Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America
The early 1990s saw a rash of books on religion and higher education, and Mark Schwehn’s 1993 Exiles From Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America was a book unlike any of the rest. It begins with two memorable illustrations of the central problem Schwehn addresses. The first recalls a faculty get-together at the University of Chicago, where Schwehn held his first tenured position, in which the attendees offered in sequence what each had written under the “occupation” line in their tax returns. After hearing “ ‘anthropologist,’ ‘historian,’ ‘psychologist,’ ” etc., Schwehn mustered the courage to confess he had written “college teacher.” The response, which he describes as “mild alarm,” made him feel as if he “had suddenly become, however briefly, an informant from another culture” (vii-viii). Eventually, Schwehn left Chicago for his alma mater, Valparaiso University, the first of many gestures towards the book’s title, which composes a narrative of religion and higher education not as declension (as in The Dying of the Light), but spatially, from center to periphery, metropole to hinterland, Chicago to Valparaiso, Eden to Exile.1
The second involves Schwehn’s analysis of the peculiar professorial locution, “I don’t have enough time to do my own work” (viii). The meaning of the phrase is, of course, clear to anyone in academe; “my own work” refers to research and writing as opposed to teaching and service; that is, the “work” for which academics are awarded tenure, promotion, and status within the guild. Importantly, research can also reward scholars with proximity to leading research universities not unlike those at which they did graduate work—their own academic Edens. The emphasis on “my own” similarly marks the degree to which a sense of meaning and worth is attached to research and writing, which, Schwehn argues, comprises for most academics their fundamental sense of self. In Christian theological terms, this sense of self, as it relates to work, is understood as “vocation.” Academics, then, find their deepest sense of meaning or “calling” in the creation, mastery, and ownership or possession of knowledge. The tasks of teaching and service, in academic parlance, “pay the bills.” The meaningful work of research (Eden) is counterpoised to the drudgery of teaching (Exile). Schwehn aims to tell us how this came to be.
Again, many of the important books in the early 1990s used a narrative of secularization to analyze with precision the way academic institutions wrestled with religion within a context of modernity. As these two illustrations suggest, however, Schwehn is up to something different. Schwehn understands the most important aspect of the academy’s wrestling with religion and modernity not to be secularization but professionalization.
Importantly, for Schwehn, this professionalization is at the heart of what ails universities because it separates research from teaching and teaching from the cultivation of virtue. For professors, these divisions prioritize research over teaching in forging vocational meaning. As these individuals embody this vocational priority, the institutions they inhabit focus on skill acquisition rather than educating the whole person. Schwehn suggests that the remedy for this state of affairs is to reimagine an academic vocation and institutional mission with teaching as its organizing principle. By understanding all of our work as pedagogical, our colleges and universities would be communities of spirited inquiry that develop certain communal virtues on which such pedagogical work depends.
To explain further how we got this vocational separation of teaching from “my own work,” Schwehn engages Max Weber’s indispensable 1917 lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” which offers a penetrating description of how the modern academy arrived at this professional ideal.2 To understand the importance of Weber’s analysis of academic work, Schwehn must, however, explain the long historical relationship between Christianity and formation in higher learning. Higher education in Europe and the United States, in all its premodern forms, shared an intellectual and institutional connection to the church. Important aspects of this connection included (1) that learning was done in community, (2) that learning and knowing were understood to be quests for truth, described in religious terms like enlightenment and formation, and (3) that learning was tied to certain Christian virtues of intellect and character that included humility, charity, faith, and self-sacrifice. In this model, academic work was communal in orientation and found meaning in connecting to transcendent truth through the formation of certain communitarian virtues. These habits of thought and practice shaped the meaning of academic work as well as the purpose of these institutions.3
While, again, authors like George Marsden understand the shift away from this model as a form of secularization (one manifestation of the modernization Weber helped to define), Schwehn, as noted, focuses on the way Weber brilliantly connects modernization in higher education to professionalization, and, more specifically, to how an individualistic focus on creating and possessing knowledge through specialization became the norm. For Weber, the disenchantment of the world, specialization, and the separation of values from fact, push academic labor towards a secular asceticism in which the purpose of that labor is solely to construct an ever-evolving edifice of finite knowledge; that is, to advance finite knowledge itself. Importantly, while these secular anchorites labor towards finite ends, they are nevertheless haunted by a longing for meaning, since their vocations originated in a monasticism aimed at transcendence.4 But in a disenchanted world, Weber insists that research requires a ruthless subordination of such sentiments, as scholars must labor to add another brick to the edifice of knowledge, knowing full well that their contributions will ultimately be displaced by others.5 As Schwehn notes, this bleak asceticism actually involves, for Weber, a kind of formation in certain virtues—what Weber calls the development of a certain “personality” marked by courage, discipline, and dispassion suited to the resolve needed to take on without flinching a commitment to the cold reason leading to meaningless labor (18). In a critical move, Schwehn argues further, however, that most moderns have not been this courageous. In his analysis of Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams, which illustrates the disenchantment of modern education Weber describes, Schwehn shows how modernist writers like Adams opted to create their own meaning in their work, something Weber himself alludes to in other places (135). This meaning, however, remains immanent, as it is found in the activity of creation itself.
For Schwehn, then, the ideal of modern academic work is isolated, specialized, self-sacrificing labor to create knowledge and thereby create meaning—“our own work.” Even though Schwehn clarifies that no one, even in Weber’s time, has actually embodied such a form of asceticism, this ideal nevertheless continues to guide academics’ sense of self-worth. Academics are formed in graduate education to embrace this ideal as the organizing feature of their working lives. If this is true, then it follows that in their careers, they often place little importance in institutional commitment, often treat teaching as an afterthought, and often understand the educational formation of their students to be along individualistic lines of skill acquisition, self-mastery, and rational calculation (tools for graduates’ own work). Institutionally, then, this understanding of education, formation, and self-worth drives the transactional nature of higher education which is centered on individual merit and advancement rather than communal or community ends.
This diagnosis is bleak. Indeed, these vocational patterns prevail in secular and church-related institutions alike, since all academics are formed in the same graduate programs and affirm the same ideals of excellence that translate into tenure, promotion, and status within their guilds. The opening vignettes could as easily have occurred at Wheaton College as at the University of Chicago. Because the problems originate in professional formation, for Schwehn, the healing intervention requires that scholars be cultivated in such a way that they center the academic vocation on teaching, which, by extension, would center institutional mission also on teaching. As the organizing principle of academic work, teaching situates the activities and meaning of work within community, as friendships of varying types—teacher and student being the most central—are inherent to teaching. Moreover, treating all
academic practices as pedagogical would lend itself naturally to formation in communitarian virtues rather than individualistic ones. Whereas Weber’s vocational ideal involves formation in virtues leading to rational self-mastery, teaching understood as a common quest for knowledge within community would involve the cultivation of humility, faith, self-sacrifice, and charity—virtues indispensable to community and a communitarian vision of vocation. Such formation in communal habits of thought and practice would cultivate an epistemological stance that strives to listen, understand, and communicate rather than to order, master, or possess knowledge. Such community might further foster interdisciplinary pedagogy, because moving outside one’s area of mastery requires dependence on those in other disciplines. Within such communities of inquiry, meaning would be found relationally, in relation to others and to reality outside oneself.6
Schwehn closes with a meditation on the Eden of Genesis 1–3, which, like The Education of Henry Adams, reveals patterns found in Weber’s model of education and in so doing illustrates the promises and perils of modern education. For Schwehn, eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a form of education in which the two humans practice certain modern academic virtues (“answers, thinks critically, judges, misjudges, sees, hungers, seeks wisdom, aspires to deity”) and actually achieve something remarkable: self-awareness and creative or technological capacity that renders them in many ways like God (131). On the other hand, they experience disorder in their relationship with each other, with plants and animals, with labor, with themselves in the form of shame, and ultimately with God. They are left longing for unity, for relationship, for Eden.
How has Schwehn’s work fared in the past 30 years? His institutional legacy remains in the organization Schwehn founded to test his ideas: the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities (formerly the Lilly Fellows Program). The Lilly Network, along with similar organizations, has helped facilitate a revitalization of institutional mission at church-related colleges and universities, as well as the importance of religion in academic
research and as a vital part of student lives even at secular institutions.7 Drawing on Schwehn’s ideas, the Lilly Network’s programming has focused on individual formation in community as a way to foster institutional transformation, helping faculty from graduate school through senior leadership undergo formation in habits of thought and practice that point towards communitarian charity rather than individual mastery.
In addition to this institutional development, Schwehn’s ideas anticipated and dovetailed with at least three developments in higher education in the twenty-first century. First, Schwehn’s insistence that the Christian theological idea of vocation is central to higher education has undergirded Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Programs for the Theological Exploration of Vocation initiative that continues as the Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE), a program of the Council of Independent Colleges. These successive organizations have extended the engagement of vocation specifically to undergraduates to help them wrestle with concepts of work and meaning. NetVUE, in particular, has also helped translate this Christian theological concept into practices at universities that are not explicitly religious. Second, Schwehn’s ideas intersect with critiques of the transactional or flattened nature of contemporary higher education. Secular proponents of the liberal arts like Andrew Delbanco and Anthony Kronman have insisted that higher education include personal formation; such advocacy has meshed with curricular developments aimed at “educating the whole person,” at service learning, and with “good life” courses at any number of schools.8 Organizations such as the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University focus on the development of virtues of character as central to educational aims. Finally, a number of scholars have joined Schwehn in pointing out the degree to which contemporary academic formation is actually, in part, a kind of malformation or deformation. Scholars such as Paul Griffiths have revisited the Augustinian distinction between curiositas, or a quest to master and create knowledge, and studiositas, or truth sought in humility—distinctions that map onto Schwehn’s parsing of modernist and communitarian modes of scholarship.9Along similar lines, Kathleen Fitzpatrick in Generous Thinking and Michael Sandel in The Tyranny of Merit note the degree to which individual competition in education distorts self-worth and exacerbates the growing chasm of class and cultural polarization between those with or without a college degree.10 And finally, Willie James Jennings’ After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging brings postcolonial and racial analysis to bear on higher education to demonstrate how the imaginary of “whiteness” distorts the goals of education into formation for white possession, mastery, and control.11 Jennings extends his analysis further back than Schwehn’s as Jennings implicates not modernity but the earlier Enlightenment and Christian models of knowing in this malformation. That is, the malformation was already inherent to the educational mission of universities before engagements with modernity. For universities, especially Christian ones, to embrace an ideal of formation rooted in the actions of Jesus, Jennings pushes his readers to imagine an education aimed at nurturing the formation of teachers and graduates who embody belonging rather than mastery. It would seem, then, that both Jennings and Schwehn emphasize the theological virtue of charity as they push us to consider education for belonging or education rooted in Edenic unity. As church-related higher education finds itself again pondering its purpose amidst financial precarity, cultural polarization, and declining enrollments, if Schwehn and Jennings are correct, it would appear we have yet to envision what Christian higher education could be if rooted in the greatest of spiritual charisms—one that captures a longing for Eden and hunger for belonging in the crowds following Jesus. That is, just as eating the fruit of modern education can move us from Edenic unity to exilic fragmentation, love in community can draw us back again to unity and belonging and in doing so give us hope for a future in which we are able to have faith in Christian higher learning.
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Footnotes
- See James Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light (Eerdmans, 1998); George Marsden, The Soul of the American University (Oxford University Press, 1994); and Philip Gleason, Contending with Modernity (Oxford University Press, 1995). Ideas for this review were shaped by essays in a special issue of The Cresset 77, no. 5 (2014): 6–25. These include Mel Piehl, “Exiles’ Return”; Michael Beaty, “Creating Communities of Learning: Exiles from Eden and The Revival of Christian Higher Education”; Mark W. Roche, “On Realizing an Alternative Concept of Academic Vocation”; and Susan VanZanten, “Still Lonesome in Eden.” Also important to my thinking are the papers delivered at the Postdoctoral Fellows Reunion and Conference dedicated to Exiles from Eden at Valparaiso University on June 6–8, 2014; papers can be accessed at https://thelillynetwork.org/2014-exiles-from-eden-conference-papers. My thinking is especially shaped by Patrick H. Byrne, “Curiosity, Exiles from Eden and Community,” also available at this website.
- Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, eds., The Vocation Lectures, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Hackett, 2004), 1–31.
- Schwehn stresses the historical connection between the church and higher learning and rejects a “return” to this pre-modern construction. He also does not think such virtues are necessarily tied to religion, but only historically tied. Schwehn believes there could be other models of communal formation that could occur outside the Christian imaginary (47–57).
- Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 8.
- Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 30.
- Schwehn’s analysis of communitarian virtue and epistemology rests on his engagement with Parker Palmer and Richard Rorty. Schwehn argues that Weber’s assessment of the academic vocation further rests on a positivist/foundationalist/objectivist ontology and epistemology. Schwehn argues that the postmodern turn to community-based ontologies and epistemologies weakens the rationale for individualistic asceticism and provides a foundation for a community-based/conversation-based search for truth and meaning centered on teaching. See Schwehn, Exiles from Eden, 22–41.
- See, for example, John Schmalzbauer and Kathleen Mahoney, The Return of Religion in American Higher Education (Baylor University Press, 2018); Douglas and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, No Longer Invisible (Oxford, 2012).
- Andrew Delbanco, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press, 2012); Anthony T. Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Yale University Press, 2007).
- See Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite (The Catholic University of America Press, 2009). I am especially indebted to Byrne, “Curiosity, Exiles from Eden and Community” for this analysis.
- Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Generous Thinking (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit (Picador, 2020).
- Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020).
