In the fallout of Lauren Green's awful interview with (or should I say at?) Reza Aslan (which I've written about here), we've seen a couple people come forward to make the argument that in the interview Aslan misrepresents his credentials as a scholar of the history of religion. At First Things, Emeritus Professor of Political Science Matthew Franck makes the claim, as does an indignant Joe Carter at Patheos.
I'm weighing in here because the claim that Aslan misrepresents his scholarly credentials in the context of the Fox News interview is so silly that it could only be made by someone looking to score cheap and meaningless 'gotcha' points amid a politically charged controversy. And before I go any further, let's note that Aslan is invoking his scholarly credentials to satisfy the question of why he would be *interested* in writing about the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
The arguments of Franck and Carter would appear to center on:
A) That Alsan has a BA in religion from Santa Clara University (for which he wrote a senior thesis on the gospel of Mark), a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard, a MFA in Fiction from Iowa, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara (for which he wrote a dissertation on 20th century Islamic social movements). In other words, that Aslan doesn't have a Ph.D. in history.
B) That he's a professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside (not a professor of religion or history)
Let me explain why these arguments are absurd.
Carter's article is a good place to start, where he poses two rhetorical questions so laughable that they could pass for academic parody: "Why would Aslan claim he has a Ph.D. in history when his degree is in sociology? Does he not understand the difference between the two degrees?"
Well, Carter evidently doesn't understand either the differences nor the similarities between these degrees. The field of sociology, for example, is rather starkly divided between quantitative sociologists who do more 'social science' research akin to the work that dominates political science and economics departments, and cultural sociologists whose work often ranges into historical research. Aslan's Ph.D. in sociology fits rather clearly into the latter, preparing him well to do historical research on religions. Only someone entirely unfamiliar with academic credentialing and doctoral training in these disciplines would ask the questions that Carter does. Either that, or only someone looking to score cheap political points would willfully ignore the wide practice of cross- and interdisciplinary research training and methods in doctoral work and beyond, particularly in social science and humanities fields that often need to gather evidence from across disciplinary boundaries to make convincing arguments.
Carter goes on to complain that "most academic historians as well as academic sociologists would take offense at the idea that a sociology of religions degree and a history degree are interchangeable." "Interchangeable" is itself a misrepresentation of the situation, but I'm curious about which academics Carter spoke with before making this claim. Because I can't imagine any but the most petty and territorial would argue that someone whose research field is so clearly 'religion' and who has a Ph.D. in either the cultural history of religion (from a sociology department) or the cultural history of religion (from a history department) has no business writing about the cultural history of religion.
We should keep in mind here what Carter and Franck seem to want to neglect: what we call departments and degrees is more a matter of heuristics than 'essential' qualities of academic training and methodology. For example, some universities put the history department under 'social sciences' with sociology, political science, economics, and maybe anthropology. Others put history under humanities, with English, philosophy, French, and maybe anthropology. The types of training people get in doctoral programs in each department vary more according to the character and research interests and composition of the departments themselves, rather than the general name of the school or department. To assess credentials as shallowly as by whether a degree says 'history' or 'sociology' on it is childlike in its simplicity and naivetee about how academic training works. What is fair grounds for questioning Aslan is whether he has a record of peer-reviewed scholarship in these fields. But keep in mind that Aslan is portraying himself as expert enough to take a scholarly interest in Jesus, not as someone with a stellar research record on Jesus. For every *trained scholar* who becomes an expert--including scholars who switch gears at some point in their career and study something they're not yet especially known for--there must be a first few publications. Fox host Green grilled Aslan on his justification simply to be interested in writing about Jesus, and Aslan responded that as a scholar of the history of religions, this is in his wheelhouse. It is.
I suspect Franck, an Emeritus Professor of Political Science who apparently thinks that, despite his own title as 'political scientist,' he can weigh in on matters of the history of religion while calling Aslan out for having a sociology degree, really ought to know better. But if we look at Franck's writing background, we see that he's a conservative pundit who is very willing to play dumb about academic credentialing to try to score cheap political points on Aslan. What's especially infuriating about these 'get off my [academic] yard' arguments is they portray academics as snide and territorial. We often are, sure; but it's just not that uncommon for people to do work on and across the borders of their traditional scholarly disciplines. Ph.D. training is narrow, but it's not so narrow that there's no overlap between fields.
That Aslan is a professor in creative writing, by the way, is as much a matter of funding streams than anything else. Again, where these critics fixate on titles, they're the ones being misleading. Aslan clearly teaches a number of courses in religious studies in addition to creative writing. This is the reality of modern academia: people are called on to teach what they *are qualified* to teach (and sometimes, frankly, even more), because universities don't want to spend money on *both* a creative writing professor and a religious history professor when they can have two for one. In a twist of dark humor, it's typically conservatives of the kind making the attacks on Aslan who want to defund higher education and slash faculty hiring budgets, resulting in people teaching outside of their 'title' fields. But again, there's nothing wrong with Aslan, who holds a MFA from the top MFA program in the country, teaching writing, while also teaching religion as a holder of a Ph.D. that, while granted by a sociology department by name, is so obviously a religious studies Ph.D. (given the dissertation). It wouldn't surprise me if Aslan had an historian and/or a religion department representative in addition to a sociologist on his dissertation committee. He may even have had dual advisors in history and sociology, religion and sociology, etc., something that's quite common. And as for the claim that because Aslan's main title is professor of creative writing, he doesn't teach religion 'for a living,' this, too is majorly flawed. It may very well be that Aslan was hired specifically because he could do both, but paid via the tenure stream available in the creative writing department. Again, this is common.
At this point I could assemble a list of academics who have made colossal contributions to fields in which they don't *specifically* have a Ph.D. by the name on the parchment...eh, why the hell not:
Maybe you've heard of:
Jurgen Habermas (Ph.D. in philosophy, pioneer in sociology and history of sociology)
Jacques Derrida (Ph.D. in philosophy, pioneer in literature)
Karl Popper (Ph.D. in psychology, pioneer in philosophy of science)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (degree in engineering before making his key contributions to philosophy pre-Ph.D.)
Bertrand Russell (degree in mathematics, pioneer in philosophy)
Alain Badiou (degrees in mathematics, pioneer in philosophy)
Daniel Kahneman (Ph.D. in psychology, pioneer in economics)
Judith Butler (Ph.D. in philosophy, pioneer in literature)
Martha Nussbaum (Ph.D. in philosophy, professor of law, literature, and philosophy)
I could go on for quite some time, and these only come to mind for me because most relate to my own field/s of study. Apart from these big-name examples, however, the average college student can take 10 minutes to look up the credentials of his or her professors, and will find that many of them are doing cross-disciplinary work, with philosophers and mathematicians trading places in math and science and philosophy of science courses, economists, MBAs, accountants, and psychologists trading places in psychology departments, econ departments, and business schools, literary scholars, historians, and cultural sociologists and anthropologists citing one another in their respective fields, and computer scientists, statisticians, and engineers all working together and across disciplines where relevant.
Alsan is well within his credentialed territory, and anyone who says otherwise should be suspected of either political motives or an unforgivable ignorance about the basics of academic training.
