About Academic Bias Against Evangelicals

I saw this in this morning's Post, and had an immediate reaction to it.

Frank G. Kauffman was teaching a course in social work at Missouri State University in 2005 when he gave an assignment that sparked a lawsuit and nearly destroyed his academic career.

He asked his students to write letters urging state legislators to support adoptions by same-sex couples. Emily Brooker, then a junior majoring in social work, objected that the assignment violated her Christian beliefs. When she refused to sign her letter, she was hauled before a faculty panel on a charge of discriminating against gays.

The case has fueled accusations by conservative groups that secular university faculties are dominated by liberals who treat conservative students, particularly evangelical Christians, with intellectual condescension or worse. Is There Disdain For Evangelicals In the Classroom?

First ... this was a course in Social Work; as far as I can tell the letters were not going to be mailed to legislators; and the professor rescinded the assignment after several students complained. This woman, Emily Brooker, got a mediocre grade in the class and was called to an academic hearing on matters including tardiness and academic problems, and sued, claiming she was being punished for not cooperating on the letter assignment. The university quickly settled. Oh, also, the professor's career was not endangered; a subsequent review of the department found problems, but not with him.

But, besides that...

The National Association of Social Workers' Code of Ethics states:

Social workers should not practice, condone, facilitate, or collaborate with any form of discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, political belief, religion, or mental or physical disability.

Social workers should act to prevent and eliminate domination of, exploitation of, and discrimination against any person, group, or class on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, political belief, religion, or mental or physical disability.

You may or may not agree that that's a reasonable policy, but it is their policy, and if you're going into that field you will live by it. The professor had argued that her beliefs made her unsuited for a career in social work.

Anyway, The Post skips over the details, instead drawing on its talking-point potential.

"On many campuses, if you're an evangelical Christian, you're going to have to go through classes in which you're told that much of what you believe religiously is not just wrong, but worthy of mockery," said David French, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund, which sued Missouri State on Brooker's behalf.

Such accusations have been leveled for years at the Ivy League and other elite private universities. But they are gaining new attention from politicians and educators because of the Brooker case, which took place at a public school in the Bible Belt, and because of two recent, nationwide surveys of professors' views on religion.

You can read the rest of the article for the surveys and discussion. Yes, professors don't like evangelicals. Or Mormons.

I read this with interest, imagining what it would be like to be teaching students in psychology or the social sciences, and have an evangelical student in a class or seminar, say a CRC member. I could just picture it, and I can see what the problem is.

The problem is a simple one: they already know what they believe. What's the use of telling somebody something when they already know the answers?

The question gets raised as if there is simply a bias against evangelicals, but there's more to it than that, and I think it is important for the universities to figure this out before higher education goes down the toilet. A professor has a responsibility to maintain some standards. The standards for social work, in the salient example, are clearly spelled out in the ethical code. This student was majoring in social work, heading toward a career in the field, and it was pretty clear to faculty (not just this one guy) she would not be able to follow the ethical standard required by the profession.

This isn't grade school, or high school, it isn't MCPS. This is a university, granting degrees that certify people as being qualified to go into a professional field or continue into graduate study. A person who strongly adheres to a belief that some people in the community do not deserve equal treatment will not be qualified to be a social worker. You don't have to agree with it, that's just how the people in the field have defined the profession.

They try to make it sound like garden-variety discrimination, but it's not. Can you imagine having somebody like this in your Biology class, trying to teach them about evolution? They already know what they believe, they're not going to get it from some professor, and the really rude ones feel it's their job to save those around them, by stating the truth as they believe it to be. I'd object to that in my class. If you can't accept the premises of evolution, then just don't take Biology. That's easy. It wouldn't mean the professor was prejudiced against the religion, it just means somebody like that will not succeed in learning the required materials. And if the university is forced to pass them through the system anyway, a college degree will be meaningless.