A Review of “Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education

In Compromising Scholarship, Yancey argues that politically conservative persons, religiously conservative persons, and especially politically, religiously conservative persons face a disadvantage when seeking either employment or a fair hearing in the contemporary American academy, especially in the social sciences and humanities. Several times while reading this book, I recalled a job interview of my own at a university in Canada. One interviewer asked whether my religious convictions might undermine my ability to teach courses in a program that prepared teachers for service in Saskatchewan’s public schools. I noted that, while the question was illegal under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, I welcomed it because I believed that all professors carried out their work on the basis of one vision of the good life or another and that my own worldview was consistent with the very dispositions that Saskatchewan desired in its teachers. I added that, politically, I was likely well to the left of anyone else in the room. Alas, my leftist politics proved unequal to the needed redemption of my faith convictions, and the job went to another person, presumably someone lacking bias or prejudice