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Universities' investment in the humanities—which are critical to the function of asking the "why" and "what for" questions—is giving way to market-based decisions, like rewarding income- and prestige-generating disciplines (like the sciences), professional schools (like law and engineering), graduate programs, restructuring core curricula, etc.

The result is that very many young adults are no longer even asked to wrestle with issues of faith, religion, values, and ultimate beliefs. They're just in college to get good grades (for graduate school) or to earn technical or professional certification in order to boost their career start. And universities seem okay with this because it pays. All the while, humanities professors are a shrinking share of the faculty, and they're increasingly rewarded not for becoming intellectuals but for specializing in narrow areas of interest and research. Be more like the hard sciences, we're told.

CT: Postmodernism is often a bit of a bogey-man in Christian circles, yet your article suggests its impact may actually be to make the university more friendly to religious persons. Why is that?

Regnerus: Postmodernism is a double-edged sword, for sure. On the bright side, it clearly opens up space for Christianity in the academy both among faculty and students, largely because the ideals of tolerance and equality have been so successfully inculcated in the American psyche. On the other hand, this approach tends to accept things as they are and frowns on religious efforts to change belief systems. So while postmoderns tolerate Christians on campus, they're hardly friendly. This, of course, seriously hinders a key goal of Christians, which is to bring change to lives and to culture. This penchant for tolerating the status quo is quite ironic, given that it itself is a significant change in the American mind and given that many of us change our own minds about all sorts of important ideas and goals all the time. But a key finding of our research is that young Americans aren't changing their minds about religion as much as we had thought. Most of them are just putting their religious faith in the closet during the college years, only to pull it out after a time, dust it off, and put it on again.

The New York Times recently highlighted the controversy of some state universities installing special footbaths in restroom facilities to accommodate the practices of Muslim students who wash their feet before prayers. Washing feet in sinks led to occasional accidents, wet floors, and damaged fixtures. The question, of course, is whether there's a church and state problem with public universities paying to install the special facilities.

Remembering the case Richard Land of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention has long made for maximum accommodation of religion, I asked for his opinion. Land is the recent author of a book tailor-fitted to the controversy, The Divided States of America: What Liberals AND Conservatives Are Missing in the God-and-Country Shouting Match!. He supports universities accommodating Muslim religious practice as an expression of "principled pluralism" which represents America at its best. Although he approves of the decision to accommodate the installation of footbaths, Land suggests a different funding mechanism. He believes the university should work with the local Muslim community to gain funding for the new fixtures, rather than paying for them out of the general student fund. Thus, a public university accommodates without sponsoring.

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August (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51