Board to determine fate of religious studies

The Department of Religious Studies faces two major obstacles following the Feb. 25-27 meeting of the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees.

Back in January, Bruce Bursten, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, announced the possibility of a merger of the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of Philosophy.

Secondly, Chancellor Jimmy Cheek announced at the Feb. 23 meeting of UT-Knoxville’s Faculty Senate that the Board of Trustees would be considering the possible discontinuance of 17 “low-producing” programs in their meeting two days later. Religious studies was one of those programs.

Since budget decisions will not become final until June, religious studies faculty are unsure about the future, Miriam Levering, professor in the Department of Religious Studies, said.

“We in religious studies have been told recently that the fate of religious studies as a department is ‘up in the air.’ We have also been told that, although the study of religion remains important at UTK, administrators do not know what form it will take in the future at this university,” she said. “This prolonged state of limbo is exhausting and demoralizing for the faculty of the religious studies department.”

The possible discontinuance of the religious studies program is not an immediate but rather an eventual concern, Mark Hulsether, professor in the Department of Religious Studies, said.

“It seems pretty clear that they are not contemplating an end to the major anytime soon — definitely not soon enough for current UT students to be worrying about that — but the question is whether they will support it in the long run,” he said.

Rather, faculty are concerned with the degradation of their own department as well as the Department of Philosophy as a result of a possible merger, Levering said.

“We agree with spokespersons from the philosophy department that we and they are educated in different ways to carry out different kinds of scholarly research,” Levering said. “…We prefer not to merge with philosophy, but largely because it seems logistically difficult to administer two different degree programs evenhandedly under one head.”

Levering said that the education of philosophy and religious studies professors is fundamentally different.

Rachelle Scott, assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, said that the study of religion is multidisciplinary and helps students understand the events of the past as well as the present.

“The historical and comparative study of religion provides students with a deeper awareness of the histories of particular religions, and it helps students to develop the necessary skills for understanding the role of religion in the contemporary world — from the protests of Buddhist monks in Tibet and Burma, to the role of Christianity in American politics, to the rise of religious violence around the world,” Scott said. “The field of religious studies examines religion through the lens of history and culture; it is inherently multicultural in scope. This is our strength.”

The proposal for merging the two departments was met with immediate disapproval by faculty of both departments. However, little has been announced since the first proposal in January.

“We understand that the deans are reconsidering the merger idea, but we do not have a clear sense of what is being planned,” Hulsether said.

Since then, the departments were asked to offer alternatives, which would still save the College of Arts and Sciences money.

“Clearly one consideration is that we will have several open tenure lines next year — no less than four out of eleven lines — so of course a path of least resistance for budget cutting is to opt not to fill them,” Hulsether said. “However, we don’t have to fill these lines immediately, and we feel that as long as we can stabilize with at least eight tenure lines in the long run — nine if UT wishes to have a reasonably strong curriculum in Islam — we can have a strong department.

“Going from eleven to eight or nine would be a major blow, but we can handle it. The hard thing right now is that we’re in limbo, so it’s very difficult to plan anything,” Hulsether said.

Both Scott and Levering mentioned the centrality of religious studies to UT’s mission of making students “Ready for the World.”

Levering said that the Department of Religious Studies has already lost their faculty line for Indian religion and, after this year, will lose the only person studying Islamic doctrine and the Koran on campus. Additionally, she said that the department is composed of a faculty who are all “key players in making students ‘Ready for the World.’”

“If these faculty lines gradually are emptied and exist only outside of a religious studies department that knows they are important, the students and their education will be the losers,” she said.

Students have benefited by gaining an understanding of humanity as a whole, both in this country and around the world, Levering said.

“They (students of religious studies) have learned a lot about how to think about a human phenomenon that defies reason and yet is tremendously important across the world and to a fulfilled human life,” she said. “In our multicultural society and global world, religious literacy that includes a broad and deep knowledge of the religions of our neighbors is the very foundation of religious freedom for them and for us.”

Hulsether said that the importance of understanding religion in today’s world should be reflected in the support given by UT to the Department of Religious Studies.

“Given the importance of conflicts on the contemporary world stage that are driven in significant part by religion, the centrality of religious ideas and institutions to so much of world history and the importance of religion to U.S. society and culture in particular, we think it is alarming and embarrassing to be thinking about cutting back on the ability to study it in a disciplined comparative way at UT,” he said. “Many of our peer institutions are beefing up their programs in religious studies at the very moment that UT is thinking about cutting back.”