Overly protecting confessional orthodoxy by insulating theology in separate departments, Protestant universities rendered Christianity unable to integrate new knowledge, setting a pattern that Catholic universities and seminaries all too readily followed.
via Where the Rot Started? | Books and Culture.
That’s quite a thesis and I think there is some truth to this. Being overly protective is just as harmful as thoughtlessly falling for every new idea that pops up. Yet, is it really true that creating a separate department thereby makes it insular and unable to integrate new knowledge?
For one thing it seems that this equation is historically inaccurate. The first “universities” were formed from and around seminaries and divinity schools. And, separate Theology faculties were well established, for hundreds of years in fact, in universities before the Protestant/Catholic schism. For example, the first four faculties at the University of Paris, which was in existence before but more or less took official shape in the 1200′s, were Arts, Medicine, Law, and Theology. (Institutions like the Sorbonne were originally founded exclusively as theology faculties that then accrued other departments.)
Second, just because a department has a separate identity either in legal formation or even in physical manifestation does not mean that it would necessarily have an insular mentality. As one member of the Chicago Divinity School explained to me, the physical location of the divinity school in the middle of the quad was meant to represent not only the department’s influence upon all other sections of the university but also the fact that they purposely sought to learn from the advances in each of the other departments.
What do you think, do separate theology departments breed insularity anymore than, say, a geology department is insulated against the developments in the physics department?