Or is that the UI homophobia-in-the-classroom case? You figure it out. Inside Higher Ed's Scott Jaschik updates us on the teaching status of religious studies instructor Kenneth Howell at the University of Illinois, Champaigne-Urbana. Howell came under scrutiny because of an email he sent to his class that articulated gay male sex acts as immoral and the equivalent of bestiality: you may recall that I wrote about it here. It appears that for years, Catholic thought instructors have been nominated and paid by the Newman Center, an institution that exists on many campuses to support the faith and the sociability of Catholic students. Although Howell has been reinstated for the fall, this incident has created an opportunity to end a curious arrangement that some faculty on campus have opposed for reasons you don't have to be skeptical of religion to understand. Think about it: would you hire someone nominated and paid for by BP, and approved by no department, to teach the ethics of offshore drilling?According to this report, the agreement puts Howell (who is a published scholar) back in the classroom, and affirms that he is subject to public university guidelines around the expression of religious views (and presumably, expressions of prejudice that would not be perceived as discriminatory if articulated in a community of like-minded believers.)
A bigger question might be: are religious institutions a legitimate "student service?" And what is the role of clerics on secular campuses, unless they have been hired in a secular capacity as tenure-track faculty or administrators? This isn't something I have seen discussed much, and yet most campuses devote a part of their budget to doing so. The Howell incident should perhaps cause us to wonder why, in this day and age, secular institutions feel they have any obligation to provide religious resources to students at all: or, to put an even finer point on it, to students of some faiths and not others. I suspect the answer to the question is that when they do hire preachers of various kinds, for one low, low, price they get an adjunct teacher/psychotherapist/co-curricular coordinator all wrapped up in one.
But it is also one of those wheels within wheels situations that makes me happy I am not an administrator. Nothing I have seen has addressed the question of a complaint filed by a student not in the class: despite your views on faculty hired because they have been approved and paid for by the Vatican, all of us should find this a little scary. It has not exactly resolved the academic freedom issue, which may create difficulties for UI down the line. While Howell will have a contract for next semester, the religion department now has control over its hiring (as it should), and will decide whether to retain him in the future.
So here's the happy choice facing UI's chair of religion next year: continue to employ indefinitely an instructor who the department doesn't seem to care enough for to defend, and who it never hired in the first place; or decline to employ him further and risk a lawsuit backed by either the liberal AAUP, the conservative Alliance Defense Fund, or both.
Because it is summer, I have illustrated this post with James Tissot's "Jesus Teaching At The Shore," taken from this website.
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The AP article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has also added that Howell is reportedly going to get $10K to teach the course this fall (http://www.stltoday.com/news/state-and-regional/illlinois/article_1fe84401-745a-51dc-af46-3e4ac09bb91a.html). Now, it didn't specify whether that was multiple sections of the course, but a quick look at the school's course schedule (http://courses.illinois.edu/cis/2010/fall/schedule/RLST/127.html?skinId=2169) reveals it's one three-credit-hour course.
Since when do adjuncts get paid $10k per course? This seems more than a little odd, but hey, if that's UI's practice, maybe I should start adjuncting there.
I'm interested to follow this because the situation is so different in Canada. We have three denominational colleges with our university and the relationship is complicated.
Another issue that has not been mentioned: According to his CV, Howell has no university-based training as a theologian, nor as an ethicist (Catholic or otherwise). He has two Ph.D's, neither one in the relevant discipline. He should never have been hired to teach this class, in the first place.
In 1995, he got a Ph.D. at the University of Lancaster (either in philosophy or "religion"), but he wrote a dissertation on "Copernicanism and biblical interpretation in early modern Protestant Europe." The revised dissertation, _God's Two Books: Copernican cosmology and biblical interpretation in early modern science_ (Notre Dame: 2002) seems to be his only scholarly publication.
Now, this certainly qualifies him as a scholar of 16th & 17th century theological disputes. But does it qualify him as an *academic* expert in *contemporary*Catholic issues?
I don't think so--any more than writing a dissertation about 21st century Catholicism would qualify him to teach about 17th century theology
He also has a Ph.D. in linguistics: Indiana, 1987: (Dissertation: "The post-Boomfieldians and the generativists: a study in the history of American linguistics.") He's clearly accomplished.
But he has no academic qualifications to teach the course he was hired to teach, as far as I can see.
Conversely, Theology and Religion departments are full of Ph.Ds and ABD's who are qualified to teach precisely this kind of class.
In short, I think we do have to defend his academic freedom--he is teaching *a version of* contemporary Catholic theology, even if it's a version that many trained Catholic theologians would find abhorrent and oversimplified.
However, we have to question the University's judgement in allowing him to teach an academic course in the first place. Were the position posted openly --even for an adjunct--they would get dozens of applications from candidates with far more persuasive credentials and training.
We have a sort of similar situation with our ROTC classes: the military chooses and pays instructors, and we have to host them and give their courses credit or risk federal funding. (My campus is totally unwilling to even consider risking any funding, of course.)
"The Howell incident should perhaps cause us to wonder why, in this day and age, secular institutions feel they have any obligation to provide religious resources to students at all..."
*Obligation* is probably too strong a word, but I think religious support does make sense as a student service. Young people who are religious are often uprooted from their faith communities when they go to college, which can represent very specific kinds of challenges to student adjustment and success.
"or, to put an even finer point on it, to students of some faiths and not others."
That is a much more serious point. Most chaplaincy programs I am aware of are officially non-sectarian, but there's a difference between, say, an avowed Christian who is affirming of Buddhist practices and an actual Buddhist practitioner. Substitute other religious traditions as needed.
"I suspect the answer to the question is that when they do hire preachers of various kinds, for one low, low, price they get an adjunct teacher/psychotherapist/co-curricular coordinator all wrapped up in one."
You forgot the recruitment advantage, for particular students and/or their parents!
Seriously, though, in a society where the great majority of people self-identify as some flavor of religious, having one or more specialists around doesn't seem like the worst idea. It can be poorly implemented, of course, or questionably prioritized. But on its face...
"The Howell incident should perhaps cause us to wonder why, in this day and age, secular institutions feel they have any obligation to provide religious resources to students at all..."
Secular schools do not usually "provide religious resources" to students-- they merely make them available. The school will usually own the land where the Interfaith Center exists, but the organizations will raise their own funds and hire their own people to help run their religious student organization as they wish. Often times, as in the case of Newman, Hillel, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, Campus Crusade for Christ, the Navigators, BASIC, etc--national organizations will raise their own funds to send someone to "plant" a student chapter at a campus. This is very similar to the way other political organizations (and sororities and fraternities) spread across campuses. (At my campus in New York, it worked just like NYPIRG.)
Many young people really want to explore the roots of their own identity when they get to college. For some this leads them to ethnic/cultural organizations, and for some their cultural identity is better placed in religious organizations. (Likewise, feminist, queer, etc groups.)
At the undergrad institution I attended, religious
groups were under the umbrella of "cultural groups" and that worked well, both in campus programming and in knowing our identity on campus. The university did not contribute toward our religious student organization's budget that I know of-- other than to allow us to use classrooms as meeting space and the email server to send around announcements. We ran the organization of 250 people through donations of people in the chapter, and sometimes alumni giving back as they graduated (to jumpstart the budget for outreach the following Fall).
If you want to read on how these sorts of groups have provided a positive "good" (well, arguable of course), see Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity- he talks about how a religious/quasi-religious group at UT-Austin was instrumental in the formation of strands of the New Left on that campus and eventually throughout the South.
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