It’s been an unusual week in the academy.
The academic freedom that so incensed Bill Buckley as a student at
Yale decades ago is now acting to protect a conservative scholar
under fire.
Baylor’s J.M. Dawson Institute for
Church-State Studies hired Francis Beckwith as its Associate
Director last summer. Although previously known as a philosopher
who had developed powerful critiques of abortion, Beckwith has used
the past few years and a research fellowship at Princeton to
transform himself into a legal scholar investigating the
controversy over public schools and the teaching of human origins.
His research culminated in publication of the book, Law, Darwinism,
and Public Education.
Here’s where the matter gets a little
sticky. Beckwith concludes an alternative to evolution that goes by
the name Intelligent Design may be constitutionally taught in
public schools. Here’s where it gets a lot
sticky. It turns out the Institute’s namesake
and founder, J.M. Dawson, was an early proponent of teaching
evolution in public schools and an ardent, strict separationist in
matters of church and state. Dawson was also instrumental in the
founding of the Americans United for the Separation of Church and
State.
After Beckwith testified before the Texas Board of Education as
to the constitutionality of teaching Intelligent Design in schools,
Dawson’s descendants (who do not fund the
program) decided the good professor should be reassigned because of
the possible divergence of his views with those of the patriarch
Dawson. They have since written formal letters requesting
Beckwith’s removal from the Institute and have
vigorously pursued media coverage of their grievance. To date, the
story has been featured in the Baptist press, the Waco
Tribune, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Reporters from Dallas, Houston, and World Magazine (a
Christian version of Time or Newsweek with a
surprisingly large circulation) are beginning to sniff around for a
good story.
The current flare-up is further evidence that America has never
quite gotten over the Scopes Trial. For some citizens, the face-off
between Clarence Darrow as the prophet of the Enlightenment and
William Jennings Bryan as the withering apostle of a spent
Christian faith stands as a holy moment in history. Jews have Mount
Sinai. Christians have Calvary. Enlightenment fundamentalists have
Darrow brilliantly cross-examining Bryan in a courthouse in
Tennessee. In their version of the national myth, people of
learning finally overcame the fearsome faithful through the triumph
of cold, hard, liberating reason. Moments like that, properly
interpreted or not, are hard to let go.
That’s why evolution has always been much
more than a scientific issue in America.
Darwin’s legacy is fully bound up in the
broader American culture war between the self-appointed enlightened
and those who insist there’s something else
waiting for us behind Curtain number three.
Among those who fail to be convinced of
evolution’s status as the final word in the
origins controversy are the group of scientists and philosophers in
the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. Design theorists have
developed a much more sophisticated critique of evolution than
young earth “creation scientists” ever put forward. By raising
questions about the information content of DNA and irreducible
complexity of even simple life forms, ID’ers
have stoked the embers of the nation’s
perennial controversy. Beckwith’s examination
of ID’s legal status in public education put
him squarely in the middle of the hot zone.
IT DOESN’T SEEM TO MATTER to
Beckwith’s opponents that his work fits
comfortably within the range of rational discourse on the subject
of the origins controversy and public schools. Nor does it mitigate
the annoyance of Dawson heirs that Dr. Beckwith
hasn’t recommended that ID be immediately
incorporated into high school curriculums, but merely affirms the
constitutionality of doing so. Instead, they repeatedly quote
“Church and State,” the house organ of Americans United for the
Separation of Church and State, to support the supposed malignancy
of Beckwith’s view. One might object on the
basis of the non-objectivity of the source. To be fair, there are
legitimate scholars who disagree with Dr. Beckwith, but
that’s hardly the basis for escorting the man
out of the ballpark.
As a doctoral fellow in the program, I have to ask the following
questions. Does Baylor University want to firmly commit its
Church-State Studies department to a particular position on
Darwinism, Intelligent Design, and public schools? For that matter,
should the department follow its namesake and cast its lot with one
version of church-state separation known as strict separationism
and work essentially as an adjunct to the ACLU and Americans United
for the Separation of Church and State?
It would seem the prudent answer to both of those queries should
be in the negative. We are at an exciting point in history where
the relationship between church and state is being re-examined in
the light of new challenges. What are the possibilities for
government-funding of faith-based social services? How does the
nation deal with legal issues raised by ever-growing religious
pluralism? What role will faith play in a new constitution for
Iraq? This is exactly the time for intellectual curiosity and
openness in a venerable field of academic inquiry. Attempts to
remove a professor for holding “unorthodox views” strike me as
stifling and outside the spirit of a university striving to
penetrate the top tier of research institutions. Given the further
fact that Baylor is explicitly trying to create the most vital
center of Christian scholarship in the nation, one imagines the
anti-Beckwith efforts will stall out.
So far, Baylor seems up to the challenge and the media scrutiny
involved. Public statements by the University’s
provost have been supportive of Beckwith’s work
and have invoked the now-sacred principle of academic freedom. The
idea that protected the mass introduction of the radical left to
American university faculties is finally doing a little work for
the other side. Mr. Buckley, I know you’re on
board with us now.
