Pitzer College in California Adds Major in Secularism

Starting this fall, Pitzer College, a small liberal arts institution in Southern California, will inaugurate a department of secular studies. Professors from other departments, including history, philosophy, religion, science and sociology, will teach courses like “God, Darwin and Design in America,” “Anxiety in the Age of Reason” and “Bible as Literature.”

The department was proposed by Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion, who describes himself as “culturally Jewish, but agnostic-atheist on questions of deep mystery.” Over the years he grew increasingly intrigued by the growth of secularism in the United States and around the world. He studied and taught in Denmark, one of the world’s most secular countries, and has written several books about atheism.

Studying nonbelief is as valid as studying belief, Mr. Zuckerman said, and the new major will make that very clear.

“It’s not about arguing ‘Is there a God or not?’?” Mr. Zuckerman said. “There are hundreds of millions of people who are nonreligious. I want to know who they are, what they believe, why they are nonreligious. You have some countries where huge percentages of people — Czechs, Scandinavians — now call themselves atheists. Canada is experiencing a huge wave of secularization. This is happening very rapidly.

“It has not been studied,” he added.

The percentage of American adults who say they have no religion has doubled in 20 years, to 15 percent, according to the American Religious Identification Survey, released in 2008. The survey was conducted by researchers at Trinity College in Hartford, which houses the Institute for the Study of Secularism, Society and Culture but does not have a distinct major in secular studies.

Barry A. Kosmin, the director of the institute, said Pitzer College would be the first to have such a major. The institute hosted a conference for academics in California a few years ago on how to develop courses on secularism, which Mr. Zuckerman attended.

Initially, Mr. Zuckerman said he found some skepticism on campus about a secular studies major.

“I had to convince them that this is not an antireligion degree, any more than a religion department exists to bash nonbelievers,” he said.

Pitzer, founded in 1963, is known as a liberal college that emphasizes community service and environmentalism, and its students receive an inordinate number of Fulbright fellowships for study abroad. It is one of the seven Claremont Colleges, neighboring campuses where students may take courses at institutions other than their own.

On April 28, Pitzer faculty members on the College Council voted unanimously to approve the secular studies major, subject to review in four years.

Laura Skandera Trombley, the president of Pitzer, said in an interview, “It’s a serious area of scholarly endeavor, and Pitzer College has a tradition of doing really exciting, cutting-edge intellectual work, so this really fits into the ethos of the college.”

Mr. Zuckerman said he immediately heard from three students interested in the major. One of them was Kiley Lawrence, a freshman from Mission Hills, Kan., and a pre-med student at Scripps College, one of the seven Claremont Colleges.

Ms. Lawrence attended an Episcopal school through eighth grade and was well versed in the Bible, but she said she became a skeptic early on. Now she plans to declare a double major in biophysics and secular studies, because, she said, “each enhances the other.”

Ms. Lawrence, 19, said, “I feel as though I’m being included in something really exciting and innovative, and perhaps even historic.”

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A Community College in Florida Works to Attract the Poor and the Presidential

Yet a community college in Miami with no trace of ivy and a policy of accepting just about everyone, even the hard luck cases, has managed to lure a trifecta of commanders in chief to its urban campus.

At Miami Dade College on Friday evening, President Obama delivered the commencement address, joining a roster that includes Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Over the years, Jimmy Carter, the elder President Bush and Gerald R. Ford have stopped in for round-table chats as have an assortment of first ladies, foreign presidents and cabinet members.

So how is it that an open-admission college that embraces academically risky students carries such cachet?

“We call it a dream factory,” said Eduardo J. Padrón, the college’s president since 1995. “We give people who ordinarily wouldn’t have the opportunity a second chance.”

The college’s demographics make for political catnip. Presidents and other members of the nation’s elite want to align themselves with an institution that has had an amazing run of success stories among its Hispanic and black students. “If we want to win the future,” said Hannah M. August, a White House spokeswoman, “we need to outeducate our global competitors, and schools like Miami Dade are helping us lead the way.”

With an enrollment of 170,000, Miami Dade is the country’s largest college (not including online universities). Ninety percent of its students are minorities, and it graduates more black and Hispanic students than any other college. This is no small accomplishment in light of the country’s stubbornly low college attendance and graduation rates among minorities.

Take a Google tour of Miami notables and an impressive list crops up of graduates and former students of Miami Dade College (or Dade County Junior College, as it was known when it opened in 1960): members of Congress (Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and John L. Mica, both Florida Republicans and House committee leaders), mayors, actors (Andy Garcia and Sylvester Stallone), music magnates (Emilio Estefan), baseball players, a former president of Panama and an assortment of successful architects, lawyers, bank presidents, hospital directors and business owners.

“I think if it weren’t for Miami Dade, I would be doing something very different right now, working in a gas station or something,” said Cesar L. Alvarez, the executive chairman of the law firm Greenberg Traurig and a 1967 graduate who said the college inspired him to achieve. “I didn’t have money to go anywhere else, and I seriously doubt anyone else would have taken me.”

The college’s home state, an electoral prize, is irresistible for any politician. But many attribute its allure for presidents and students to Dr. Padrón, who boasts of Miami Dade’s community college soul. He has elevated its status and nurtured his political relationships. Mr. Obama selected him to head the President’s Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans. He has held similar posts under past presidents.

Like many in Miami, Dr. Padrón is an alumnus. “He was his own case study,” Mr. Alvarez said.

Dr. Padrón attended the college in the 1960s, fresh from Cuba, with only a smattering of English and no chance of attending any other college. He excelled, eventually working his way to a doctorate in economics at the University of Florida. He rebuffed a lucrative job with DuPont, choosing instead to pay a social debt to his community. He started working at the college and has stayed for 40 years.

Rather than encourage professors to polish their credentials by publishing papers, Dr. Padrón urges them to be passionate about teaching and committed to helping struggling students, many of whom barely graduated high school or struggle to afford college. Some take 10 years to graduate because they are working their way through school. Others charge through in two years and transfer to top-tier universities.

Miami Dade also focuses on training students for real-world jobs; it graduates more nurses, for example, than any other college.

“Our students, a majority, come to us unprepared,” said Dr. Padrón, who said Miami public schools, with some exceptions, often fail to properly educate the city’s children. “It takes effort and money to get them to a level they can compete. If we say, ‘You are not prepared. We won’t admit you,’ thousands and thousands would not be able to come to college. The cycle of poverty would continue. That’s why this is so crucial.”

That was true of Mr. Estefan, a Miami institution who was just another broke Cuban refugee with no option but Miami Dade. He squeezed in courses at night between his day job as an office boy at the Bacardi Corporation and an evening job as an accordion player at an Italian restaurant. Mr. Estefan, now a world-renowned music producer, credits the college for giving him a foundation for what it takes to run a business.

When he aspired to jump into the music business, people told him he was too poor, too foreign, too old. “Then at Miami Dade, one professor said to me, ‘In this country, you can do anything.’?”

 

Gender Games: College Teams, Relying on Deception, Undermine Gender Equity

At the University of South Florida, more than half of the 71 women on the cross-country roster failed to run a race in 2009. Asked about it, a few laughed and said they did not know they were on the team.

At Marshall University, the women’s tennis coach recently invited three freshmen onto the team even though he knew they were not good enough to practice against his scholarship athletes, let alone compete. They could come to practice whenever they liked, he told them, and would not have to travel with the team.

At Cornell, only when the 34 fencers on the women’s team take off their protective masks at practice does it become clear that 15 of them are men. Texas A&M and Duke are among the elite women’s basketball teams that also take advantage of a federal loophole that allows them to report male practice players as female participants.

Title IX, passed in 1972 at the height of the women’s rights movement, banned sex discrimination in any federally financed education program. It threw into sharp relief the unequal treatment of male and female athletes on college campuses.

Over the next 40 years, the law spawned a cultural transformation: the number of women competing in college sports has soared by more than 500 percent — to 186,000 a year from fewer than 30,000 in 1972.

But as women have grown to 57 percent of American colleges’ enrollment, athletic programs have increasingly struggled to field a proportional number of female athletes. And instead of pouring money into new women’s teams or trimming the rosters of prized football teams, many colleges are turning to a sleight of hand known as roster management. According to a review of public records from more than 20 colleges and universities by The New York Times, and an analysis of federal participation statistics from all 345 institutions in N.C.A.A. Division I — the highest level of college sports — many are padding women’s team rosters with underqualified, even unwitting, athletes. They are counting male practice players as women. And they are trimming the rosters of men’s teams.

“Those of us in the business know that universities have been end-running Title IX for a long time, and they do it until they get caught,” said Donna E. Shalala, the president of the University of Miami.

Each year, institutions must report their male and female participation numbers to the Department of Education. And even though the numbers would not be used in a formal investigation, many colleges manipulate them to avoid bringing about one. The embarrassment that comes with a public inquiry or a lawsuit can motivate them to do what it takes to stay under the radar.

Shrinking budgets also spur universities to use these tactics, said Jake Crouthamel, a former Syracuse athletic director. “It’s easier to add more people on a roster than it is to start a new sport,” he said.

Yet football, the pride of many universities and a draw for alumni, rarely faces cuts. The average Division I football team went from 95 players 30 years ago to 111 players in 2009-10.

“Football is the elephant in the whole thing,” Mr. Crouthamel said. “That’s the monster.”

Advocates for men’s teams say roster management hurts their cause as well, because colleges tend to eliminate men’s sports rather than increase women’s sports to reach parity. Officials have also cut the size of men’s teams, compromising their competitiveness.

“I think roster management is almost a cuss word,” said Tommy Bell, the athletic director at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. He wants to restore a men’s track team, he said, but to do so, he must trim men’s spots elsewhere. “I hate doing it,” he said.

According to the most current federal numbers, women make up 53 percent of the student body at Division I institutions yet only 46 percent of all athletes. And that discrepancy does not take into account all the tactics used to boost the numbers artificially.

Roster management came under scrutiny last year when a federal judge ruled that Quinnipiac University in Connecticut had violated Title IX by engaging in several questionable practices, including requiring that women cross-country runners join the indoor and outdoor track teams so they could be counted three times. The judge found earlier that Quinnipiac had been padding women’s rosters by counting players, then cutting them a few weeks later. Quinnipiac athletic officials declined to comment, but in its appeal, the university said the judge’s conclusion that women were required to be on all three teams was not supported by evidence.

Russlynn H. Ali, the assistant education secretary who heads the Office for Civil Rights, which is charged with enforcing Title IX, said the Quinnipiac case was “a check on what some were doing, either knowingly or unwittingly.”

Karen Crouse, Griffin Palmer and Marjorie Connelly contributed reporting.