SESSION III:  SUNDAY MORNING

Frank Oakley, Williams College, President Emeritus

Concluding Remarks prepared for the Lilly  Seminar on Religion and Higher Education

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1. Having been asked to speak to the broad range of topics we have discussed in this seminar, I decided to prepare for my assignment today by reading the splendidly meaty reports on each of our sessions routinely circulated as reminders immediately prior to the meetings that followed.  Andrea wrote most of these reports, and I should like to begin by congratulating her on their impressive quality--full, clear, accurate, and intellectually generous. I mention this last admirable quality because she usually succeeded somehow in winkling out pearls of insight from the veritable oysters of obfuscation of which some of us (I'm thinking mainly of myself) succeeded from time to time in delivering ourselves.
     What immediately caught my attention as I read through these reports were the issues that were raised more than once but never quite succeeded in making it into the center of our discourse, or the issues that were only fleetingly alluded to and never made it further than a sort of off-stage presence on the margins of the group's consciousness -- as it were, moths banging against the outer screen of our consciousness but not quite able to get to the light.
 Of these, essentially failures as issues at least so far as our dominant discourse was concerned, three in particular caught my attention.  I find it interesting that two of the three were essentially institutional in nature and the third administrative.  Despite their fate, all three really are, I believe, pertinent to our various discussions about religion and what was referred to as "the formation" of students, about the intersection of religious commitment and classroom teaching and whether or not that was something to be deplored or affirmed, about the impact -- desirable, undesirable, or essentially irrelevant -- of a scholar's religious beliefs upon the nature of the research he or she pursues and the scholarship he or she produces.
          What, with your permission, I should like to do, then, is to describe these three quasi-"failed" issues before turning to say a few words about religion and student formation, religion and classroom teaching, religion and scholarship.  On the topic of divinity-school education, having failed myself to get any sort of intellectual traction on the matter, I am afraid I have nothing to say.

2.      (a)  First, the institutional make-up of the world of American higher education
              At our Pasadena meeting, Clarke Cochran adopted a firmly institutional approach and spoke interestingly about the role institutions play in embodying meaning, sustaining it in the people who belong to them, mediating it to their initiates, and manifesting it to the larger world. For me, at least, he was sounding harmonics of the sort of notes Mary Douglas strikes in her little book, How Institutions Think.. But Cochran was something of an exception and I haven't sensed that, as a group, we are really all that interested in hearing about institutions.  (Or, at least, I hadn't until yesterday.)
           No big surprise, of course. One doesn't have to do much more than paddle in the shallows of the vast ocean of controversialist commentary on the state of American higher education, the corruption of the academy, the decline of the humanities, and so on, without becoming gloomily conscious of the speed with which academics, when throwing themselves into such controversy, tend to abandon their painfully-acquired habits of disciplined scholarly inquiry, reaching instead, and it seems instinctively, for the provincially autobiographical, and substituting for empirically informed argumentation great gusts of disheveled anecdotage.
      But that, of course, won't do. There are, after all, more than 3,500 institutions of higher education in the United States, big and small, public and private, religiously affiliated and not, different enough in institutional mission, sources of funding, make-up of student body, quality of faculty etc., etc. to induce the Camegie Corporation to come up with a classification system that allots them to one or other of no less than ten different categories. And while on some issues one can, of course, generalize across those categories in reasonably meaningful fashion, on others it is really misleading to do so.
      One might have thought that all this institutional variety and differentiation would induce a measure of careful specification in those delivering themselves of generalizations about the state of higher education today.  But not so.  Read enough of the vigorous controversialist, culture-war type of literature about our campuses, penetrate the surface skin of incantatory accusation, probe the underlying soft tissue of endlessly recycled anecdotage and one finds that the supportive skeletal frame would appear to extend no further than the situation prevailing (or allegedly prevailing) at no more than a dozen or so of our leading research universities and liberal arts colleges -- all of them in some respects highly privileged institutions and not particularly representative of the whole.
      Admittedly, in our own discussions in this seminar we've done somewhat better than that.  Richard Hughes reminded us of the different modes of Christian education to be found even in the small universe of colleges and universities with an explicitly Christian identity.  Alan Wolfe also alluded to this yesterday.  Dick Bernstein complained about the uncritical way in which we kept using the word "secular," as if we really knew what it meant.  But I cannot recall anybody having brought those two things into any sort of helpful configuration -- not enough, at least, to raise the question of what exactly we mean when by way of contrast to religiously-affiliated colleges, we apply the word secular to the larger institutional universe, to all those thousands of disparate campuses, from leading private research universities to obscure community colleges, institutions operating under vastly different conditions, pursuing quite disparate missions, possessed of very different histories.  And yet, if Berkeley and Yale are both of them secular universities they are, surely, secular in different ways. Similarly, Evergreen State and, say, Swarthmore.  Such differences in mode of secularity are unlikely, I suspect, to have all that much of an impact on the deportment of faculty as teachers, still less in what they do in their scholarly work -- if, that is, they are accustomed to doing any. But those differences will, I am pretty sure, affect what is done in the way of "student formation" and whether or not such a thing is even talked about.

     (b) Second, disciplinary differences.  The academic disciplines as we know them being historical deliverances reflecting the institutionalization of contingent selections of academic and intellectual presuppositions and practices, I classify them as institutions. And, even if we bracket the natural sciences, and concern ourselves only with the arts, humanities and social sciences, I am struck by the degree to which these institutional forms shape the way in which we severally react to talk about "the warranting process," "the rules of the relevant epistemic community," the demand for "intersubjective testability"--a fact that Alan Wolfe alluded to  yesterday.  But in our earlier discussions it was Denis Donoghue who returned to this issue again and again, with considerable insistence, even objecting that the criterion of intersubjective testability was being given "a kind of totalitarian force in its application." And Jean Elshtain, I believe, surfaced cognate worries in a different context.
      But I don't think, by and large, that we fully engaged the issue or came to grips with it properly.  If, as Denis pointed out, truth claims involving statements about how the world is play little or no role in art, literary criticism, musicology and so on, then talk about intersubjective testability is likely to smack of boiled-over scientism, and some other sort of warranting process has to be called for.  E.g., is a given work competent, productive, significant, interesting?
      It's a pity that we did not discuss such disciplinary differences a bit more probingly.  I would be curious to know, for example, if we could all agree that talk of intersubjective testability is the sort of warranting talk that should be confined to the empirically-based disciplines. I would also like to know if Nick Wolterstorff, Dick Bernstein and Eleonore Stump would definitely want to exclude philosophy from its purview.  And I would like to know, too, if the firm line Denis has drawn between disciplines is not really a line that can be seen to run through such disciplines as art, musicology and literary studies. Surely one would want to evoke some criteria of intersubjective testability in assessing the product of the sort of historian who finds a disciplinary home in a history department.  But would not one also want to do the same for a scholar who tells us that he or she is a "new literary historian" as opposed to a person pursuing a formalist-cum-aesthetic approach to literature?  And the same, I think, would apply to art history and musicology.
      I see a great deal of art historians and museum curators and I can't help noticing the growing condescension evident in both groups towards the sort of aesthetic and formalistic evaluation of works of art.  That they sometimes find it possible to dismiss as "mere connoisseurship" -- though no museum, of course, could function without some curators blessed with that richly mysterious capacity.  The art historians and curators who adopt such a posture of condescension are usually themselves pursuing historical or sociological interests and I can't help thinking that it would be healthy for them to have to respond to criteria of intersubjective testability of the sort to which the work of ordinary, honest to God, historians is subjected.
      Moreover, even if one evokes by way of substitute warranting criteria like
"competent," "significant," "productive," "interesting" (what David Hollinger referred to, engagingly, as "mush words"; I liked that), it would still seem to me that, if empirical data are adduced in defense of the proposition that such-and-such a work is, say, "significant," then, thus far at least, the warranting process would properly have to involve some sort of "intersubjective testability."

     (c) Third, the administrative perspective.  Well, Richard Mouw made a noble effort to introduce it into our discussions and Gene Lowe, Jeanne Knoerle and I dipped an occasional tentative toe in the same waters. But the issue didn't fly (or swim!). Again, no big surprise. At these seminars we have heard many an explicit or implicit affirmation of faith, but the only robustly explicit affirmation of a lack of faith that comes to mind was that of a lack of faith in university administrators.  The prevailing gulf in the academic world between faculty and administrators seems to be so wide as to tempt faculty to conclude that there doesn't even exist anything as stable or coherent as an administrative perspective.
      This was brought home to me about twenty years ago now when, after several years of hard work as Dean of the Faculty, I was fortunate enough to be invited to spend a year as a member of the history school at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. During that year I quickly learned not to let drop too readily the fact that I had been serving as an administrator.  After all, what serious scholar would do anything so foolish?  But, then, I had a mirror-image experience when the year was over and I went on to spend six weeks during the summer as a participant in the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard.  There, to let drop the fact that you were a faculty member still involved in teaching and research would clearly have the effect of calling into question your credentials as a card-carrying member of the administrative guild.  To most of the participants of that Institute the faculty appeared unquestionably to be the enemy, the alien other.
      All this is too bad, and for many reasons that I can't go into here.  Suffice it to say that in the context of this seminar it is too bad that the administrative perspective was not a more central presence in our somewhat desultory discussions of student formation.  I sense (or, at least, suspect) that many of us as faculty members were not really all that interested in (and, perhaps, even a bit suspicious of) all that talk about issues pertaining to the formation of students.  But no one who has been in an administrative leadership position on a campus -- or, at least, on a small campus -- can for a moment doubt that a richly textured, complex and largely uncoordinated process of student moral formation is going on.  Nor can such a person, especially if he or she is president, indulge for a moment the illusion that he or she has properly no role to play in that process, or can in conscience avoid the responsibility of attempting in some measure to shape it.  He or she, after all, and willy-nilly, is the bearer, shaper, mediator, even embodier of the institution's purpose, mission, meaning. That is to say, to borrow the language of some commentators, one of his or her most testing challenges is that of "managing the institutions' meaning."  I'll return to this in a moment.

3. I've talked of three of the things that failed to make it into the center of our discourse.  And it should be clear that all three are pertinent to one or other (more) of the topics we have discussed at considerable length: religious and student formation, religious commitment and classroom teaching, Christianity and scholarship.  And, while trying to avoid repeating myself, I would like to say a few further words about each of them.

     (a) First, the matter of formation. This topic strikes me as not a very rewarding one to address unless one is prepared to distinguish among both institutional settings and institutional responsibilities.  So far as settings go, between institutions with a confessional religious identity and those without one, for the former differentiating (as Richard Hughes did) by particular confessional tradition; among the latter differentiating, if you wish, by degrees of secularity or detachment from a religious tradition; among all of them distinguishing between big universities with extensive commitments to graduate and professional education and small, face to face, college communities with a predominantly undergraduate teaching mission; between institutions catering for a body of full-time students drawn from the traditional collegiate age-group, and those catering much more to older students, and part-time students; between those with a predominantly residential student body and all the others -- by far, incidentally, the majority.  Only 1/5 of our undergraduates nationwide have a residential experience at college.  And so on.  And, so far as institutional responsibilities go, I think we need to distinguish between the instructional corps and those with administrative and/or leadership responsibilities pertaining in some measure to the quality of student life.
      It is usually, I think (and understandably so) those involved in religiously-affiliated institutions who are prone to raising to the level of conscious deliberation knotty questions pertaining to student formation, but some such formation is, of course, going on in the full range of our institutions of higher education, whether religious or secular.  I would guess that in big universities catering in large degree for graduate and professional education and/or for older, non-resident, and frequently part-time students, that formation is likely to be confined largely to the classroom setting, where, whether we want to admit it or not, students do take their cues, whether by imitation or reaction, from the intellectual/moral deportment of their instructors.  And, at one of our sessions, an interesting exchange among Denis Donoghue, Peter Steinfels, Eleonore Stump and Dick Bernstein reflected a clear recognition of that fact, with Dick noting that even though Denis "was saying what he didn't want to do, he had in fact described a distinctive, important way of mentoring."
      In my own institutional setting, which is basically secular though with some religiously blunted edges (or, if you wish, religiously-eroded contours), I don't think I had thought all that much about the formation issue until I became president of the College. (Though I had thought a great deal, as Dean of the Faculty, about the mentoring of faculty. That job does involve a certain amount of pastoral care of one's colleagues.  I was their bishop, they were my flock, etc.)  But, as president, though I cannot recall ever having used the term, I simply could not sidestep the issue of student formation.  I had in some way to try to shape the ethos of the place, to shape student behavior -- or, at least, to set limits to it.
      A strong stream of sewage flows beneath the surface of even the most benign of campuses (so much so that, in our own case, reading on Monday momings the security reports of weekend mayhem resurrected memories from my distant military past in the British Army of reading the weekend Duty Officer's reports of goings on in a garrison town, who was in jail for disturbing the peace, who had to be bailed out, and so on.)  From time to time, that stream of sewage surfaces and one has to work to reduce the incidence of such occurrences, as well as to prevent it from leaking into and polluting the general stream of campus life.  And that not only means maintaining a firm, equitable, equitably-administered and credible disciplinary system, but also making (or grasping) the occasion to articulate the standards of community behavior expected of students and to explain, discuss, if necessary argue about, those standards. With that in view, we instituted regular class meetings, individual and separate assemblies for the first year, sophomore, junior and senior classes and, in addition, for nine years I also went along every month with the Dean of Students, Dean of the Faculty, and Provost to each of our residential houses in turn for an after-dinner open discussion, at which students could raise whatever questions they wished.  If these sessions were sometimes quite boring, on other occasions they were deeply moving and compelling and one sensed a real and growing hunger for an adult presence in student life.  At times the issues raised were trivial, at other times far from that.  They ranged from matters like complaints about parking space, or about campus lighting, via questions about the College's alcohol policy or investment practices, to hand-wringing about the behavior of fellow students (for instance, the vomit level at such and such a residential house after a weekend party), all the way to quite sensitive, probing and affecting discussions about race or gender-related problems, or the complexities of sexual-identity issues, or even about curricular matters and the challenges of the life of the mind.
 Clearly, a great deal of our effort was devoted to articulating, modeling, inculcating attitudes of tolerance, decency, mutual respect among students with very different backgrounds in a increasingly multiracial and culturally plural community.  But, as Jim Heft reminded us at one of our sessions, thoughtful explication of the life of the mind, and of the type of freedom and restraint it presupposes, is itself a formation. And, recognizing that within the nation at large the life of the mind is itself a counter-cultural form which the academy must vindicate and celebrate, we sought to multiply the occasions on which we could do precisely that.
     But what, you may be thinking, has religion got to do with all of this?  That is not at all easy to assess.  The fact that I myself had had what Bob Wuthnow would probably call a "heavy-duty" religious upbringing undoubtedly imparted to me some of the passion I brought to this particular responsibility, as well as the level of comfort with which I went about the task on the explicitly religious occasions which still occur on a voluntary basis on our sort of campus, or in such explicitly religious settings as the College chapel or the College's Jewish Religious Center -- a synagogue which I myself had built in response to the rising level of religious observance among our Jewish students.  In evoking the College's ethos and affirming its commitments on such occasions and in such settings I did so, I suspect, with an unselfconscious religious charge.  And I can't believe I was unique in that, given the variety of conditions and shifting, complex accommodations covered by the term when we designate a university or college as "secular."

     (b) Second, religion and teaching. On this matter I really don't have a great deal to add.  So far as the descriptive side of the matter goes, it seems to me a simple matter of fact that the religious background or continuing commitments of academics have frequently drawn them to the particular subject they teach, led them to focus on some particular dimension of that subject, encouraged them in the particular emphases they impart in their teaching. And I believe that fact to be an important one. Here, I was much taken by Frank Tumer's argument that scholars and teachers of religious commitment may well function within the academy as it were, counter-cyclically, keeping alive certain types of questions, topics, interests that the prevailingly dominant academic norms have had the effect of de-legitimating -- or, at least, sidelining.
 Further than that, I am inclined to think that certain types of religious commitment may lead a teacher to emphasize or convey to students by his or her own intellectual or pedagogic deportment the degree to which there is a moral dimension to learning, the fact that we don't do our thinking as disembodied intellects but as real, sentient human beings burdened with all the normal freight of vanity, fear, ambition, insecurity, laziness, and pride.
      And if one turns to the prescriptive side of the coin -- the affirmation in the classroom of one's faith or, at least, the explicit identification of oneself as a believer in this or that -- I thought I detected at least in our particular small-discussion group a sort of cleavage in sensibilities between evangelicals and Catholics, with the former more prone to favoring forthright self-identification and the latter more comfortable with a rather oblique or even occluded stance.  Certainly, even though I myself teach a lot of religiously-related material, my own classroom practice does not involve any such self-identification.  But, then, as David Hollinger pointed out, we all participate in "multiple solidarities," and I'm not in the habit in the classroom of foregrounding any of them.  If a student asks (and that is an unusual occurrence), I am perfectly willing to respond in forthright fashion. But I am anxious for students to avoid substituting identity for argument or stereotyping for understanding.  I worry that too much focus on the teacher or the teacher's commitments may serve to distract them from paying close attention to the matter at hand -- a text, a body of evidence, logical or illogical chains of reasoning, etc.  Subject-matter matters.  A lot.

     (c) Third, and finally, the matter of Christian scholarship.  Of all the issues we have addressed this was the one that interested me most.  And yet, as our discussions wore on, this was the issue that came to puzzle me most.  I have not read Warren Nord's book, but, from hearing him speak and from talking with him, I did not come away with any clear sense that he was arguing for the sort of redefinition of epistemic community or opening up of warranting conventions, or "turn from cognitive to constitutional analysis" that David Hollinger attributed to him last time.  On the other hand, rightly or wrongly, I did get the impression of George Marsden's project from the last chapter of his Soul of the American University.  But if that was, indeed, his original project, he certainly seemed to have moved away from it in his later book The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship.  And nothing that he said when he spoke to us at our last meeting suggested anything to the contrary.
           I am left, then, with the impression, as I indicated last time, that what some of the advocates of Christian scholarship may be doing is not so much asserting some sort of epistemic privilege for Christian scholarship, as expressing a type of epistemic resentment stimulated by the degree of marginalization or condescension they may have experienced at the hands of a highly-secularized mainstream academic establishment.  And, from an interesting set of remarks he made at the end of our last meeting, I venture to think that Mark Schwehn might not altogether disagree with me on that.
 That said, where do I stand?  Well, after reflection, I think I stand in a rather uncomfortable place -- uncomfortable because I find myself attempting the stretching maneuver of trying to stand in two places at the same time.  And I conclude that that may be the case because, over the years, and in my historical work at least, I have pursued two rather different sets of interests -- the first of which has given me good reason to worry about the assertion of claims to epistemic privilege (or, better, the tacit assumption of such a privilege), while the latter leads me off in a different direction and induces me to wonder a bit about the nature of the structures of plausibility sustaining the epistemic norms dominant in contemporary academic scholarship, and to wonder also if they are not destined, as time goes on, to become increasingly the exclusive possession of a beleaguered cognitive minority. Let me at least try to explain what I mean.
 The first is the easier point to make.  I have worked for years on a topic in the history of the ecclesiology of the Latin (i.e. Roman Catholic) Church.  That topic concerns the external structure or constitution of that church as a visible, hierarchical organization. And I conclude that side by side with the familiar high papalist, absolutist monarchical understanding of the Church's constitution favored classically by Italian theologians, there existed, deeply-rooted in the earlier canon law but with a clear prominence from about 1300 onwards, a rival constitutionalist understanding, which emphasized the community-based consensual, and conciliar (or, if you wish, parliamentary) nature of the Church's supreme authority.  And that constitutionalist tradition, I now conclude, was no revolutionary and merely evanescent product of an era of crisis, which is the way in which it has been portrayed, but one with a continuous history in the Latin Church, side by side with the high-papalist monarchical view, all the way down to the First Vatican Council in 1870, after which, by a sort of politics of oblivion or triumph of an essentially ultramontane historiography, it was stuffed down a kind of Orwellian memory hole so that it is well-nigh forgotten today.  But I find myself arriving at that conclusion in the teeth of a dominant historiography, largely Catholic in provenance, in which, even in the work of some very fine ecclesiastical historians, theological and canonistic criteria have been permitted, on admittedly neuralgic points but still anachronistically and improperly, to trump arguments framed in accord with the normal canons of historic endeavor.  Epistemic privilege, it seems, with a vengeance.  Others, doubtless, would disagree with me on this.  But I've thought about it a lot.  That is where I am.  Ich kann nicht anderes.  As a result, when I hear any talk about claims for epistemic privilege, I tend to rally instinctively to the side of the skeptics.
      The second point is a more tricky one and stems from my teaching in the history of ideas which has been fairly broad-gauged, and from work I have also pursued for years in the history of natural theology, natural philosophy, and natural law theory.  This is the point that I take up briefly in the letter which Jim Turner circulated, and it is the point that led me to suggest that we might all do well to read or re-read Hans Jonas's little essay.  If he is in general correct (and I think he is)--despite the fact that he taught at the New School, and not, as I incorrectly said, Columbia--then, in the more distant reaches of or own                                     intellectual history, the rise to prominence of a religious tradition rooted in the non-philosophic beliefs and practices of a mass of ordinary faithful succeeded, in the course of a slowly unfolding encounter with the Greek philosophical tradition, in raising new questions and postulates that came to be naturalized as philosophical questions or postulates right at the very heart of the European and Western philosophical tradition as it has come down to us.
      But, if that is so, and if the outer membrane of philosophy has not become, as Jonas implies, less permeable than once it was, then should we not be open to the possibility that something similar could happen again, and should we not, therefore, be more attentive to shifts in the religious thinking of the broad masses of ordinary believers in society at large?  (And here all the New Age stuff may be particularly pertinent.)  And should we not also be open to the possibility that the claims that such as Warren Nord and George Marsden appear to be making may well be straws in the wind, the moral equivalent of leading economic indicators, signaling fundamental intellectual changes to come?
 Finally, if that is indeed the way in which some of our tradition's most fundamental philosophical ideas developed in the past and may develop again in the future, does that not underline the historically-contingent, institutionally conditioned, community-sustained nature of the plausibility structures that undergird the epistemic norms currently prevailing in our scholarly world.  And, if so, should that not dispose someone like me to be more sympathetic than I honestly seem to be able to be to the claims currently being advanced for faith-based scholarship?