The ivory tower and the public realm

Abstract

This essay is a response to the question of whether scholars of religion in the employ of the modern university have an obligation to help meet the challenges and threats ‘to the social order sometimes linked to aspects of religion’ raised at the 2023 annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion. Donald Wiebe argues here that even raising the question ignores, or reveals a failure to understand, the character and purpose of the modern university, which is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The task of the professor, therefore, is simply to transmit accepted knowledge, seek out new knowledge, and confer on students the skills necessary to grow knowledge of the world and its contents. Wiebe maintains, therefore, that even considering the question amounts to an unjustifiable attempt to inflate the importance of the profession, which will result in making scholars of religion in the academy public intellectuals and departments for the study of religion a type of non-governmental organization.

In January 2023, Professor Tim Jensen, president of the International Association for the History of Religions proposed that the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion (CSSR) consider organizing a special ‘roundtable panel discussion’ at its 2023 annual meeting to be held in association with the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Khan, 2023). He proposed the topic of ‘possible roles, if any, of a scholar of religion regarding promotion of public knowledge and understanding of religion’ (Jensen, 2023). I was not altogether surprised that the CSSR responded positively to the suggestion. Anyone who knows the history of the CSSR will be aware that its ambitions have always exceeded the purely academic objective of understanding and explaining religious phenomena – of providing society with reliable objective knowledge of religions and religion. The field in Canada seems to understand that the task for the academic study of religion in the modern research university must be concerned with ensuring that the field be of benefit to society at large – that scholars of religion should be engaged with such endeavours as health, technology and the arts. Harold Coward (2014: 145) made this crystal clear in his ‘personal retrospective’ on Fifty Years of Religious Studies in Canada, as did Aaron Hughes (2020) in his Institutional History of the Study of Religion in Canada. The fundamental task of the scholar of religion, they argue, is to engage in public policy matters by drawing on ‘the wisdom of the world’s religions [including indigenous wisdom] in an ethical analysis of possible responses to major issues’ (Coward, 2014: 185, 191). This is possible, Coward (2014) claims, because a study of religion can open the scholar’s mind to non-conceptual levels of knowledge (63), making it possible for society to hold in check the influence of a hegemonic secularized ideology and to contribute to making sense of the world by revealing to us what it truly means to be human (63, 169, 180, 199–200). Hughes (2020) comes to roughly the same conclusions when he argues that the study of religion in Canada is dominated by the ‘George Grant/Wilfred Cantwell Smith’ (153) vision for religious studies, which emphasized ‘the importance of faith and of the shared spiritual life’, and inspired ‘the academic study of religion as a means to help articulate and solve universal human problems’ – a vision supported by a belief among many university administrators ‘that a public university should attend to the perennial questions of human existence . . . where ethical teaching was to raise society from the inhumanity of technological encroachment’ (157).

It is of particular interest to me that Professor Jensen (2023) put forward the proposal for considering the proposition that academic departments for the study of religion in the modern university – and the scholar-scientists working in them – have a public responsibility ‘to help meet the challenges and ward off associated threats [to society]’, should they exist. This, one might have thought, is not a topic one would expect the president of an institution that is dedicated to promoting the academic and scientific study of religion would recommend for the annual meeting of a national member association of that institution. And it is still something of a mystery to me that Professor Jensen should also have proposed that I be the respondent to the presentations at that meeting, given my widely known opposition to expanding the ambitions and objectives of the academic study of religion beyond the walls of the ‘ivory tower’ since the publication of my 1984 essay, ‘The failure of nerve in the academic study of religion’ (Wiebe 1984). On the other hand, Professor Jenson may have thought such a roundtable panel discussion would undermine my recent critique of proposed new directions for the International Association for the History of Religions spelled out in my publication An Argument in Defence of a Strictly Scientific Study of Religion: The Controversy at Delphi (Wiebe, 2021), where the executive committee of the Association proposed to turn it into an omnibus organization that would include the promotion of normative and applied studies of religion. Although puzzled by Professor Jensen’s incentive for this event and by my invitation to participate in it, I was nevertheless motivated to participate as a respondent to the papers presented. However, my ‘assignment’ by the organizers of this panel to memorialize the event in Studies in Religion is not that of a respondent. As I was informed by Professor Dimitrova (2023), president of the CSSR: ‘Please note that there will be no response/respondent role’ in the publication of the proceedings, ‘but I’d like to invite Professor Wiebe to write a similar brief essay, in which he presents his own ideas on the subject, i.e., an essay/presentation on its own merits, and NOT as a response to the other essays’. Consequently, I am pleased to have this opportunity to try once again to set out my ideas on the proper relationship of the scientific enterprise and the modern research university to the ‘public realm’.

The modern research university is a public institution, but it is not itself in ‘the public realm’. Unlike the public realm, the research university is not a venue for the free expression of ideas, beliefs and opinion. It is a unique institution in that it is committed to the transmission, preservation and production of scientific knowledge of the world and its contents. The only task of the sciences, broadly understood, is to obtain reliable beliefs about the world – to understand and explain the world as it is, and to represent it as accurately as possible in empirically, experimentally and theoretically testable propositional claims. The intersubjective testability of the knowledge claims made, of course, makes possible a personal and cultural perspective that transcends, in today’s parlance, position-relative knowledge claims. The sciences, therefore, are engaged in basic research, motivated simply by epistemic curiosity rather than by targeted practical, technological or existential objectives.

There is no question that non-scientific types of knowledge, such as indigenous knowledge, also exist. However, the claim that this means that scientific knowledge is only one epistemic subculture among many equally credible epistemic subcultures fails to persuade. As the anthropologist and philosopher Ernest Gellner (1992: 77) puts it, the sciences have produced ‘the single most striking, indeed, shattering, fact about the world’ in which we live – namely, ‘that real culture-transcending knowledge does exist’ – and the sciences have achieved this by limiting themselves to purely academic methods and intellectual integrity. Thus, Gellner continues,

[w]e happen to live in a world in which one style of knowledge, though born of one culture, is being adapted by all of them, with enormous speed and eagerness . . . and is totally transforming the milieu in which [we] live. This is simply a fact. (Gellner, 1992: 78)

The academic implications of this characterization of the sciences are clearly illustrated by Maurice Cowling in his analysis of the difference, for example, between politics and political science. He writes:

[T]he only rational action to which scholars, as scholars [my emphasis], are committed, the only moral action to which they are commended and the only ‘social responsibility’ to which their professional position compels them, is to use their energies in order to explain in its full diversity as much as they can of the nature of the world in which they live. (Cowling, 1963: 210)

Two decades later, Walter Burkert similarly characterized the differences between religious and humanistic studies of religion and the academic and scientific study of religion. He wrote:

The language that has proved the most generally understood and cross-cultural is that of secularized scholarship. Its practice today is determined by science in its broadest sense, its system of rules by the laws of logic. It may, of course, seem the most questionable endeavour of all to try to translate religious phenomena into this language; by its self-conception, a religion must deny that such explanations are possible. However, scholarship is free to study even the rejection of knowledge and repudiation of independent thought, for scholarship, in attempting to understand the world, has the broader perspective here and cannot abstain from analyzing the worldwide fact of religion. This is not a hopeless undertaking. However, a discussion of religion must then be anything but religious. (Burkert, 1983: xxi)

To be sure, the modern research university is not the only source of knowledge about the world and its contents. And it is certainly true that modern scientific knowledge has not provided solutions to all the problems of human existence. That, of course, was never its intent. Nevertheless, it is not the case that the sciences can make no contribution to improving the world – whether transforming students into exemplary moral citizens inculcating tolerance and respect for others or nurturing public intellectuals and activists concerned primarily with the public realm. But neither of these results was the primary purpose of its making, for, as literary critic John Ellis (1997: 155) puts it, this can only lead to the triumph of politics over academic-scientific inquiry. As sociologist Steve Bruce (2018: 17) puts it with respect to the social sciences, only adopting ‘the general logic of science [can] prevent social science [from] degenerating into literary criticism or fiction’. This can also be applied to the study of the humanities and cultural studies by way of what literary critic Stanley Fish calls ‘academicizing’ the subject matter. This involves turning highly charged political, moral and cultural matters ‘into the stuff of academic investigation’, which is achieved by detaching ‘it from the context of its real-world agency, where there is a decision to be made, and reinsert[ing it] into a context of an academic urgency, where there is an analysis to be performed’ (Fish, 2015: 309). He therefore rightly insists that following the injunction ‘to academicize’ amounts to marginalizing moral and political concerns and objectives in order simply to know more about the phenomena that interest us.

To think that it is the business of any academic study to improve the world by resolving our existential concerns, solving policy issues for society or producing revenue for the state, as Fish puts it (2015), is to fall prey to the temptation to inflate the importance of our profession, which is limited to the transmission of received knowledge, the production of new knowledge, and conferring the skills involved in growing our knowledge on the next generation of students. This, of course, as I have already noted, is not to say that the knowledge produced by the basic research undertaken in the university is irrelevant to projects to improve the world, but only that scholar-scientists must not neglect the work they were hired to undertake to engage in ‘applied knowledge’. And any attempt to combine the two objectives by substituting socially, psychologically or politically targeted research for basic research will, in Robert Nisbet’s (1971: 200) words, convert the modern university from an ‘ivory tower’ ‘into a kind of political engine. Or, for that matter, an economic engine. Or, a humanitarian or therapeutic engine’. Moreover, it will transform the scholar-scientist into a partisan intellectual and activist dominated by extra-academic and extra-scientific agendas (Fish, 2015: 301).

The historian Clark Kerr (1963: 114) correctly claimed that ‘[t]he university as producer, wholesaler and retailer of knowledge cannot escape service’ to society. However, the service it performs is provided by creating the context in which reliable objective knowledge about the real worlds (physical and social), essential for improving the world, can be produced. As Fish (2015) puts it, this is ‘Why We Built the Ivory Tower’ (301). Its only purpose, he argues, is to produce reliable transcultural knowledge, not to save the world, which, he points out, will involve ‘political tasks that belong properly to other institutions’ (303). Engaging in them can only deform the appropriate task of the academic, which is to search for knowledge and disseminate it through publication and teaching.

The topic of the CSSR roundtable panel – ‘Possible Roles, If Any, of a Scholar of Religion Regarding Promotion of Public Knowledge and Understanding of Religion’ – suggests that the scholar of religion is not only responsible for seeking knowledge about religion and religions, but also has the obligation to promote that knowledge in the public realm. It is not clear, however, whether that would involve anything more than publishing one’s reliable research results. There is a degree of complexity and ambiguity in the formulation of the concern being raised here about the objective or objectives of what the conference organizers call the ‘academic, scientific study of religion’. Further elaboration of the title by the organizers, however, raises the question about whether the ‘scholar of religion’ has a moral ‘obligation’ or ‘obligations’ to ‘meet the challenges and ward off associated threats’ to ‘the social order’ that might sometimes be ‘linked to aspects of religion’ Dimitrova (2023a). As the organizers frame the issue: ‘does the scholar of religion have a particular role in promoting public and political knowledge and understanding of religions?’ (Dimitrova 2023a) And, if they do, the organizers ask for specifics as to how that role is to be played out, clearly assuming that being a scholar of religion necessarily involves more than simply seeking and publishing scientific knowledge about religion – that in some sense scholar-scientists of religion have an extra-scientific ‘obligation’ that requires of them partisan political engagement in the public realm, to take sides, so to speak, in response to the destructive challenges facing society. But that would amount to buying into what Fish (2015, 306-07; see also his 2008) calls the ‘save-the-world theory of academic performance’ and surrendering one’s identity as a scholar-scientist by obliterating the boundary between the sciences and partisan advocacy, between academic work and political work. This, I maintain, will cast the individual religion scholar into the role of a sage or public intellectual, and academics collectively into a new clerisy. And this will make religious studies departments into non-governmental organizations engaging in public policy concerns and warding off threats facing society.

Professor Jensen (2023), in his contribution to the roundtable panel discussion, informed us that his university demands that scholars have ‘an obligation to share the knowledge produced within the university with the public at large’. That is eminently reasonable if scholars do that by publishing the results of their research on, and analysis of, religious phenomena in monographs and journal articles, making that knowledge available to intellectuals and activists in ‘the public realm’. What I find unacceptable is his university’s further demand that scholars of religion must ‘contribute to and participate in the public debate’ about religious matters.

Today, I often hear claims that scholars of religion are required to follow their university’s mandate to undertake research that will have social and political relevance. This is just as problematic for the academic study of religion as is confusing it with a theological or humanistic concern for meaning because (1) it infringes on the principle of academic freedom; (2) it assumes that the objective of the department for the study of religion is to serve the state in governing society; (3) it assumes that ‘basic research’ is unable to provide knowledge relevant to the state’s concerns; (4) it will reduce the scholarly study of religion to gathering empirical data about religious groups with relevance to specific social and political concerns in society, and therefore will radically distort the scientific study of religion; (5) it will transform departments for the study of religion (as well as the university at large) from a purpose-designed institution created to promote knowledge about the world and its contents into a kind of non-governmental political organization; (6) it will remove ‘religion/religiosity’ as the subject matter of primary interest in the department, substituting for it attention to the influence religious groups might have on society; and (7) this means that there can be no ‘basic research’ of religion, as there is in the natural and social sciences.

It seems to me that scholars of religion who argue for a coalescence of the scientific and political roles of the modern university suggest the university is not an epistemically distinctive social institution. This is not a novel argument. Kerr (1963) argues something of this sort when he refers to the modern university – what he calls the ‘multiversity’ – as a ‘prime instrument of national purpose’ rather than a ‘house of intellect set apart’ (94). He is right, of course, to point out that the ‘university as producer, wholesaler and retailer of knowledge cannot escape service’ (94), and that there is a sense, therefore, in which ‘the boundaries of the university are stretched to embrace all of society’ (115). Indeed, as he points out, the creation of the land-grant universities in the USA in the 19th century exemplifies his view. Nevertheless, he also insists on what we might call the epistemic elitism of the university. Although he thinks the social sciences may help to determine what is good for society and, therefore, add ‘wisdom’ to ‘truth’ (knowledge), there is no indication that he sees this as an essential task of the university, or as contributing to the knowledge of the world achieved through the sciences. I think scholars of religion do not take seriously enough the fear expressed by some that, in seeking ‘wisdom’ in addition to ‘truth’ (knowledge), ‘the university will be drawn too far away from basic to applied research and from applied research to application itself’ (Kerr, 1963: 117). The exploitation of this ambiguity in discussing the relationship between science and society has led to the emergence of the outsized ambitions of many scholars of religion as intellectuals who see themselves as in service to society at large rather than as mere producers of objective knowledge of religious phenomena.