Want to see some bullshittin' in action? Have a read of this sermon from 2004. It was preached from the pulpit of Great St Mary's Church, Cambridge - the church of the University of Cambridge. 
it is not irrelevant that the University itself was gathered around this Church, that many of its earliest members were sent by religious orders, and that colleges have their chapels
Oh, it's relevant enough. That's why places like UCL were founded - so that people who didn't meet the theological acceptance criteria for entry to the existing institutions would be able to study! Academia found it's connection with the church out of necessity - it is one of the few bits of good sense that academia has divorced itself from the Church so much.
In the United States, theological meddling with higher learning was part and parcel of the whole regime. Harvard had a policy to expel homosexual students all the way up to the 1920s - and they still had vestigial components of that policy surviving all the way in to the fifties.
If a large sprinkling of God were necessary for the search for truth to work, then why is God not striking down the heathen scholars at heathen institutes like the aforementioned UCL.
This paragraph is particularly filled with sophistry:
'the secular experiment' - in which it was the norm for the world to be known only by reference to itself - has been shown to be a failure; it has thinned down all the ways by which we may see how things are related. Common life has been dissolved into separate interests. Now we recognize that the world is secular and religious, not only because of the religious motivations which are so obviously at work in most issues in the world today, but also because so many of the quests of modern intellectual life have religious roots and goals, even if they are well-hidden
So, because religion had a monopoly on truth in the past, that means we should continue giving them the favour now. Sorry, but that argument doesn't hold up. You can't argue from the status quo's existence to it's continuation.
And the idea that secularism is preventing people form understanding religion as a phenomenon is laughable. It is secularists who want comprehensive comparative religious education in schools, and religious fundamentalists who believe they are the ones with The Truth In Capital Letters who oppose it. It is the religious folk who want their kids segregated off in to schools based on their parent's superstitions.
If I were a professor at Cambridge, this kind of rubbish would infuritate me - don't the chaplains get it? They aren't there to minister or be God's appointed on campus. They are there to keep the choir running and the chapel looking pretty for the prospective undergraduates. To think they are there to do anything but keep the ancient cultural flames alive for the sake of postmodern authenticity is to delude themselves in to thinking they are important.
