The Storm over Academic Freedom

Discussions concerning academic freedom are not unique to the twentieth century. In recent years, however, they have penetrated hitherto untouched areas of learning with unprecedented boldness and touched off practical repercussions often of devastating significance. The culprit at work may well be the modern misdefinition of freedom, namely, the right to do as one pleases.

In endorsing “The Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure” the American Association of University Professors underscores the fact that academic freedom properly interpreted demands self-restraint and the observance of certain standards. Here are two pertinent excerpts:

The teacher is entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of results, subject to the adequate performance of his other duties.… The teacher is entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing his subject, but he should be careful not to introduce into his teaching controversial matter which has no relation to his subject. (Italics supplied.)

To force subjective opinions upon students unduly, and to inject extraneous, time-consuming controversial matters into the classroom waylays both pursuit of the truth and the primary needs of students. Where such intellectually undisciplined excursions occur, students may as well play tic-tac-toe; their professors have, in effect, given a promissory note and then have forfeited payment on the ruse that freedom exempts them.

Unfortunately the thunder for academic liberty today reverberates in areas where distinctions between right and wrong, between propriety and impropriety have become blurred. It clamors for hearing in discussions of sex morality, where purity is dissolved by promiscuity; of political science, where democratic principles are bent toward Communist premises; of literature and the arts, where wholesome creativity is disparaged in the interest of perversion. It is a remarkable commentary on twentieth-century civilization—or declension—that teachers of American youth clamor loudest for academic freedom in such areas. While Soviet scientists must cope with the totalitarian twist of their studies for political purposes, the American classroom with its free-wheeling passion for license would itself seem to be destroying true freedom.

Recently a commission of the Florida State Legislature assessed certain classes at the University of South Florida; it severely indicted two professors for Communist affiliations and another for classroom assaults upon religious beliefs. One professor was described as “a man … determined by proper federal authority to have a very extensive record of affiliations with Communist front organizations.… Each year for many years he has made trips to the Soviet Union.” The report noted that another professor, author of an extensive work on the current cold war, blamed the United States and its allies for tensions with the Soviet Union, blamed the United States for starting World Wars I and II, and justified Russian aggression and territorial expansion because of the United States’ assertedly war like nature. The third professor (in English), the report added, sympathetically used a textbook whose author—defended by the professor as neither atheistic nor irreligious—disparaged belief in a personal God as outmoded superstition, intellectually inferior and scientifically discredited.

When a professor under the guise of education veers off course content to subvert an objective order of morality and truth, and vindicates his license in so doing by appealing to academic freedom, it is high time to scrutinize the implications. Misused academic freedom can easily enough become the “fifth amendment” whereby radical and irresponsible intellectuals exempt themselves from answerability while they undermine truth and morality. Using a highly serviceable mechanism to gain immunity, such saboteurs in the classroom advance rationalistic positions that destroy the very ends for which the sponsoring institutions were established.

The Christian religion declares that true and enduring freedom is found in Jesus Christ alone. It might be hoped, then, that church-related institutions would set before the secular world an enviable example of truly comprehending and practicing academic freedom. In an age when such words as freedom, life, truth, and love elicit unusual interest and involvement, the evangelical movement has a peculiar responsibility to direct their meaning and content. But the problems of Christian colleges and seminaries are often not unlike those of secular institutions. Not only is the context of debate often much the same, but the proposed solutions may be at variance with the spirit of the Gospel itself. The problems become especially complex when, in institutions founded and supported to perpetuate a specific viewpoint, some professor pleads the right of private interpretation of the Bible—a right both accorded and enjoined by Scripture—to justify his over-riding of academic obligations and to challenge the right of an institution to protest his action. What are the boundaries of academic freedom? To what extent may speculative hypotheses be expounded in institutions dedicated to contrary affirmations?

Because accrediting agencies tend to be theologically inclusive and ecumenical in temper, they may find it easier to associate academic freedom on the church-related campus with the promoting of ecumenism than with the preservation of sectarianism. No religious institution, however, is totally devoid of required faculty beliefs; even the most liberal school would expect a theologian at least to maintain the validity of the God-idea. What constitutes the difference between religious institutions is not the presence or absence of faculty subscription to a complex of minimal beliefs. The difference, rather, lies in the content of such statements and in their restrictive powers. That evangelical institutions expect of a faculty full rather than scant statement and support of doctrinal beliefs is therefore no embarrassing mark of academic deficiency or idiosyncrasy.

Such statements, however, may be troublesome. Of necessity they cannot include the entire Bible. Yet if they assign special emphasis to secondary matters, such as the details of eschatology, they may require more than the Bible itself allows. No less devastating in these safeguards to theological and institutional integrity, however, is the danger of substituting orthodoxy for academic proficiency; unless one challenges, reinforces, and ennobles the other, both may undermine what they claim to support. Those who shroud their acceptance of creeds and statements of faith with mental reservations, or with semantic deviations, are another not infrequent problem in closely regulated schools.

Some evangelical scholars point out that under this approach to “protection” Christian institutions may be inviting a Protestant inquisition. Just as an inclusive faculty may lead to a theology of the least common denominator, so an exclusive faculty may experience reductio ad absurdum. No doctrinal statement, they maintain, but only the integrity of each professor, can guard an institution’s soundness. Some aver, too, that to sign a statement, however scriptural, contravenes apostolic precedent; since no profession is higher than identification with Christ’s church, what is not required there ought not be imposed by Christian institutions. Those who espouse this view insist that the apostles and their followers would have deplored the requirement of a signed statement as a personal affront contravening the basic principle of Christian liberty.

But the fact remains that first-century and twentieth-century Christianity are remarkably different. The latter is sometimes little more than a vague churchianity that assures nothing in the way of apostolic beliefs. And sometimes original meanings are twisted by well-intentioned scholars in order to conform biblical emphases to modern biases. The founders and most supporters of Christian institutions, however, recognize that specific revealed truths are basic and essential to historic Christianity. How to maintain these affirmations and how to free institutions from subverters of these truths is the pressing concern.

Resignation to a lamentable phase of church history and perpetuation of a quasi-reactionary strategy that excludes those who under the guise of freedom promote unsound doctrine is no solution. The real answer to this problem is renewal of the Church. Rectification of the Church is, of course, primarily a work of the Holy Spirit. Not all ecclesiastical trends, unfortunately, abet the renewal of Christ’s church. But God’s refreshing must remain the continuing burden of those who covet a proper comprehension of academic freedom in church-related institutions.

Protests against signing doctrinal statements may be prompted, as we have seen, not only by a desire to reorient schools and seminaries, but also by a longing for the renewal of the Church. Proponents of renewal argue that endless adjustment simply for the sake of survival in no way corrects the basic problem. What would the apostles recommend as the best solution? Would they approve our procedures? Would they call for reorganization and even liquidation of some institutions?

The fact remains that at no time can Christian causes minimize the biblical warnings against deceivers of the elect and “wolves” entering the sheepfold. In our own generation the compromise character of both the Church and Christian institutions creates an urgent call for action. Churches as a whole are often sounder than some of their related educational institutions. By voicing the latest intellectual speculations campuses have frequently detoured the churches from authentic concepts and concerns. Instead of inculcating a sense of Christian vocation, they have at times made young people serviceable to alien ideologies.

Are we simply to forfeit those church-related institutions which fall short of their true function? How shall Christian institutions maintain their theological soundness and protect their original principles? For one thing, the relationship between local churches and Christian education needs reinforcement. Many church young people who enroll in secular schools or even in unstable church-related institutions quickly put their beliefs in hiding. Lacking a coherent grasp of the larger implications of the Christian revelation, they are vulnerable to all the vagaries of doctrine. Local churches therefore have the tremendous challenge both of teaching and of nurturing these young people. Given the proper preparation in their churches, young people may penetrate secular institutions of learning with confidence, instead of simply eking out a pitiful intellectual survival. In the same sense a Christian university worthy of the name must constantly purpose to aggressively confront the world of secular learning. Local churches, too, must pray without ceasing for cleansing from the political mechanisms of ecclesiastical life, and must promote such an atmosphere in denominational life that a man’s verbal statement is the equivalent of his signature. That administrators of church-related schools require signed documents is not a development for which they are one-sidedly to be blamed.

Another approach is to permit prospective faculty members to make their own statements of beliefs. Instead of confronting them with a prefabricated declaration that awaits signature, a faculty committee or the faculty as a whole might engage the candidates in related conversation. The institution’s decision to invite or not to invite would then rest on such a voluntary statement of priorities. Quite obviously, anyone reluctant to profess the Apostles’ Creed has no place on the faculty of a Christian institution. The history of Christian theology also reveals clearly enough that the loss of scriptural authority in time produces a subversion of basic Christian doctrines.

The children of the world are often wiser than the children of light. The vagueness of affirmations that often suffices for faculty appointments in Christian institutions would scarcely admit one to membership in the Communist party.

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Bishop’S ‘Honest To God’ Drops Out The Gospel

“It is not every day that a Bishop goes on public record as apparently denying almost every fundamental doctrine of the Church in which he holds office,” said the Church Times. “He is coming round to a position a number of us have held for some time,” said an atheist professor at Oxford University. Add the Archbishop of Canterbury’s declination of comment and you have typical reactions to Honest to God, a paperback by Jack Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich. In this most radical episcopal work in many a day “the Bishop makes no mention of man’s need of grace, redemption, salvation,” noted Dr. Edwin Morris, Archbishop of Wales. “I see no gospel.…” Bishop Robinson once made news as an admirer of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

One voice sounded staunchly in the Bishop’s defense. Preaching in Westminster Abbey, the Rev. David Edwards noted that God had thereby gotten headlines. “If the Bishop is a Christian and if this is a valuable theological book, why should there be this demand for his resignation?” Edwards, managing director of SCM Press, hopes to sell 100,000 copies of the book.

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