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On the Tenure Track at a Religious Institution

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By James M. Lang

This spring I am teaching a writing workshop on the topic of argument. For their most recent papers, I assigned my students a series of essays and documents on the controversy that surrounded the release, by the U.S. Roman Catholic Bishops, of a set of guidelines designed to strengthen the ties between the church hierarchy and American Catholic colleges and universities.

I teach at a small, Catholic, liberal-arts college, so the students had some reason to be interested in this question. During the week they were writing their papers, I met with them individually to discuss their rough drafts. As we talked, one question kept recurring to them, and to me: What really separates a Catholic college from a secular one?

Most of them had a great deal of difficulty defining precisely what distinguished the education they were getting from that of their high-school friends at similarly-sized -- but secular -- liberal-arts colleges.

Once I had raised this question for my students, I couldn't help but begin to ask myself the parallel question: What does it mean to teach at a Catholic college, especially defined against my doctoral training at a secular institution? More broadly, what does it mean to be on the tenure track at a college with a religious affiliation?

I spent a few weeks keeping an eye out for evidence that would help me answer this question, and learned, first and foremost, that the answer depends on where you're sitting.

As a Catholic, I see the signs of my religion everywhere on campus, and those signs are a friendly and comforting presence to me. From the crucifixes in the classroom to the recent lecture the college sponsored on the achievements of Pope John Paul II, from the student religious retreats to the daily masses in the campus chapel, the manifestations of Catholicism seem omnipresent to me.

As my students pointed out, however, most of those specifically Catholic programs and events -- with the major exception of the two-course theology requirement for all students -- are optional. Students who wish to take advantage of these programs can, and nonreligious students are free to skip them.

It's not quite the same situation for faculty members. When we were interviewing candidates recently for a position in my department, we were asked to schedule a meeting for each of them with a member of the administration -- a Catholic priest -- who spoke with them about the mission and religious identity of the college.

And recently, a member of the administration invited me to participate in a faculty discussion group about the mission statement of the college, with special attention paid to its Catholic identity.

I suspect these moments of participation in the Catholic mission of the college are not quite voluntary. If I or my department had attempted to shirk either of these meetings, it would have raised eyebrows and questions. Fortunately for me, I find such conversations interesting, and am happy to participate in them.

But I am not quite sure how invitations like these, so comfortable to me, appear to non-Catholic professors or to nonpracticing Catholics on the faculty. I don't think anyone who would accept a position at a Catholic college would be completely hostile to such invitations, or to what they represent. At worst, I think they may appear as a vague cause for apprehension, an uneasiness at the possibility that somehow more religion will mean less academic freedom.

I caught a glimpse of this perspective from one of the job candidates in our recent hiring of a specialist in 18th-century British literature.

I drove the candidate to dinner, and during our brief conversation in the car I encouraged her to ask me whatever questions she would like to ask a first-year assistant professor in an unguarded moment.

At some point in that conversation she asked me whether the Catholic identity of the college might prevent her from teaching the material she was accustomed to using in the classroom. Specifically, she pointed out that the literature and historical documents from her period in British history often contained anti-papist sentiments, and she wanted to know if she would have to avoid that material in the future.

The question seemed strange, even slightly paranoid, to me; she was clearly concerned that the religious affiliation of the college could translate into interference in the autonomy of her classroom or her research.

That may be true at some religious colleges, I assured her, but it is fortunately not the case here. I told her how, in my first semester, I had asked several senior colleagues whether they thought it would stir any controversy -- either in the administration or with my students -- for me to show Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange in my contemporary British fiction class.

It was a priest who actually gave me the strongest encouragement to do so. "Challenge your students," he said to me.

Reflecting on her comments afterward, I realized that I had come here with some of the same apprehensions, expecting the college to act as a moral censor on the materials I brought into my classroom. I would have had no hesitation teaching A Clockwork Orange at my graduate institution, a secular research university.

The notion that the college would be a moral censor on my teaching lasted only until I arrived here. In my experience, it is an outsider's perspective. From the inside, it feels very different -- both to me and to non-Catholic colleagues with whom I have spoken about this issue.

Last week I broached the subject with two colleagues over a few beers. Both are non-Catholic, and both have spent at least part of their careers at secular institutions. But both, like me, share an interest in teaching questions of values, ethics, and morals, although none of us are philosophers by training. In our courses on language and literature, we raise questions that ask students to consider the ethical or moral implications of what we are reading, or we might challenge them to think about the religious or spiritual questions that a work of literature raises.

At some point in the conversation, one of us managed to roll all of this into a question that seemed to capture the spirit of the discussion: "Do you feel more comfortable here, rather than at your graduate institution, raising questions about ethics, morality, and spirituality in the classroom?"

The answer was affirmative and immediate for all three of us.

And that, as best as I have been able to tell this year, seems to mark the difference.

The horizon of questions I feel comfortable asking in the classroom has expanded considerably as I moved from my secular graduate institution to this religious college. The courses I was teaching two years ago remained tightly focused on analyzing and processing meaning in literary texts. As I grew more comfortable in my teaching, I began to raise questions about ethics and values, but always felt as if I needed to do so surreptitiously. I had not heard many of those questions raised in my graduate courses. Nor had I heard them raised in the classroom by professors for whom I served as a teaching assistant.

Here I see those questions as the end toward which all of our work in analysis and process is leading. Equally important, I now feel perfectly comfortable raising questions about God and spirituality and organized religion in the classroom -- topics I would not have touched two years ago.

Undoubtedly some colleagues of mine -- non-Catholic or nonreligious -- prefer to focus on general ethics and values, without delving into the theological questions in which I am interested. We coexist happily here.

I am open to the possibility, though, that my non-Catholic colleagues might write very different essays about their experiences here.

During the recent Easter season, in the 40-day period of Lent, I occasionally attended weekday mass in the campus chapel. Sometimes I would see senior faculty members or administrators there, and they would see me, and I couldn't help but wonder whether, back at their offices, they were putting a star next to my name for being a practicing Catholic -- and whether, conversely, my non-Catholic colleague in the office next door was not getting that star.

Most of me suspects this is not really the case. I wouldn't dream of giving students higher grades for being Catholics, and I don't want or expect my colleagues in the faculty or administration to give me a break in my tenure case because of my religion.

I do want and expect -- or have come to expect, over the last eight months -- to be able to practice that religion openly, and to raise, both in and out of the classroom, the questions about God and the cosmos and our place in it that every religion, mine included, hopes to answer.

For me, the freedom and comfort I have felt in asking those questions here defines what it means to teach at this Catholic college.