Hidden Constraints to Academic Freedom

As one who has taught at a seminary for almost all of her career, this question has a different feel for me. For the most part, seminaries reflect particular confessional stances and locations, so the question is not so much should this wing of higher education do confessional scholarship (for the most part, it does), but how does it do its scholarship? Does it provide explicit and/or implicit constraints on scholarship? And could a scholar’s work bring them into conflict with the confessional stances of their institution in such a way that they would fear bringing their full learning and selves to their scholarship?

The faculty handbook at my institution speaks of the “inevitable tension” arising from the pursuit of knowledge with the value of academic freedom and the confessional parameters of an evangelical institution. This tension is a given in any school that is both confessional and academic. But rather than explore how a faith statement or requirement of doctrinal agreement sits in tension with academic freedom, I’d like to address the implicit constraints that are present and exert very real pressure upon faculty hiring, scholarship, and teaching. And if we turn our sights to implicit constraints, then we might find we have something in common with non-confessional institutions of higher learning. For I’d suggest that all universities, colleges, seminaries, etc. have implicit constraints of various kinds that set the ground rules for and even shape the scholarship they produce.

I’d offer two examples of what these implicit constraints might look like, both from my context of evangelical seminary education. Bethel Seminary, like many seminaries, has a statement of faith in which we affirm a particular view on the nature of Scripture. Whatever the terminology used (e.g., inspired, infallible, inerrant), evangelical seminaries tend to have an explicit statement about the authority of the biblical text. Yet what often happens in faculty hiring, promotion, tenure, and review goes beyond ensuring that faculty have signed on to the institution’s statement of faith. Typically, there are additional and often implicit expectations about specific interpretations that presumably arise from the shared belief in Scripture’s authority (and go beyond the rest of the faith statement, which usually addresses core theological beliefs). In this scenario, assumptions about interpretations arising from an “evangelical hermeneutic” lead to constraints that move beyond the written page of an explicit statement of faith. Yet as Kevin Vanhoozer has argued, the belief in any particular formation of biblical authority (in his argument, inerrancy) is not yet a set of interpretations. A particular view of biblical authority is an “underdetermined hermeneutic” (Vanhoozer, 97). It does not assure the same interpretive conclusions. To assume that the one inevitably leads to the other (e.g., that a high view of Scripture necessitates certain, particular conclusions) is to confuse issues of authority and hermeneutics (Vanhoozer).

So I get nervous when I hear judgments about scholars who hold particular interpretations of biblical texts that judge these scholars to be ‘outside the fold’ or lacking in integrity even as they sign an institution’s faith statement. Evangelicals have done this kind of judging for years around various issues. For example, in debates on the issue of gender and leadership, it is not uncommon to hear the accusation that egalitarians play fast and loose with the text and so must not hold it in high regard.

It is important for evangelical seminaries and universities to come clean about their implicit constraints for hiring and maintaining their faculty. If a confessional stance is communicated in a published statement of faith that is clear upon hiring (as promoted by the American Association of University Professors’ “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure”), then there’s a chance for faculties to walk the fine line between academic freedom and confessional agreement. But when informal but real constraints beyond those clearly delineated are at work, the task of credible scholarship becomes more difficult.

I’ve also been thinking about a second example of implicit constraints, and this one particularly related to faculty hiring. There’s an all too common word that gets used when particular scholars are being considered for positions at evangelical institutions. It’s the ‘fit’ word. “They don’t fit who we are.” My nervousness with the overuse (in my estimation) of this assessment is that is has, in my experience, been used against women and people of color as they are considered for positions in evangelical institutions and organizations where their presence on faculty has been limited or non-existent until quite recently. In spite of assurances from such candidates that they are fully comfortable signing the statement of faith, somehow they are deemed a poor fit for the institution. “They just don’t seem to fit” becomes not only a path out the door for these otherwise viable candidates but an indictment of our own inability to see how privilege (white and gender) works.

So while I readily acknowledge the difficulties that evangelical scholars and institutions face in terms of balancing the fine line between confessional commitments and academic freedom, I will continue to be concerned about the constraints on academic freedom that are implicit, often unacknowledged, and so more insidious.

Works Cited

Vanhoozer, Kevin J. “Lost in Interpretation? Truth, Scripture, and Hermeneutics.”

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48 (2005): 89-114.