The role of religion in higher education: Evidence from faculty surveys at Baylor, Notre Dame, Boston College, and Brigham Young and from OLS regression models based on all 'national' private universities (Massachusetts, Texas, Indiana, Utah)

Standard histories of secularization in higher education suggest that religiously identified universities cannot attain academic excellence or prestige without cutting their ties to the church. However, schools such as Baylor, Notre Dame, Boston College and Brigham Young have continued to strive for academic excellence while maintaining a relatively strong commitment to the church. Therefore, we were interested in answering several questions. First, are these schools truly committed to their sponsoring church? And if so, how do the faculty practice Christian scholarship? Secondly, based on the apparent pattern of the secularization of higher education, must a school secularize in order to achieve academic excellence? Answering the above questions required two methods of research. The first step was to analyze faculty surveys from Brigham Young, Boston College, Baylor and Notre Dame. Then a series of regressions based on U.S. News and World Report's college rankings were run in order to predict an academic reputation for church-related universities treating them as though they did not have a religious identification. Results from the surveys suggest that the structure or organization (i.e., curriculum, mission, and chapel) of a university is a likely predictor of faculty attitudes towards their school's religious tradition or heritage. Brigham Young has the most rigid structure and their faculty proved to be the most committed to their school's religious tradition, followed by Baylor, Notre Dame and Boston College. More specifically, faculty attitudes at all four schools clustered around some very important variables, denomination and school in which the faculty member teaches. Those who identified themselves with the same denomination as their school and did not teach in the Arts and Sciences were most likely to support the religious tradition at their university. Finally, conventional wisdom, which states that a school must secularize in order to achieve academic excellence proved to be overstated by our regression models. Religious schools are not handicapped by their church-affiliation in achieving academic excellence or recruiting top students and faculty.