Tucker’s Refound Mission: Morality and Religion at the College

By Mostafa A. Heddaya | Saturday, October 4, 2008

Following Stuart Lord’s recent resignation, College Chaplain Richard Crocker was promoted to be the dean of the Tucker Foundation. Crocker, who officially succeeded Lord as dean of the Tucker Foundation on September 15, has spent the last five and a half years as College Chaplain. At its founding in 1951, Tucker was charged with the mission of preserving and promoting the spiritual and moral elements of campus life—at that time, this implicitly meant the religious life of campus. Instead of remaining faithful to its founding purpose, the foundation has moved increasingly away from its mission, instead embracing secular, ideologically inclusive goals, like community service and leftist activism. With the ascendance of Chaplain Crocker to the deanship, the Tucker Foundation, according to the Chaplain, will work to restore Tucker to its original mission. In light of these changes in the Tucker Foundation, TDR sat down with several figures involved with religious life at the College to examine Dartmouth’s cultural and pedagogical relationship with religion.

To understand why Tucker moved away from its original mission, it’s important to first examine why college campuses are secular today. In 2005, Student Body president Noah Riner ‘06 famously provoked an avalanche of outrage when he dared briefly to mention Jesus Christ in his Convocation speech for the class of 2009. Riner spoke about character and, in passing, mentioned the example of Jesus Christ:

Jesus is a good example of character, but He’s also much more than that. He is the solution to flawed people like corrupt Dartmouth alums, looters, and me. It’s so easy to focus on the defects of others and ignore my own. But I need saving as much as they do. Jesus’ message of redemption is simple. People are imperfect, and there are consequences for our actions. He gave His life for our sin so that we wouldn’t have to bear the penalty of the law; so we could see love. The problem is me; the solution is God’s love: Jesus on the cross, for us.”

Needless to say, the campus was in an uproar for weeks following Riner’s speech, proving that the academy’s hostility to religion is alive and well. Far from being an isolated event, Riner’s run-in with the secularist apparatus at Dartmouth is a commonplace occurrence, and one would have to look no further than awkward classroom exchanges and Daily D opinion pieces to find proof of this tension. All too often, professors abuse the privilege of the lectern by preaching an intellectual orthodoxy that categorically denies the value of religion as anything more than the subject of sterile academic inquiry.

With religion so besieged, the Tucker Foundation, the very organization created to foster religious life at Dartmouth, seems uninterested in creating campus-wide dialogue and debate on religious issues. Thus, religious education at Dartmouth has been relegated to an institution unwilling to shoulder its burden, placing a proper understanding of religion beyond the scope of a Dartmouth education.

President John Sloan Dickey exorcised the religious element from Parkhurst in 1951 by founding the Tucker Foundation. Charged with “educat[ing] Dartmouth students to think and act as ethical leaders and responsible citizens in the global community through service, character development, and spiritual exploration,” the Tucker Foundation’s essential purpose was to foster religious life at Dartmouth.

As both college chaplain and dean of the Tucker Foundation, Richard Crocker is the first person to hold both positions concurrently in a number of years. According to Crocker, the position was originally split with the hiring of Scott Brown as Tucker dean in the mid-1990’s. Crocker explains, “[Brown] was not a clergy person, there was a sense that the college administration wanted Tucker to become an organizer. He was a Dartmouth alum, and had worked at Harvard Business School…and after three years concluded for a variety of reasons that this was not working for him.”

Not wanting to openly announce their desire to secularize Tucker, the Freedman administration tapped into its ever-inventive lexicon of bureaucratic euphemisms: “A word that I remember hearing was that they wanted Tucker to be ‘entrepreneurial;’ I’m not sure what that means but that’s the word I remember hearing,” Crocker said.

Dartmouth was founded “to encourage the laudable and charitable design of spreading Christian knowledge among the savages of our American wilderness.” The history of religion at Dartmouth, thus, is in many ways the history of Dartmouth herself. Crocker agrees, explaining that “The history of Dartmouth is undeniable...Its foundation was steeped in a kind of evangelical Christianity that formed the very impulse for the creation of this college.” William Jewett Tucker, the namesake of the Tucker Foundation, was the last ministerial president of Dartmouth. Changing academic attitudes regarding the blending of religion and education caused a nationwide move to secularize higher education. This movement resulted in the eventual creation of the Tucker Foundation. Crocker elaborates:

Things change, the academic specialties changed and the whole road to president changed. The Tucker Foundation was created by President Dickey and charged with continuing the moral and spiritual work of Dartmouth College. It doesn’t specifically mention religion, but at that time, it was sort of understood that this would be the religious center of the College as well…I think the College has a historical connection with religious concerns that is important for the College to continue to affirm. I think it’s important for us to affirm it broadly; it’s not a narrow concern, it’s not that there is a particular point of view which is going to be upheld or inculcated in students. But the religious concern has been such an integral part of Dartmouth College for so many years that it is both historically and morally a component of the granite in your brains.
However, things have changed. We are a much more pluralistic institution, certainly, and our student body and culture is much more secular, and by our culture I mean New Hampshire and the Northeast, not the nation as a whole. Many students come here from a pretty secular background. Our figures from the freshman survey indicate that about a third of the students have no religious affiliation. And we recognize that there is a huge amount of the faculty here who are not just secular, but secularist in their orientation. So it’s an uneasy balance at times, but it is a balance and I’d say that because there is one third without a religious orientation, there are two thirds that do have one, and they worry about their faith; we have a huge variety of faiths that people feel strongly about. If the College did not take that dimension of students’ lives up, it would be greatly affected.

Under Freedman, the Tucker Foundation was created with a new “religious” agenda in mind—activism. Though initially, it was created to to be the moral and spiritual center on campus, it was also a center devoted to serving the community. Lately, this latter part of Tucker’s mission has been emphasized at the expense of the former. Crocker continues:

Tucker was from the beginning a place where students who wanted to make a difference—I mean people who were actually concerned—met to translate their imagery into something they thought would improve society. The service program naturally thrived, and has been sustained and is very strong and very meaningful in this community. Obviously that’s something I’m very proud of.
At the same time, making a difference socially has in the past meant engaging social issues. Tucker was very prominent in aiding the anti-Apartheid movement which caused some tension between Tucker’s positions and its students, and many who gravitated to another perspective. Tucker was identified with that, and I think was proud of the fact that the College adopted its position. Tucker has also been a center for people who generally have opposed various wars; the Vietnam War protests were certainly not coordinated by Tucker but I think it’s fair to say that many Tucker participants, including staff, were sympathetic to the protestors and supported them in many ways. And I think it’s true now to say that we continue to emphasize issues of social justice—there is no single focus on which all of us agree, but at least part of my job as chaplain, and now as dean, is to raise concerns about moral issues and some of those moral issues are also social and political issues and there is a certain tension between just being the “do good” organization which does good things, and the organization which provokes.

Instead of organizing events that brought religion into public conversation at Dartmouth, the Tucker Foundation found itself in a bizarre position as a pseudo-activist body—a position not far from where it is today. Crocker says:

In the last few years, Tucker has become much more “centrist” than it was ten or twelve years ago. Students who have had concerns about the morality and rightness of the Iraq war gravitated toward Tucker and certainly found a home and support in their concerns about that. At the same time, Tucker has not been leading like ‘Ministers Against the Iraq War’ who issued statements of caution or concern about that war publicly, pretty moderate but still definite statements about it. I think there’s been a lot of concern at Tucker about gender equity and we have also helped to sponsor the “Class Divide” project, in fact we originated it, supported it, and held workshops. So the set of values that Tucker espouses are centered on questions of social justice, though we understand that people can take different perspectives on that subject.

In spite of Tucker’s drifting focus, the College has observed increasing levels of student involvement in religious groups. Over the last ten years, the number of students declaring no affiliation has risen steadily according to Crocker, from 26% to 33%, while the number of students involved in religious life on campus has also grown. However, the former group is substantially more vocal than the latter, and religious practice is often vilified both inside and outside the classroom. Crocker explains that this is both the result of certain attitudes toward religion and the pedagogical process:

Students are in the position of the development and establishment of their identity. We are in a culture in which certain Christian assumptions have been dominant.
To reject those, at least to criticize them, is a part of becoming an educated person. It’s all a part of education. But I think that the rejection of certain evangelical Christianity at Dartmouth is popular. I think that’s largely due to political reasons. Ever since Ronald Reagan, we’ve had an identity of certain political stances to religious stances and many people want to consider them the same and want to reject them both.

Given this hostility, it seems bizarre that the Tucker Foundation has chosen to pander to those who are unwilling to broach a topic due to the perception of intellectual taboo. Kevin Reinhart, professor of Religion, adds that:

The most important variable [in religious life at Dartmouth] is what a student brings to the College. For a person who is churched (or mosqued, or synagogued) college is a chance to reflect on their faith, deepen it, make it less simple, less conventional, less suburban, more complex, and self-aware. For those not churched, college is a chance to consider one’s stance toward religion, its claims, its effects. This is an opportunity that really needs to be pursued: to hang out and have respectful, substantial, discussions about religion with people who aren’t like you—religious conversations if you are not religious, non-religious ones if you are; engage Jewish and Muslim peers if you are Christian, and so on.

But the very discussion advocated by Professor Reinhart is jeopardized by the overwhelming amount of hostility religious students already feel when discussing their faith in the public sphere at Dartmouth.

This attitude is often underpinned by the adversarial position some professors take when a student broaches matters of faith in the classroom. In order for students to have honest and meaningful religious dialogue outside the classroom, the stigmatization of religious belief in the classroom must end. Andrew Dete, president of the Campus Ministry Council at the Catholic Aquinas House, comments:

To put yourself out there as religious, and to identify yourself in that way here, is frowned upon...We talk so much about diversity, but it ends up being this undifferentiated pluralism: i.e. we’re all kind of the same. I wish people that belonged to different religious groups would express that point a little more…I don’t think we should shy away from public shows of religion.

The problem, however, is more than a simple and detached cultural stance. Professors and college administrators actively reinforce the stigma surrounding religious expression. Dete continues:

I think that religion is a serious part of academic discourse, in some sense, because it’s such a huge part of the world. And it’s funny to see it underrepresented in an academic setting, in my opinion. I had a friend who had trouble trying to write his thesis on T.S. Eliot, because he felt like when he went and talked with his advisor, they discouraged him from taking a religious route with it.

Beyond being a simple bureaucracy for handling the various components of religious life and organizing service trips, Tucker seems to have forsaken one of the traditional elements of fostering religion on campus: religious introspection.

Last spring, the Tucker Foundation hosted a debate between Dinesh D’Souza and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong on the topic of religion and morality. This event, which according to Dean Crocker was actually organized by D’Souza himself, seems to be the correct approach to returning a frank discussion of religion to the academy. That this event more or less fell into the hands of the Tucker Foundation when they were approached about hosting it is no less than appalling—these types of events seem central to the mission of the Tucker Foundation.

Although community service is certainly good, Tucker’s day-to-day functions aren’t essential to the pedagogical mission of the College. Large, campus-wide lectures and debates will bring Tucker out of the shadows of irrelevant fringe activism and make it a defining Dartmouth institution.

Tucker’s Refound Mission: Morality and Religion at the College

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