Higher education was once a domain steeped in religion, where attendance at chapel services was mandatory, where church strictures governed the faculty, and where college presidents were typically drawn from the clergy. The secularization of most universities has been thoroughly studied, often by academics highlighting the loss to religion.
C. John Sommerville, however, is less interested in any loss to religion than in the loss to the university -- and its place in shaping the culture.
A century ago, American universities aspired to be the wellsprings of political, social and cultural leadership, Sommerville, a professor emeritus, argues in The Decline of the Secular University, a slim volume published by Oxford in May and excerpted last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
But today, he maintains, "the secular university is increasingly marginal to American society," ceding influence to popular culture, talk show pundits, "populist bloggers" and political research organizations, even hiring out university laboratories to business and government in hopes of revenues from patents.
A major reason, he contends more controversially, is the secularism that in his judgment has come to dominate academic life the way that religion previously did. What "looked vital and self-sufficient in 1900," Somerville writes, has proved unable to provide "wisdom and leadership to American life."
Having made natural science's standards for the exploration of physical reality the model of all true knowledge, that secularism, in the author's view, has simply not been able to replace religion in giving plausible answers to questions about the nature of humanity, its distinctiveness from other life forms, the value and goals of a life, or the basis of morality.
Now retired from many years of teaching history at the University of Florida, Sommerville has punctuated his book with lists of concepts -- many of them "terms that even the secular university cannot do without" -- like justice, freedom, truth, responsibility, sanity, purpose, evil, equality, welfare, happiness, hope, courage, humility, thankfulness, beauty, wealth, human nature and human rights.
None of them, he says, can be adequately understood apart from religiously inflected language and associations.
But having become tongue-tied when it comes to this language and associations, secular universities "fail to connect with people's most urgent questions," Sommerville writes.
This is particularly the case for higher education at universities like his own, less focused on scientific "discovery of physical reality" than on professional education in fields including law, the health-care business, engineering and communications.
The point, Sommerville emphasizes, is not "to apply religious dogmas to our intellectual puzzles," an unlikely venture, in any case, but also reflecting "the habit of seeing religion as a collection of doctrines, a thing to think about, when it can be a whole perspective or way of thinking."
What he wants, instead, is simply that the university "widen its discourse," invite "religious voices into the discussion" and allow religiously committed scholars "to be themselves in their academic roles."
Welcoming religion "into academic debates will strike many as outlandish," he concedes.
"Partly, that could reflect our simplistic notions of what religious arguments would be like," Sommerville added. "Those whose last brush with religion was in Sunday school may be underestimating them."
The Decline of the Secular University is an intentionally provocative book. It weighs in on the notorious philosophical debate about the relationship between facts and values, on science and religion, on the "hermeneutical turn" and the new role of narrative in the humanities and social sciences and on the demise of Western civilization courses, once a replacement for religion in the college curriculum.
It is a book filled with pointed observations.
Noting the many programs teaching students how to make money, he illustrates higher education's failure to address "our life questions" by asking his students "where in the university they would go to learn how to spend their money."
Playing with the familiar formula that schools should "teach about religion but not teach religion," he devotes a chapter to "teaching about secularism, instead of just teaching secularism."
But the book will also prove frustrating to anyone seeking specifics on how thoroughly and by what means religion is really excluded from secular universities. Sommerville's impressions of "official secularism" certainly coincide with those of many people in the academy, but there are enough counter examples to leave room for argument.
Recent surveys from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, show that 80 percent of college faculty members consider themselves "spiritual persons" to one degree or another and that almost two-thirds of the college faculty members describe themselves as religious, either "to a great extent" (35 percent) or "to some extent" (29 percent).
Yet just 30 percent believed that colleges should help "spiritual development," while twice as many endorsed strengthening students' "self-understanding" or "moral character."
On the other hand, from half to two-thirds of third-year undergraduates reported that their professors never provided opportunities to discuss the meaning and purpose of life or spiritual and religious matters.
Had Sommerville mined findings like those, he might have nuanced his impressions but not, one suspects, by much. Clearly, there is a gap between what undergraduate students are looking for and what professors, regardless of their own religious convictions, feel they can or should try to provide.
Many readers might also find Sommerville to be tantalizingly elusive about exactly how he envisions that religious viewpoints might be introduced into university discourse.
Obviously, Sommerville thinks that serious theological thought should be a presence on university campuses, not limited to divinity schools or restricted to within religious-studies departments that stress detached description of religions but not working out problems from within them.
Sommerville is appalled that "`Sin,' `trinity,' `incarnation' and `creation' are words that would be greeted with incomprehension in the academy today."
Yet, along with other legacies of Christian thought, he judges them essential to much of what the university holds dear, including its often critical stance toward its own culture.
Still, when it come to prescriptions, Sommerville remains vague, and deliberately so. In the book, he begs off any effort "to decide in advance" what "a more inclusive university should teach."
And in a phone conversation last Friday, he added, "I felt that the book should not go too far in settling things when its purpose was to start a conversation -- or even a controversy."
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs