Professional Matters at Religiously Affiliated Institutions

In this brief contribution, I will describe my experience as a non-Catholic working at a Catholic research university in the Jesuit tradition, early in my career before I had tenure. At the time, the university was embroiled in a heated debate about what its historical identity meant as it continued a transformation from regional Catholic university to one with a more global visibility and outreach.

Being on the faculty of a school in the evangelical Christian tradition like mine, a residential small liberal arts college in the Midwest, has both its challenges and rewards. The challenges—the expectation of faithfully keeping certain codes of behavior and faith, the demands by students upon one’s time outside the classroom—are perhaps better known.

When I began teaching at my small liberal arts college in the 1980s, I had honestly not thought much about the school’s affiliation with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). It had never crossed my mind that the college might be taking a risk in hiring a non-Lutheran like me, nor that I myself might be taking a risk in signing on to teach at a college that operates on the basis of a religious tradition different from my own.

I worked for three years at a Mormon-affiliated institution as a Visiting Assistant Professor — a very positive experience for me overall, but definitely one requiring some adjustment. My non-LDS identity and my female gender were salient in every aspect of my work there: the school employs very few non-Mormons, and relatively few female faculty, so for the vast majority of my students I was the only non-Mormon and one of a few women who had ever taught or would ever teach them. I will discuss how this affected my teaching and my overall integration into the institution's community.

Being a Catholic at a Baptist institution is not nearly so tricky as speaking to a mixed audience of believers and non-believers at an SCS panel. What I mean by “Christianity” (that every person is a child of God, infinitely loved and created for true freedom and everlasting happiness; Mother Teresa) is not what many hear in “Christianity” (prohibitions and condemnations at war with freedom and happiness; Steve Bannon).