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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   32702 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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More realistically, it's just an attack on the existence of religious colleges at all. Which is shameful.

Specifically, religious colleges can (and do) use faith statements to effectively exclude homosexuals from professorships. Their position is essentially "There's nothing wrong with being homosexual, it's just that you have to sign a statement saying that you won't do sinful things, like have homosexual sex." This is why organizations like the American Philosophical Association changed their anti-discrimination language to something like:

This includes both discrimination on the basis of status and discrimination on the basis of conduct integrally connected to that status, where "integrally connected” means (a) the conduct is a normal and predictable expression of the status (e.g., sexual conduct expressive of a sexual orientation, conduct expressive of a disability status), or (b) the conduct is something that only a person with that status could engage in (e.g., pregnancy), or (c) the proscription of that conduct is historically and routinely connected with invidious discrimination against the status (e.g., interracial marriage).

In other words, it's not enough to say "we accept everyone as long as they live up to our religious standards"--you have to accept everyone, and their "integrally connected" behaviors, too, even though the failure modes of such a requirement are probably easy to imagine. Anyway, as a consequence, some religious colleges lost the ability to advertise jobs in APA publications.

Progressives dominate academia, by a wide margin. It's pretty important to them to keep the door slammed very firmly in the face of possible competitors to that monopoly on propagandizing America's young adults (and is probably also why they tend to be in favor of pushing "college for everyone" even when the economics of such a thing make no sense).

It would be... interesting... to see how all this might interact with a Muslim-sponsored university, but there aren't many of those in the US. (Yet?)

And with the exception of a few institutions like Notre Dame, I can't imagine a scenario where a person applies to various institutions and the least expensive or most prestigious option, or even the option with the best cost-to-benefit ratio, is a religious college.

BYU is both highly ranked and quite affordable

I assume you meant to reply to @urquan, since that is who you're quoting. But you're right:

Notre Dame and BYU are far from the only well-respected religious university in the U.S. Notre Dame is far from the only well-respected Catholic university in the U.S. Georgetown is technically Catholic, Marquette and Gonzaga and Loyola as well. They don't seem to care much about homosexual conduct though, as far as I can tell.

Southern Methodist... it's in the name. Pepperdine is affiliated with the Church of Christ. Pepperdine as well as Baylor (Baptist) have codes of conduct that exclude homosexual sex, though they otherwise seem happy to use progressive-approved language in discussing sexual identitarianism. I have no idea how serious they are about enforcement, though.

But most of the schools I just named are "top 100 national universities" in the US News rankings.

That's a fair summary.

And BYU is another university like Notre Dame that strikes me as quite willing to compromise on values for tuition money, though I understand they do have a large student population that is practicing LDS. My mind skips BYU sometimes because I'm not from that part of the country and have no connections to the Mormon community; but my understanding is it's right on the edge between being a relatively prestigious university and being a finishing school for the children of elite LDS members. And I didn't even realize Georgetown was historically Catholic -- and, I mean, Yale and Harvard were historically religous, but no one would confuse them for Bible College.

But to be clear, my point isn't that religious universities are bad — far from it, I have friends and family embedded in religious colleges. My parents met each other at one. But my position is that they're typically worse in comparative terms especially when accounting for the other institutions that are likely to have accepted a particular applicant for admission, when the explicitly religious nature of the college is excluded, and particularly if we're being practical and evaluating public universities in the calculus. I don't include colleges that are willing to sell out their faith for prestige in the definition of a religious institution, especially since they won't be willing to enforce faith standards that are the topic of this discussion. I suppose time will tell whether BYU, Pepperdine, Baylor, and Notre Dame end up sliding more or less in that direction.

as quite willing to compromise on values for tuition money,

Do they? I would have thought they were heavily subsidized.

BYU is absolutely not willing to compromise on values for tuition money and requires a pastor’s letter of recommendation regardless of denomination.

I have no idea how serious they are about enforcement, though.

Given that I can't remember any media frenzies about students being disciplined for having gay sex, I can conclude that the level of enforcement is somewhere between zero and zero.

BYU is affordable if you are mormon. If you are not, it is not actually a good deal.

It looks like it's 13000 per year for non-Mormons. That's not bad, though there exist other options for similar prices.

Ah, that’s an angle on it I hadn’t considered: it’s an attempt to aid PhD’s in finding a job.

I’m definitely of the opinion that we have way too many people with postgraduate degrees and at least half the people we graduate from those programs, let alone initially admit, don’t belong there. Not always because they’re not bright enough or capable, but because education is an occupational credential and we need to get some of the bright young people pursuing doctorates to instead work towards more socially-beneficial pursuits.

But then again I’m someone whose preferred model of the university involves more teaching than research, and believes that popular historians spreading relatively-accurate knowledge of history to a wide audience serve a much more important social function than historians writing boring monographs called “Catchy Title: Socially-Preferred Groups and the Function of Particular Economic Force in Time Period Place, Oddly Specific Year to Round Number Year.”

I think this is primarily about controlling the culture of education. There are a lot of religious schools in MN and there is a lot of tension between them and the DFL. See also the ban on banning books that doesn't actually ban banning books.

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