Faculty in the Department of Religion said a lack of University funding has led to a shortage of full-time professors and gaps in the depth of religion course offerings.

Professors within the department said GW is not providing them with the necessary funding to fill vacancies for full-time faculty, which has created heavier workloads for existing faculty and stripped the department of the capacity to offer advanced courses on all major world religions. Faculty said there are currently no full-time faculty that teach courses on Christianity, Hinduism or Buddhism, which they said has hindered the depth of student learning on the trio of religions amid reported student demand for more religious course offerings.

The department currently has nine core faculty, according to its website. Between 2014 and 2023, two full-time religion professors left, shrinking the department from eight to six full-time faculty, causing a 25 percent drop in full-time faculty within the department and a 42.9 percent decrease in all tenured and tenure track full-time faculty within the department after three tenured and tenure track faculty left, according to the Office of Institutional Research and Planning internal faculty dashboard data obtained by The Hatchet.

Columbian College of Arts & Sciences Vice Dean for Programs and Operations Kim Gross said hiring additional full-time faculty is determined by factors, like student enrollment, “short-term fiscal considerations,” scholarship needs and the “local market” for part-time faculty in the “vacated discipline.”

“The department’s size does not diminish the importance of its work, particularly when looking at what’s happening in the world today,” Gross said in an email. “Through this and other disciplines within the college, students gain a critical understanding of those from different faiths and cultural backgrounds and gain the ability to talk across differences and bridge divides.”

Five students are declared religion majors in 2024, according to the enrollment dashboard. In 2017, there were 10 declared religion majors on campus. There are currently no live job postings for religion faculty positions.

Gross said the University annually reviews support and resources for the department and that after staffing turnover, the University has a “full-time administrator in place supporting the department” but did not specify when the turnover occurred or when the administrator was placed. She said officials have hired temporary part-time faculty to ensure courses were covered where there was demand for them.

“The department chair acts as the primary liaison between the department faculty and the dean’s office on these issues,” Gross said in an email. “We work with the chairs to determine departmental needs and how best to meet them.”

Students majoring in religion must complete an Introduction to World Religions prerequisite, a required course titled Thinking About Religion: Classic and Contemporary Approaches, a required Senior Capstone Seminar and nine religion electives ranging from The New Testament to Islam and Hinduism in South Asia. The department offers courses in religions, like Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, according to the department’s website.

Gross said the department has offered a “similar” number of undergraduate courses over the past three years, including this academic year. The department initially offered 26 courses for the fall 2024 semester, but six were canceled post-registration, according to the schedule of classes. In fall 2017, the department also offered 26 classes.

Irene Oh, the chair of the department, said the lack of funding for full-time faculty in Christianity and Hinduism relates to the University’s limited budget and “differing priorities” between the department and the dean’s office, not because of poor communication between the two offices.

“I am hopeful, however, that this situation will be rectified, as a well-rounded Religion Department would demonstrate GW’s commitment to the liberal arts,” Oh said in an email.

Oh said within the last decade, three of the seven tenured and tenure-line faculty have left but have not been replaced. She said the department has attempted to meet student demand for more course offerings by hiring part-time faculty, adding that GW as a research institution should have tenured professors in religious studies because religion is needed to understand topics, like artificial intelligence and war.

“In order for GW to be a leader in this field, we simply need more faculty,” Oh said.

Robert Eisen, a professor of religion and the former chair of the department, said requests from department faculty to hire full-time professors have been “consistently” denied by the University in recent years, and he said that “resources” from GW have diminished over his 34 years in the department, which has made it difficult to provide a full curriculum in religion.

Eisen said the department lacks full-time professors for three of the six global religions that are practiced most widely — Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism. He said the department has never had a full-time professor specializing in Buddhism.

“We have a very talented group of professors who are doing their best to cover the basic areas of religion, but it has been getting harder and harder to do so,” Eisen said in an email.

Eisen said because the department does not have a full-time professor in Christianity, the department cannot offer as many classes as it would with a full-time professor, creating gaps in knowledge about a widely practiced religion.

The University offered three courses in Christianity for the fall 2024 semester but canceled two post-registration, according to the schedule of classes. A lower-level intermediate course titled Christianity is still running, but the University canceled a lower-level introductory course titled The New Testament and a lower-level intermediate course titled Sex and Gender in Christianity.

Upper-level Christianity courses have not been offered since at least spring 2021, when Christianity in the Ancient World — which is no longer a course listed in the department’s curriculum — was last offered, according to internet archives. In 2021, the department had a full-time professor with a focus on the Bible and early Christianity, according to internet archives.

Eisen said the department has also been without a full-time professor in Hinduism since the retirement of Alf Hiltebeitel, a late professor of religion, in 2017.

The University offered one course in Hinduism — a lower-level intermediate course — for the fall 2024 semester but canceled it post-registration, according to the schedule of classes. The department is not offering any courses in Hinduism for the spring 2025 semester.

Intermediate-level courses and upper-level Hinduism courses have not been offered since at least fall 2016, when GW last offered Mythologies of India and India’s Great Epics: Mahabharata, respectively, according to internet archives.

“The most fundamental thing that a department needs to be a department is faculty to cover the major areas of the discipline it teaches,” Eisen said. “If it doesn’t have those people, it can’t serve its functions.”

In 2014, the University had a $20 million budget shortfall, causing several departments including religion to cut back on part-time faculty. Eisen, who was then the department chair, said the budget cut reduced the number of religion courses taught that year.

In 2017, faculty said the department’s budget was insufficient to hire new faculty to teach Hinduism and Buddhism or launch initiatives, like a master’s degree program that would combine religion and international affairs, which they said, in turn, led to a lack of curriculum diversity. That year, to attract more students, the department made curriculum requirements less specialized and removed the mandate for religion majors to take courses in four different religions. 

Major requirements in 2024 require at least two courses on Abrahamic religions and two on non-Abrahamic religions. 

Xiaofei Kang, a professor of religion, said part-time professors can provide temporary help but are not “long-term solutions” to expanding course offerings. She said full-time faculty are “essential” for any institution that is seriously committed to promoting religious literacy because these professors can offer a stable curriculum, mentor students and engage with other religion-related campus activities due to their permanent place at the department.

“As a full-time faculty myself, I have fulfilled these roles to different extents as a natural part of my job over the years, but I cannot imagine how we could expect the same from any part-time faculty,” Kang said in an email.

Kelly Pemberton, a professor of religion and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, said that when the department let go of some part-time faculty more than a decade ago due to a loss of funding, some of the courses taught by those professors were never offered again. She said because the department is small, the retirement of two or three more professors could have “devastating” effects.

“Students will not be able to get an adequate education as religion majors, and students across the University who are interested in taking religion courses will have fewer offerings to choose from,” Pemberton said in an email. “Eventually, the existence of the department will be in question if we continue to have resources depleted and positions unfilled as more of us retire in the future.”