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The university where you teach has a divinity school.
What's really weird to me about these kinds of claims is how (ironically!) cloistered they are. There are twenty-two registered student religious clubs on the Yale campus. Of COURSE there are religious communities at Yale, and at all colleges.
Are there anti-religious communities, too? Yes, of course. Are some students reluctant to discuss their religious views with students they don't know well? Again, yes. Of course.
But to say that discussion of faith is "verboten" on a college campus is to erase not just the religious students on that campus but the communities of faith that exist there.
A university is a community, and it is a collection of communities—an agglomeration of public, private, and semi-public spaces. It has a dominant culture and a plethora of subcultures. Inevitably.
(This is, by the way, one of many reasons why I will be forever indebted to the @binghamtonsa. My involvement with student government brought me in contact with all sorts of student cultures that otherwise would have been invisible to me.)
It's just so freaking condescending to claim that it's impossible for students to discuss their faith on campus. Some conversations may be hard, in some circles. They may be uncomfortable. But where something is uncomfortable, students carve out spaces to support each other.
And I now see that Christakis intended to refer specifically to disussions of faith among faculty, not students.
In response to which I'll just comment that "discussing religious beliefs on campus" and "faculty discussing their religious beliefs with other faculty" are two VERY different things.
If you think of the campus as a place where faculty and administrators do their work, you think of it in a very different way than if you think of it as a huge, sprawling community, most of whose citizens are students.
And if you think of a divinity school as a place where teachers teach, you're going to imagine its function very differently than if you imagine it as a place where students study.
So when I said "the university where you teach has a divinity school," Christakis heard me as making reference to the academic study of religion, whereas I was referring to the living community of people who might gather for such study.
Anyway, yes, the university is forever and always an institution AND a community. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
