Academic freedom

As promised, a blog on Conflicting Allegiances, specifically on William Cavanaugh's essay on academic freedom and the ecclesially based university (or EBU).  The phrase "ecclesially based" is used by the writers to differentiate themselves from all the other church-related university stuff going on out there, and because the members of the Ekklesia Project (who are 12/14 of the essaysists in the book {or 6/7 as GRE-takers like myself know}) are addicted to the word ekklesia.

I'm going to skip the intro to the book, which is the same old same old "liberal theory separates Christianity from the communal base that renders it viable across time" and "such a [church-related] university...is liberally based because it forms its students within the general categories of liberal democratic polity that only afford Christianity social space within the private realm of individual beliefs" line. 

Cavanaugh argues that the accusation that an EBU limits academic freedom is false and shows how the meaning of academic freedom has changed through the centuries.  Nowadays, academic freedom means the freedom of the individual professor, unconfined by orthodoxy or authority.  But we have lost the additional meaning of academic freedom - the corporate freedom of the university of freedom from state interference.  He claims that in the medieval ages, "the idea of a national university supervised by the state was unimaginable and would have been considered a serious violation of academic freedom...a student who pledged allegiance to the local civil authority would lose his membership in the university...Patriotism was considered a violation of academic freedom." 

While affirming the importance of individual academic freedom, Cavanaugh wants to "expand the vision of academic freedom to include a consideration of the corporate freedom of the university.  What this means for the EBU is the freedom to be Christian." 

Church-related universities are no different than secular ones and are blandly uniform, since they have all rushed to embrace "diversity" and "values" without defining what those words mean.  If all the universities are stripped of their particular traditions and simply mirror society, how is that diverse? 

Freedom cannot only be defined negatively; "what makes one free is...the presence of means to achieve worthwhile ends."  Orthodoxy and submission to authority are not limits but preconditions to freedom.  Orthodoxy is not the end but the beginning of inquiry.  Furthermore, orthodoxy is not unique to theology; the sciences also depend upon it.  There, orthodoxy functions as "paradigms...that give the researcher a place to stand from which to conduct further inquiry...Paradigms...are the sets of theories and practices considered normative within any scientific community at a given time."  Paradigms may change, but they still serve as a measure against which to judge new evidence.  Thus science and theology share much more in common than is usually realized. 

Both also accept reliance upon authority, as do the social sciences and humanities.  All of these "proceed not so much by the disinterested weighing of empirical evidence as through the exegesis of authoritative texts in a hermeneutical tradition....all human reasoning depends upon the acceptance of an authority from without the individual."  Here Cavanaugh pulls out the ol' MacIntyre "autonomous rationality is a myth" line.  So, in order to be more creative and critical, students must first "possess certain habits and dispositions acquired by hard experience in the context of a community in which authority has an orienting function." 

"Students today by and large do not need to be freed from narrow dogmatism and unthinking acceptance of religious authority.  They need to be freed from the confines of the self and the dreary consumerism that teaches them to regard truth as something chosen, not received."  [italics mine]

I'll tie this together somehow with the "theology departments are evil" blog and offer my own thoughts next.