Society for Values in Higher Education

Religious ignorance is widespread and dangerous, according to a group of scholars who will be meeting at the College of Notre Dame this month

By Michael Hill

Sun Reporter

July 15, 2007

Baltimore will soon be the site for a tradition that dates back eight decades: the summer meeting of a group of academics, educators and others to ponder the role of religion, ethics and values on college campuses.

"Originally they called it a week of work," says Stephen Sfekas, a Baltimore lawyer who is on the board of what is now known as the Society for Values in Higher Education. "They would meet in some rustic resort and go out and do some sort of social service work in the morning, then talk about values in the afternoon."

The work part has gone away, but the discussions will take place July 25 to July 29 at the College of Notre Dame. This year's theme is "Inquiry and Action: Teaching and Learning in a Religiously Pluralistic World."

About 150 people from across the country are expected to attend. For anyone interested in registering, information is available at www.svhe.org or from society@pdx.edu.

Speakers are expected to include M.A. Muqtedar Khan of the University of Delaware and Brookings Institution, author of American Muslims: Bridging Faith and Freedom; Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and professor of religion in public life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.; and R. Eugene Rice, senior scholar at the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

The Society for Values in Higher Education traces its history back to 1923, when Charles Foster Kent, an Old Testament scholar at Yale University, decided that the pendulum on campuses had swung too far toward the secular.

"He thought that religion was not taken seriously as an academic subject," says Sfekas, who is the host for the summer meeting.

Kent started a fellowship program to encourage graduate students and college faculty and administrators to study these issues. Kent's efforts drew the attention of William H. Danforth, founder of the Ralston Purina Co.

"He thought Kent's vision was brilliant and started funding fellowships for postdoctoral and doctoral students," Sfekas says. "The fellowships were for academically proficient students who were concerned about the kind of issues religions is traditionally concerned with."

Sfekas explains that this expanded the scope of the fellowships beyond religion to include values, ethics and social concerns.

These eventually merged with the Danforth fellowship program. The alumni of these programs formed the Society for Religion in Higher Education to continue to examine these issues after their schooling was finished. In the 1970s, the name was changed to the Society for Values in Higher Education.

"I think they thought the other name sounded a bit pious," Sfekas says, pointing out that membership is now open to anyone interested.

Sfekas, an alumnus of City College high school, got a Danforth fellowship in 1968 when he graduated from Georgetown University. He received a master's in history from Yale before switching tracks and returning to Georgetown to study law.

So what is the point of this meeting?

There is a different theme each year. This year we are talking about something called the Wingspread Declaration that came out of an initiative by the society called the Democracy Project.

Thirty-some people - professionals, academics, ministers, public officials - including some who will be speaking at the meeting, spent a week or two talking about religion in higher education. They had huge debates on all kinds of issues.

The study that came out identified three interrelated issues. The first was the most obvious: the issue of academic freedom, of the fundamental values in the academy, of free speech, free inquiry, free discourse, free debate, that the truth emerges from facing facts, from thinking clearly without ideological or religious blinkers on, but recognizing that part of the way we perceive the world includes our religious orientation and background.

The second is the issue of religious literacy. There is a huge amount of religious illiteracy in this country. Not only do we not know much about other people's religions, frequently we don't know much about our own. Basic things have been distorted, forgotten or misremembered.

There is a real universal importance in increasing people's knowledge of this fundamental aspect of people's existence. This hearkens back to the origins of the society as an organization that wanted to make sure the academy treated religion seriously.

The third element is that millions of young people come to college every year at a time of exploration and growth. This does not just involve academic issues, but spiritual issues as well that these students are trying to explore and figure out. In what way should the universities help kids with this, figure out where they stand, philosophically, ethically, religiously?

The first night of the meeting should be really interesting. Chris Leighton, the executive director of the Institute of Christian and Jewish Studies, has studied these issues in the Maryland academic community and what he has found covers the entire gamut of responses, from totally secular to totally religious with all kinds of stuff in between. It's really a prototype for a study of the entire country, a look at what's successful and what's not.

It is interesting that you are having the meeting here in Baltimore. You will be at a Catholic college, but just down the road is Johns Hopkins, which was one of the country's first universities founded as a secular institution. Most of the others, including Yale, where Kent taught, followed suit, ridding themselves of their religious trappings to pursue a more scientific truth. Isn't that really the role of academic institutions today?

That's an interesting point and is exactly what Kent was involved in exploring. He was a fascinating character. He was not talking about making colleges and universities sectarian, he was talking about taking religion seriously as an important human endeavor, that affects the way people have acted and felt throughout history.

Consider the fact that many people decided to go to war in Iraq without knowing that there was a difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims. That's kind of mind-blowing.

The United States has, of course, all kinds of Christians and Jews, but also now many Muslims and Buddhists and representatives of all the world's religions in numbers it has never seen before.

For us to have a functioning society, both locally and internationally, it really is important that we grasp what it is about religion that is so fundamental to people's lives.

This is true even in countries that seem to be secular. In Britain, for example, almost nobody goes to church, but they were a Christian nation for 1,500 years and you see holdovers of that belief in their patterns of thought and the like.

So, even though a country or a people is not overtly religious, you still have ethical frameworks modeled on religious beliefs. It is a fundamental part of human existence. You can't not deal with it.

Isn't one problem for academia that the campus mirrors society, making it difficult to treat something as an intellectual inquiry when a certain percentage of the students think the subject matter is sacred?

I think the institutions are struggling with that. The non-Catholic universities in this country, say, 50 years ago, were 90 percent Christian with a quota on Jews. Most of the students were mainstream Protestants. Now you have Christians from all kinds of denominations and Jews of all different types. You have Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists and people who don't believe in anything.

How does a university deal with that? You can't make the same assumptions you once made, that a class would understand a Bible story, for instance. Or that people in that group, right there in the room with you, would share the same fundamental beliefs about what kind of society we live in.

These are the same issues that Kent was talking about in the 1920s, just on a different scale. It is fascinating that in this most modern of times, when we are on the verge of computers developing artificial intelligence, that the most fundamental religious beliefs are making a comeback.

Do you think anyone is listening to what your society is saying?

Our plan, after we hear from our amazing group of speakers, is to break down into working groups so by our final session on Sunday, we can have some plans and thoughts on where to go next that we can put into a grant application.

This would be an action plan, a way of dealing with these issues in a practical way. At the end, we should have some thoughts on how universities should be responding to the challenges of religion today. If we can go to a foundation and put some money in it, we hope this can have an impact on American society at large.

michael.hill@baltsun.com

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