Joel Gereboff, Arizona State University

Joel Gereboff has been at Arizona State University for thirty-four years and has been head of the religious studies department since 1998. He has been involved in promoting the academic study of religion in several international locations as well. His research focuses on rabbinic Judaism, American Judaism, and comparative religious ethics.

The Challenge of Changing Institutional Structures

Over the course of the past five years, religious studies at Arizona State University has changed its institutional location and rethought its configuration of course offerings to address broader thematic issues. This move aims to make evident to majors and other students the ways in which the study of religion contributes to the understanding of complex questions and developments. As part of the broader reorganization of many units into schools (within colleges), religious studies three years ago became part of the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. Intellectual and budgetary considerations led to significant alterations in the institutional makeup of Arizona State University. Within this new school, religious studies continues to oversee and define its own major, minor, and course offerings while also searching for new possible collaborative teaching opportunities with the other two faculties comprising the school. These conversations are for the most part just beginning, and how they will impact the way religious studies contributes to the university in general will be made evident in coming years. However, prior to this reorganization, our faculty had already begun to explore how we might reenvision our undergraduate role. These discussions, as well as other developments — including the appointment of a number of colleagues with joint appointments in other units, the pursuit of cross-listing courses with other units, our initiation and ongoing contribution to a number of undergraduate certificate programs, our faculty involvement in a variety of research and program centers, and the overall participation of our faculty in individual and collaborative research — all enhance the visibility of religious studies and its crucial contribution to teaching and learning in public higher education.

Arizona State University is among the largest multicampus universities in the United States, with over 70,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The largest campus is in Tempe, and the religious studies program resides within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Religious studies became a department in 1979, and has grown to include a full-time faculty of more than twenty. It offers numerous courses leading to undergraduate minor and major, master’s, and doctoral degrees. Approximately 4,000–5,000 students per semester typically enroll in religious studies courses. The number of majors, however, has remained in the low hundreds with a significant number of minors as well.

President Michael Crow assumed the leadership of the university in 2002 and put forward a vision for transforming the institution into a New American University. Eight design aspirations comprise this plan, and it includes several that have contributed in important ways to our rethinking the contribution of our undergraduate instruction: fusing intellectual disciplines, engaging globally, and transforming society. We have sought to devise new courses, develop interconnections with multiple units, create new certificate programs, and retool the major to emphasize broad thematic issues that in part take into account these institutional goals. At the same time, these changes also serve student interests in ways that equip them to be contributing members of the local, national, and global society.

“One university in many locations” has also been a guiding principle of Arizona State University. In concrete terms, this has meant that although students pursue their major in a unit housed on one of our four campuses, courses that meet the specific requirements of their major may be offered on any of the campuses and are fully transferable. The rapid growth of online course offerings (many not fielded out of our unit but under the “REL” prefix) has also meant that, other than having initially provided the course description and proposing certain content so as to satisfy general studies requirements, we do not directly supervise many of these particular offerings. Thus, as detailed below, many students often lack a grasp of the overall goals of the study of religion and also of who stands behind courses in which they are enrolled. This is true even after we have initiated some major changes to enhance the overt contribution of the study of religion to the examination of numerous social, cultural, and political issues, and to shape the teaching and especially research and programming related to the study of religion at Arizona State University. In some ways we are not fully in control of the ways in which the study of religion contributes to our overall university. But the general interest in the study of religion remains very high, at least measured in terms of university-wide enrollments in REL courses, which total more than 5,000 students per semester.

In order to understand more recent initiatives undertaken by the faculty in religious studies, I offer the following short history of our unit. From its start, the religious studies department defined the goal of our major as follows:

To cultivate knowledge of:

1. The beliefs, practices, and institutions of Asian religions, Western religions, and religion in the Americas
2. The theoretical and methodological issues involved in the discipline of religious studies
3. The roles of religion in individual and collective life in diverse historical and social contexts

While we had always required comparative analysis, the curriculum initially and for many years was organized around courses on different periods and aspects of specific religious traditions or religions in particular geographic regions. Implicit in these courses was the exploration of broad cultural and social phenomena, such as the role of texts and the nature of interpretation, or religion and social and/or political change and stability. But students would have had to draw selectively from examinations of such matters as they emerged episodically in different classes. Throughout the first two decades of the history of our unit, we routinely attracted some of the university’s best students, with nearly a third of our majors being “double majors.” Such students tended to be able to make important connections between their learning in religious studies and knowledge gained from their studies in such fields as languages and literature, anthropology, and psychology. Furthermore, colleagues in other academic units, when looking at the list of courses and their descriptions, would not have so easily perceived the multiple connections between our teaching and research and their own interests. Such connections, of course, did emerge from interactions among members of our faculty and colleagues in other units, resulting in a good understanding by many of the faculty and administrators at Arizona State University of the broader and critical contributions the study of religion did and could make.

As part of a septennial review in the late 1990s we initiated some changes in our undergraduate course offerings by introducing what can be seen as topical courses. These offerings drew upon data from several different religions, though the examples would vary depending on the instructor. At the lower division level, courses explored such issues as saints and sinners, living and dying, religion and popular culture, and religion and the modern world. At the upper division level, they explored comparative mysticism; religion, violence, and conflict resolution; religion, nationalism, and ethnic conflict; religion and sexuality; and religion and global politics. The titles of these courses make explicit the specific general issues to which comparative religious data are relevant. A good number of these courses were readily cross-listed with other units, including global studies, psychology, justice studies, and women and gender studies. The cross-listing provided students majoring in other units with exposure to the study of religion, while at the same time satisfying requirements for their own major. These efforts also strengthened connections with faculty in these other units.

The vision of Arizona State University as a New American University retools the mission and, to a large extent, the structure of American higher education. Local, national, and global factors all contribute to this plan. The university’s web site devotes much space to presenting this vision and describes it in part in this way:

“In order to become that model for the New American University, Arizona State University [ASU] has undergone some radical changes over the last few years. We have undertaken a massive reorganization of our institution. We have torn down walls between disciplines and encouraged collaboration among diverse units. We have altered the trajectory of the university and reevaluated the role that universities play in society, in the economy, and in education at all levels.”

“Already, ASU has built a new physical and intellectual environment for learning and discovery. ASU has changed the community of people who inhabit that environment. And ASU has rewritten the objectives for the people in that environment as well as for the institution as a whole.”

“By breaking the mold, ASU has become a place where local solutions have global impact.”

One key feature detailed in the above is the desire and in many ways the requirement for collaboration among diverse units. Achieving this goal has resulted structurally in the reorganization of many academic units into schools. These new units often bring together faculty from a number of disciplines to investigate complex questions that cannot be answered by the knowledge and approaches of a single discipline. These new configurations in some cases have fostered growth in collaborative research, which has simultaneously had an impact on graduate education. But in terms of undergraduate instruction, although some new degrees have come into being, especially related to fields of applied studies, disciplinary faculties within these schools have for the most part continued to offer more “traditional” degrees, though with some modifications. Thus for example, the former Department of Foreign Languages became the School of International Letters and Cultures. It still offers degrees in French, Spanish, and German, with some new school-wide requirements. In the case of the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies (SHPRS), each of the faculties remains responsible for its undergraduate degrees. But each of the units in varying ways has begun to rethink some of its offerings and overall requirements in part due to developments within its discipline and in part in response to changes at the university, including opportunities that emerge from our being now part of this school. Here I want to focus on our most important initiative: the identification of thematic foci of our undergraduate offerings and degree program.

Even prior to our being incorporated into our present school configuration, colleagues had undertaken a discussion to make explicit the larger questions that our course offerings considered. The intent was to make our offerings evident to the campus community and also to revise our major requirements to include classes with thematic concentration in addition to existing classes in traditions and religions based on geographic regions. Three themes emerged as key organizing frameworks for our various offerings, with many courses falling under more than one. These themes are: 1) Religion in global contexts; 2) Religion in public life and conflict; and 3) Text practice and representation. The descriptions in the course catalog for each of these themes identify clearly the specific issues a student will explore and also notes the context that gives rise to the importance of being able to analyze intelligently and communicate insights about these matters. For example the description for the “Religion, Public Life, and Conflict” course begins as follows:

“Students will look at the various ways in which religion interacts with civic society, including the role of religion in the public square, in relations between nations, regions, and cultures, and in the formation of public policy.”

The description then notes the contextual factors that make this a critical issue today:

“Relations between religion and civic society, in the United States and throughout the world, are far more complex than the apparently stable categories of ‘church’ and ‘state’ would suggest. Despite predictions to the contrary, religion remains a major force in the public square, in the formulation of public policy, and in relations between nations, regions, and cultures. The critical study of these dynamics under the thematic rubric of religion, conflict, and public life brings the analytic tools of religious studies into conjunction with those of political science, history, sociology, anthropology, economics, ethics, theology, and global, gender, and critical race studies.”

Additional paragraphs elaborate on the above matters, but what I want to underscore here is the effort made to identify in the final sentence the interconnections between the study of religion and knowledge gained in other units. The description for the emphasis in the “Religion in Global Contexts” course similarly underscores such connections. It states:

“Students will study the dynamics of religious continuity and change, both historically and in the contemporary global world context. Religion is studied as a site where cultures meet and transformation takes place.

 To study religion in global contexts is to attend to the dynamics of religious continuity and change in historical and contemporary times and in distinct sociopolitical environments. Students who pursue work with this thematic emphasis draw on the analytical resources of religious studies as these intersect with those of anthropology, global studies, transborder and diaspora studies, and the study of languages and literatures.”

This change in the description and options for our majors has already had some positive impact on our students. Our undergraduate advisor has reported that many students find this alternative way of completing our degree attractive and that it helps them see the broader interconnections between their study of religion and their other academic interests. Our faculty also is more cognizant of emphasizing these concerns in their teaching, and we have consistently offered as our required capstone seminar, “Problems in the Study of Religion,” courses that address one or more of these thematic emphases. Finally, in advancing various proposals to the administration, we routinely refer to these themes, as well as to a number of the tracks in our doctoral program, such as “Islam in a Global Context,” “Christianity in a Global Context,” and “Anthropology of Religion” so as to ensure they understand our “transdisciplinary” commitments and contributions to the mission of Arizona State University and to the advancement of knowledge.

Undergraduate interest in religious studies remains very strong at Arizona State University. Overall enrollments in undergraduate courses continue to increase. This is evident as well in the newest institutional component of Arizona State University, ASU Online. Beginning last spring, a distinct administrative unit was established and administers all fully-online degrees. Students enrolled in these degree programs may only register for courses offered through ASU Online (face-to-face students cannot register for these courses, but can enroll in the numerous icourses [online courses] offered by many academic units). At present, another campus at Arizona State University is offering a good number of courses in religious studies for ASU Online, enrolling approximately 400–500 students per term. Our faculty has decided to offer a fully-online degree in religious studies beginning next fall. The challenges of adding these courses to our existing offerings and supervising these majors will significantly increase our responsibilities. But one positive impact of this initiative is that highly skilled course designers employed by ASU Online will guide our faculty in creating these offerings. In some ways these courses should have a more consistent quality than the existing online offerings not developed with such guidance. All this is to say that, while we have been committed to high quality undergraduate instruction, many local institutional as well as broader national and international factors continue to challenge our achievement of this goal. 

All in all, religious studies is doing well at Arizona State University in terms of exposing numerous students to the vital contribution that studying religion makes to advancing the understanding of numerous and complex issues. But we wonder with what degree of sophistication most students grasp these contributions that often are more implicit than explicit. In what ways the growth of online education, even when overseen by design experts, further shapes these outcomes is yet to be seen. We remain confident of our place in the academy and continue to strengthen existing undertakings; e.g., certificate programs, participation in centers, cross-listing courses, and developing new initiatives to enhance the contributions of research and the study of religion. We have made overt on our web page and in our conversations with students, faculty colleagues, and administrators the larger themes and multiple interconnections our discipline has to offer. The explicit articulation of such themes and interconnections should be replicable by colleagues in religious studies at other academic institutions. Pursuing this approach should in most cases help to underscore how religious studies is distinctive, and not disposable, in American higher education of the twenty-first century.