{"id":29209,"date":"2014-02-17T15:33:41","date_gmt":"2014-02-17T20:33:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=29209"},"modified":"2014-02-17T17:39:39","modified_gmt":"2014-02-17T22:39:39","slug":"sounding-the-secularist-alarm-at-byu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2014\/02\/sounding-the-secularist-alarm-at-byu\/","title":{"rendered":"Sounding the Secularist Alarm at BYU"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ralph Hancock has a provocative article<\/a> in the March edition of First Things in which he raises concerns about the specialization\/secularization he sees occurring at Brigham Young University:<\/p>\n

“For some decades, BYU had managed a compromise\u00a0between the academic mainstream and its own\u00a0aspiration to a distinctive mission. [While encouraging excellence in the scholarly communities\u00a0in which we participate,\u00a0leaders have also]\u00a0urged the faculty to\u00a0resist hyper-specialization, by which we seek merely\u00a0to ‘imitate others or win their approval,’ and instead\u00a0to assume the responsibility of ‘those educated and\u00a0spiritual and wise [to] sort, sift, prioritize, integrate,\u00a0and give some sense of wholeness… to great eternal\u00a0truths.’ But the machinery of specialization was already\u00a0in place, and it has only accelerated.<\/p>\n

“While\u00a0the mainstream academic\u00a0suppression of all questions of\u00a0transcendent purpose and of associated\u00a0moral limits was taken\u00a0as a given across the disciplines,\u00a0and while most researchers and teachers deferred intellectually,\u00a0in their specialized professional capacities,\u00a0to the authority of a rationalist and reductionist\u00a0framework of understanding, they were not for the\u00a0most part concerned to draw the moral, political, and\u00a0religious implications. The authority of a reductionist\u00a0scientism and an ethic of limitless personal freedom\u00a0grew steadily in the human sciences and humanities,\u00a0but most BYU professors were happy to consider\u00a0their scientific or scholarly work as ‘value-neutral’ and to compartmentalize their religious and moral\u00a0beliefs in a ‘private’ domain supposedly exempt\u00a0from the ordering paradigm of their discipline. Even\u00a0the relatively few professors knowingly committed to\u00a0the moral and political implications of the secular\u2013progressive paradigm often felt no urgent need to\u00a0convert less enlightened students.”<\/p>\n

This trend toward specialization\/secularization, he argues, has left professors and students at BYU less capable of\u00a0countering “liberationist\u00a0or reductionist arguments by critiquing\u00a0fundamental ideas”:<\/p>\n

“One student remarked to me: ‘I\u00a0have noticed in my classes that it is almost taboo to\u00a0defend a conservative position on issues that align\u00a0with church doctrine. I feel like I am being bold by\u00a0stating my opinion on issues that are supported by\u00a0the doctrine. I wonder if other students feel similarly.’\u00a0Without engaging the ideas underlying the moral and\u00a0political forces of secular progressivism, BYU can\u00a0only cooperate by default with the dominant movement.\u00a0To acquiesce to the authority of the secular academic\u00a0establishment is effectively to endorse it and to\u00a0bolster it, even if most do not intend this effect.”<\/p>\n

The stakes, he argues, are crucial:<\/p>\n

“The tragic result of BYU\u2019s movement from its\u00a0distinctive, countercultural mission is that many\u00a0good young Latter-day Saints feel that they have to\u00a0choose between being thoughtful, reasonable, and\u00a0well-informed and being loyal to fundamental moral\u00a0and religious principles. Happily, many faculty provide\u00a0living counterexamples to this generalization,\u00a0but few take up the task of providing an intellectual\u00a0alternative. The secular culture intimidates some of\u00a0the best of the rising generation by presenting them\u00a0with this alternative: You can be counted among the\u00a0smart people, or you can cling to your groundless\u00a0and cruel prejudices. BYU shows little interest in articulating\u00a0a third choice: an intellectual defense of\u00a0openness to unfashionable truths.”<\/p>\n

He predicts that a breaking point is on the horizon, concluding that “[t]o preserve what remains\u00a0of BYU\u2019s legacy and to build a truly distinctive and\u00a0enduring university on this foundation of openness to\u00a0Truth will require much of BYU\u2019s faculty and administration\u00a0in the very near future.”<\/p>\n

As a philosophical matter, I think Hancock is right to point to the passivity of contemporary academics in the face of a technological culture in which a naive empiricism has fostered an increasingly specialized and reductive intellectual order. Assuming a \u201cvalue neutral” method, many scholars today–particularly those bent on reducing all aspects of academic life to one form of quantitative research or another–reject out of hand as uninteresting and irrelevant most fundamental questions of purpose, meaning and ethics. This development is exacerbated by the growing specialization that continues to narrow the focus of professional researchers, further limiting these scholars’ areas of expertise. Moreover, by ignoring the limits of the kinds of claims that can be made on the basis of their methodological findings, many scholars have become increasingly oblivious to the actual need to ground their claims at all. To foster the broader range of discussion that BYU desires, I think it is key to keep these limits at the center of the conversation and to highlight the enormous significance that religious, moral and ethical understanding provide to the foundation of spiritual and intellectual life.<\/p>\n

That said, I think the portrait that Hancock paints at times feels somewhat reductionist. \u00a0I’m often left wondering what exactly he means when he uses the terms “liberal,” “secular,” and “progressive,” and I believe there is a danger in asserting that the appropriate political and social response to the ungrounded aspects of contemporary academics is expressed in the confrontation of impoverished versions of today\u2019s conservative and liberal ideologies. I think it actually behooves us to avoid holding the restored gospel hostage to these or any other transient ideological constructs.<\/p>\n

Please keep comments respectful and on topic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ralph Hancock has a provocative article in the March edition of First Things in which he raises concerns about the specialization\/secularization he sees occurring at Brigham Young University: “For some decades, BYU had managed a compromise\u00a0between the academic mainstream and its own\u00a0aspiration to a distinctive mission. [While encouraging excellence in the scholarly communities\u00a0in which we participate,\u00a0leaders have also]\u00a0urged the faculty to\u00a0resist hyper-specialization, by which we seek merely\u00a0to ‘imitate others or win their approval,’ and instead\u00a0to assume the responsibility of ‘those educated and\u00a0spiritual and wise [to] sort, sift, prioritize, integrate,\u00a0and give some sense of wholeness… to great eternal\u00a0truths.’ But the machinery of specialization was already\u00a0in place, and it has only accelerated. “While\u00a0the mainstream academic\u00a0suppression of all questions of\u00a0transcendent purpose and of associated\u00a0moral limits was taken\u00a0as a given across the disciplines,\u00a0and while most researchers and teachers deferred intellectually,\u00a0in their specialized professional capacities,\u00a0to the authority of a rationalist and reductionist\u00a0framework of understanding, they were not for the\u00a0most part concerned to draw the moral, political, and\u00a0religious implications. The authority of a reductionist\u00a0scientism and an ethic of limitless personal freedom\u00a0grew steadily in the human sciences and humanities,\u00a0but most BYU professors were happy to consider\u00a0their scientific or scholarly work as ‘value-neutral’ and to compartmentalize their religious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29209"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29215,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29209\/revisions\/29215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}