A growing number of colleges and universities are using private donations to endow professorships focused on specific religious faiths, but as an article in today’s Wall Street Journal points out, when the donors pay for a scholar of their faith, they want someone who will not challenge their strongly held beliefs. And so those colleges are under increasing pressure to make a safe choice and avoid controversial hires.

Case in point is D. Michael Quinn, a well-regarded historian of the Mormon faith. Mr. Quinn resigned a professorship at Brigham Young University in 1988, was excommunicated by the church in 1992 for his scholarship (The Chronicle, August 9, 1996), and has been looking for an academic job ever since (The Chronicle, February 27, 2004). He has been blackballed, he says, by both Mormon and non-Mormon colleges—not for lack of credentials, the Journal reports, but because Mormon donors paid for the open positions. As a result, a researcher who might otherwise be considered a key hire at a time of surging scholarly interest in Mormonism (The Chronicle, March 22, 2002) remains unaffiliated.