Faculty are Finding Faith

God may have a place at Harvard after all.

On the heels of the General Education report that added a religion requirement to the Core, a national study released last week revealed that the majority of college educators believe in some form of God.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Neil Gross, co-author of the study, said he was surprised to find so many people of faith in the professorate.

“Conservative critics of higher education paint the academy as a bastion of atheism,” Gross wrote in an e-mail. “There are indeed more atheists in the professorate than in the general population, but many professors are people of faith.”

The study, titled “How Religious Are America’s College and University Professors” and written by Gross and Solon Simmons of George Mason University, found that 36.6 percent of professors at “elite institutions” identify themselves as atheists or agnostics, in comparison to 23.4 percent of professors nationwide. The study used the “US News and World Report” ranking of the top 50 doctoral universities to define elite institutions, and religious individuals were identified as anyone other than atheists or agnostics.

But professors remain less spiritual than the general public—only 6.9 percent of the U.S. population identifies itself as agnostic or atheistic, according to a 2000 General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center.

Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History Karen L. King said it is not surprising that there are more atheists and agnostics among professors than among the general public.

King said that professors, who frequently engage in intellectual thought, would be more likely to question their own faith.

Such questioning leads to defining themselves by those terms, she said.

Others were surprised that professors are so faith-based.

“Harvard has a reputation for liberal, secular professors” said President of the Harvard Secular Society Amanda L. Shapiro ’08.

Shapiro, a sociology concentrator, added that most of her professors have presented religion in a way that “seemed pretty objective.”

Gross said he could not compare the spirituality of Harvard professors with academics at other universities because he did not survey enough professors at any particular institution.