Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America.

EXILES FROM EDEN 

Religion and the Academic Vocation in America

Mark R. Schwehn

Oxford University Press, $19.95, 141 pp.

The central metaphor of this volume on the connection between religion and the academic vocation is drawn from anthropologist Clifford Geertz's suggestion that most academics start their careers "at the center of things" and then find employment by "moving toward the edges...lower down or further out." Geertz calls this phenomenon the "exile from Eden syndrome."

But what would one make of a scholar who intentionally left a tenured position at a prestigious secular university (Chicago) in order to take up teaching at a much smaller, religiously committed university (Valparaiso), as the author of this book did? Schwehn notes the irony that nothing in his reading of Genesis 1-3 had led him to consider edenic the University of Chicago, at best a paradise lost. But why Valparaiso? Surely not because the university's name, "vale of paradise." adequately encompasses its reality. Surely not because it has the financial resources of its more prestigious neighbor to the north. The principal reason for his move from Chicago to Valparaiso, says Schwehn, was that he "found [he] could pursue [his] own sense of the academic vocation more fully and responsibly at Valparaiso than at Chicago."

Schwehn's powerful essay on the academic vocation explains not simply why this voluntary exile was appropriate for him, but also why it is essential to reconnect religion and higher education in America. The central burden of his argument is "not to explain, much less to justify" this connection, but "to account for how we could ever have lost sight of it." Among the chief culprits are the European philosophers of "enlightened" secular rationalism such as David Hume, who remained blind to the relationship between spirituality and learning. Or the German sociologist, Max Weber, whose programmatic 1918 essay, "Wissenschaft als Beruf," Schwehn explores at length and in subtle depth as a radical transmutation of the religious vocabulary of the Reformation. Or even former Harvard President Derek Bok, whose ruminations in 1986 to the Board of Overseers of his university falsely contrasted the duty of scholars to make and transmit knowledge with the inability of Harvard's faculty to help students learn how to "become more mature, morally perceptive human beings" and thus lead "ethical, fulfilling lives." Or Allan Bloom's book a year later, The Closing of the American Mind, with its trenchant criticism of the drift and rootlessness in much of modern American higher education, but without anything like the subtlety of understanding of the connection between vision and virtue that Schwehn persuasively argues can be found in religious community.

Schwehn deftly analyzes what these disparate sources of our current malaise in higher education have in common: a rejection of the connection that higher learning must have with religion in order to flourish. Put more positively, he reappropriates the language of the spiritual virtues to develop a compelling alternative account of the academic calling. Among these virtues are humility, faith, self-denial, charity, friendship, and justice. Aware that many might wonder what these virtues have to do with academics they have known or with faculty meetings they recently attended, I simply urge these skeptics to read Schwehn's perceptive commentary on the link between these virtues and the academic life well lived.

Schwehn mentions several times the golden rule of hermeneutics proposed by literary critic Wayne Booth ("Read as you would have others read you; listen as you would have others listen to you"). More to the point, he exemplifies this rule by offering a charitable reading of those he subjects to the rigors of his criticism, including Hume, Weber, Bok, and Bloom. He esteems each of his opponents---or better, his partners in dialogue--and he appreciates their contributions in the very act of dissecting the flaws of their claims. Thus the virtues of the Enlightenment are not overlooked, but its vices are identified as the defects of its virtues. He takes seriously the claim of the Enlightenment to find a better path to truth in reason than in religion, acknowledging that passionate religious commitments have led to destructive tribalism and violence. But he notes with equal force the evil of secular totalitarian regimes of the Left and the Right that have left behind human carnage by the millions in our own century.

By avoiding a tendentious selectivity of historical data, Schwehn reaches conclusions that are compelling precisely because they do not exceed the warrant of the evidence he adduces. So when he announces his own leap of faith, it seems quite reasonable by comparison to the secularist dogma that the risks of reviving religious conflict are too great. "Remove the notion that theism should seek to achieve consensus about the good, and the specter about reviving religious conflict largely disappears .... Suppose...that theism has been and will continue to be responsible for cultivating and sustaining the very virtues that make productive study of and conversation among rival conceptions of the good possible. To the extent that this is true, the risks of weakening the great religious traditions are too great."

Exiles from Eden is not a vindication of the value of church-related colleges at the expense of secular colleges and universities, but a volume that university administrators in both religious and secular settings could usefully give their faculty colleagues to help restore a better sense of the purpose of theft academic vocation. Schwehn's broad conception of the role of teaching in the academic vocation is masterly, enabling scholars to overcome theft commonly felt alienation from contact with real students as a distraction at best from their "real work" of research and publication.

This point could have been strengthened by widening the scope of inquiry to include at least a passing reference to the fact that the overwhelming majority of teachers in America are not employed in colleges at all, let alone in prestigious research universities that operate on a mechanical approach to the "publish or perish" rule, with all the dangers of excessive specialization, intellectualization, and disenchantment. They teach children and teen-agers in the nation's elementary and secondary schools. By all reports, many--some say most--of these teachers do an inadequate job. Schwehn's understanding of teaching as a true calling or vocation has profound implications for one of the most troubling social policies in America today, the lamentable state of the education of our youth. If it strains credulity to think of the University of Chicago as edenic, it is all the more fanciful to imagine that teachers' colleges are paradisiacal. But Schwehn passes over in silence the even more massive "exile from Eden" of hundreds of thousands of elementary and secondary teachers who are anything but delighted to be in their classrooms. We are left with only the vaguest hint of a connection between his understanding of the vocation of teaching and the larger problem of effective teaching in our society. When Schwehn writes that "All academics are exiles from Eden," he really means all college profs, even though he acknowledges the problem of the formation and deformation of most eighteen-year-olds before they get to college as a "most troubling" question. Schwehn appears innocent of one of John Silber's rare funny comments, that "we had to invent the term 'postsecondary' because we no longer had an adequate answer to the question, higher than what?" Focused exclusively on postsecondary education, this volume does not directly address the "rising tide of mediocrity" in American education that was decried bootiessly in the early years of the Reagan era, that remained unchanged by the "Education President," George Bush, and that does not even now seem urgent to the reinvestment strategies of the new president.

Exiles from Eden is a compelling argument both for the restoration of religion in the understanding and practice of the academic vocation in general and for the more particular efforts of religious communities to transmit their convictions in the setting of modern higher education. It is especially urgent at a time when several institutions of higher learning---including several Catholic colleges and universities--have experienced a failure of nerve or a loss of rootedness in their religious traditions, and therefore an adequate reason for their continued existence.