The Tufts Community Union Judiciary has rendered a fair albeit complex, middle-of-the-road decision in the question of whether to eliminate the Tufts Christian Fellowship as a bona fide Tufts University student organization. To abolish the group would have effectively silenced its voice on campus. There were many issues at stake in the controversy, and to its credit the Tufts student body in the pages of the various student newspapers including the Daily, the Observer and the Primary Source gave informed comment on the issue from all sides. While the TCUJ's decision is not the final step in this controversy since the administration will ultimately decide the status of the TCF, it is fitting that student opinion through the TCUJ's findings as well as opinions expressed on campus will have been a part of the decision making process.
The wisdom of the decision by the TCUJ is that while it recognizes the Tufts University policy of non-discrimination, to the extent that it can be defined, it does not threaten the identity of any student run group that has either a religious or a political agenda. While presumably the Monty Python Club will not have to deal with a potential officer who thinks that Groucho Marx is funnier than John Cleese, such groups as the Democrats, the Republicans, the Spartacus League, the Primary Source (which has already been threatened with de-funding), and the various feminist and activist groups would have to worry. This is because student clubs tests in the rough identity of ideals and purposes of their membership. To prevent them from regulating their membership by excluding people who deny those ideals and purposes is to make them subject to attack in a way that destroys their function of representing a particular controversial point of view. It has been reported that one student group, Tufts Men Against Violence, has already altered its constitution to permit women to join.
As Tufts works its way through this controversy, it is hard to escape the conclusion that it is a further example of how intolerance is being justified in the name of tolerance or more especially of how religion is being marginalized by our cultural and academic elites. The TCUJ's first decision which simply kicked the TCF off campus may seem compelling to people who believe that organized religion is intrinsically intolerant, that it makes judgments about whole classes of people including women and gays, or is authoritarian. The resulting conclusion may be that religion is inimical to the ideals of an open university setting. Yet the irony is that for nearly a thousand years in the history of Western civilization, organized religion was the sole originator and support of higher education.
Historically, the revered religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism have systematically supported higher education as part of their mission to inculcate a vision of the divine into society. In doing so these groups believed they could refine the manners and elevate the attitudes of believers and develop higher learning beyond the basic ability to read sacred texts, in order to create rational and complex systems of learning. During the Middle Ages, the great universities of Europe were founded under the auspices of the Church, including the University of Bologna in Italy, the Jagellonian University in Poland, the University of Paris, and Oxford and Cambridge universities in England. Typically, the schools were originally set up as part of a church or cathedral, and came by the end of the 13th Century to include separate faculties for Liberal Arts, Theology, Law and Medicine. In the early Middle Ages, the Arab Moslem civilization which at that time was more advanced than that of Europe, developed secular learning by the rediscovery, translation and commentary of ancient Greek writers including Aristotle. The same civilization also harbored Jewish learning including the great figure of Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides) who wrote a famous text that dealt with the conflict between The Torah and secular learning represented by Aristotle.
In America, in fact in New England, many of our best known institutions of higher learning have religious foundations. Harvard began in the early colonial period as a seminary for Congregational ministers and in the 17th Century, the great Puritan preacher and writer Cotton Mather was considered for it's presidency. Baptists who had been denied the right to worship in Puritan Massachusetts founded Brown University and for a century after it's founding, the presidents of Brown were Baptist ministers. Brandeis University was founded as a college for Jewish students who, back in the 1950s, had only limited access to enrollment into Ivy League schools. Boston University was founded under the auspices of the Methodist Church and continues to maintain a highly regarded divinity school (as do Harvard and Boston College). Local Catholic institutions such as Boston College, Merrimack College, Holy Cross and Emmanuel were founded by and continue to be run by their respective religious orders.
Tufts University was also founded under religious auspices, namely that of the Universalist religion, an offshoot of Protestantism, and for a hundred years maintained a divinity school, the Crane School of Theology. However, Tufts has continued to lose that part of its institutional memory which is religious. Only recently it was being suggested that once the sole remaining full-time professor of religion retired, there was no need for a replacement, and only student demand rescued the Department of Comparative Religion. This would have been an unmitigated tragedy, I think, since even on the most secular of terms religion needs to be studied and understood as an historical force and current social phenomenon. As a formative influence in students' lives there is literally no replacement for the insight, inspiration and moral and intellectual definition provided by religious belief. Thus one of the reasons for the vitriolic nature of our current politics is that politics is the one remaining system, which can give meaning to our lives once religion is no longer on the intellectual horizon. Political persecution is as potent a destroyer of civil peace and ruination of personal life as religious persecution.
Occasionally, there is a question expressed (along with some weak humor) about the meaning of the symbol on the seal of Tufts University, the downward flying dove with an olive branch in its beak. However, its meaning becomes plain in the context of religious symbolism, for the dove is the traditional symbol of wisdom as the olive branch is of peace. In Christian theology the dove is the symbol of the Third Person of the Trinity, i.e. the Holy Spirit who is that aspect of God's nature which is the spirit of love and wisdom. It would be a shame to efface its memory entirely at Tufts.
John Caiazza is the Associate Director of Student Financial Services. He will soon be moving to a position at Marlboro College in Vermont.
