My name is Terry Lee Mattingly. However, when I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, I took the name of a patron saint — St. Brendan the Navigator.

Let’s pretend that I am young and attending a state university right now and that I have decided to require professors to address me as “Holy St. Brendan the Navigator.” It is, after all, my name. While we are at it, let’s say that all of the Catholic and Orthodox students take the same tack, if their saint names are different then the names they were given at birth.

Some professors would wince, but go along with this. But let’s say that one professor is very secular, a Marxist perhaps, and he refuses — stating that my request violates his personal convictions. I threaten to sue, along with other students in the same situation. Game on.

How would the leaders of this taxpayer-funded public university respond? Would this be treated as a natural request on my part, with the understanding that any refusal would attack my sense of identity? What if I requested that my university ID card state my name as “St. Brendan the Navigator”?

It’s a crazy question, of course. But it would — at a state university — raise issues about the First Amendment (free speech and religious liberty) and academic freedom. These questions were at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast discussion. Click here to tune that in. [This episode also includes a bizarre gaffe when — I’m wrestling with a painful medical condition right now — I messed up my own saint’s name, mixing St. Brendan’s title with that of St. Nicholas of Myra. Listen for it.]

At the heart of the podcast discussion is a timely question: Can the state force the professor to recognize and even affirm — with public speech — beliefs that violate his conscience?

Now, as readers probably guessed right from the get go, this podcast focuses on another matter of personal identity — the degree to which professors can be forced to cooperate with students who chose to use any of the myriad and evolving gender pronouns linked to the LGBTQ+ movement. We looked at a Washington Post story with this headline: “A professor was reprimanded for refusing to use a transgender student’s pronouns. A court says he can sue.”

Now, when these clashes take part in PRIVATE schools — left or right, religious or secular — it’s clear (pending passage of the Equality Act) that these doctrinally defined institutions have a right to create belief and lifestyle covenants that settle issues of this kind. Students can chose to affirm these beliefs, freely signing on the dotted line, or go to school somewhere else.

But what about state schools built and operated with tax dollars?