News
March 2
Almost a year and a half after the derecognition of the evangelical student religious group Tufts Christian Fellowship ( TCF), the heated debate over qualifica- tions for student leadership positions for religious groups came to some resolution with a new policy from the Committee on Student Life (CSL).
Alva Couch and Haydn Forrest, the CSL faculty and student co-chairs, wrote a Feb. 6 op-ed to the Daily, which detailed the significant alterations that the CSL made to the policy.
"The most important change in the policy is that groups are no longer able to seek an exemption from the Tufts non- discrimination policy," Forrest, a senior, told the Daily an email.
In November of 2012, CSL passed the "justified departure" policy, which per- mitted student religious groups to apply for exemption from the non-discrimina- tion policy. Couch, an associate professor of computer science, said the previous policy set a dangerous precedent.
"...The basic problem that they had with [the policy] is [that] if you allow someone to discriminate for religious reasons, why don't you allow people to discriminate for non-religious reasons?" Couch said. Couch also explained that he saw the exemption policy as an experiment.
If the "justified departure" exemption were granted, it would allow the student religious group to require students in leadership roles to have certain character- istics, such as adhering to certain beliefs or abstaining from "sexually unchaste" activities, according to Forrest.
In an interview conducted last fall, Forrest told the Daily that transparency was one of the key mechanisms of the justified departure policy. The point was to ensure that incoming students would be fully aware of the conditions needed for leadership positions in groups they were joining, he said.
Junior Kumar Ramanathan, who was a member of the CSL last spring, disagreed with the idea that transparency was the key to solving the issue.
"I think that's a false dichotomy - that discrimination is just going to happen and either it can be secret or it can be out in the open," he said.
Student opposition to last semester's exemption policy was heavily voiced by the organization Coalition Against Religious Exclusion (CARE), of which Ramanathan is a member.
Senior Walker Bristol, a student repre- sentative of the CSL and also a member of CARE, said the group's activity ramped up when the justified departure policy was released.
CARE realized that in order to change the policy, they would have put their resources into packing the CSL with people who wanted that change, according to Bristol.
"I wanted to be able to advocate for religious communities and people who have religious identities [who] wouldn't be represented by people in power in religious organizations," Bristol said.
CARE was not the only student group who functioned as an oppositional voice. The Equal Educational Opportunity Committee (EEOC) sent the CSL a let- ter last fall detailing their argument that student religious groups are first student groups, then religious groups. If stu- dents wish to practice their religion in a way that doesn't follow Tufts law, they argued, they can do that outside of a TCU-funded group.
Couch echoed this sentiment from EEOC.
"Most of the conflict that occurred within campus was [because] people felt that we were not sufficiently treat- ing [student religious groups] as student organizations and, as such, the student government was not empowered to gov- ern them," he said.
According to Couch, the student gov- ernment was in crisis and grew con-
SHelby Carpenter / tHe tuftS Daily the controversy over the derecognition of tufts Christian fellowship has brought much dis-
??cussion to the interfaith community at tufts.
cerned for what they would do if they didn't want to recognize a student group. Senior Jonathan Jacques, chair of the TCU Judiciary, said the new policy removes
a lot of pressure from the Senate.
"We don't have the possibility anymore of groups coming to us and wanting an exemption from the non-discrimination policy, and us having to figure out, 'Well, is it specific enough [or] is it not specific enough?'" he said. "The biggest issue with [the previous policy] was that we had to think a few steps ahead and think, 'Well, if a new student is going to come to this group, are they going to know exactly what they're getting themselves into' ... That had a lot of grey area, and that's com-
pletely removed from the picture now." Ultimately, Couch saw it as a question of whether or not the non-discrimina- tion policy could accommodate student religious groups with requirements for leadership. But, in his first year as CSL co-
chair, he was able to come to an answer. "The reason that the policy is so volatile and changed is that I think the answer to that is no - but it took us an entire term to figure that out," he said. "And that is the
real issue here."
Senior Menghan Liu is a member of
the Vision and Planning Board of the Interdenominational Christian Fellowship, which is now unaffiliated with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a national campus ministry organization with which TCF was initially affiliated. Liu served on the execu- tive board for TCF since fall of 2012.
"We felt that our desire to require our leadership to have certain beliefs was actually an expression of non-discrimi- nation on the grounds of religion rather than an exemption from [discrimination, and] based off of that the CSL took our appeal and created the policy," she said, describing the sentiment of last spring.
However, she said that over the last year there has been a great deal of dia- logue between the members of TCF about what their group's beliefs are, and that the group has removed language in its constitution that requires leaders to be "sexually chaste."
According to Liu, the group had planned on requesting exemption from the non-discrimination policy so they could reapply for recognition. They were
told, however, that the policy was under review and could not be used.
"There's a variety of opinion even with- in the fellowship about what that means for us on campus, but at least the gen- eral consensus is that we would like our leaders to have certain religious beliefs because that flows naturally out of who we are," she said.
When asked why the phrase "sexually chaste" was taken out of their constitu- tion, Liu explained that there were still a variety of opinions within the fellowship about the requirements for a leader.
"When choosing leadership, it will be about that person and whether they are truly and genuinely pursuing their reli- gion or pursuing living out their faith, or pursuing a greater relationship with God or with Jesus Christ ..." she said.
Whether or not sexual practices factors into that definition, Liu said, is some- thing that not everyone agrees on.
Couch sees the new policy as a solution, however, because it removes requirements for leaders and still allows them to be selected through an equal voting process.
"We are definitely not saying that a non-Christian can be the leader of a Christian group," Couch said. "We are saying that in the democratic process, supposedly ... takes care of that. And one question I would ask of the critics is, do they really feel so insecure about the democratic process that they feel they have to impose controls on it?"
Nonetheless, codifying democratic elec- tions is not something that is outlined in the new CSL policy. According to Bristol, it would be difficult to implement.
"The point that we can appoint leaders or elect leaders is still ongoing," Bristol said. "That's a TCU question."
Bristol also mentioned that it might be hard to control the election process with groups that are horizontal or elect leaders through an application process, such as Peer Health Exchange.
Couch said he sees the democratic process as the critical, even though it's not outlined explicitly in the policy.
"[For] a group that adapts to the peo- ple in the group - that's not necessarily because the leadership is non-Christian; it's because the group has shifted its boundaries," he said.
