ASU professor docked for ‘Christian bias’ after asking students about ‘highest good’

Arizona State University Professor Owen Anderson said he was penalized in his annual performance review for alleged “bias” and “slant” toward Christianity after teaching theologian Thomas Aquinas and asking students about the “highest good.”

In 2025, Anderson, who is an outspoken critic of ASU’s DEI mandates, taught two sections of Religions of the World, Introduction to Ethics, and Issues in Death and Dying in ASU’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies.

While his Religions of the World courses received strong student evaluations (4.7 and 4.45 out of 5), the other two courses scored significantly lower at 4.2 and 3.38. Anderson told The College Fix that a score of 3.38 is “well-below the college mean.” 

The review, issued by School Director Miriam Mara, cited anonymous student complaints as a major factor. One student stated, “Although I agree with what Owen Anderson teaches, I completely understand if people feel offended after taking his class,” according to documents reviewed by The Fix. 

Another stated that “If I were a Hindu or Buddhist, and truly believed in reincarnation, I would be offended if I were asked to denounce it.” A third student insinuated that “grades are based on using the term ‘god’ and thus having the correct religious view.” 

Director Mara concluded that “such implications are sobering, and it would be helpful if Professor Anderson found a way to address these considerations from students in his courses going forward.”

But these student allegations came with scant evidence, Professor Anderson told The Fix. 

Anderson said the evaluation was meant to follow an objective rubric that tallies points from specific activities to produce a 1-5 score, but Director Mara departed from it.

He appealed the review to Todd Sandrin, dean of the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. The dean upheld the evaluation, citing Anderson’s course materials and assessments as showing “unqualified normative language.” Examples included questions such as “What is the highest good?” and exam prompts asking how St. Thomas Aquinas would answer certain philosophical questions. Dean Sandrin also flagged the true or false question “Death should not make us think about life.”

Apart from this, he has no further recourse to review the decision or fix his score.

“[Dr. Sandrin] is the last level of appeal for me at ASU,” Anderson said. “The dean just gets to give me this review and move on and the record shows that my classes are slanted toward Christianity.”

According to Anderson, both Mara and Sandrin cited student evaluations that accused his class of being Christian, that he used the Bible “too much,” and that he asked his students to renounce their Buddhist beliefs — all similarly without proof.

Anderson noted that both the Religions of the World and Death and Dying courses explicitly include study of the Bible in their official descriptions, and Introduction to Ethics covers major Christian ethical theories alongside secular ones.

The professor said he believes ASU’s actions represent Christian bias.

“I believe this is overt discrimination against me,” he told The Fix. 

Anderson is also the lead plaintiff in a case objecting to ASU’s DEI training.

In his interview with The Fix, he added that ASU often recommends professors implement “decolonizing and anti-racism ideologies” in their classes. “Do they also ask critical race theory professors to stop teaching that view?”

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, echoed Anderson’s concerns in an email to The Fix. 

Wood said he is “puzzled that the University seems to have done nothing to determine whether the complaints were valid.”  

“A professor teaching in a secular university about religion inevitably will irritate some students because students bring with them strong sensitivities on these matters. That doesn’t mean the professor is ‘biased.’”

“Bias,” Wood said, “implies that he grants special favor to his own views.” 

“But if the students are complaining that he posed the same kinds of questions in reference to all the religions about which he was teaching, he is clear of the charge of bias,” the higher education expert said. 

Further, equal scrutiny should apply to all teaching that examines claims about what is good and right. 

However, in recent years, advocates of various “social justice” doctrines have often ignored this principle, while many university administrators have failed to enforce consistent standards across the curriculum, Wood told The Fix.

ASU did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the case.

MORE: Hofstra professor facing probe after calling colleague’s comments ‘word salad’