News

By Kathleen Gilbert

LANGLEY, British Columbia, February 3, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has accused  Langley's Trinity Western University of falling below an accepted standard of academic freedom because it requires faculty to sign a statement of Christian faith as a condition of employment.  The CAUT, a national umbrella group of faculty associations, has also placed the school on a list of “institutions found to have imposed a requirement of a commitment to a particular ideology or statement as condition of employment.”
 
A CAUT committee concluded in a report dated October 2009 that “TWU’s Statement of Faith, its Responsibilities of Membership statement and the university’s policy on academic freedom allow for unwarranted and unacceptable constraints on academic freedom.”

The committee based its results on statements found in the school's documents testifying to the fact that the school's mission is rooted in the Christian faith.  For example, one statement CAUT pointed out in TWU's academic calendar reads: “Trinity Western faculty members are selected on the basis of academic preparation, teaching ability, and commitment to the Christian faith.” 

Further, the school states that it recognizes academic freedom “is an essential ingredient in an effective university program.”  However, TWU “rejects as incompatible with human nature and revelational theism a definition of academic freedom which arbitrarily and exclusively requires pluralism without commitment, denies the existence of any fixed points of reference, maximizes the quest for truth to the extent of assuming it is never knowable, and implies an absolute freedom from moral and religious responsibility to its community.”

Instead TWU says it is “committed to academic freedom in teaching and investigation from a stated perspective, i.e., within parameters consistent with the confessional basis of the constituency to which the University is responsible, but practiced in an environment of free inquiry and discussion and of encouragement to integrity in research.”

But after quoting the above passage and others, the CAUT report concludes: “On the basis of these documents alone, there is no question that Trinity Western University violates the commitment to academic freedom that is the foundational bedrock of the university community in Canada and internationally.”

More broadly, James Turk, executive director of CAUT, claimed in a National Post report that “a school that requires its faculty to subscribe to a particular religious belief or ideology cannot be practicing academic freedom.”

“This is not about the school being Christian, but about faculty having to sign a statement of faith before being hired. A university is meant as a place to explore ideas, not to create disciples of Christ,” said Turk.

Turk said CAUT has investigatory committees also examining Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg and Crandall University in Moncton. 

TWU president Jonathan Raymond has objected that CAUT placed TWU on its “blacklist” without adequately discussing the matter with the school first.  “With us there was no discussion, no exchange,” he said. 
 
“There is no topic under the sun that can't be raised,” said Raymond about the way the university works.  “We assume faculty will have their thinking informed by their Christian faith, but we don't influence it. They can raise all perspectives but we expect they'll also raise the Christian perspective.”

In an official response, TWU raises several concerns with CAUT's process in the investigation.  The CAUT, they say, was apparently not responding to a complaint or allegation about TWU; also, TWU says CAUT broke a promise in an August 2009 meeting that the report would not be published without further dialogue.

The school says they have since asked CAUT to take down the report and discuss the matter further, but were refused.

The Catholic Civil Rights League has also responded by accusing CAUT of flouting the religious history of Canadian higher education.

“To us, this is a fairly straightforward attempt to find problems with universities that take their religious heritage seriously, in an attempt to further marginalize religion in academic life,” said Phil Horgan, president of the CCRL. “Both sides appear to agree that there had been no complaint of infringement of academic freedom, or overall quality of the staff and their work. So why send out e-mails to academics looking for problems that would surely be well known if they existed?”

The group points out that most of Canada’s universities were established by Churches and religious orders, usually as seminaries that included liberal arts education open to non-clergy candidates.

In 2001, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled against a bid by the B.C. College of Teachers to challenge Trinity Western’s right to train teachers for the public school system, claiming that the school's Christian beliefs could lead to discrimination against homosexual students. The Court ruled that the graduates could be judged only on their behavior in the classroom.

TWU was chartered by the BC government in 1969 as a Christian post-secondary institution, and received accreditation in 1985.