According to some professors, woke moralists have limited academic freedom in unfortunate ways. Religious institutions can be a bastion of free speech in this environment. Michael Regnier, executive director of Heterodox University, said “To have some kind of faith-based or credal commitment” as a university, “raises some very interesting questions.”
“There are no questions that are off the table at Samford,” said Art Carden, a professor of Economics at the Baptist University in Birmingham, Alabama. A colleague told him that he had been at several different institutions and “had more intellectual freedom at Samford than he’d had anywhere else, at least in terms of his ability to pursue the things that he wanted to pursue.”
There’s an enormous amount of intellectual spiritual and cultural freedom here,” he continued. He also acknowledged that they “struggle to maintain both its spiritual integrity and its intellectual integrity.” He said that this “very difficult tight rope for a lot of schools to walk,” but said this “really contributes to the vibrancy of the intellectual and spiritual environment here.”
Dawn-Marie Wood, an associate professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, said that “We certainly do enjoy that kind of freedom … many degrees of that on campus as well,” she said. The purpose of higher education at BYU is about “expanding our students’ thinking and opening their minds to new ideas.” She continued to say that “Open inquiry is alive and well,” Wood said.
She pushed back on the idea that this is threatened “just because faith-based institutions might see ourselves as having additional truth through revelatory means.” Wood went on to say “We are collecting that (truth) from all different areas,” she said. That’s the “expansive experience that we’re inviting students into … so I feel like I haven’t seen that be something that is stifled at all but rather just the opposite in terms of open inquiry.”
When we speak about “viewpoint diversity” or “any kind of diversity,” one professor said, “there’s always that question in the background of diversity at what level? And there can be a tradeoff where you know having an exactly representative population of some larger population inside of your classroom or inside of your institution has many benefits, but it can also make each little institution itself kind of the same as every other one.”
Wood knows that secular and theological truth are often complimentary. “When secular and sacred truths reinforce each other, we embrace both. And then there are other times when secular claims may conflict with revealed truth or doctrine and then we intentionally mark the difference.” She added “That requires us to model what it looks like to cherish ambiguity on certain things that we don’t have the answers for.” This, she says, “represents an opportunity” to demonstrate the kind of “intellectual humility” that makes space for uncertainty, while also being “intellectually charitable.”
Wood also said that “I love that I don’t have to ‘turn on’ church on Sunday and turn that off when I go into the classroom, or ‘turn on’ classroom when I go into the classroom and turn off something else.” She went on to say “That’s one of the beautiful things about disciple scholarship,” Wood agreed. “You really are able to bring your whole self right to the classroom, to every faculty meeting, to every devotional … it’s a beautiful thing.”