Erskine is adamant that its professors be Christians and that they believe that the Bible does not err. The Employee Resource Handbook states, “Erskine employs as new faculty members only Christians who have consented in writing to the Philosophy of Christian Higher Education statement, including its definition of an evangelical Christian, and the appropriate College or Seminary Mission Statement.”

In what ways should the doctrine of academic freedom apply to colleges that have an explicitly creedal mission? It is an old question. The founders of the American Association of University Professors answered it concisely in their founding statement, the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure:

If a church or religious denomination establishes a college to be governed by a board of trustees, with the express understanding that the college will be used as an instrument of propaganda in the interests of the religious faith professed by the church or denomination creating it, the trustees have a right to demand that everything be subordinated to that end.

In effect, the AAUP at its beginning drew a sharp line between religious colleges and secular ones and focused on academic freedom as exclusively an issue at secular institutions.

The AAUP softened this stance in its 1940 in its revised “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.” There it added:

Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institutions should be clearly stated in writing at the time of appointment.

This surely implies that by 1940 the AAUP had changed its mind: religious colleges can have “academic freedom” of some sort, as long as they are explicit about the areas excluded from the doctrine.

The AAUP’s 1940 statement, however, was purposely vague. Far from settling the question of how religious colleges can or should protect academic freedom, it set up an ambiguity that has repeatedly led to confrontations. Another such case has just come to light. The AAUP has written a letter to Erskine College on behalf of a faculty member who was apparently fired for his public repudiation of the tenets of faith that the college upholds.

What Happened at Erskine

As typically happens with cases such as this, the facts are shrouded in non-disclosure, elliptical statements, exaggerations, and sometimes deliberate distortion. Erskine College isn’t saying that it fired the professor for his rejection of its faith; and the AAUP so far is sticking to its usual approach of complaining about procedural irregularities. But the press and some bloggers are confident that they have the real story. And they may be right. The facts as they appear in that light are:

William Crenshaw was a tenured English professor who was first suspended on August 12 and then fired on September 7 after teaching at the college for 35 years. The only reason that is publicly available comes from an email that the Erskine College president sent to Crenshaw on August 23 saying that, “The College cannot permit you to hold your position on an active basis and while doing so [permit you to] encourage people to quit donating to Erskine and to quit sending their kids to Erskine.”

Behind this, however, lie Crenshaw’s voluble attacks on the college’s religious positions. In the most widely quoted of Crenshaw’s dissents, he wrote on a Facebook page:

Science is the litmus test on the validity of the educational enterprise. If a school teaches real science, it’s a pretty safe bet that all other departments are sound. If it teaches bogus science, everything else is suspect…. I want a real college, not one that rejects facts, knowledge, and understanding because they conflict with a narrow religious belief. Any college that lets theology trump fact is not a college; it is an institution of indoctrination. It teaches lies. Colleges do not teach lies. Period.

This has led to bloggers, such as David Drumm, headlining his account of the incident, “Erskine College Professor Fired for Supporting Science.”

That pretty clearly falls into the category of distortion. Erskine may have fired Crenshaw for rejecting the college’s religious positions, but that surely isn’t the same as firing him for “supporting science.” It is Crenshaw, not Erskine College, who seems to think that religious faith and scientific inquiry are incompatible.

The story jumped to a higher level of visibility this week when Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed reported on the AAUP’s involvement.

The Gadfly

Erskine, a small South Carolina college, is defined by its sectarian identity. Founded by the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, the college’s mission puts specific emphasis on “a Christ-centered learning environment” and “biblical truth.” The college has fewer than fifty faculty members, so it seems likely that Crenshaw’s dissenting voice was conspicuous within the community.

Crenshaw styled himself a gadfly, teaching courses such as “How to Become a Dangerous Person,” challenging students with creationist views to provide proofs for their beliefs, and insisting on the priority of scientific evidence over biblical doctrine.

One Inside Higher Ed article from last year quotes an Erskine student who called Crenshaw “the most extreme example” of faculty members who “openly oppose or evade the integration of Christian faith with learning.” According to the most recent IHE piece, bloggers from Erskine’s denomination took umbrage at some of Crenshaw’s online statements about science, including the one quoted above.

“Facts, knowledge, and understanding” are indeed important in higher education’s lessons on pursuing the truth. But they need not be diametrically opposed to religion. (Full disclosures: We are both members of a Presbyterian church, though not Erskine’s denomination.) Faith and science can indeed clash, but they don’t have to and many of such supposed conflicts can be resolved without injury to either faith or reason.

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About the Authors
Ashley Thorne is the director of communications for the National Association of Scholars. She writes frequently about issues in higher education at www.nas.org. She received her undergraduate degree in politics, philosophy, and economics from The King’s College in 2007. In 2010 she published a chapter, “Ducking the Coffins: How I Became an Edu-Con,” in an anthology edited by Jonah Goldberg, Proud to Be Right.

Peter Wood is the president of the National Association of Scholars. He is the author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003) which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from the John Locke Foundation. He is a graduate of Haverford College, Rutgers University, and the University of Rochester, from which he received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987. He previously served as provost of The King’s College in New York City, and as associate provost and the president’s chief of staff at Boston University, where he was also a tenured member of the anthropology department. His essays on American culture have appeared in The National Review Online, Partisan Review, Frontpage Magazine, Minding the Campus, The Claremont Review of Books, The American Conservative, Society and other journals.

Editor’s Note: For those readers not familiar with the National Association of Scholars (from which this article is taken) we are including the following information from the NAS website:

NAS is an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities.

NAS was founded in 1987, soon after Allan Bloom’s surprise best-seller, The Closing of the American Mind, alerted Americans to the ravages wrought by illiberal ideologies on campus. The founders of NAS summoned faculty members from across the political spectrum to help defend the core values of liberal education.

The NAS today is higher education’s most vigilant watchdog. We stand for intellectual integrity in the curriculum, in the classroom, and across the campus—and we respond when colleges and universities fall short of the mark. We uphold the principle of individual merit and oppose racial, gender, and other group preferences. And we regard the Western intellectual heritage as the indispensable foundation of American higher education.