A Clash of Civilizations: Religious and Academic Discourse in the English Classroom

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A colleague teaching at a public university recently told me of a conversation with her chair as he lamented the large number of fundamentalist students on his campus and in his classes. He informed my stunned colleague, a Christian, that part of their job as professors of English was to move these students away from their faith. On the surface such candor seems to confirm what a great many cultural and religious conservatives believe already: that higher education as it exists in the United States purposefully erodes the fundamental values of those it seeks to educate. Indeed, conservative religious people can view themselves as a threatened minority. According to the First Amendment scholar J. M. Balkin, conservative students increasingly articulate this sense of embattlement in terms of broad First Amendment protections and view their inability to speak in class as a form of censorship (169; qtd. in Sherwood 56). It may well be that this phenomenon is overstated. Nevertheless, I want to avoid the tendency to blame our students for their failures to learn and to feel at home in the academic worlds that we have created. Maybe we should be forthright and admit that we are often uncomfortable with our students’ religion and that we often don’t know what to do with it in the classroom. Having taught at both state universities and faith-based institutions, I can say with some confidence that this discomfort runs across the