraining from discriminatory language and insulting comments), but changed nothing else in the way they do business, Christian students would be worse off than they are today.
As things are now, Muslims, Jews, Christians, and other religious students know where they stand in HDFS and HSS. They know that they are sometimes the targets of ignorant and prejudicial comments by certain faculty. That’s actually good, because it increases the likelihood that they will also think about the far more serious problem of discrimination they encounter, namely the extraordinary one-sidedness and censorship by omission that are hallmarks of the curricula in these departments.
Such curricular discrimination is not unique to Cornell but exists in most Human Ecology programs throughout the country (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the humanities and social sciences generally).
Put very simply, HDFS and HSS do not give serious consideration to religiously-grounded views of human sexuality, marriage, abortion, sex outside of marriage, and other sensitive issues pertaining to families. These views are thought to have no legitimate place in the curriculum of the modern secular university—except perhaps in a purely anthropological-sociological-descriptive sense.
Many academics would even consider it a violation of the First Amendment to have Jewish or Christian professors elaborating on and lending support to a traditional religious view of the family. If nothing else, such an arrangement would likely incur the combined wrath of the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and People for the American Way—something no administrator in her right mind wants to risk.
This exclusion of religious scholarship and teaching not only constitutes an injustice; it also makes for a dull and parochial educational experience. Many students in HDFS and HSS have told me that they are seldom challenged to think critically about issues presented in class. Only infrequently do they hear scholarly presentations of positions contrary to those endorsed by the professor in charge.
How can we explain what is happening in these departments? I think it is fair to say that the dominant view among secular educators in America today is that secular thinking is reasonable, universal, and appropriate for public education, whereas religious thinking is based on dogma, faith, and tradition, and ought to be kept private.
It may be legitimate to deal with religion descriptively, analyzing and interpreting it the way that anthropologists interpret the beliefs and practices of an Amazonian tribal culture. But when it comes to developing and advocating views of the family which might be relevant to current public policy, religious thinking is simply not acceptable.
This antipathy to religion in education is a holdover from past ‘generations of Enlightenment thinkers who honestly believed that secular thinking, even in areas like political theory and ethics, was compellingly rational, universal, and of a quite different order epistemologically from religious thinking. The latter was based on faith and tradition and was essentially nonrational (or even irrational) and parochial.
But much recent work in epistemology has shown the inadequacy of this Enlightenment claim to the exclusive rationality of secular reason. It now seems clear that all human thought enterprises rest on certain initial assumptions and convictions about the nature of reality. All are limited, operate within a particular time and place, and entail risk of error. I find little justification for the position that liberal, secular, humanistic reasoning of the sort that dominates HDFS and HSS is scientific but that religious thinking about families rests on dogma and faith.
Such a view reflects neither a sophisticated understanding of the role of reason in religion nor an understanding of the degree to which all human thought enterprises rest on initial commitments which can not in any simple fashion be proven by reason to be correct. Even selecting which issues to study and teach about in HDFS and HSS is a value-driven undertaking which depends largely on one’s basic worldview.
To be sure, we Americans learned long ago that in matters of public policy it makes good sense not to emphasize our religious differences. This is politically wise and may be a way of showing sensitivity to the beliefs of others. Indeed, it would seem odd to refer to a Presbyterian way of running the Post Office, a Jewish approach to building superhighways, or a Catholic position on provisioning the military.
But when we deal with what I call the “Big Questions” — who are we, how should we live, and what is life all about—it makes a great deal of sense to refer to, say, a Catholic view of abortion, an Orthodox Jewish understanding of the family, or an Evangelical Christian position on divorce. Similarly, one can point to a Marxist view of moral education or a secular humanist view of sex education.
When it comes to the Big Questions, we must either permit religious thinkers to enter the marketplace of ideas as legitimate participants, or we shall end up with an intolerable injustice (at least in universities that are supported by the state): Secular thinkers (perhaps Marxists or atheistic humanists) will be permitted to recommend their answers to the Big questions to students, but religious thinkers must be silent. Where is the evidence that a majority of the Founders of our political experiment had in mind such an arrangement?
Only when one accepts the Enlightenment myth of the essential rationality of secular thinking and the essential irrationality of religious thinking does such a position seem even remotely justifiable in a democratic and highly pluralistic society. It is a view which essentially says to the religious American: We will tolerate you and your ideas as long as you keep them at home or in the church or synagogue—that is as long as you keep them private.
Such a policy, however, disenfranchises a majority of Americans or else forces them to become moral and intellectual schizophrenics. It basically says: Yes, you may continue to be part of this great American society, including our public universities, as long as you keep your mouth shut and are willing to sit in the back of the bus.
But what possible justification is there for such a political arrangement? If liberal nontheistic humanists can inculcate in students their particular secular views of the family in HDFS and HSS (as they do every day), why should not Christians be allowed to argue in favor of their religiously-based views?
Indeed, we must ask another question: Why has HUMEC not hired individuals who are professionally educated in, say, a Christian view of the family? Associate Dean Charles McClintock has stated that HUMEC refuses to hire faculty on the basis of their religious beliefs. But virtually all faculty now teaching in HDFS and HSS have been hired because of their willingness to pursue essentially secular approaches to various subject matters. In framing its job descriptions, the college in effect says: If you are a scholar/teacher who approaches family studies from within a religious (rather than secular) framework, don’t bother applying. There is no job available for you. The parallel to how various institutions treated blacks and women fifty years ago is painfully obvious!
To be sure, HUMEC should not hire a faculty person on the basis of his religious beliefs, if those beliefs are not directly relevant to the demands of the job. But, of course, they are relevant in some cases. If a philosophy department wants to have an analytical philosopher on board to think and teach as an analytical philosopher, it would make little sense to hire an existentialist or a Platonist.
Similarly, if the college decides—as I am arguing that it should—to hire someone to develop research programs and teach from the perspective of Jewish or Christian understandings of the family, then it makes good sense to pay attention to the candidate’s religious beliefs.
The fact that HUMEC for years has discriminated against religious approaches to family studies cannot be excused on the basis of a shortage Christian and Jewish scholars who could perform research and teaching in this field in a highly competent manner. It is rather because of the college’s position that theological thinking about families has no legitimate place in a tax-supported, public institution. The unjust result is that the state grants its endorsement to secular thinking about families and at the same time discriminates against and excludes (censors) religious thinking.
But if the Enlightenment conviction that secular thinking is uniquely rational can no longer be reasonably defended, then the college’s approach is unjustifiable. Indeed, I would make a stronger argument: it basically violates the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. By censoring religious thinking about families and sponsoring only secular thinking, it grants secular thinking the imprimatur of government. In a subsequent piece I shall argue that what the college is doing violates both the free exercise and the nonestablishment components of the First Amendment religion clause.
Can any fair-minded person really believe that I should pay taxes to support an institution which systematically undermines the values and beliefs which I am trying to teach teach my children by indoctrinating them in a set of secular and humanistic beliefs and values—all the while rigorously excluding any fair consideration of my beliefs and values from this state-sponsored forum just because they are religious? Does a true liberal really want to be party to such state-sponsored censorship and indoctrination?
Should the college continue to hire faculty who teach students that the basic meaning of human existence consists in self-fulfillment and the satisfaction of their personal needs and wants, and refuse to employ faculty who would teach them that one’s most basic responsibility in life is to learn the love of God and serve one’s neighbors? Should HUMEC continue to employ faculty who talk about human freedom largely in terms of personal choice, while at the same time refusing to hire other faculty who might teach that freedom is fundamentally a matter of learning to trust and obey God? To answer these questions in the affirmative betrays a strange combination of prejudice and ignorance of the underlying meaning of the American political compact.
To suggest that the religiously-grounded positions as a total set are any less challenging academically, any less relevant to current social issues, or any less sophisticated intellectually than the secular positions is simply to betray one’s religionist bias.
To achieve justice in education, HUMEC will have to expand its marketplace of ideas. As odious as I find some of the views of various faculty, I want no part in trying to censor those views. Rather, I believe the time has come for HDFS and HSS deliberately to hire additional faculty—at least three to start with, perhaps two Christians and one Jew—who will be professionally competent to teach and do research on traditionally religious views of the family and other issues dealt with in these departments.
Insofar as many liberal Christians and Jews hold views fairly close to those of faculty now teaching in HDFS and HSS, these new faculty hires should also come from the more conservative wing of these religious traditions.
Would it not be acceptable to hire an atheist or an agnostic to teach and do research on Christian views of the family? I think the answer to this question is fairly simple. First, not many are professionally competent to do so. Second, it is very hard to do so fairly if you think these beliefs make little sense or are even socially and politically destructive. And third, and perhaps most important, insofar as certain kinds of understanding demand commitment as well as technical knowledge, most faculty who stand outside a particular tradition simply are not capable of doing an acceptable job. It is difficult to imagine a committed utilitarian philosopher being hired to do teaching and research in normative ethics within a deontological framework.
Except in extreme circumstances, few universities would give serious thought to staffing a black studies program mainly with whites or Asians, just as they would not likely hire males to fill most of the positions in a women’s studies program. The Enlightenment conviction that true rationality and scholarship are unconnected to time, place, gender, race, or tradition makes little sense to many thoughtful epistemologists today.
Obviously, there are vested interests that have a stake in not making fundamental changes in HDFS and HSS such as those I here propose. This is not unlike the situation which prevailed during the early stages of the civil rights and women’s movements. When dialogue failed to produce results, these movements finally had to turn to organized protests, political action, and the courts to bring about significant change.
My hope is that HUMEC faculty and administrators will continue to engage in serious dialogue with those who are concerned about religious discrimination at the college. Such dialogue will need to include serious attempts to understand the life experiences of religious students as well as the political and philosophical implications of current practice in the college.
A commitment by the college to fill no new faculty positions till this issue of religious discrimination is resolved, would be a welcome sign of good faith, particularly during the present period of budget cuts and institutional retrenchment.
Professor Richard A. Baer, Jr., is a professor of Natural Resources in the School of Agriculture & Life Sciences.
Editor’s Note: In a later issue of The Cornell American Richard Baer will elaborate on just what kind of faculty might be hired to broaden the marketplace of ideas in HDFS and HSS, focusing on what particular disciplines they might represent and on what kinds of research, teaching, and extension they might engage in.