Yes, Academics are Biased

The last post outlined one major reason that academics are biased - they remain true to the methods necessary to attain the goal of understanding reality. But that is only part of the story.

Another part, and a source of considerable misunderstanding even in academia, is that in the 20th century both the emerging social sciences and the established physical sciences became politicized. This doesn’t mean that they became partisan. Rather scientists recognized that maintaining a stance of neutral objectivity toward the subject of their research and its effects was fundamentally immoral. 

Bear in mind that the vast advances in chemistry and physics of the late nineteenth and early 20th century were almost immediately weaponized in two world wars. No scientist could escape the moral dilemmas posed by having their work used for the  destruction of human life on hitherto unimaginable scales - even if the ultimate goal was victory over tyranny or the defense of other human lives. 

Similarly social scientists gradually realized that their engagement with human subjects carried with it moral demands. Nor morally decent person can use human lives, individually or in groups, simply to write another research paper or get an advanced degree. And this is particularly true if one is observing humans and human groups suffering as a result of the prevailing political, economic, and social forces. 

And the same was true of the humanities. After all, the study of philosophy, history, law,  and literature began for the purpose of training leaders in society. They always had an intrinsically moral purpose, and teachers in the humanities could not ignore that moral purpose in their research and writing.

But note again that the politicization, the moral engagement with society found in the liberal arts university, was not based on partisanship but rather on commitment to moral purposes. The key value being perpetuated was the well-being of humans and humanity, not a particular political agenda.

One would imagine that exactly this human-centric morality would resonate with the commitments of religious people. And it did with many. However at least three forces mitigated against any easy alliance within the university. The first I mentioned the previous post: the accelerating exclusion of revelation and faith from the mainstream of academic life as across the disciplines as scholars sought to preserve the integrity of the scientific and critical method against attack. While there were religious scholars seeking to engage their colleagues around questions of epistemology without recourse to fundamentalism, in the post-WWII American context fundamentalism was the ascendent religious voice. 

As a result of systematic exclusion of their perspectives from academic life religious people felt, with some justification, that the particular way of knowing represented by revelation received and interpreted through faith was being expelled from academic life. Departments of religious studies are perhaps the best example. From the 1920’s onward scholars studying religion diligently sought to remove anything resembling “theology” or actual references to God from their field. And across the university it became doctrine then dogma that naturalism rather than supernaturalism, the study of the immanent rather than the study of the transcendent was the only legitimate framework for authentic scholarship.

It is anecdotal, but worth noting, that when I went to the University of Texas this major tier one university did not have and never had a department of religious studies. Religion was completely absent the curriculum unless it snuck in through philosophy, anthropology, or social sciences.  

The second force separating those with religious commitments from academic life arose from the necessary combination of moral commitment and a naturalistic framework for understanding reality. Quite naturally scientists concerned with moral questions would ground their reflections in a familiar naturalistic framework. They would look within humanity itself rather than in humanity’s relationship with God for a basis for morality. As a result, as much as religious people might agree on specific moral issues, they might well disagree on the basis by which decisions concerning morality were made. 

I want to stress that a morality based in immanence doesn’t of necessity oppose morality based in revelation and faith. On any moral issue from saving endangered species to abortion to LGBTQ rights immanence based morality can move in multiple directions depending on how the “good” for humans and humankind is understood. Religious and non-religious scholars may ultimately agree on many moral issues. 

The problem is that naturalism excludes and even denies moral reasoning based on revelation. It is hard for people to reason together about moral issues, and academic life is all about reasoning together, when they have no shared basis for advancing and critiquing arguments. 

The third force mitigating against inclusion of religious ways of knowing is the focus on value added in academic research and dialogue. The sciences and humanities could readily show progress in the 20th century across a range of positive human goods. They were advancing knowledge of the world and humanity and in many cases making human life longer, more fruitful, and happier. 

On other hand religious scholars do not seem to have articulated any distinctive contribution to academic discussions from their knowledge of revelation and faith. Indeed they have largely been on the defensive, protecting the credibility of their own discourse whether it is through analytical philosophy, the fulsome embrace of critical methods in the study of scripture, or the wholehearted application of the social sciences to understanding religious life and communities. 

After all, one substantial branch of Christian theology, evangelicalism or Neo-orthodoxy aggressively asserts that Christian theology has nothing new to say at a basic level about either God or humanity. If you haven't learned anything knew in your own field of study what do you have to offer that's new for other fields of study?

And even liberal or progressive theology would be hard pressed to articulate just what new revelations about God or humanity have emerged in a 20th century busy with new theologizing. Process theology? The Schleiermacher lineage? Not even the majority of Christians are particularly excited by these advances. They certainly haven't take philosophy and religious studies departments by storm. 

Given these three forces, systematic exclusion, lack of a common basis for discussions of morality, and an inability to show value added as understood in academic circles it isn’t surprising that revelation and faith as ways of knowing find themselves in a tenuous place in the academy. So there is some justification among religious people for feeling that their particular contribution to human knowledge, their particular way of perceiving reality through revelation and faith has been excluded from academic life. 

But again the problem isn’t bias in the negative sense. It is rather focus on achieving results through a set of proven methods.

Those of us who believe that attending to revelation and faith might in fact be enlightening need to recognize this, and realize that our obligation to the university is to show a view of reality through the lens of faith may well illuminate that which an excessive focus on immanence obscures. And there is a way forward to do this - if we will ask in new ways just what it means to be the recipients through faith of God's revelation.