Josiah Ranen
Twenty years ago, I was sitting at 51st Street Coffee House with my girlfriend, a UMKC sociology graduate student and teaching assistant, while she worked through a stack of papers for her professor. “Look at this,” she said, sliding one across the table. “Can you believe it? He is actually citing the Bible and using a religious argument. That should have no place in a sociology paper.”
I skimmed the essay. The undergraduate had indeed drawn on biblical writings alongside secular sociological studies. His thesis, rooted in what many would call traditional Christian values, argued that these ideas shaped the core of modern Western civilization and were relevant to the sociological issue he was addressing in the paper. In broad strokes, it resembled arguments later articulated by Tom Holland in his work "Dominion".
My girlfriend’s red pen moved swiftly across the page, striking passages she dismissed as “mythological” and unfit for academic citation. Watching her, I felt uneasy. The critique seemed less about reasoning or methodology and more about the lens through which the student approached the topic.
This secular bias in academia has only gotten worse in the last two decades and threatens destroy it entirely. My personal unease over this from 20 years resurfaced sharply when I read about a recent controversy at the University of Oklahoma. A psychology student wrote an essay in which she rejected the concept of multiple genders as “demonic,” citing biblical principles to support her position. The Instructor apparently assigned a zero, explaining that the paper failed to meet the assignment’s requirements and relied on ideology rather than empirical evidence. The incident has quickly drawn national attention.
That decision, putting an instructor on leave after a complaint, seems like overreach. The student had a right to express her beliefs, but disciplining a faculty member for grading according to academic standards risks chilling classrooms. It sends a message: deviate from accepted ideological frameworks at your peril.
But OU’s case isn’t an isolated incident. It is part of a growing pattern across the country. At Texas A&M University, for example, the firing of a literature professor over a controversial class on gender identity recently triggered a formal finding that the dismissal violated her academic freedom. A faculty committee concluded the firing was not justified by any legitimate pedagogical failure — but was instead the result of political pressure following a student complaint and viral social‑media attention. KERA News+3The Texas Tribune+3https://www.kbtx.com+3
Similarly, at multiple institutions, faculty and students alike have reported a chilling effect: courses canceled or altered, speakers disinvited, administrators suspending or disciplining instructors — all amid fears of losing federal funding or drawing civil‑rights investigations from governmental agencies. Critics warn that campus speech oversight and funding conditionality have been repurposed into tools of ideological enforcement. The Guardian+2ameu.org+2
What underlies this pattern is a troubling dynamic: universities increasingly operate under a “funding‑for‑compliance” model. Because most public colleges and universities depend heavily on federal grants, research funding, and student aid — all tied to federal nondiscrimination and civil‑rights regulations — the institutions have strong incentives to avoid controversy that might trigger oversight or funding withdrawal. That pressure can make administrators risk‑averse, preemptively suppressing arguments or punishing instructors at the first hint of ideological discomfort.
In this climate, academic freedom becomes a fragile commodity. It isn’t protected by tenure alone; it must be defended in practice against external political, financial, and regulatory threats.
Yet religious or philosophically grounded arguments have long played a role in social theory, political thought, and historical analysis. Excluding them a priori doesn’t make scholarship more rigorous , it makes it narrower. If universities are truly committed to open inquiry, they need to judge student work on methodology, coherence, clarity, and analytical rigor , not on whether the conclusions align with prevailing cultural or academic orthodoxies.
We should not fear religiously grounded scholarship. We should ask whether the reasoning is tight, sources engaged, arguments relevant. Let students draw from history, philosophy, religion, and empirical research and evaluate what they write on its merits. Let instructors grade accordingly. Let academic freedom protect both ideas and those who assess them.
If institutions instead retreat at the first sign of controversy, academic inquiry will shrink. The classroom will become a safe but sterile place, free from offense, but also from meaningful debate. And that impoverishes us all.
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