Campus 'Diversity' Puts Religion on Probation
Virginia Postrel ("Bloomberg," September 18, 2014)
American colleges often praise “diversity” as one of their highest values.
The term is, of course, a well-understood code word for diversity not of
thought or values but of race and ethnicity. The assumption is that people
of different backgrounds and experiences, including ethnic backgrounds and
immigrant experiences, will naturally bring with them diversity of thought
and values and, hence, enrich campus cultural and intellectual life.
The problem now facing the California State University system is that this
assumption may very well be true. Faced with a conflict between that its
self-proclaimed commitments to diversity and "access", the university system
-- with permission from the U.S. Supreme Court -- has passed a new rule
that clearly prioritizes the former over the latter.
With 23 campuses and 446,000 students, including about 391,000
undergraduates, Cal State is the largest four-year college system in the U.S.
It is
also one of the most ethnically diverse, reflecting the state’s large
population of Latin American and Asian immigrants. Although demographics vary
by
campus, overall the student body is 33 percent Latino (25.5 percent Mexican
American), 15.3 percent Asian (plus another 1.2 percent Filipino), 29.1
percent white and 4.6 percent black.
Many of the upwardly mobile first- and second-generation immigrants who
populate this proudly diverse system don’t think like the people who run it.
The faculty and administration tend to be secular and socially liberal,
while many students, particularly students of color, are traditionally
religious and socially conservative.
“In their science classes or in their literature classes, what’s
understood as the normative world view is different from their conservative
evangelical world view,” says Rebecca Y. Kim, a sociologist at Pepperdine
University who studies the religious experiences of Asian-American students,
particularly the children of Korean immigrants, who dominate evangelical
groups on
many U.S. campuses. For these students, she suggest, Christian fellowship
meetings provide what sociologists call “plausibility structures” --
social groupings in which students’ religious beliefs and mores are treated as
normal. “They get that space within the secular institution,” Kim says.
At Cal State, the secular institution is encroaching on that space. A new
rule, known system-wide as Executive Order 1068, requires student groups
seeking official recognition to adopt an “all comers” policy, allowing any
currently enrolled student to join or to serve as an officer. (An exception
allows fraternities and sororities to remain segregated by sex.) “If the
chess club wants to prohibit checkers players, that would be illegal,”
explains Michael Uhlenkamp, Cal State’s public affairs director.
The rule grows out of the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Christian Legal
Society v. Martinez. The court held it constitutional for a public
university to require recognized student groups to adopt all-comers policies,
even
if that meant that a religious fellowship couldn’t exclude people who
disagree with its doctrines.
The policy at issue required groups at Hastings Law School in San Francisco
(part of the University of California system, not Cal State) to “allow any
student to participate, become a member, or seek leadership positions in
the organization, regardless of their status or beliefs.” Christian Legal
Society wanted an exemption allowing it to exclude members who didn’t agree
both to its doctrinal creed and to a code of conduct prohibiting “sexual
relations other than within a marriage between one man and one woman” and
thereby excluding students who engage in “unrepentant homosexual conduct.” The
case was thus seen as a gay-rights case, although Mormons and people who
watch pornography were equally excluded.
The court ruled that although a state university can’t ban a group from
campus for not agreeing to an all-comers policy, the school doesn’t have to
give it privileges such as free access to rooms. The court didn’t declare
such policies mandatory, of course. It only ruled that they are not illegal.
Cal State adopted its own all-comers the next year, and it is going into
effect now. “As a university system, we embrace the idea of access,”
Uhlenkamp said, “and this is something that expands on that.” Only groups that
sign a pledge to accept all students as members and -- the key provision --
as officers, without any restrictions on their beliefs, will be certified as
official organizations able to use rooms for free, identify themselves
with the school name, participate in recruitment events outside the designated
“free speech zone” or (although this is rare for religious groups)
receive funding from student fees.
Two national groups, the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and Cru (which
includes affiliate ministries aimed at Asians, Latinos and blacks), have
declined to agree to the rule for officers, although their membership is open
to anyone.1 Since individual campuses must approve chapter applications,
however, it isn’t entirely clear whether all their chapters will be
decertified. Both groups still appear, for example, on the Cal State-Fullerton
website, with Cru’s constitution dated Aug. 20.
If the all-comers policy worked the way it sounds on paper, it would
destroy the qualities that make religious fellowships valuable to students,
especially ethnic minorities. “If you force them to have leaders who don’t
have
this distinct world view and belief system, it completely goes against the
reason for their existence,” says Kim.
But Uhlenkamp is quick to argue that the policy won’t have such dire
effects. Recognized groups are still allowed to elect their officers and to
impose requirements that they be active members for a certain period of time.
The democratic process, he suggests, should keep groups true to their
missions. “The practical implication is that someone who doesn’t have those
values, besides the fact that they didn’t sign a piece of paper, is likely not
going to rise to a leadership position if they weren’t of a likeminded
belief system,” he says.
He may very well be right. Indeed, much of Kim’s work examines why campus
evangelical groups tend to self-segregate by ethnicity, even when they’re
open to anyone, profess universalist views and worship in English with almost
identical services. “It’s just more comfortable” is the explanation most
students gave her. “When you unpack that,” she says, “it’s the comfort of
being with fellow believers, but also with people who understand what it’s
like to be them.”
Social dynamics, in other words, may keep most evangelical Christian groups
doctrinally conservative for the same reasons that predominantly black or
Korean groups that are open to anyone tend to stay ethnically homogeneous.
If that's true, however, the policy is a gratuitous insult, forcing groups
to deny their core values and sign symbolic statements they don’t really
believe. It’s a way for the university to pledge allegiance to diversity
without embracing pluralism.
1 It is not true, as Slate correspondent Mark Joseph Stern wrote, that “
because InterVarsity insisted on refusing membership to all gay students, Cal
State was legally compelled to revoke its recognition as an official
student group.” In fact, InterVarsity’s membership is open to all students.
The
policy at issue is a requirement that chapter officers subscribe to a
doctrinal statement that says nothing about sex or sexuality.
To contact the writer of this article: Virginia Postrel at
[email protected].
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Tobin Harshaw at
[email protected].
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[RC] As today's young people in school mature, will Caifornia become conservative?
BILROJ via Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community Thu, 18 Sep 2014 21:58:51 -0700
