1 Faith and Learning in Higher Education: Historical Reflections for Orthodox Scholars Today Andrea Sterk University of Florida

Faith and Learning in Higher Education: Historical Reflections for Orthodox Scholars Today Andrea Sterk University of Florida Consultation of the Orthodox Theological Society in America and the Office of Vocation & Ministry, Hellenic College Cenacle Retreat Center, Chicago, Illinois June 12, 2008 Before I begin my formal presentation, I’d like to situate myself and say something about the thrust of my comments. Although not myself Orthodox, I have been very much influenced by the Orthodox tradition. In my thinking as a historian of Christianity I have particularly particularly benefited from the work of Father Georges Florovsky and Father John Meyendorff, among other prominent Orthodox historians and theologians. With regard to pedagogical experience, I have had the privilege to teach in a variety of institutional settings: a Presbyterian seminary, a small Christian liberal arts college, a Catholic university, and now in a history department at a large public research university. I am aware of the diversity of institutions and departments represented here, but my remarks will be especially geared to those who teach or do their scholarship in (or for) a largely secular academic context—although I trust my reflections will be relevant to a broader audience of Christian academics. Finally, I am certainly not an expert on the issues I’ll be addressing tonight but rather a fellow pilgrim in this journey through the academic life; so most of my remarks are intended to spur further thought and discussion as we have much to learn from each other. Higher Education in the 21st Century: Some Challenges and Possible Responses My reflections begin not with history but with the contemporary situation of the academy in the 21st century. What are some of the major challenges that academics—teachers and scholars, believers as well as unbelievers—face toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century? Some of these are intellectual challenges arising largely from within the academic milieu; others are social and economic challenges, largely imposed from outside the academy, but have just as serious ramifications and are just as important for our consideration as academics, especially academics of religious conviction, as the intellectual challenges we face. For many committed Christian scholars—especially for those who work in the humanities—the most obvious challenge that comes to mind is post-modernism (though I hesitate to use this as a monolithic term). The deconstruction of texts and meaning, an emphasis on subjectivity, and the contingency of all truth pose obvious challenges to Christian scholars. Many Orthodox academics, however, have ignored postmodernism; others have responded positively by embracing some of its methodological perspectives while at the same time affirming the reality and complexity of Christian metanarrative.1 However, even for Christian scholars who have found constructive ways to negotiate the labyrinth of postmodern approaches 1 to their disciplines, incorporating its insights while eschewing certain of its underlying foundational assumptions about truth, it is important to recognize that postmodern thinking undergirds many of the structures of our institutions of higher education and affects the undergraduate curriculum as a whole. Particularly disturbing is the postmodern emphasis on fragmentation, bricolage, lack of methodology in the various disciplines. A good example of the eclecticism that characterizes much post-modern scholarship is the work of the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, though not, strictly speaking, a post-modernist. A recent review (in the Times Literary Supplement) describes his books as: …disheveled collages of ideas, ranging from Kant to computer science, St. Augustine to Agatha Christie. There seems to be nothing in heaven or earth that is not grist to his intellectual mill. One digression spawns another until the author seems as unclear as the reader about what he was suppose to be arguing…In typically postmodern style, his work leaps impudently over the frontiers between high and popular culture, swerving in the course of a paragraph from Kierkegaard to Mel Gibson. Trained as a philosopher in Ljubljana and Paris, he is a film buff, psychoanalytical theorist, amateur theologian and political analyst…2 The description of his work continues at length in much the same vein. If Žižek himself is “a strenuous thinker,” as the reviewer claims, and his books “lucid in style” with “prose that is crisp and consumer friendly” despite his postmodern method, the same certainly cannot be said of much that passes as postmodern scholarship today. While an emphasis on interdisciplinarity has certainly enriched scholarship in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, one wonders how the emphasis on fragmentation has affected teaching and learning when placed in the hands of academics less astute or less well-trained than Žižek or other scholars of his caliber. This postmodern emphasis on fragmentation coincides with what is a broader trend and perhaps a more pernicious threat to the academy, namely the lack of cohesiveness in higher education. As some have put it, in our increasingly narrow areas of specialization we have gradually shifted from the notion of a university to a multi-versity. Despite paying lipservice to interdisciplinarity in many institutions, the disciplines remain fragmented and nothing really ties things together. We have lost the idea that various branches of knowledge ought to cohere, and we have lost the value and even the notion of the humanities altogether; indeed the very concept of the human comes into question. A second challenge is the diminishing role of higher education in society. The university is clearly taken much less seriously than it once was. While one may disagree with some arguments of John Sommerville regarding the “decline” of the secular university, the title of his recent book, I believe he has rightly analyzed the changing status of higher education in the U.S.3 Universities are becoming increasingly marginalized in terms of their influence in American society. They do not provide the leadership in politics and culture that they once did, and even in the sciences universities increasingly hire their labs out to business and government with the goal of gaining patents. There has also been a shift toward vocational and professional education rather than the traditional liberal arts curriculum. Perhaps the decreasing status of the university in American society is one of the reasons that higher education, especially public education, has been so hard hit by the economic crises of our day. This leads me to another challenge to the academy in the first decade of the 21st century, namely economic strains and their effects. While many public as well as private universities and colleges have been affected by the general economic decline, my own university has been 2 particularly hard hit. The University of Florida is in the midst of a $47 million budget cut. A large percentage of the cuts are coming in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and most of these cuts are in the humanities. A little over a month ago the university announced that graduate programs would be suspended (including philosophy), departments such as German and French would be merged into a department of modern languages, and multiple staff and 18 untenured faculty were laid off – all of these in the humanities and primarily in languages. Yet the university also announced that it had made these difficult decisions without jeopardizing “the core mission of the university,” a statement which left many of us bewildered. In any case, there is no end to these strains in sight, and we need to be aware of such trends in the academy as a whole and prepared to respond to them in our particular institutional settings. Some of these challenges I’ve described are unique to the U.S. in the twenty-first century, but questions of how Christians should view learning and the very purpose of higher education have long been issues of debate among scholars. So, how might we as Christian scholars and teachers respond to these and other challenges facing higher education in our day? Before considering some models from the past, I’d like to highlight three types of responses that I believe are fairly typical – both today and throughout history: The first is a response of antagonism. This is a typical response of some evangelical scholars who lament the “decline” of the secular university or pose an us/them dichotomy with regard to Christians and the academy. But this is not just an evangelical mindset. There are many examples of Christian scholars throughout history being antagonistic toward the ideals if not specific institutions of higher education. Tertullian is typical in his famous diatribe, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” or the tension between the so-called rigorists (most often monks) and the laxists (most often scholars) in Byzantine history. The rigorists, of course, were characterized by a more antagonistic response to higher education. At times Christians expressed more of a caution than an antagonism toward pagan culture. St. Basil, for example, considered the ancient classics as part and parcel of an educated Christian’s formation but was careful to warn: “You should not surrender to these men once for all the rudders of your mind.”4 In general, however, the Orthodox tradition has had a relatively positive outlook on learning. A second response is withdrawal. Withdrawal comes in various forms and is perhaps a more widespread response among Christian academics. In some cases, we carefully frame our scholarly subjects to avoid controversy, perhaps publishing only in “safe” journals. For others, withdrawal is not as much a retreat from challenging intellectual ideas as a withdrawal from administrative work, decision making, the petty debates and rivalries that mark our departments or our educational institutions as a whole. We want to crawl into our shells and pursue our own scholarly agendas, our own work, leave the fighting to others.

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