From the WSJ Opinion Archives
HOUSES OF WORSHIP
Harvard Loses Its Edge
Nixing a religion requirement will hurt the university.
"As Harvard University goes, so goes American higher education," runs the old adage. And in certain cases it is true. In the late 1940s, for instance, the university helped remake the American college curriculum with the document General Education in a Free Society, the report that launched a thousand Western Civilization courses.
This fall Harvard had another opportunity to reshape American higher education. In a report released in October, the university's Task Force on General Education recommended adding a required course on "Reason and Faith" to the undergraduate core curriculum. Noting that religion "is a fact of twenty-first-century life--around the world and right at home," the report proposed something revolutionary in Ivy League America, namely a religion requirement for every undergraduate.
By placing religion at the center of undergraduate education, the task force paid tribute to the growing number of Harvard faculty who explore the sacred in their classrooms. From Robert Orsi's evocative work in American religious history to Mary Jo Bane's research on faith and public policy, the university is home to some of the leading religion scholars in the world.
Building on the foundation laid by the likes of Mr. Orsi and Ms. Bane, the "Reason and Faith" requirement was presented as a way to "help students become more informed and reflective citizens." In a world where faith shapes everything from international relations to presidential elections, it is hard to argue with the idea that everybody ought to know something about religion.
Yet that is exactly what Harvard's faculty did. At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, only religion scholar Diana Eck spoke out in favor of the proposal. In a stinging piece in the Harvard Crimson, the psychologist Steven Pinker argued that the persistence of religion is "an American anachronism . . . in an era in which the rest of the West is moving beyond it." By ignoring the salience of faith to most of the world's population, Mr. Pinker inadvertently demonstrated the need for a course in religion. A visit to virtually any African nation (or Paris suburb, for that matter) would quickly dispel the notion that America is alone in its piety.
In any case, the religion requirement failed to carry the day. Last week the task force announced that it had withdrawn the "Reason and Faith" course proposal, replacing it with a requirement on "what it means to be a human being." If, as Stanley Fish argues, religion is where the action is in academia, Harvard failed to act.
One of the places where the action may be heading is Princeton University, home of the Center for the Study of Religion. Established in 2001 to explore what director Robert Wuthnow calls "the most understudied social phenomenon of the 20th century," the center has sponsored freshman seminars and advanced courses in history, sociology, philosophy, English, art, theater and dance, anthropology, and East Asian studies. At the time of its founding, Princeton's president, Harold Shapiro, said that he knew of "no other institution in the United States pursuing efforts as interdisciplinary and wide-ranging."
Another institution to watch is UCLA, home to a massive study on "Spirituality in Higher Education" led by Alexander and Helen Astin of the Higher Education Research Institute. Through a national survey of 112,000 undergraduates, the Astins' project has documented strong student interest in spirituality and religion. Responding to this demand, UCLA is creating a National Institute on Integrating Spirituality into the Campus Curriculum and Cocurriculum. According to Mr. Astin, the most cited higher-education researcher in America, "spirituality deserves a central place in liberal education."
In recent years higher education has enjoyed what Alan Wolfe calls a "welcome revival of religion." Princeton and UCLA are two of the many universities where there has been renewed interest in religious scholarship. While Harvard has made a significant contribution to this domain, its influence is far weaker than one would expect of an institution with a $29 billion endowment. The fact that the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame has a larger faculty than the Harvard Divinity School says something about the resources Harvard has devoted to religion.
The late David Riesman once argued that America's elite universities are at the "head of a snake-like procession" of schools. The procession may be starting to take religion seriously as a subject of study, but Harvard won't be leading it.
Mr. Schmalzbauer teaches in the Religious Studies Department at Missouri State University.
