Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/10/07/the_charge_of_the_academy.php
Friday, October 7, 2005
Theologian David Bentley Hart, writing in the New Criterion, responded to an opinion column assuming the inevitable withering away of religious faith in these words:
Surely, I thought as I was reading, this is a man [A. N. Wilson, in the Daily Telegraph] in whom parochialism has metastasized into a psychosis. Here we are living in an age when Christianity is spreading more rapidly and more widely than at any other point in the two millennia of its history—throughout the global South and East—and yet, because the Church languishes in the senile cultures of a small geological apophysis (with a few appertinent isles) at the western edge of continental Asia, Wilson concludes that the faith is in its death throes.
He did not—but could have—named American college campuses as additional petri dishes that house and nourish this sort of narrow-minded culture. I'd expect that there's a sizeable chunk of the student body for whom college means an opportunity to pony up tens of thousands to prevent the Bible-thumpin', holy water-tossin', ice cream social-hostin' crazies from lurching out of Jesusland. Those snaggle-toothed, neo-fascist Neanderthals bugged the bejesus out of some precocious achievers who swore that, if it's the last thing they'd ever do, they'd escape to the school of their dreams; fair Harvard. Oops! So much for that. Well, Dartmouth's O.K.— rustic, but not in that way, you know. Then this Noah Riner fellow comes along and confounds the whole scheme….
To be fair, the majority of student commentators on the "Jesus incident" have not signed on to the secular temper tantrum. Perhaps they realize that, given the vast numbers of human beings today who subscribe to this "Christianity," not to mention "religion," the fact that the College devotes copious funds to teaching courses that engage these systems of thought, the fact that it also has a chapel on its grounds and a chaplain in its employ, and the yet-unmentioned fact that religion has endured throughout human history—knowing these facts, perhaps they thought that it is not such an outrage for Student Assembly President Noah Riner to espouse a religious viewpoint on a platform given to him by the voters.
Fine, you say, but what gets my humanist goat was his too, too earnest unbosoming of the religious position. There was no winking irony, no perfunctory apology forestalling offense. He did not pause to acknowledge the rich diversity of mind-sets. Yet, imagine placing these restrictions on any other position taken on philosophy or politics. Or, better yet, note what has been said in previous convocation speeches.
Dean Krishna, in 1999, said:
It's true that although we all may be smart, some of us aren't always good…. Cultural, racial, and sexual insensitivity are all realities on this campus. Class of '03, if you're like any other class in our recent history, chances are that some 50 of you will be sexually abused here. And many more of you will be hurt in other ways. So how do we stop all this? The solution is to educate ourselves, and the best way to do that is by asking questions.
Then there's former Student Assembly president Janos Marton in 2002:
The world doesn't need more leaders who spout empty buzzwords like 'compassionate conservatism.' Instead, it needs a generation willing to make sacrifices in the name of compassionate activism….The death of 2,800 Americans was a terrible tragedy, but it should not allow us to forget and devalue the 35,000 people across the world who die of starvation and malnutrition every…[sic]. We must learn from the mistakes we made in Latin America that led to great suffering at the hands of U.S forces and U.S.-backed dictators. We must never again support a tyrant like we once supported Saddam Hussein. And we must never forget that only one country used weapons of mass destruction in World War II, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, and that was the United States.
"You don't have to fight wars to become great," he concluded, with a jab at the government rushing us into war. Marton's popularity catapulted him to a second term, and during Convocation 2003 he took a strong stance against the war on drugs. Finally, he invoked his muse:
The rebel journalist Hunter S. Thompson surmised as much to a college crowd, when he noted, "I would never recommend drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone—but they've always worked for me."
These are strong and debatable opinions, presented to a "captive audience," in the words of one of Riner's critics, Brian Martin '06. Perhaps the maligned compassionate conservatives or aspiring drug czars were alienated, disturbed, disappointed, saddened, etc. (choose your own buzzword) by Marton's remarks, but, poor guys, they sucked it up and entered a long, rewarding period of convalescence, to be sure.
Paul Heintz '06 added fuel to the fire by drawing a cartoon in the Daily Dartmouth that depicted a pot-smoking Jesus urging Riner to calm down. But as Bruce Gago '05 opined in the D this week, the collegiate culture of secular humanism engages in arm-twisting just as much, if not more, than Christianity does. As he said, "Were next year's convocation speaker to express the humanist's sentiments, there would be nary an outcry [from Christians]. The Daily Dartmouth would not receive any letters to the editor from angry Christians offended at the closed-mindedness of humanists. Christian comic artists would not draw cartoons mocking Nietzsche and Darwin."
Clearly, it would have been ludicrous to argue that Marton should have apologized in advance. This argument is an annoying pathology of a community that considers disingenuous self-effacement the very height of decorum, yet it keeps coming back like a song. Let's be honest: the real reason why Marton was exempt from this sort of high-falutin' indignation can be seen in the difference between Hunter S. Thompson and Jesus Christ. To your average student, one evokes going on an ether binge with Dr. Gonzo, and the other recalls some bird-brained Sunday school teacher's rap-you-on-the-knuckles homiletics—everything College isn't supposed to be. As your attorney, I advise you to pick the former, they paraphrase to themselves.
What was most disappointing about the objections to Riner's speech was that few if any dealt specifically with the veracity of the views he predicated. Kaelin Goulet '07, the former "Vice President for Student Life" in the Student Assembly, resigned because, in her words, his choosing to talk about Jesus was "reprehensible and an abuse of power." This is a very serious charge. It implies willful malfeasance and a refusal to play by the rules. Obviously, the criteria for an "abuse of power" must exceed the speaker simply being perceived as wrong; otherwise, hardly anyone could speak on campus. Likewise, flaunting the courage of one's convictions to a captive audience does not make one objectionable, as evidenced by the preceding excerpts. The dictum of "not tolerating intolerance" is indefensible nonsense, wrong on its own terms. It's evident that Riner did nothing tantamount to dissolving the bonds of community or deliberately instigating a riot. He challenged otherwise cosseted pea-greens with a position contrary to their own. (Or, he "managed to alienate many in the audience regardless of their faiths," according to the Daily Dartmouth.) Is that abuse or effective use?
Criticisms of Riner focused almost entirely on the appropriateness of discussing Christianity, i.e. whether it should be permitted in public discourse, as opposed to its truth. The D's editorial acknowledged that a "college is a place where all ideas are examined critically in a forum that invites discussion," but added sternly that he had preached "his faith from a commandeered pulpit." Brian Martin '06, in his Op-Ed critcizing Riner, asserted that "Jesus would not have wanted to make new students feel unwelcome, to make faculty feel uncomfortable…" (This, about a man who persuaded men to walk away from their families and jobs, riled people up by associating with prostitutes and tax collectors, and physically disrupted public commerce in a fit of rage, but never mind.) Others cited their own Christianity while finding it dreadfully impolitic for Riner to wax unabashed at the podium.
My frustration is compounded by the fact there are so many cogent rebuttals that could have been offered: examples from historical Jesus research, the observation that many nowadays subscribe to ethical systems that deem "character" an irrelevant concept (like our legal system), alternate exemplars of virtue like Socrates, news items citing the exaggerated accounts of rape and murder in New Orleans, or one of millions of arguments that have been lobbed against Christ from Judas to Nietzsche to Dawkins. Or, perhaps endorsements of President Wright's humanistic take on the New Orleans catastrophe. Many had probably already taken these counter-arguments to heart, but it is also likely that some who might have liked to engage these questions felt it would be seen as less than refined.
The conservative outcry in the media was perhaps overblown and asymmetrical to the intensity of the initial objections. No censorious ukase from Parkhurst slid into Riner's mailbox, after all, and, from what I understand, Riner is administering the Assembly just fine. What we got were a few juveniles lending pseudo-legalistic gloss to their tenuous quibbles and emotional prejudices. What we should be lamenting is the inability to talk about religion publicly except in meddling, cowardly terms of exclusion and inclusion, instead of truth and falsehood.
At an institution of higher learning, we allow the promulgation of more arguments than are likely true so as to elongate the truth-seeking process and ensure its conscientiousness. First impressions will not do. Therefore, free speech should be freer on a college campus than anywhere else on earth because the Academy is uniquely charged with hashing out the big questions. And what could be bigger than the issues raised by Jesus? The nature of man, the metaphysics of our world, the definitions of right and wrong—students, believers or not, cannot shirk from contending with these.