Secularization, Education, and Drift

I've been reading and thinking about secularization lately as part of my research on Ashesi University and its blending of Western and African motifs.

In Ghana schools, as in the rest of life, religion is a deeply ingrained part of the routine.  Religious and Moral Training is part of the state curriculum.  The photograph here is of students and staff worshiping as part of the school day.   Religious beliefs are diverse.  Christians are in the majority in most parts of the country, but there are also many Muslims as well as followers of Traditional beliefs and practices.  But a belief in God is widely shared.

Americans of course no longer share that assumption.  In fact at most universities it's safe to say that professing strong religious beliefs will lead, at best, to people regarding you as quaint.

The shift toward secularism has been going on for a long time in American universities, but for the first two thirds or so of the twentieth century the ethos of most campuses--like the culture as a whole--was still strongly informed by Protestantism, broadly defined.  So when professors or administrators talked about serving the public interest, there was a general understanding of what that entailed. In the past several decades academic and mainstream culture have been dominated by an emphasis on what is commonly referred to as expressive or radical individualism, or what some critics have described as a shift from a focus on one's social responsibilities to a focus on one's personal rights.

This expressive individualism has led us to become more sensitive than before to injustice.  But since the alpha and omega of life is the pursuit of individual rather than collective happiness, universities have become much better at deconstruction than reconstruction; we excel at identifying oppression but struggle at advancing positive alternatives, in part because to do so would be to impose, we assume, constructed and arbitrary beliefs on radically free individuals.  The result, as Columbia University cultural historian (who identifies himself as a secular Jew) Andrew Delbanco puts it, is a sense of "drift."

His solution, (advanced in College; What it Was, Is, and Should Be)  is to recapture the sense of mission that U.S. colleges once articulated: "to serve others is to serve oneself by providing a sense of purpose, thereby countering the loneliness and aimlessness by which all people, young and old, can be afflicted."

As Portland State's motto is "To Serve the City," I think we have an excellent foundation from which to build a sense of shared purpose.