There is rich potential for exploring these developments. But most work done
to date, including what I have written above, remains impressionistic and
anecdotal. We need hard, quantified evidence. Once gathered, the difficulty, as
always, will be to distinguish actual causes from non-causal correlations. To
take an example outside of religious studies that many people should be able
to appreciate: it is often possible to demonstrate a clear, direct correlation
between ice-cream consumption and crime, but that does not mean that eating
ice cream causes crime, or vice versa. Both go up with an increase in temperature.
Institutionalization
In her chapter, Satoko Fujiwara notes that although the study of religions has
a relatively long history in Japan, it occupies a rather marginal place in
Japanese universities. That lament is something of a refrain among scholars
of religion worldwide. What can we say about this marginality?
The vast expansion of the university that has taken place since World War
II has meant that, in terms of absolute numbers, every component of the
educational core at tertiary institutions now has more faculty and students
worldwide than it did fifty years ago (Drori and Moon 2006: 163). But some
components have done better than others. According to UNESCO’s Inter-
national Standard Classification of Education (1976, revised 1997) ‘religion
and theology’ belong to the core area of the university that has fared the worst,
the humanities (class 22).^2 According to a study by Gili Drori and Hyeyoung
Moon (2006: 164), in the thirty years from 1965 to 1995 the percentage of
students enrolling in the humanities dropped by about 40 percent (see Table
1). The loss of faculty share was similar (see Table 2; I omit ‘Humanities
Applied’, basically the study of law.) Drori and Moon (2006) do not distinguish
subfields within the humanities, so without significantly more research it is not
possible to say more precisely where the decline in humanities students took
place, but in examining faculty share Frank and Gabler (2006) do distinguish
subfields. According to their results, the loss in ‘religion and theology’ (to use
UNESCO terminology) was among the worst: down 60 percent from
1915–1935 to 1975–1995. But philosophy’s loss was even worse (71 percent),
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
TOWARD A GLOBAL VISION OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
309
Table 1 Worldwide share of student enrollments by division
(after Drori and Moon 2006: 164, numbers approximate)
1965 (%) 1995 (%)
Humanities 20 12
Social Sciences 15 30
