Try to imagine this scene.

You are in a laboratory on a state university campus, in facilities funded with a stream of tax dollars. The dark room is full of medical students, taking part in a sacred ritual that will end a required course in Gross Anatomy.

It is time to say goodbye to the late Anna Marie, Meredith, Chet and Sal. Here is how Larry Keller of The Palm Beach Post describes the scene in Boca Raton:

Those aren’t the real names of the four cadavers the students have been slicing, sawing and probing since November in a fourth-floor laboratory in the biomedical science building. They don’t know their true names. So these are the names they gave them.

With great solemnity, the professor begins leading the students in ancient Greek Orthodox prayers, while Byzantine chant fills the air. Beeswax candles glow throughout the lab and rose incense drifts in clouds around the worshipers, just like in the ancient Christian rites in sanctuaries on Sunday mornings.

Or maybe it is Latin-rite Catholic prayers and Gregorian chant. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter, since I made this part up.

Hang in there with me for a moment.

How do you think the university would react to this ritual? The local chapter of the ACLU? We can even ask how The Palm Beach Post would have covered this shocking attack on the wall between church and state laboratory.

We don’t have to worry about that scenario, since I will now tell you what actually happened in the event covered by Keller’s “Ritual lets med students bid farewell to cadavers.” The prayers, you see, were from Tibetan Buddhism.

The lab, with its stainless-steel gurneys and cabinets, was stark and sterile. But now, as students reentered the room, the stink of formaldehyde was replaced by the sensual scent of incense. Buddhist chants filled the room. And each student was handed a candle and formed a circle near the gurneys, now adorned with elegant flowers, not dissected corpses.

One by one each person made brief remarks, expressing appreciation for the dead from whom they learned and thanking their teachers and fellow students for their shared experiences. After speaking, each person used their lighted candle to illuminate that of the student next to them.

“They say the body is the temple of the soul,” said Fanny Bangoura, 28, of Cooper City. “I’m grateful people donated their temples for us to explore.”

This is a very interesting story and it veers out of the spiritual into some sticky issues of ethics and medical education. The use of cadavers is way down and some people are trying to turn this entire exercise into a 3-D computer exercise. Others insist that there is no substitute for the real thing.

Also, let me stress that I am not saying that Keller’s report contains latent anti-Christian bias or something. It is a moving story and told with dignity.

I just kind of wonder what would happen if you cut out the Buddhism angle and substituted, well, a pack of Assembly of God missionaries praying in unknown tongues with their hands in the air in Pentecostal praise, while medical students marched in circles carrying Christian flags.

I can’t imagine The Palm Beach Post going for that. Instead, we get:

Back at the closing ritual in the lab, students and teachers finished their remarks, and a melancholy song filled the room with the lyrics: “Gently, gently. Resting sweetly.”

Some bowed their heads in reflection, faces aglow in the candlelight. Then the bright lab lights came on again, and Blanks spoke one last time.

“Go out and make a new world.”

My Scripps Howard column today took me back into the faith-integration wars at Baylor University, my alma mater, and the growth of institutions that try to blend ancient Christian faith and modern learning, which required a reference to the Council for Christian Colleges and my work there.

As I said before here on the blog, I have refrained from writing much about the Baylor conflict because I have family ties and I have friends on both sides of the battle. Still, I wanted to try to explain how the Baylor conflict is linked to some larger issues in higher education, both secular and sacred. If the mood strikes you, take a look.

Writing the column reminded me of several recent pieces I have read about related topics. The first concerns a controversial new book called God on the Quad by journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley. Here is the top of a Wall Street Journal piece on her thesis, which focuses on a small circle of religious schools and the growth of the CCCU in general.

It’s not news in academia, although it may come as a surprise to the rest of us: America’s 700-plus religiously affiliated colleges and universities are enjoying an unprecedented surge of growth and a revival of interest. . . .

(The) number of students attending the 100 schools of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities — an organization of four-year liberal-arts schools dedicated to promoting the Christian faith — rose 60% between 1990 and 2002. In those same years the attendance at nonreligious public and private schools stayed essentially flat. The number of applications to the University of Notre Dame, the nation’s premier Catholic college, has risen steadily over the past decade, with a 23% jump last year alone.

But numbers don’t tell the whole story. Many religious schools, traditionally regarded as second-tier or worse, have improved the quality of their students and of their academic offerings, sometimes dramatically.

The Boston Globe recently dug into a related trend — the growth of traditional Christian ministries on a wide variety of campuses. To explore that angle, click here.

But the article that intrigued me the most was a Newsweek online exclusive, an interview with Stephen Jones, the next heir to the presidency of Bob Jones University (see webcam). This is one institution that fits almost any historian’s definition of “Christian fundamentalism.” Yet check out these exchanges with journalist Susannah Meadows:

NEWSWEEK: Why does your father feel the university needs a younger leader?

Stephen Jones: He said in the last two or three years he really doesn’t understand this generation, with all the dramatic changes socially and culturally our nation’s gone through. It just kind of creates a gap there.

Which changes specifically?

The inroads the culture has made even into the church. The MTV generation, pop culture, all of that has been significant and has really increased in intensity over the past 15 years. His whole generation has a hard time with it. Doesn’t understand. . . .

What do you see young people struggling with?

The philosophical view point that there is no absolute truth, that one person’s belief is just as good as another, that two different things can both be right. That’s a completely postmodern view of truth and one that’s insupportable by scripture. A student has to wrestle through that because it’s definitely not popular. It’s definitely not the message of the culture and the media. It’s one of the things I have to wrestle through, what will orient my life.

George Barna! Call your answering service. The raised-on-MTV students at Bob Jones University are struggling with postmodernism and the loss of transcendent moral absolutes?

Of course they are. Meet the new mall, same as the old mall.

During the past few years, I have hesitated to write about the national coverage of Baylor University’s academic civil war — either in my Scripps Howard columns or on this blog.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, I have two degrees from Baylor and my whole family bleeds green and gold and, to varying degrees, some members are involved in Baylor life. The man who has been the lightning rod at the heart of the Baylor changes — President Robert Sloan — is a friend. Now he is standing down.

Nevertheless, let me make a few comments — stressing that everything I say here is my own analysis and should not be pinned on others.

First of all, the mainstream media coverage so far in the state of Texas has had little to do with the issues at the heart of the Baylor conflict, other than the personality clashes linked to Sloan and those who oppose him. There are significant ideas at the heart of the war and you will rarely see them in the newspapers. Without a doubt, the best article about the Sloan era was printed in a liberal, mainline Protestant magazine — The Christian Century. To read it, click here. More on this article in a moment.

In the Texas press, the Baylor war is often linked — directly or indirectly — with the multi-decade conflict within the Southern Baptist Convention, pitting “moderates” against “fundamentalists.” This is half right.

In the SBC civil war, the “moderate” Baptists — think Bill Moyers, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — have lost virtually everything when it comes to corporate power, seminaries, etc. In Texas, Baylor has always been at the center of “moderate” life. A small number of these Baptists are, literally, crypto-Unitarians who simply like good preaching. However, most would feel right at home in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Above all, they do not think of themselves as evangelicals and they cannot tolerate “fundamentalists.”

The “moderates” are at the heart of revolt against Sloan and the vision known as Baylor 2012. As they often say in private: “We are not going to lose our Baylor,” with an emphasis on “our.”

Following a common media-coverage template, that means Sloan represents the “fundamentalists.” The only problem is that he does not. A wide variety of people have backed his cause, from mainstream evangelicals to traditional Catholics, from Anglicans to the Orthodox. At the national level, many Christian educational leaders — from Notre Dame to Yale, from Duke to Harvard — have endorsed the Baylor vision. Check out this list.

The Baylor conflict has pitted “moderate” Baptists against this diverse national coalition — call it the ecumenical traditionalists. Are they conservatives? Yes, mostly. Are they in favor of “Christian education”? Yes, in the historic sense of the term. Are they “fundamentalists”? No, they are not. Many of the central thinkers in Baylor’s move toward the integration of faith, research and learning are Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants.

The Christian Century piece captured this. The big question: Does the historic Christian faith have intellectual content? Does this matter on a university campus that calls itself “Baptist,” “Christian” or both?

Here is a key section of Robert Benne’s piece in the Century. I have done some editing to shorten this. Note the role of the former Baylor president, Dr. Herbert Reynolds, a key figure in the campaign to oust Sloan:

The Christian identity Baylor leaders are seeking is not defined by a confessional tradition, as at Calvin College, or by evangelical definitions of faith, as at Wheaton College. It seeks a “big tent” kind of Christian orthodoxy that includes Lutherans, Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists and others, as well as the hoped-for number of Baptists. It is a “mere Christianity” kind of orthodoxy.

What’s so controversial about this? The answer lies in the particular form of Baptist piety — with its accompanying view of Baptist higher education-that has prevailed at Baylor and is now being formally challenged. For former President Reynolds and his faculty supporters, one’s relationship with Christ is what is essential in faith. … Christianity, in this form of Baptist piety, includes an inevitable moral imperative. But in one’s relationship with Christ — which is highly individual and inward — one has “soul competency.” A true Christian shares the freedom of the priesthood of each believer. This competency and freedom compel one to read the Bible and its meanings according to conscience. Nothing about the faith should be articulated in creeds or systems of Christian thought. . . .

This traditionally Baptist construal of the faith results in a particular vision of the Christian university. Some have called it the “atmospheric” or “two-spheres” approach. The Christian character of the university resides in the hospitable, friendly, caring, just and edifying atmosphere created by sincere Christians. It also resides in the religion courses and the extracurricular religious activities that permeate the university. But what happens in the classrooms of this kind of Christian university is pretty much the same as what occurs in public universities. . . .

Above all, traditional Baptists disagree with Sloan’s contention that Christianity has intellectual content. In the view of Baylor’s new leaders, faith is more than atmospheric. There is a deposit of Christian belief that all Christians should hold to. On the basis of that belief they should engage the secular claims of the various academic disciplines. In Sloan’s view, the Christian faith gives a comprehensive account of all of life and reality; it addresses the key questions of life, death, human nature, salvation, history, meaning and conduct.

Now, with this in mind, you are ready to read some of the coverage of the announcement that Sloan has decided to leave the Baylor presidency, stating his conviction that the board of regents will carry on with Baylor 2012. It will be interesting to see how openly the “moderate Baptists” attempt to campaign for a president who wants a “Baptist” university but not a “Christian” university.

Here is the Sloan package at Christianity Today and here is the main story at the dominant newspaper in the state, the Dallas Morning News. The old, establishment, mostly moderate Baptist newspaper in Texas — the Baptist Standard — has posted a story offering its perspective.

Above all, anyone interested in these latest developments at Baylor should take the time to watch the video coverage of the actual press conference in which Sloan and Board of Regents Chairman Will Davis discuss what led to this moment and what might happen next.

Let me end with a quote from the Dallas Morning News coverage that offers a hint of the real issues in this bitter conflict — even if the reporter did not fully grasp what this Sloan opponent was saying.

“Traditionally, Baylor has been an outstanding academic education with a Christian atmosphere that produced lots of good teachers and lawyers and physicians and dentists,” said former regent Gracie Hatfield Hilton of Arlington. “It has not been a research institution. Research is great and fine and good — I am not opposed to it, but that is not what Baylor has traditionally been about.”

The key word? “Atmosphere.” There is “education,” then there is “atmosphere.” Two spheres. That’s the story.

I will eat my hat if someone comes up with — ahem — hard evidence of a public school teaching 10th graders how to put condoms on cucumbers. . . .

Posted by: Jeff Sharlet | December 5, 2004 05:14 AM

Sorry, but I have been on the road the last two days, down to an amazing Ethics & Public Policy Center mini-conference in Key West, Fla., entitled "Toward an Understanding of Religion, Politics and Public Life." Some of the materials from this — including large segments of White House speechwriter Michael Gerson’s talk on religion and presidential rhetoric — will be available online or in newsletters sooner or later. I seems that several of the two dozen mainstream journalists present have plans to write about one or more of the presentations at some time or another. Watch David Brooks and E.J. Dionne Jr. for starters.

But I did want to respond a bit to the earlier cucumbers and condoms thread, including the comment by The Revealer‘s Jeff Sharlet.

As I noted in the comments section, the Washington Post has weighed in on this story after it received quite a bit of attention from the Washington Times. So at this point, the reality of the controversy is no longer in question.

However, various reports — including the broadside from Maureen Dowd’s brother referenced earlier — debated a key fact in the story. What is the age of the cucumber-sheathing female in the public-education video? There may be an element of suburban legend to this.

For some people, it would seem inaccurately, she is a 10th-grade girl. The Post says she is a "young
woman." Another reference says it is a very young looking college student. The latter seems like the best bet to me, when you consider where these kinds of educational materials seem to originate.

In the Post, reporter Rebecca Dana describes how this Montgomery County (Md.) School Board controversy seems to be gaining strength (I am frantically seeking safe adjectives) rather than fading. Right in the lead, the story stresses that normal people — they don’t even have to be religious! — are upset about the cucumber-and-sexual-identity thing. Here is one of the key passages:

Under the changes, 10th-graders — except those whose parents opt them out of the sex-ed portion of the required high school health education class — will see a short video demonstrating how to apply a condom. Also added will be a one-week instructional segment on sexual identity, including discussions about
homosexuality and bisexuality. This segment, proposed for eighth- and 10th-grade health classes, will be tested in the spring at three middle schools and three high schools, not yet chosen.

The school board president, Sharon W. Cox (At Large), said the strong feedback was expected. "The response did not surprise me, either in its tenor or volume," she said.

Some people say the heat is related to the election results, of course. Maryland is a unique blend of ultra-red and ultra-blue zip codes. As the story notes, with a sniff: "In the region, some school districts do have leaner sex education curricula." In one nearby county they use a wooden phallus — no word on the type of wood — instead of a green vegetable. Just another day in real-world classrooms.

Stay tuned. I am sure the HBO special report (or Frontline) will be lively.

A decade ago, a sharp Harvard-educated think tank wonk named Stephen Bates wrote an important book — praised by everyone from E.J. Dionne Jr. to Father Richard John Neuhaus — that I still hear quoted in Beltway discussions from time to time.

It was called Battleground: One Mother’s Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of our Classrooms. Bates thought he would be on the side of the educational establishment. He ended up worried that American public schools are in danger — because educators cannot not get themselves to be fair to the religious conservatives in their desks. I cannot possibly do justice to the book in a few paragraphs. But here is a chunk of an interview I did with him at that time:

It speaks volumes, said Bates, that the educational establishment will accommodate so many other special interest groups, but not conservative Christians. Driving millions of people away from public schools will only increase support for the ultimate weapons in education battles — tax-funded tuition vouchers and school board takeovers, he said.

Thus, it undercuts education, and threatens religious liberty, when state officials attempt to woo children away from the religious beliefs of their parents.

“I’m afraid that public school leaders are cutting their own throats,” said Bates. “They are going to have to realize the importance of being sensitive to the beliefs of all kinds of faith groups — big, little or whatever — before it’s too late.”

I thought about Bates’ book while reading a Washington Post piece titled “Some Abstinence Programs Mistead Teens, Report Says.” Ceci Connolly’s report offers half of a very important story. I have no doubts whatsoever that this hit piece has unearthed some wonderfully wacky examples of religious-right influence in some abstinance-based sex education programs.

I also have no doubt that the conservatives behind some of the better programs have science that they can quote to back their arguments. This is another one of those reports in which it is assumed that every anecdote and statistic the progressives quote is accurate and every anecdote and statistic the traditionalists quote is wrong — with almost no details cited on the source of anything being quoted by anyone. The left could be using highly politicized studies funded by Planned Parenthood, for all we know. The right could be quoting Focus on the Family. Who knows?

You can read the details for yourself. Here is one of the key summaries, drawing on research pushed by the office of Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.):

Several million children ages 9 to 18 have participated in the more than 100 federal abstinence programs since the efforts began in 1999. Waxman’s staff reviewed the 13 most commonly used curricula — those used by at least five programs apiece.

The report concluded that two of the curricula were accurate but the 11 others, used by 69 organizations in 25 states, contain unproved claims, subjective conclusions or outright falsehoods regarding reproductive health, gender traits and when life begins. In some cases, Waxman said in an interview, the factual issues were limited to occasional misinterpretations of publicly available data; in others, the materials pervasively presented subjective opinions as scientific fact.

The story is simply loaded with statements sure to inspire hand-to-hand combat between apologists for the sexual revolution and apologists for, let’s say, Evangelical-Catholic-Muslim-Hindu traditions about the moral status of sex outside of marriage.

Back to Bates, for a moment. Here is the hard part of the issue the Post is trying to cover. How does an institution funded with tax dollars offer sex-education materials that say that sex outside of marriage is just peachy — or that it is sin, sin, sinful — without attacking the moral beliefs on one or the other side of this divide?

How do schools, and newspapers, treat both sides with respect? I would imagine that the progressives quoted in the Connolly piece would say she treated them fairly, while the conservatives scream bloody murder. If you want to hear what they would scream, you can read Maureen Dowd’s account of her Thanksgiving visit with the red-zone traditionalists in her family. At one point, she lets her brother Kevin — a salesman from Montgomery County, Md. — air some of his views about the 2004 election. He writes:

We do not live in a secular country. There are all sorts of people of faith that place moral values over personal freedoms. They are not all “wacky evangelicals.” . . . They don’t like being told that a young girl does not have to seek her mother’s counsel about an abortion. They don’t like seeing an eight-month-old fetus having his head punctured and his brains sucked out. They don’t like being told the Pledge of Allegiance, a moment of silent prayer and the words “under God” are offensive to an enlightened few so nobody should be allowed to use them. . . . My wife and I picked our sons’ schools based on three criteria: 1) moral values 2) discipline 3) religious maintenance — in that order. We have spent an obscene amount of money doing this and never regretted a penny. Last week on the news, I heard that the Montgomery County school board voted to include a class with a 10th-grade girl demonstrating how to put a
condom on a cucumber and a study of the homosexual lifestyle. The vote was 6-0. I feel better about the money all the time.

There you go. That’s the divide that Bates described so well in his book. It’s the divide that the Post failed to cover in its story on the Waxman report.

Rather than a series of separate blog items, here are three quick updates on recent items of interest (not including my finale — maybe — in the Incredibles paranoia trilogy).

First of all, Barnard College poli-sci professor Jeffrey Friedman has written a very level-headed essay in The New Republic responding to the “sneering” — that’s his word — New York Times piece about the hypocrisy of red-state voters who still like to watch trashy television shows, such as the neo-”City in the City” babes of Desperate Housewives.

Doug LeBlanc has already written on this Times piece, drawing some fine comments from readers. Still, Friedman updates the debate on several points. For starters, he really shows why it is time to drop all discussions of the red state-blue state divide, outside of specific issues linked to the Electoral College. You really have to talk about red counties and blue counties, or even zip codes. And the total number of “values voters” was actually rather small — even if strategic.

Enough already. Here is a major chunk of Friedman’s essay:

Pointing out instances of conservative hypocrisy has become something of a post-election pastime for liberals, and in this case, it might have some basis in fact, no matter how exaggerated the Times story made it seem — after all, there is surely at least some overlap between Bush values voters and Desperate Housewives fans. . . . Rather than attacking the specific policies promoted by values voters . . . the charge of hypocrisy attacks the voters themselves. But it’s an elementary point of logic that a claim’s validity is independent of the character of those who advocate it. A truth is a truth, no more or less true because of who believes it. The whole issue of hypocrisy, then, for all the importance it routinely assumes in political discourse, is a red herring.

If a professed atheist secretly worships God “just in case,” we’re entitled to say that he lacks the courage of his convictions. But we aren’t entitled to say that those convictions are false. God exists, or doesn’t exist, regardless of what any atheist secretly believes. The same goes for the beliefs of values voters: They are valid, or they aren’t, irrespective of whether a voter who believes in their validity succeeds in bringing them to bear when he turns on the TV set.

I think that is called “linear thought.” Bracing, isn’t it?

George F. Will has — surprise, surprise — weighed in on the issue of political liberalism on mainstream college and university campuses. Calling this revelation shocking is, he argues, a bit like a breaking news report with the headline: “Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find.” He also points toward information in a recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education that I will try to get my hands on (I do not have an online subscription). Meanwhile, here is a rather typically dry Will comment:

The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reports that in 2004, of the top five institutions in terms of employee per capita contributions to presidential candidates, the third, fourth and fifth were Time Warner, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft. The top two were the University of California system and Harvard, both of which gave about 19 times more money to John Kerry than to George W. Bush.

But George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley, denies that academic institutions are biased against conservatives. The disparity in hiring, he explains, occurs because conservatives are not as interested as liberals in academic careers. Why does he think liberals are like that? “Unlike conservatives, they believe in working for the public good and social justice.”

That clears that up.

I am fascinated by the surge of reporting on the fusion of Christmas and Hanukkah this year. As I mentioned earlier, I think there is more to this than timely public relations for online merchandise and a timely soap-opera news hook with The O.C.

Now, the topic has gone totally mainstream, with its own Associated Press report. How mainstream is this trend?

Kansas City-based Hallmark Cards Inc. says among its most popular categories of Hanukkah cards is the one that combines Jewish and Christian themes. The company tried the idea with just one card in the mid-90s; today they have four. . . .

American Greetings Corp. has also increased its Hanukkah-Christmas line offerings since its introduction eight years ago. There are around 10 this year. . . . Most of American Greetings’ Hanukkah-Christmas cards are humorous. . . . One shows three snowmen — two dressed in traditional winter hats and scarves, the third wearing a yarmulke and prayer shawl. Another features a list of Hanukkah songs that never caught on, including “Shlepping Through a Winter Wonderland,” “Bubbie Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and “Come On, Baby, Light My Menorah.”

“We don’t go over the line,” said Pam Fink, who works on Jewish-themed cards for American Greetings. “We’re careful to make sure it’s lighthearted funny, but not too far.”

Come On, Baby, Light My Menorah? I guess it depends on how one defines “baby.”

Let me open by getting a few comments out of the way, just to be careful.

I realize that the recent New York Times article titled “Republicans Outnumbered in Academia, Studies Find” contained few, if any, clear references to religious issues. Ditto for John Fund’s Wall Street Journal essay, “High Bias: It’s time to bring some intellectual diversity to America’s colleges and universities.”

Who cares? I still think there is a giant religion ghost hiding in the silence. Let me state, in anticipation of valid comments by some readers, that I would be the last person to automatically equate the word “Republican” with the word “Christian” or even “conservative.” I am well aware, as this blog constantly points out, that there are traditional religious believers — social-issue conservatives, even — who are political progressives and active in the Democratic Party (my new Democrats for Life T-shirt should arrive any day now). There are liberal believers and conservative believers in both major political parties.

Nevertheless, one would have to be blind not to see that there are more social-issues and religious conservatives among the Republicans these days than among the Democratics. It’s also hard not to notice — although many journalists continue to do so — the growing coalition of anti-fundamentalist voters that is throwing its weight around in Democratic Party. The Democrats are nervous about this.

In light of all of this, it’s easy to grasp the religious implications of new research about the ratio of Democrats/liberals to Republicans/conservatives on college and university campuses. This is one of those “Duh!” stories that has been rumbling around for decades. Writing in the Times, John Tierney offers this summary of some of the data:

One of the studies, a national survey of more than 1,000 academics, shows that Democratic professors outnumber Republicans by at least seven to one in the humanities and social sciences. That ratio is more than twice as lopsided as it was three decades ago, and it seems quite likely to keep  increasing, because the younger faculty members are more consistently Democratic than the ones nearing retirement, said Daniel Klein, an associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University and a co-author of the study.

In a separate study of voter registration records, Professor Klein found a nine-to-one ratio of Democrats to Republicans on the faculties of Berkeley and Stanford. That study, which included professors from the hard sciences, engineering and professional schools as well as the humanities and social sciences, also found the ratio especially lopsided among the younger professors of assistant or associate rank: 183 Democrats versus six Republicans.

There’s plenty of other amazing numbers where those came from.

Sure enough, this issue is serving as a rallying point for the right — with the omnipresent former leftist David Horowitz leading the charge on behalf of his new Students for Academic Freedom network. The goal is to find a way promote diversity, of all things, while stopping short of affirmative-action campaigns for political and moral conservatives. It’s especially interesting to note the number of conservative scholars who have eventually settled into jobs far from the bloody and political tenure wars.

While you’re at it, note the references to “conservative” scholars who quickly point out that they are Libertarian conservatives. This also points toward deep fears of being labeled as “religious conservatives” — the kiss of death. You also see this rush to embrace the Libertarian label among Republicans in Hollywood.

Actually, there is one clearly religious quotation in Tierney’s piece — which completely avoids any discussion of the hottest moral and cultural issues that divide America and the academic fields that relate to them. Is it possible that these academic kingdoms have now defined themselves in opposition to traditional religious beliefs? One scholar thinks so.

“Our colleges have become less marketplaces of ideas than churches in which you have to be a true believer to get a seat in the pews,” said Stephen H. Balch, a Republican and the president of the National Association of Scholars. “We’ve drifted to a secular version of 19th-century denominational colleges, in which the university’s mission is to crusade against sin and make the country a morally better place.”

Fund’s note covers a lot of the same territory, but goes on to note one or two religious issues that have obvious political implications. Thus, Jewish students at Columbia University claim that they are facing discrimination at the hands of anti-Israel professors. Students have reported professors making statements such as “the Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the new Nazi.”

Finally, Fund notes that there are leaders in the academic establishment — conservatives are the new rebels — who do not believe they are involved in “group think” or the crushing of free speech. Perhaps they believe they are merely engaged in quality control?

Robert Brandon, a Duke University philosophy professor, is one liberal who has at least made an effort to explain why conservatives are seldom seen in academia. “We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill’s analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican Party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia.”

Then again, perhaps this another sign that the toughest issues in American life are linked to faith, salvation and the sexual revolution, although perhaps not in that order. Those seeking more information on these topics can dig into the files of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or read one of my Scripps Howard columns about these conflicts.