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Instead, I tried to point out the intellectual incoherence of the piece of scholarship we were evaluating, which advocated a libertine ethic of unlimited sexual freedom for 12-year-old boys and girls. How would this square with the piece's feminist imperative to protect girls from the exploits of sexually predatory boys? Do we really want to give boys full freedom to pursue any and all of their sexual desires? But that suggestion didn't go anywhere either.
Recently, in the lobby of my building, I ran into an academic acquaintance from the West Coast. Although I was in a rush to get somewhere, she had to tell me about her Jewish boyfriend, who, looking to earn a few extra dollars teaching a sabbatical-replacement class, had recently interviewed at a local Christian liberal arts college. Apparently, the dean of the college had nervously reminded her boyfriend before he signed the contract that his was a Christian school. Puzzled as to how Christianity could possibly make any difference in college education, the boyfriend asked what exactly that meant. The dean, my storytelling colleague related with scorn (however accurately, I do not know), replied that this meant that there was no smoking on campus and students should not cheat. How stupid, she laughed, to think that Christianity might affect higher education in any way, and to imply that all non-Christians were running around the world smoking and cheating. The Moron. But, oh, she was late and had to run. Goodbye.
And then there was the occasion, not long ago, when I found myself part of an informal discussion of faculty evaluating the merits of a professional talk we had all heard. The talk had included a significant religious analysis, which sought to explain some of the variance in a particular outcome with a religious explanatory variable. In other words, religion matters in shaping human action. But not all of the faculty in the discussion were satisfied, and to some degree for legitimate reasons, in my view. After a slight pause in the discussion, however, one colleague disclosed what he took to be an enlightening fact about the presenter of the talk: "In an earlier discussion with this person, I discovered that he himself was personally raised to be religious." Then silence. Yeah, so?, I thought. (I can be a little slow.) Then I realized the point: because the presenter had a personal religious history, he was probably biased in his interest in religion and perhaps in his analysis of religious effects, and so their research and findings were suspect. The discussion moved on. Afterward, I emailed the faculty member who made this comment. I asked whether, if a personal religious identity had this biasing effect, having a given social-class location, gender identity, or racial or ethnic heritage would likewise inevitably make suspect a scholar's research on social inequality, sex and gender, or race and ethnic relations. To this question I received no reply.
Life in the university goes on. And in the academy, particularistic identities are often what authenticate scholars' authority and insight in research. Who but a woman or African American, after all, could understand the reality of women or African Americans? Except for a religious identity, which is uniquely suspect for providing not insight or understanding, but bias and questionable findings.
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