02 The battle hymn of the republic of learning

The issue of academic-freedom in religious institutions is a fiercely debated one. We mostly hear the echoes from a divided United States, where public funding is at stake, but the reactions from the temples of science are also apparent in Australia.² One side stands on the constitutional right to free expression, while the other stands on the separation of church and state. Both have assumptions about what the normal state is. Religious people hold that their faith is an integral part of their freedom, an objective and public thing. Secular commentators, on the other hand, see it as a form of aberrance, a set of private choices that should not be forced upon others. Religious people object to having to pay for atheistic alternatives, while at the same time being squeezed out of consideration as being ‘normal’ citizens; secular people, on the other hand, closely define the nature of the state in order to protect the dominance of the liberal ideal and the power of its elites. The latter absolutize epistemological liberalism as a form of knowledge,³ and use the debate over academic-freedom in order to deny public funding to private institutions, categorically stating that religious institutions cannot sustain a culture of academic-freedom. The public debates about creationism and intelligent design are often ways of using the religious extreme to define a secular, sensible middle.⁴ It is no coincidence that those who are currently in the leadership of major universities were born in the 1940s and 1950s, and grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. We would not be so harsh as Roche, in saying that "the most significant threat to freedom of ideas on campus has come not from without, from federal, state, or private assault, but--and increasingly since the "Cultural Revolution" of the late Sixties--from within, usually instigated by ex-New Left professors trying to regain the illusion of a revolutionary virility."⁵ It would be fair to say, however, that the current leadership of the secular academic establishment share assumptions as to the nature of academic freedom which coincide with their moral individualism and their presuppositions about the normality of economic growth.⁶ As Nicholas Wolterstorff, Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University, has pointed out, this produces strange anomalies.

In fact, there are significant restrictions on academic free speech in all settings – as Stanley Fish quips in a book title, ‘There’s no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing too’.⁸ This reality of contested meanings of freedom is one of which few Pentecostals have experience, but into which we are now entering. As Pentecostals begin to move into this sector, we need to learn from the experience of others. We are not destined simply to ‘fight the last war all over again’ (as Michael Hollerich describes the situation for the Catholic College sector).⁹ We have the advantage of not having to work with 2000 years of entrenched doctrine and autocracy, and the fights that have gone with it. We have the disadvantage of an experience gap in the culture wars which have featured the Australian scene since its foundation as a child of the Enlightenment. For us the largest feature on our horizon are the powers that be. We have not yet begun to see the giants in the land across the river. Speaking for those who have been there, Hollerich notes that the largest issue facing communities of Christian scholars is not the restrictiveness of their churches, but the implicit benchmarking of our disciplines against secular norms:

Baylor University provost, David Jeffery, suggests that the major threat arises from the tension between individualist and communalist values in western societies: ‘The issue is that relationships between the institution as a community and individuals seeking their own individual freedoms within the community are more strained than they used to be.’¹¹ The freedom of the academic is based on a concept of the ‘selfless’ search for truth – a claim hard to sustain in individualistic west, where everything we do implies a prime regard for the self and its rights. We also have to be aware of wider social trends. Recent pressure in the United States for an Academic Bill of Rights to protect the rights of students to demur from the opinions of their professors has both good and bad outcomes. On the one hand, it protects religious students against secularizing tendencies in secular universities. On the other, it makes it harder for a lecturer to simply say ‘you are wrong’ on the basis of their expert opinion. In other words, the classroom (even in private institutions on this side of the world) could well increasingly become a place where ‘freedom’ becomes a legal issue.¹² Defining the nature of behaviour both by staff and students, and of constituency members who are observing the defined ‘freedom of debate’ which is essential to a campus, will take some thought. It reminds us however that academic freedom is not just about staff – it is also about the right of students to inquire and to learn in ways which include self-directed learning as people ‘responsible to themselves’.¹³

Freedom relates to the frame of being – what is the space (in which we are located) for, how does that help me construct my God-given vocation, and (therefore) what are the appropriate freedoms with relate to that space? This is difficult in Christian institutions of higher education for a number of reasons. The first is that there is some doubt out in the republic of letters that the university can, per se, fulfil a meaningful role in the modern world.¹⁴ Given that we can answer this, the problem of Christian liberal arts colleges and universities arises because there are multiple demands on an institution, multiple accounts as to why they exist. Again, we can learn from others. It would be my contention that most of the conflicts in overseas religious institutions have emerged from conflict in the core values of the institutions themselves. Every now and again, an academic will do something stupid – we are just people, after all. But the majority of the conflicts seem to arise either through a change in direction in an institution – where what was actually a core tenet of a college changed (perhaps through change of leadership), creating dissonance on the campus between the old and the new – or though the leadership selecting one of a number of existing core values as substantive, effectively dismissing other possible interpretations. Hollerich notes, for example, that while the public reason for Catholic Colleges in the 19thc was the teaching of Catholic faith, the actual reason was to encourage the ‘upward mobility of the Catholic population’ by engaging with the educational possibilities emerging from the secular sciences and the professions. Not surprisingly, through the twentieth century, the public and the social values underpinning the Colleges’ existence came into conflict, leading to on-campus conflict over academic freedom involving people who were really wrestling over the nature of what a Catholic College was.¹⁵ So, defining "who we are," agreeing to "be who we say we are," and "being who we are," are important steps towards a proper sense of academic freedom in Pentecostal institutions of higher education. Making the terms of this compact apparent to incoming staff is also essential. Are we to search for truth wherever it may lead us? Is it our purpose, too, ‘to include the moral, spiritual and religious dimension in [our] research, and to evaluate the attainments of science and technology in the perspective of the totality of the human person’?¹⁶ If so, then we need to agree on our purposes and structure ourselves accordingly. The consequences reach into almost every part of our operations.

The concept of academic freedom varies slightly from culture to culture. With a strong public welfare infrastructure, British and German concerns are more interested in the individual-institution tension, particularly as they draw their traditions of academic freedom directly from the medieval corporate structures established to protect the universalist pursuits of scholars from the vagaries of contending local corporations, in particular municipal corporations, and Kings-in-Council.¹⁷ The first mention of the term academic freedom is in 1220 by a Pope (Honorius III) who encouraged the university in Bologna to defend its "scholastic freedom" (libertas scolastica) against the local government.¹⁸ Universities developed out of the presuppositions inherent in Christendom: ‘the unconditional exaltation of truth and the supranational character of the papacy.’¹⁹ In this setting, the European approach to academic freedom has been defined as:

It is seen as something which emerges from the nature of being a scholar, and the scholar’s role in Western society, ie. it is not an alienable privilege, but a functional constituent of scholarship itself. Coherent with the right of the scholar is the right of the educational institution itself to "be able to set their own standards, free from undue outside interference."²¹ Community (Christendom) defines institution defines scholarship, each with its rights and freedoms.

By comparison, American concerns – rooted in a consolidated national culture – relate to the absolute rights (or limitation thereof) of the individual scholar as an individual.²² Australia stands somewhere in between (indicating why we cannot simply absorb American models of higher education uncritically).²³ As the Curtin University approach notes, academic freedom is framed by the role of the academic (ie. it is not a freedom applied to the person, so much as to their role as ‘a staff member’, ‘a citizen, a member of a learned profession and an employee of the University.’)²⁴ In other words, ‘freedom’ is applied within the constraints of community definitions and recognitions. The community is both an economic (institutional) and a social (interpersonal) reality. Given this self-understanding, the university therefore binds itself to recognize certain rights inherent in the position:

The continuity between this and the provisions of the Catholic Church’s ruling statement about academic freedom within the system of pontifical institutions worldwide is apparent. In Ex Corde Ecclesiae, John Paul II defined academic freedom as:

The elements of, promise, membership, discipline, commitment to truth, search, dissemination, and the common good, are common to both secular and religious constituencies. How we structure promise, membership and discipline, therefore, are fundamental to the outward signs of commitment to truth, search, dissemination, and the common good. The implication is obvious – academic freedom needs to include a balance of the freedoms of the student, the teacher, the body of teachers reasoning together, and the institution as an entity existing within a larger community.²⁶ Academic freedom is ‘an instrumental good’ provided so that the institution and its staff can pursue its proper ends, ie, "to contribute to the growth of the body of truthful propositions and to this body’s transmission to contemporary and oncoming generations."²⁷ That which interferes with its instrumentality also by definition interferes with the extension of academic freedom as a right. (Allowance for processes of mediation and a definition of ‘appropriate authority’ and ‘appropriate interlocutors’ to be involved in academic discussions is a natural consequence of this.)

It would be true to say that most leaders in our movement have little understanding of educational processes, and little expectation about the intelligence of their members. The model of the charismatic leader is to hear from God and to tell the people what he has heard. The concept that they may be in fact serving a community which can hear from God and which is capable of dealing with what they’ve heard is not a common one. And yet, the community model is precisely what a uni-versity is – it is a community of scholarship. With the prevailing church model, education tends to default towards indoctrination, with more emphasis on character outcomes and opinions than on intellectual formation and knowledge. Because we "don’t yet have a paradigm of what a church-related university (or liberal arts college) ought to look like",²⁸ and are indeed in the process of inventing one, the tension between the functions of such an institution and the existing model will obviously raise issues. All parties will need to admit that the college exists as a place where definite, charismatic, revelational knowledge and certainty exist alongside and in interaction with the indefinite but progressive search for truth.²⁹ It is not an unusual tension in our tradition. Our doctrine of salvation is a case in point: we are saved at a moment in time, and yet we are being saved until we enter into the fullness of the promise which is kept for us in Christ. The tension between present authority and knowledge and emerging understanding will be definitional to what we are trying to build. Leaders and pastors will have to acknowledge that their revelational knowledge and ecclesial authority is not absolute, while teachers will have to admit that their academic freedom and scholarly knowledge are not absolute goods. Absolutized power corrupts the process of coming to know, while absolutized knowledge "makes us our own centre".³⁰ As Hoye notes, in an academic institution, ‘respect for authorities cannot imply being against truth’.³¹

On occasion, no doubt we will find ourselves discussing matters and disagreeing, not because both parties are not Christian, but because both parties have different understandings as to the nature of learning. The question "what is the relationship between indoctrination and education?" is a subset of the question of "what is the relationship between truth and fact." They obviously overlap, but they are not identical, and clearly the purposes of a university or liberal arts college tend more towards education than towards indoctrination. Once one steps out of the undergraduate program into graduate and research programs, the difference between the two becomes even more marked. Unlike the church model, there needs to be space for disagreement and ‘learning together’. Like the church model, however, that space is not limitless. It needs to be governed by laws of charity and mutual commitment. It cannot be legislated in its daily functioning. The American experience of the use of the mandatum in the Catholic church to regulate the teachers of Catholic doctrine, indicates that legislation does not work. It does not work because of who academics are – they are by nature curious, intelligent people, who know whether a text is being interpreted in ways true to its origins or as a means of control. This is not merely their nature, but their job – and indeed, many have traded off better paying pursuits for the opportunity to serve in environments where their faith perspective is given freedom. It also does not work because of what the Church is: any religion which has at its core sentiments like ‘if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed’ will have problems with merely legal proscription. It does not work because of what the academy is, and the community standards which are expected of academics in accredited institutions. A preferred approach is that rather than the positive requirement to seek approval and licensing, that an internal representation process and continuous conversation be established with the supporting community.

There will clearly need to be some mandated areas of freedom of operation and responsibility written into the charter Pentecostal college’s. When President of Baylor University, Herbert H. Reynolds, was planning the future of that institution, he came to the conclusion that he could not sit back and watch the University be taken over by ultra-conservative Baptists who are "more interested in indoctrination than education and enlightenment".³²

There needs to be agreement on issues of the integration of faith and learning and what a sufficient basis of faith for such an institution would be, given that it is designed to serve (in the first instance) a Pentecostal constituency. That constituency that is not itself in agreement as to what a natural theology would look like from a Pentecostal perspective, nor does it hold an agreed model of knowledge, but rather it holds together conflicting models in tension – a fundamentalist literalism on one hand, and a commitment to the freedom of the spirit in continuing revelation on the other.³³ We do have the advantage of not having fought lengthy wars over issues of fundamentalism, and therefore we are not carrying as much baggage as other traditions. On the other hand, we are often pragmatic in our usage of other people’s discoveries and knowledge, without really exploring what is behind them, while at the same time going on crusades about often minor issues when one of the markers of our identity is touched. When our own constituency cannot agree over such matters, how can we as a service institution agree? When the context in which we live constructs ideologies by drawing a very sharp line between Christian and secular enlightenment options, how can we expect to find agreement? At the same time, it is important that we do not set the standard of the at a lowest common denominator which will allow the institution to, over time, cease to be a Christian. Qualities of heart and mind, of spirit and character, as well as mere intellectual ability, are relevant elements in the process of hiring and preferring staff. We have to treasure diversity, because we’re a learning institution, and an institution without an engagement with diversity cannot learn. At the same time, diversity is not an end point so much as a means. As Marsden notes, ‘The conventional wisdom that one has to be in a highly diverse atmosphere in order to have a creative intellectual environment is simply wrong.’³⁴ It will, however, be necessary to hire people who have trained outside church institutions. This is not only something driven by the law of the market (PhDs are rare, and therefore demand a higher exchange value, either in cultural or in economic terms), but it is also desirable, given that knowledge is pitched against the entire range of those who know a particular discipline well, not just those who find themselves within church-based institutions. With one of the lowest educational attainment rates of all Christian denominations, Pentecostals will for some time need to look outside their own pool. This is something that can be solved either with time (we ‘grow our own’), or money (we hire in experts from Pentecostal institutions elsewhere in the world) –neither of which, however, is in plentiful supply.

Once we agree, then we need to be able to stand on what we have agreed. On the one hand, faculty who work in a Pentecostal college cannot always be looking over their shoulders, ready with an apology to their discipline for who we Pentecostals are. Being Pentecostal is a given part of being a Pentecostal scholar, and one of our principle audiences must be the Church.³⁵ On the other hand, the university administration cannot be always looking back over their shoulders, ready with an apology to their church and denominational leaders for who we scholars are. We are by definition not a church – and that is OK. We are by definition not a secular university – and that is OK. Conflict begins with an a priori disposition to defend some unshared, and inalienable position. Scholars need to protect both their discipline and their faith-based identity; and university administrations need to help them do it. It is neither for the scholar nor the administrator to use the principles of academic freedom as a lever to detach the institution from the constituency that it serves, the community which gives it its mandate. Their vocation is defined as serving "the religious university’s dual nature as both a community of inquiry (Athens) and a community of conviction (Jerusalem)."³⁶ Moreover, scholars need to be able to work freely (the reason they are scholars) within an agreed faith environment (the reason they are Christian scholars). Administrators will face the difficulty of working out of the church perspective. Scholars are not assistant pastors, and relationships with them need to hold in mind their expertise, ability and calling. The patronizing attitude of many senior pastors to teaching staff which I personally have witnessed is a hangover of a period when teaching staff were essentially pastors not presently doing something else. On the other hand, the ‘god professor’ model has done untold harm to church based institutions in the past. The rapprochement between the two cultures comes down to the nature of the third culture, the type of university culture that we are going to build. In our setting, pastors have taken on the role of vision projectors. Institutions need such input. At the same time, vision is not enough, and academics are essentially in the job of working out the theory of how things work. It will take ‘unusual administrative vision’ to make the two constituents work together in the Pentecostal context.

It is the experience of many Christian institutions that an informal creed is in fact in operation, superseding the formal agreements and visions relating to the formation of the institution. Mere dislike or personal disagreement therefore becomes a matter of institution wide concern, a process which is divisive and destructive. The exchange of knowledge and the process of learning is based on trust (the social taboos related to teacher-student relationships are not merely about dominance and subservience, but also about the knowledge that something fundamentally functional has been destroyed.) Breach of that trust relationship, between teacher and student, between student and student, or between faculty and executive, destroys the basis on which a learning institution operates. It is for this reason that in the past the trust relationship has been formally and contractually arranged between staff and their institution, in the form of tenure arrangements. "Tenure", according to the American Association of University Professors,

In fact, this arrangement has become a measure of academic-freedom. The challenge is that a private institution does not have the same financial flexibility as public institutions, and it must be admitted that tenure provides not only academic freedom, but economic inflexibilities and hiding places for non-productivity. Tenure is the formal means of protecting academic freedom in the world’s wealthiest economy, but because of its institutional costs it often counteracts the ends for which it was instituted. As Galbraith notes in his novel, A Tenured Professor (1990),

Pentecostals will need to be able to demonstrate proper protections for academic freedom, while at the same time realizing the institutional and cultural costs of entrenching an individualist interpretation in tenure. We cannot afford to have ‘academic freedom’ as a ‘transcendent value’ if it functionally displaces our real, core, transcendent values and encourages selfishness and subservience. Some form of mutual obligation, entrenched in real relationships, would be a preferable way of running a Christian institution. Whether it is workable in terms of institutional risk reduction is the key question.

In addition to the strengths associated with our lack of history, we also have a number of weaknesses. We share with Catholic institutions the sense of purpose which comes from teaching within a sense of calling, and being less bureaucratic, we are less susceptible (though not immune) to routinization. We do not however have the sense of historic continuity which Catholics or Lutherans have when it comes to working in their college’s and universities. We have no philosophy of vocation for the position of teacher or thinker – that which in other traditions is the position filled by the ‘doctors of the church’ who had the "ius ubique docendi" (the right to teach anywhere). (It is also a set of roles which are in trouble elsewhere – Hollerich talks about the decline of the religious orders, and so the definable carriers of the ‘educational apostolate’ in Catholicism. In part this is one of the reasons for rising conflict between the bishops and the educational institutions in that system.)³⁹ For us to have a sense that, through us, the Church ‘explores the mysteries of humanity and of the world, clarifying them in the light of Revelation’,⁴⁰ we need to clarify where we stand with regard to the spiritual vocation of scholars. Another issue is that we also have no metaphysics and no natural theology with which to protect our endeavours from the prevailing instrumentalization of existence – if the ‘triumph of technique’ is the story of modernity, then it is also uncomfortably close to being the story of the triumph of western Pentecostalism (or at least, of the megachurches, where ‘excellence’ has become the highest virtue). Given this modernist stance among our tradition, do we have an a priori commitment to pursuing the unity of knowledge which is the basis of the ‘uni-versity’, or are we happy to replicate the fragmentation of knowledge typical of the secular multiversities which know inhabit the public cultures of the west? If the role of the university is to pursue ‘the united endeavour of intelligence and faith [that] will enable people to come to the full measure of their humanity,’⁴¹ then we have some work to do on our theology of humanity, and our approaches to revelation, intelligence and faith. One of our great dangers is becoming merely a religiously legitimized skills training organization, simply through the pressure of economic necessity. Government moves towards opening up the University sector to competition has, in the minds of many academics in the public sector, already created pressure on standards.⁴² In a college like ours, we do not have the luxury of choosing (as the title of an Australia Institute conference implied in 2001), between ‘Enterprise or Academy?’.⁴³ We are somehow always both, but have not yet found a model which embraces both in a seamless manner. There is already pressure on staff to keep the student body ‘happy’ – and, as the Steele case at the University of Wollongong showed, over extension in this direction can undermine an institution’s academic credibility in the broader community.⁴⁴ The Fraser case at Macquarie University also underlines the need for freedom to be limited to expertise – ie. freedom in defined areas within the classroom. Otherwise, academic freedom issues become confused with contextual issues – did Macquarie sack him because he had voided his trust as an academic, or because he was a threat to the economic lifeline of the university, ie. Asian students?⁴⁵ (The speed with which he was sacked was remarkable, especially when compared to parallel religious cases – William Kinney, for instance, cites the case of Charles E Curran who, though teaching with ‘flagrant disregard’ for Church positions on birth control, abortion rights and homosexuality, etc, was not sacked for nearly 20 years after the case came to the attention of authorities.)⁴⁶ Outside the classroom, the scholar has to be able to comment as a private citizen, though needs to practice restraint, accuracy and proper distinction from the views of his or her institution.⁴⁷

Another danger from the economic requirements of a private educational institution is that pressure to keep the ship afloat may also lead us to distinguish between people who can pay and those who can’t – undermining the Pentecostal ethos of diversity coming into unity through the action of the Holy Spirit. We need to seek for a solution in this matter. As Jeffrey notes:

Clearly, a proper awareness of the private and enterprise demands on a college needs to inform the community discourse on academic freedom.

Given the difference between communal and university cultures, there needs to be a means for mediation which can take place within the church rather than in the civil courts. We do not have bishops as such in the Pentecostal churches, and so need to consider how unreconcilable differences can be dealt with in a reasonable way. As Russell points out, it was the need to create "a figure with buffer status between the rival jurisdictions" having claim on the university that was the origin of the figure of the Chancellor. "He was … the point in which all theories of power, ecclesiastical and secular, ascending and descending, were blended." ⁴⁹

The aim for Pentecostal liberal arts colleges is for a studium generale under the influence of the Holy Spirit, which produces scholarship and teaching contributing to God’s great plan for the transformation of humanity.  While considerable steps have been made in this direction in the United States and elsewhere, here in Australia we have a very significant journey before us. It is important that we are as intentional and responsible in our treatment of the issues as is possible.  The discussion which flows from papers such as this will hopefully help in that process.