Category Archives: American Universities

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Teaching the Faith in a Christian University, Part Two: The Religion Professor’s Responsibility

I ended my previous essay by quoting a statement that I place in all my course syllabi and teased my next essay by saying, “Next Time I will unpack my syllabus statement in hopes of answering the question about the place of evangelism, catechesis and theology in the Christian college.”

Preliminaries

The much-discussed tensions within the concept of “a Christian university” find expression also within in the idea of teaching the faith within an academic institution. An institution that presents itself to students, donors, and the public as a “Christian university” incurs an obligation both to be authentically Christian and to uphold sound academic standards. I won’t undertake here the challenge of blending these two principles together harmoniously in one institution. I work toward this end in my forthcoming book The Christian University & The Academy.

A professor teaching the faith in a Christian university must do justice to at least three major concerns:

Courses should present authentic Christianity
Courses should be pedagogically appropriate to students
Courses should be academically sound

The meaning of each of these concerns is contested and always has been. Contested or not, however, a Christian university must define the limits of what it considers true Christianity, good teaching, and sound academia. Individual professors don’t get to define these values as they wish.

Courses Should Present Authentic Christianity

At whatever level and by whatever method, professors should endeavor to present true Christianity to their students. The measure of “true” Christianity is its conformity to the teaching of Jesus and his apostles as recorded in the canonical New Testament. I will accept no substitute for this criterion. There have always been disputed questions and obscure matters on which learned and sincere Christians have disagreed. But it is very clear both in the New Testament and in the course of church history that some matters of faith, doctrine, and morality are nonnegotiable. To step outside these boundaries is to move away from orthodoxy into heresy.

In secular private and public universities, leftist politics has all but replaced liberal values and traditional subject matter. This is especially true in the humanities and social sciences but increasingly so even in the natural sciences. Christian university professors—most of whom received their graduate education in secular universities—are not immune from the temptation to use their classrooms to advocate for the social or political causes dear to them. In my experience, the ones most likely to politicize their classrooms are on the political and theological left.

After the elections of 2016 and 2024 in which evangelical Christians overwhelmingly supported Donald J. Trump for President of the United States, it is not uncommon for Christian university professors to dismiss the faith of evangelicals in very harsh terms. In the politicized Christian university classroom, students often hear barely-argued assertions that Christianity is incompatible with capitalism and most compatible with socialism, that Christians should champion radical responses to climate change, that God is always on the side of the oppressed, and other claims based on a liberationist approach to theology. (For my thoughts on Liberation Theology, see my essay of February 19, 2025: “Is Liberation Theology Christian?”)

I do not deny that Christianity has implications for the way we live in the world and that we need to reflect on these implications. But such reflection presupposes a thorough grasp of Christianity and a commitment to live according to the teaching of Jesus and his apostles. Unhappily, most contemporary students and many faculty do not possess either one. So, “Christianity” becomes an empty cypher invoked to enhance the authority of the speaker. In my view, it is unethical as well as unacademic to ask students to accept a supposed social or political implication of Christianity before they gain a thorough knowledge of Christianity itself.

The first priority, then, is to make sure that Christian university students encounter the full range of Christian teaching as presented in the Bible and the ecumenical tradition of the church.

Courses Should be Pedagogically Appropriate to Students

The student bodies of the colleges I attended as an undergraduate were pretty homogeneous. Most of us were raised in Christian homes, attended church all our lives, and had a basic knowledge of the Bible. Most students lived within 250 miles of the college. There were very few international students, and I don’t recall a single Roman Catholic, adherent of a non-Christian religion, or atheist among my classmates.

This description fits very few Christian universities today. In my general studies classes I have evangelical students, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists. I have students from six continents. How do you teach the true Christian faith to such a diverse class of students? Do you design your course for the least, average, or most knowledgeable? Do you teach in a way that presupposes Christian faith or belief in God or at least openness to faith? Do you stay objective and descriptive or do you advocate for belief?

Precise answers to these questions must be decided by the teachers, given the makeup of their classes. However, I think there are some goals we must strive to achieve whatever the composition of the student body. We should want every student to learn the story told in the Bible and embodied in the historical life of the church. Even if we teach in the descriptive and objective style characteristic of academia, the Christian sources themselves present Christianity as the truth about God’s identity and purposes. So, even if professors refrain from using the rhetoric of evangelism, the claims of the Christian message will exert their persuasive power. And a Christian university professor should be happy about that.

Consider what the student with no prior knowledge of Christianity can learn: the basics of what Christianity asserts about God, creation and providence; about human nature, sin, death, and salvation; about Jesus Christ, the Spirit, and the church; about what constitutes well lived human life, and about the hope for eternal life. And the student with prior knowledge of Christianity can benefit from an orderly, sympathetic, and coherent presentation of the Christian narrative and doctrine. Catechesis, then, if conducted in an academic mode, is not out of place in a Christian university classroom. In contrast, theology explores in depth the interconnections among the topics of faith. It teaches students how to justify the church’s teachings from Scripture, tradition, and reason and engage in debates with dissenting views. Theology is best reserved for advanced students who are believers and wish to learn how to teach the basics of the faith to others.

Courses Should be Academically Sound

Teaching the faith in an evangelistic or catechetical way differs from teaching the faith in an academic style. But that difference is not what you might suspect. We expect the academic style to proceed rationally, to respect the freedom of the student, to delve deeply into the subject matter, and explore the subject’s connections to other subject areas. But evangelism should also appeal to listeners’ reason, respect their freedom, and address their concerns honestly. Catechesis, too, respects these values. What then makes a presentation of the faith academic?

Academic teaching accepts the obligation to avoid relying on presupposed authority. It feels an obligation to state clearly its presuppositions and axioms, present evidence for its assertions, get informed about the views of others, and argue logically for its conclusions. Though evangelism makes arguments, it is primarily proclamation and confession. Catechesis does not ask students to bow blindly to the church’s authority. It respects their rationality and freedom. Nevertheless, it focuses on explaining the details of what the church believes to those who already have faith and wish to learn more. Christian evangelistic, catechetical, and academic teaching communicate the same faith, but they do so in different ways tailored to different audiences and for different purposes.

To teach the faith academically is not at all synonymous with taking a skeptical, cynical, or ironic stance. It’s not identical with being progressive, liberal, or rationalistic. Except in extreme cases—concluding to a flat earth, holocaust denial, or soundness of phrenology—it is not the conclusions you reach but the methods you use that make for academic soundness.

Who Hijacked the American University?

The Author

John M. Ellis gave nearly 50 years to higher education as a professor of German language and literature in three countries, spending the majority of his career at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the current president of the California chapter of the National Association of Scholars, an organization devoted to returning higher education to its traditional academic purpose. Ellis’s book does exactly what its title says it does. It documents the very sad tale of how the once great American universities, which valued reason, facts, debate, analysis, and principled critique, have been hijacked by radical politics. The chapter titles unfold the story:

1. What Do Those Near-Riots Tell Us About The State Of Higher Education?

2. Who Are The People Destroying Our Universities?

3. How Was It Possible For This To Happen?

4. Sabotaging Education For Citizenship

5. Graduates Who Know Little And Can’t Think

6. The Wretched State Of The Campuses

7. The Campus World Of Lies And Deceit

8. What Can Be Done To Restore Higher Education

The Sad Story

If you are interested in an insider’s perspective on the sorry state of higher education in the United States, read this book. In this post I won’t attempt to summarize the book chapter-by-chapter; it’s a story best told by the author. Instead, I will quote a condensed summary of the story from the last chapter and describe Ellis’s recommendations for reform:

What have we found? Solid evidence that most students after four years on a college campus show no improvement either in ability to reason or in general knowledge; college faculties now virtually cleansed of all but left-leaning professors, and with the controlling faction being radical political activists who have neither the wish nor the ability to be genuinely academic thinkers and teachers; classrooms everywhere used for preaching the ideology of those political activists, not to teach students how to think for themselves—minds manipulated instead of minds opened; a campus atmosphere where a vicious intolerance for right-of-center opinion makes serious discussion of the issues of the day impossible; an extreme, destructive version of identity politics entrenched both in the faculty and in aggressive politicized bureaucracies; a climate of fear with respect to matters of political or social ideology throughout the campus; major damage to the prospects of upward mobility for minorities; a virtual end to teaching of the U.S. Constitution, and U.S. history no longer taught in a balanced and intelligent way but instead used to further the radicals’ war against their own society; a dominant campus ideology that is irretrievably discredited by the misery it has brought wherever it has been tried…bitter, intolerant and ignorant hatred of the social and economic system that has made this nation the most successful in the history of the world; a determined attempt to end the kind of education that transmits the knowledge and wisdom of past generations; the nation’s political climate poisoned by the hate-filled attitudes that many students absorb from their radical professors; all of this sustained by a culture of deceit at every level of the campus; and students who remain strangers to any serious and well-informed discussions about social and political matters (pp. 171-172).

What Can Be Done?

Speaking from decades of experience, Ellis urges us to give up any illusions that American higher education can be reformed from within. It is so completely controlled by radical faculty activists and bureaucrats that it is impervious to rational considerations. Even the few administrators and board members who are not themselves sold out to the radical left are intimidated by rabid faculty activists or have already quit in disgust. Only external pressure can reform the universities. The power base of the radical faculty must be totally dismantled. So, how can this be done? Here are some of Ellis’s recommendations:

1. The radical faculty apparently think that state legislatures and donors will keep sending money and parents will keep sending their children and mortgaging their houses to pay tuition no matter what the faculty does. They are arrogant in their security. But if the state legislatures, pressured by public outrage, threaten to defund the beast unless it changes, parents refuse to pay tuition for political indoctrination and donors stop giving, the universities will have to listen. Tenure won’t protect you, if there is no money for your program!

2. State legislatures could abolish departments that they deem irreformable and others could be placed in “receivership” under new management to be reconstituted as genuinely academic programs.

3. The state could (and should) abolish all “studies” programs—gender studies, women’s studies, black studies, etc.—because they are by definition devoted to political ideology and activism rather than learning. They are anti-academic and deprive students of an education.

4. On an individual level, once the word is out that students cannot get an real education in the unreformed university, families may seek alternative ways to educate themselves. In other words, the monopoly of the activist university needs to be broken.

Next Time: Are Christian colleges immune from being stolen by radical activist faculty and ideological “studies” programs?

The Christian College* and the New Left

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This essay concludes the seven-part series containing my review and reflections on Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution. The series began on May 03, 2024. Look for it: in a few days I will post a compilation of the whole series so you will have access to the entire review in one document.

The Collapse of the Modern Liberal University

In the previous essay we learned why the era of the modern liberal university, which began around 1870, came to an undignified end around 1970. The modern university adopted a critical, skeptical, never-ending research model of academia and exempted no moral tradition or religious dogma from critical scrutiny. Though it praised the quest for truth, progress and scientific discovery as its founding principle, its operational values were completely negative. Modern academic leaders were especially on guard against Christian fundamentalism and cultural conservativism; hence they focused exclusively on the dangers from the Right. This one-sided focus, however, made them vulnerable to criticism from the Left. When the Left accused the liberal establishment of not being radical enough in its criticism of the forces of conservativism, the establishment could make no reply. For though it examines everything, it believes nothing. Because it could not appeal to positive political, moral, historical, religious or metaphysical beliefs, the modern liberal university collapsed like a house of cards.

The Christian College: A Place to Stand

In contrast to the modern liberal university, the Christian college, if it takes Christianity seriously, can draw on a worldview authoritative for the Christian tradition and integrated into the charter and mission of the school. It can resist the critical, skeptical, know-nothing philosophy of the modern liberal university as well as the New Left’s subversive combination of criticism and dogmatism. The modern liberal university founded itself on the illusion that perpetual criticism of tradition will eventually generate scientific truth. The post-modern leftist university justifies its existence by repeating the groundless dogma that destruction of every actual thing will bring about utopia. The Christian college is founded on faith in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, the authority of the canonical Scriptures accepted by the ecumenical church, and respect for the two-thousand-year Christian tradition.

The Christian college can assert with confidence that world history cannot be explained with the simple formulas of the neo-Marxists. The true human situation cannot be illuminated by dividing people into the villainous oppressors and the innocent oppressed, and it cannot be improved by instigating an endless war of liberation from ever smaller micro aggressions. For the Christian, violence, hatred, envy, greed, division, and all other sins against human community derive from abandonment of obedience and worship of God the Creator (Romans 1:18-32). There will be no reconciliation among human beings until there is reconciliation with God. Liberal platitudes and leftist threats cannot overcome division between races, classes, nations, sexes, or any other binary. Hatred cannot overcome hatred, racism cannot expel racism, violence cannot end violence. Satan cannot cast out Satan. Only the Holy Spirit can do that!

The Christian College: Friend of Truth

The liberal university argues that truth is illusive, and the post-modern university asserts that there is no such thing as truth and reason is a slave to self-interest; power alone is real and acquiring it is all that matters. The Christian college rests in the truth of faith and finds this truth reliable in producing light, love, joy, unity, and peace. Its knowledge grounded in faith gives the Christian college the right, the confidence and the determination to assert truth claims against liberal quibbling and leftist intimidation. Its faith knowledge bestows on the Christian college a mandate to establish and enforce community standards. The open secret is that liberal faculties perpetuate themselves by hiring and retaining other liberals and leftist faculties hire and promote their fellow-travelers. With much more integrity, Christian colleges have the right to hire and retain administrators, faculty, and staff who affirm Christian faith. Moreover, they have the right to define in statements of faith and codes of conduct what they mean by the “Christian faith.”

The Christian College: Courage to Push Back

Academic freedom and tenure are not absolute even in the most liberal and leftist universities. Those institutions have the right to define the boundaries of academic freedom and, under certain conditions, the right to revoke tenure and terminate employment. Like other colleges, Christian colleges do not acknowledge unlimited academic freedom or irrevocable tenure, but they define the limits differently. Christian colleges encourage faculty to speak about their faith in and outside the classroom and commend the Christian faith to their students. Professors are free to critique anti-Christian philosophies and lifestyles. In contrast, these activities are restricted by law in publicly funded universities and by custom in elite private universities. At the same time, liberal and post-modern universities give faculty unrestricted freedom to affirm atheism, Marxism, and libertinism. As long as they do not engage in sexual harassment, they are free to live immoral lives. Christian colleges deny faculty members these freedoms. Faculty members who feel restricted by this denial do not belong in Christian colleges. If they are serious about maintaining their Christian identity, Christian colleges should make clear to faculty members that academic freedom and tenure will not protect them if they violate their contractual obligation to abide by the college’s faith statements and codes of conduct.

The Christian College: Its Critical Principles

Every academic endeavor must employ critical principles; otherwise, it has no criteria by which to distinguish possible from impossible, true from false, valid from invalid, probable from improbable, good from bad, wise from unwise, right from wrong, and just from unjust. For an academic community to exist and work together, its basic critical principles must be accepted by all members of that community. Christian colleges no doubt share many critical principles with other colleges, especially in the areas of logic, mathematics, and other hard sciences. In areas of morality, history, theology, and metaphysics, however, they differ dramatically. The liberal university denies that it gives any positive belief, moral, historical, theological, or metaphysical, the status of a critical principle by which to judge other beliefs of this type. The post-modern university, in contrast, asserts the morality of diversity, equity and inclusion and the narrative of oppressor versus oppressed as critical principles by which to judge other moral beliefs and narratives. The Christian college asserts the morality of faith, hope, and love and the biblical narrative of God, creation, sin, incarnation, reconciliation and redemption as critical principles by which to judge other moral beliefs and narratives. And it may in good faith exercise this power with boldness.

The Christian College: Learning to Say “No”

Most Christian college professors and administrators received their terminal degrees at universities dominated by the New Left. Having been immersed in Critical Theory, CRT, DEI, and Critical Pedagogy throughout their graduate studies—especially those studying education, social sciences, religious studies, literature, and all identity-based programs—new professors bring these theories and activist teaching methods with them to the Christian college and begin employing them in their teaching and institutionalizing them in training programs. These programs, sponsored by various administrative offices, often appear on the academic agenda without any justification at all. When questioned, their sponsors appeal to “best practices” or the latest educational literature. Or, they attempt to justify these neo-Marxist programs on Christian grounds, arguing that standing up for the poor and oppressed, working for social justice and against racism, and seeking diversity, equity, and inclusion embody the highest ethics found in the Bible and the Christian tradition. Who could object to that?

If you read the previous essays in this series, you won’t be surprised to learn that I completely reject these arguments. They are usually made by people who have only a superficial understanding of Critical Theory—of Marcuse, Davis, Freire, and Bell—and even less understanding of Christian doctrine and history. They mistake a small linguistic overlap between Christian vocabulary and neo-Marxist vocabulary for substantive agreement. The words diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism, oppression and justice as used by the New Left possess no more than verbal resemblances to Christian concepts, and sometimes they mean the direct opposite.

Suggestions for Christian Colleges

1. Don’t allow programs based on Critical Theory, CRT, DEI, intersectional identities, and Critical Pedagogy to be instituted. Discontinue them if they are already in place. Beware: these neo-Marxist programs appear under a variety of innocent sounding names. Read the fine print.

2. Replace teacher workshops rooted in Critical Pedagogy with workshops firmly centered in Christian Pedagogy, and discontinue programs that train faculty and staff in diversity, equity, and inclusion and institute programs that teach faith, hope, and love.

3. Institute continuing education programs that help your faculty and staff understand the Christian worldview at a deeper level.

4. Scrutinize every program and office in view of the critical principles listed above, and make sure that every other narrative and identity is thoroughly subordinate to the Christian narrative and identity.

*This essay focuses on higher education, but it applies equally to primary and secondary education.

What Went Wrong in American Higher Education and What to Do About It

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In the previous six essays I summarized Christopher Rufo’s account of how the New Left came to dominate American education, government agencies, and corporations. I will devote this essay to higher education.

Christian Faith versus The New Left Philosophy

Before I discuss higher education, I want to assert briefly and bluntly that neo-Marxist philosophy is incompatible with Christianity. You cannot be a disciple of Karl Marx and Herbert Marcuse and be a Christian in any sense close to orthodoxy. Marcuse was an atheist as are most other New Left leaders. As we saw in our previous essays, neo-Marxists are willing to destroy a relatively just, admittedly imperfect, social order in a despairing hope that a perfect one will take its place. The New Left divides human beings into oppressors and oppressed; it further divides the oppressed into a hierarchy of ever more marginalized identities. It explains all human relationships by this narrow category. Moreover, it justifies violence as a means of bringing about its vision of justice. CRT, DEI, and Critical Pedagogy make no sense apart from neo-Marxist critical theory. They cannot be adapted to serve a Christian purpose.

In contrast to the New Left philosophy, Christianity proclaims that God exists and is known truly in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. God is the creator and lord of the world. Human beings are God’s creatures made in his image and subject to sin, corruption and death. There is no hope for salvation except in God. People find their true identity in faith and union with Christ. Jesus calls on his disciples to live in peace and joy, to be peacemakers and extend mercy, to love their neighbors and enemies. There is one church, inclusion into which depends on faith and baptism. Class envy and racial animus are forbidden. Violence in service of supposed just causes is prohibited. In both spirit and letter, Christianity and neo-Marxism could hardly be more antithetical. You cannot serve two masters.

Why American Universities Fell So Readily to the New Left

Why were American universities so easily and so thoroughly conquered by the New Left? Why could they not resist such an anti-Christian, anti-democratic, anti-American, and divisive philosophy?

The New University

The short answer is that in the late 19^th century the old American colleges began their transformation into modern universities by adopting the research model of the University of Berlin (1810). They cease assuming the truth of Christianity and argued for professorial and student freedom to teach and learn unencumbered by confessional restrictions. They viewed academic freedom and professional competence as essential because the new idea of the university centered on critique of old ideas and the production of new knowledge. Hence any force that resisted those new goals was considered anti-progressive. And progressive academic leaders thought that orthodox Christianity and conservative politics were the most counter-revolutionary forces they had to fear. To guard against these reactionary forces, modern academic leaders institutionalized such strong protections as near inviolable academic freedom and career-long tenure. The enemies of critical scholarship, value neutral research, and the progress of science, they thought, were all on the right, that is, among those wanting to turn back the clock. Hence all modern academia’s defenses were directed to its right. The values academic leaders asserted were critical, skeptical, purely methodological, liberal, and supposedly metaphysically and religiously neutral; all were designed to defend against traditional religious and political dogmas. Modern academia could not assert positive beliefs, truths, and values without sounding dogmatic and hypocritical. Its only commitment was to make no commitments. It never imagined that it would be attacked and conquered from the dogmatic left.

The Dilemma

As we learned from Rufo, the New Left turned modern academia’s progressive rhetoric, critical methods, and institutions of academic freedom and tenure against it. Because the New Left was neither conservative nor Christian, it caught the liberal establishment off guard. The New Left painted the liberal order of the modern university as sold out to the white capitalist establishment. The liberal university establishment, in the leftist critique, was not critical enough, not neutral, and not progressive. Liberal academics and university administrators were face with a dilemma. They could admit that they have positive commitments after all and assert those beliefs, values, and truths in its defense against the leftist critique. Or, they could give in to the New Left as the logical outcome of their critical stance toward traditional Christianity and conservative politics. Not wanting to give ground to their old enemies, they chose the latter. To escape Christian dogma and reactionary politics, the nightmares of the liberal establishment, the university mortgaged itself to tyrannical, dogmatic leftists.

Is Reform Possible?

According to Rufo, the only possibility of overturning the neo-Marxist hold on the American university—if there is a possibility at all—lies in the democratic process. The public must reassert its control and reimpose its values on the education system. It will have to insist that primary, secondary and college education should stop working to create activists for the left’s utopian vision of social justice and take up again its traditional task of preparing productive and informed citizens for the constitutional republic of the United States of America. The value of tenure for securing the quality of education and as protection from arbitrary dismissal should be obvious, but it must be granted and maintained only under specific and clearly stated contractual obligations consistent with the stated mission of the university. The protection of academic freedom should not be extended to efforts that subvert the academic mission of the university by redirecting the educational process toward non-academic purposes. Moreover, universities should make it clear that freedom of speech applies not to the classroom but to public spaces. In staff, administrative, and bureaucratic positions, where academic tenure and academic freedom do not apply, legislatures, Boards of Regents, and administrators have much more freedom to reorganize and reform the educational bureaucracy. Shutting down all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices would be a good start.

An Uphill Climb

But I am skeptical that the public, elected officials, and Boards of Regents will carry out these measures. I could list many reasons for my pessimism, and so could you. But from an insider perspective, this one stands out: there is a deeply rooted assumption in higher education that there should be a single academic culture that sets the standards for the whole nation. Each university, it is assumed, should embody those standards. As long as this assumption holds sway, it is impossible for any one university to assert positive beliefs, values, and truths against the New Left. In a diverse society like ours, it is unlikely that a set of beliefs, values, and truths strong enough to resist the New Left can emerge as a national consensus. The only way forward is to reject the assumption of the necessity of one uniform definition of sound education. Individual universities must assert their right to define their own standards.

Next Time: The New Left and The Christian College

“Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain” Or Demystifying Academic Freedom and Professorial Privilege

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In my previous essay on academic freedom (July 15, 2023), I reviewed Daniel Gordon’s recent book, What is Academic Freedom? A Century of Debate–1915 to the Present (Routledge, 2022). Gordon argues convincingly that no single definition of academic freedom commands universal assent within American academia. In this essay, I will explore the implications of Gordon’s thesis and lay a foundation for constructing a view of the nature and limits of academic freedom in Christian colleges and universities.

Academic Freedom: Universal Right or Elitist Privilege?

Knowledge is Power

Every ancient society treasured its wisdom, technical skills, and bodies of knowledge. Prophets, priests, and philosophers mastered the received tradition and taught it to the next generation. Some speculated about God and the heavens and others dealt with humanity and earth. But from Solomon to Socrates, Descartes to Darwin, and Newton to Nietzsche thinkers were admired and despised, immortalized and martyred. One person’s saint is another’s heretic. Why would the same thinker be hailed as a savior and persecuted as a traitor? How could an idea be received as light from heaven by some and condemned as infernal heresy by others?

Francis Bacon may have put his finger on the reason: “Knowledge in itself is power.” Technical knowledge enables us to do things that we could not do otherwise. Knowing how to speak and write well may enable you to persuade other people to buy your product or join your cause. Learning the sciences of mathematics, physics, chemistry, or biology opens doors to respected and well-paid professions. If people think you know how to fix the economy or win wars, they will place you in high office and put their collective power at your disposal. No wonder professions, unions, and guilds jealously guard their trade secrets and defend their privileges by requiring degrees, accreditation, licensure and sometimes by resorting to intimidation and violence!

Ideas are Dangerous

Knowledge can be used for good or evil, to build or destroy. Ideas, even if they are true, are dangerous things. To a politician that maintains power by perpetuating falsehoods, truth is dangerous and one who speaks it is an enemy. Lies, too, can destroy lives and livelihoods. So can fancies, superstitions, and other expressions of ignorance and conceit. Prophets, liars, and charlatans wield the dangerous weapon of speech.

We should not be surprised, then, that societies from ancient to modern times feel the need to regulate the knowledge industry, that is, to have a say about what counts for knowledge and who is recognized as a reliable teacher. Sometimes that regulation was enforced with a heavy hand, as in the cases of Socrates, Jesus, and Galileo, and at others, through the subtle power of social disapproval. In any case, for most of human history, those who dared speak their minds understood that they risked losing freedom, livelihood, and life itself.

The Price of Privilege

The modern doctrines of academic freedom and professorial self-governance were designed to buck the trend of history and exempt university professors from hazards braved by their courageous predecessors. But I wonder, can “truth-to-power” speech be institutionalized without losing its prophetic edge? What price must be paid for these privileges? The modern professorate is a self-perpetuating, highly selective group, and the fee for admission is steep. No charlatans and liars, purveyors of fancies and superstitions are allowed to join. But who are the gatekeepers, the ones that decide who is in and who is out? Who determines what ideas are fanciful and superstitious and who the charlatans are?

At the risk of sounding more cynical than I already have, I have to ask a further series of questions: Was professionalizing the professorate and adopting the modern doctrine of academic freedom just a less obvious way for progressive society to regulate the knowledge industry? Might not excluding some thinkers as “charlatans and purveyors of fancies and superstitions” be the way the “profession” colludes with its powerful patrons to shield them from scrutiny? Is “professionalization” a euphemism for “cooptation”?

Even the casual reader of the AAUP’s 1915 General Declaration on academic freedom can catch the disdain in which its authors held “proprietary” colleges, a category that includes any school dedicated to advancing particular political, philosophical or religious causes. As “proprietary types,” devoted to their “propagandist duties,” denominational colleges, seminaries, and what we now call “Christian” colleges, do not rise to the high standards of universities devoted to the “public” good. By making themselves the arbiters of what counts as the common good, the authors of the General Declaration in effect institutionalized their (progressive) political, philosophical, and religious causes as if they were the rationally self-evident norms of academic excellence.

The Profession: Self-Governance or Self-Service?

Who Guards the Guardians?

The modern concept of academic freedom goes back at least to the founding of the University of Berlin (1810). Thousands of Americans studied in Germany during the nineteenth century, and they returned to America eager to raise American universities up to German standards. Establishing the professorate as a self-governing profession protected by complete academic freedom was among the first tasks they undertook. The 1915 AAUP General Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure is the classic American statement on academic freedom. The Declaration argued that as a profession constituted by a specialized body of skills and knowledge and dedicated to the public good, the professorate has earned the right to self-governance in all academic matters, that is, the qualifications of teachers, tenure decisions, the curriculum, and the range of theories worthy of consideration within each discipline. The original AAUP statement and all later iterations insist that faculty should be free from all external regulation in matters of academic judgment. According to the Declaration, faculty should not be treated as “employees” as are the grounds keeping staff but as “appointees” in analogy to federal judges.

As an insider to the profession, I understand wanting freedom to write and teach as I please. I understand why professors want the public to think that their work is vital to the common good and that academic freedom and tenure, good pay, a light teaching load, and time to study and research are necessary to that end. I can make a good case for all of this. But the AAUP’s General Declaration paints professors with an aura of sainthood. They are portrayed as incorruptible guardians of knowledge and unselfish benefactors of society. In its rhetoric about the glories of the vocation, professors walk on water and open the eyes of the blind, but in reality they stumble along in the same muddy stream as do other human beings. The nobility of the professorial calling must not be carelessly attributed to practitioners of that vocation. In my experience professors can be just as petty, jealous, narrow, envious, hypocritical, greedy, and ambitious as politicians, business leaders, and the cleaning crew. Of course they want complete self-governance in matters of academic freedom and tenure! I want it too!

But who will guard the guardians? The General Declaration assumes that, even if a few of its members abuse their privileges, “the profession” will remain pure; it can police its members. But the history of other associations and organizations makes this assumption dubious. Should we believe that the professorate can escape the gravitational pull of mundane self-interest, ideological orthodoxies, and nepotism when the clergy, labor unions, and police departments have not been able to do so? Shall we, then, appoint an elite group of superguardians to guard the academic guardians? But who would guard them?

There is no substitute for checks and balances that can serve as counterweights to tyranny arising from outside or inside the university. The faculty can be as tyrannical as the government or the administration or the board. Universities exist as cooperative efforts on the part of many interested parties, all of them necessary to the existence and functioning of the school: founders, donors, boards of regents, alumni, students, administrators, the public, and faculty. There is no escaping the messy business of negotiating, if not harmony, at least some acceptable compromise among these parties. The guardians must guard each other in an unbroken circle of accountability in which no one and no area is exempt from the scrutiny of all.

What is “the Profession” and Who Speaks for it?

The General Declaration speaks as if there were a real entity called “the profession.” This way of speaking leaves the impression that every competent college teacher shares the same view about the aims of higher education and agrees on the methods and resources needed to accomplish these goals. This was not true in 1915, and it is not true today. Is the purpose of higher education to pass on the wisdom accumulated by generations past or to train researchers to engage in discovery of new knowledge? Should professors in their research and teaching seek disinterestedly for truth or work to change the world? Professors were divided then, and they are divided now on these questions. Implied in this second dichotomy are two very different views of academic freedom and the professor/student relationship, which we see today in the conflict between the postmodern activist and the anti-political professional views.

Professors in Christian colleges and universities often find themselves on different sides of this debate. But more importantly, thoughtful Christian professors, especially those teaching in Christian schools, understand that they do not fit comfortably in either camp. For they are committed to doing their research and teaching guided by the Christian worldview. In the final article in this series, I will take up how this institutional and professorial commitment to the truth of Christianity changes the way we think about academic freedom and professorial self-governance.

Careerism and Silence in Higher Education

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I’ve spent 45 years in higher education either as a student or a professor. I’ve blogged about it before, and I will have more to say about higher education in America in the future. No doubt this is true in every profession, but careerism is among the most serious problems plaguing colleges and universities today. There are certain paths that lead to tenure and promotion or to administrative posts in academia, and not all of them benefit students or advance knowledge. Some faculty appear to care only about making a career, and others compromise their ideals, their good sense, and even their consciences to play the game. And some, of course, selfishly use their classroom to recruit activists for their favorite cause.* But I am convinced that most teachers — even though they consent to jump through the hoops, play the game, and hold their noses and bite their tongues — care about students and the pursuit of knowledge.

But as I took my walk this morning, thinking about these things, two analogies came to mind. I think, given the context of contemporary culture, they speak for themselves.

The Sheep and the Wolf

Sheep outnumber wolves 100 to 1. But the wolf is fierce, loud, and fast. The wolf appears, and the sheep scatter or cower in a corner. Then, one by one, the wolf picks them off. But had the sheep understood the power of coordinated action they could have trampled the wolf under their cloven hooves.

The Bully

To be successful, the schoolyard bully must isolate the smallest kid and provide an example to the rest of what comes of resistance. The silent kids outnumber the bully and his toadies 10 to one. Should the 10 find the courage to rush him, the bully’s courage will fail and the specter of his power will vanish like the morning fog.

*Let me make this point clear: a good teacher cares about students’ individual welfare and invests the time it takes to promote it. Bad teachers treat their students as means to the professor’s own ends: vanity, career, or political ideology. Good teachers teach their students to think clearly while bad teachers train their students to talk like the professor. Good teachers love their students, but bad teachers love themselves through their students.

Where Christian Colleges Go to Die

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Faith and Beginnings

Most Christian colleges were founded by people of great faith. The original faculty and administrators believed wholeheartedly in the Christian mission of the college as the decisive reason for its existence. Many colleges founded within the last hundred years began as a protest and an alternative to the dominant culture of academia. Students, faculty, and donors were attracted to these colleges because of their distinctive Christian identity. They unhesitatingly confessed Jesus as Lord and Savior, crucified and risen from the dead. And they expected every teacher and administrator to adhere to this faith and to live consistently with this confession. Students, too, were required to attend worship and to live by the community’s moral code. Beyond this basic evangelical confession, some colleges required adherence to denominational confessions or expanded evangelical confessions, and they expected community members to live according to a strict moral code. Why, then, do so many of these colleges fall away after such a faith-filled beginning?

Warnings

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever (1 John 2:15-17).
Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matt 4:1-4).

The Logic of Survival

Christian colleges face many of the temptations individual Christians confront. Of course, just as colleges do not have hearts and tongues with which to believe and confess, they do not experience bodily lusts that can lead them astray. However, colleges have a character formed by a combination of its tradition and its current community. It is a kind of collective personality we can call a “soul.” And this soul can be tempted by certain threats and allurements to abandon its founding principles. Holding true may prove costly:

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul” (Mark 8:34-36).

The instinct for survival is basic to every human being. When the Lord bragged about Job’s faithfulness, Satan replied, “Skin for skin! A man will give all he has for his own life. But now stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face” (Job 2:4-5). Christian colleges, too, want to survive, and that urge can drive them to compromise their Christian mission. Colleges are expensive operations, and the roadside of history is littered with bankrupt colleges. They need tuition paying students and gifts of money and property. In its efforts to attract students and resources, it will be tempted to broaden its base of support to include people whose priorities do not align with the Christian mission. The college survives but at the cost of its soul.

Ambition and Assimilation

Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets (Luke 6:26)

If a Christian college survives, it faces a second temptation. Colleges are driven by ambition to achieve ever greater prominence. They move beyond the narrow circle of their denominations to gain a regional reputation, and then, they set their sights on national prominence. How does a college gain national prominence? Of course, a college can become well known for its winning athletic teams or its beautiful campus. But I am speaking about its academic ranking. Many factors contribute to academic standing, but one stands out as essential: the academic accomplishments of its faculty. Colleges ambitious to climb the rankings ladder must recruit highly trained, talented faculty and provide them with time and resources to conduct research that gets noticed nationally and internationally. Accomplishing this goal requires a change of priorities. (1) Academic potential becomes the number one qualification for faculty recruitment and retention. A college with national ambitions cannot hire and tenure Christian teachers if they are mediocre researchers. (2) It requires lots of money. Nationally ranked colleges and universities must build huge endowments to support reduced teaching loads and research. Seeking grants from government agencies and industry becomes part of faculty job descriptions. (3) The research faculty members produce must be impressive to the national and international community of scholars working the same fields.

Embarrassment

If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels (Mark 8:38)

These academic changes will produce a dramatic transformation in college culture. The outstanding faculty will demand the freedoms and privileges enjoyed by their colleagues at “peer” and “aspirational” universities: virtually unlimited academic freedom, near unconditional tenure, and complete control over the curriculum. Having been recruited and tenured for their research prowess, they do not devote their primary loyalty to the Christian mission of the college but to their disciplines and their peers in the academy. Hence they find themselves embarrassed by remnants of the old Christian college culture that still remain, which, when measured by the ethos of the national academic culture, appear quaint and unenlightened.

The Kingdoms of the World

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”
Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only’” (Matt 4:8-10).

The college’s new national profile will expose it to scrutiny by the dominant academic culture. Gradually, social pressure from without and from within will force it step by step to conform to the national culture. What began as a protest and an alternative to secular academia becomes celebration and assimilation to that culture. Politics replaces faith, social activism displaces evangelism, and self-expression crowds out moral conscientiousness. The college has gained the world but lost its soul. A poor bargain indeed!

Series Ends. Although there is more to say, this post concludes the four-part series on “open letters” to higher education. I will probably feel the need to revisit the topic, since I have spent all my adult life studying or teaching in colleges and universities.

Christian Colleges and Universities: Can They be Academically Sound?

A Christian College?

There many kinds of institutions and associations that call themselves Christian: Churches, legal societies, charitable organizations, mission societies, adoption agencies, and hundreds of others. And each of these associations can legitimately designate itself “Christian” as long as it confesses and lives by the faith set forth in the New Testament. Each group also claims to be an institution of a certain sort that does the kind of work appropriate to its type. What would you think of a charitable organization that never helped anyone in need, or an adoption agency that never placed a child with loving parents, or a legal society that focused exclusively on raising chickens?

In the same way, Christian colleges must do the essential work that colleges exist to do, or they should cease calling themselves colleges. But here we face our first difficulty. There is no authoritative blueprint defining the nature and work of a college. Nor does any accrediting body or government agency have an intrinsic right to create such a blueprint. What we have instead of such an authority is a history of associations that called themselves “colleges.” As educational endeavors, colleges organize themselves as societies of teachers and students whose purpose for coming together is Advanced learning, which involves coming to understand the best intellectual achievements a society has to offer. This core meaning remains constant throughout all the changes within the history of higher education. Hence a Christian college, if it wishes to identify itself with this history, must at minimum constitute itself as an association of teachers and students whose purpose is higher or advanced learning.

What Counts as Advanced Learning?

Tradition Dependence

What, then, counts as advanced learning? Again we face a difficulty not often acknowledged. There is no unchanging and authoritative blueprint that determines what should be taught in institutions of advanced learning. Every society teaches its young what it judges to be the best wisdom, securest knowledge, and most useful skills. No society would teach its children what it knows to be foolish, erroneous, and useless. But judgment about what is true and useful differs from society to society and from age to age. What counted as advanced learning in Ancient Greece differs from that in fifth-century Rome, thirteenth-century Paris, nineteenth-century Berlin, or twenty-first century Los Angeles.

No society is monolithic in its understanding of what is wise, good, true, and useful. Certainly not contemporary American society! From the beginning, American society has been composed of many competing traditions with differing views on the nature of education in general and of advanced learning in particular. Historically, the pluralism in American higher education has mirrored regional, philosophical, political, and denominational differences. Educational traditions compete with each other for dominance. Ideally, a tradition would support its claim to superiority with rational arguments designed to persuade. However, those seeking power rarely limit themselves to rational persuasion.

The Secular Progressive Tradition

In a story too long and complicated to tell here, the secular progressive tradition of academia, about which I wrote in my letter to American academia, gained dominance over other traditions through a variety of means: championing the latest natural science, allying itself with industry and government, and riding a wave of progressive social and moral thought. It presents itself to the public as the standard that defines the meaning of advanced learning. It considers traditional Catholic, denominational, evangelical, and other conservative colleges unenlightened and culturally backward; lately, one even hears Christian colleges referred to as breeding grounds for racism, colonialism, homophobia, and other moral evils. See George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief, for insight into this story.

The Christian Tradition of Advanced Learning

Despite its arrogant claims, the secular progressive tradition of academia possesses no divine right to set standards for advanced learning. Reason is not its exclusive possession. Its ever-changing vision of what is wise, good, true, and useful can be contested. Hence Christian colleges and universities need not accept its definition of what makes a college academically sound as a pattern to emulate. No external authority has the right to dictate what a college should teach and how.

In fact, Orthodox Christians contest secular progressive academia’s vision of what is wise, good, true, and useful. We understand God, creation, human nature, the human condition, human destiny, and morality, and a thousand other things very differently. We do not share the same vision of human good or of what constitutes a good human being. To love God above all things is the most profound of human obligations. In contrast, idolatry, that is, worshiping anything other than God, is the most profound abandonment of duty and the wellspring of manifold evil (Rom 1:18-32).

For us, the events of the cross and resurrection of Jesus are the most significant events in human history. Because we believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, we also believe that Jesus Christ reveals the true nature, identity, and destiny of humanity (Rom 8:29; 1 John 3:2). Jesus is the image of the invisible God (Col 1:15). He is the Lord and only Savior. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). He is “power of God and wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). In Christ “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2:3). Orthodox Christians do not believe that an education that omits or rejects these truths and this vision of human life can provide a foundation for a good life. For us, much of what American academia considers wise, good, true, and useful we consider foolish, bad, false, and useless. In view of the wisdom revealed in Christ, we confidently apply to our own age Paul’s rhetorical jabs given to the “wise” of his age:

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe (1 Cor 1:20-21).

And this is our rationale for creating and maintaining Christian colleges.

An Open Letter to Christian Colleges and Universities (Part One)

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About My “Harsh” Letter

As you know, recently I wrote a letter to American academia. Some readers thought it was too harsh and sweeping. Others took it personally. And still others thought my criticisms were aimed at Christian as well as secular higher education. Allow me, then, to correct those misperceptions. As to its harshness, I do not think I can satisfy those who thought it was too harsh. I thought about softening it somewhat, but I decided not to do so lest its impact be lessened. Concerning its target, the letter was aimed at the dominant culture of academia, not at any one person within it. Many wonderful professors, administrators, and staff—some of them sincere Christians—work within this system. They care about students and value reason. My criticisms were directed not at them but at the system that, regardless of the beliefs of any individual, harbors irrational bias against orthodox Christianity and lives in dread of a right-wing takeover. I described it as systemic animus, and I stand by that assessment.

Nor did I have you in mind. You do not fit the pattern of the dominant academic culture. Indeed, your only reason for existence is to protest against that culture and provide a clear alternative. But now I am writing to you. I want to warn you, encourage you, and, yes, advise you about how to guard your identity as a light in darkness.

A Little History

There is so much to say! We go back a long time, and you predate me by hundreds of years. I would love to rehearse your entire history from Colonial America to today. We could learn so much from that story. I will indulge myself, however, with only a few historical observations. Nearly every college founded in the United States between 1636 (Harvard) and 1900 was begun by a Christian denomination. They did not need to call themselves “Christian” because all the colleges were Christian in some sense. However, between 1875 and 1925 many American Colleges began to call themselves “nonsectarian,” meaning generic or cultural, as opposed to confessional Christianity. The case of Johns Hopkins University is instructive. America’s first research university, founded in 1876, JHU labeled itself “nonsectarian” from the beginning. Toward the end of his founding address, the University’s first president Daniel Coit Gilman turned to the Board of Trustees and addressed them in these words:

Before concluding, I repeat in public the assent which I have privately made to your official overtures. In speaking of your freedom from sectarian and political control, you expressed to me a hope that this foundation should be pervaded by the spirit of an enlightened Christianity… I now as then express my cordial and entire concurrence.” https://www.jhu.edu/about/history/gilman-address/.

Only in the Twentieth Century, after the majority of colleges and universities in America had completed the transition from “enlightened Christianity” to complete secularity, did “Christian” colleges begin thinking of themselves as a group in distinction from the secular majority.

What Makes a College “Christian”

I am writing to colleges and universities that wish to be known as “Christian” and market themselves to students, donors, and alumni as such. My first question, then, is this: when you say you are a “Christian” college or university, what do you mean? More importantly, what should you mean?

The Individual “Christian”

I have to ask this question because calling yourself Christian does not make it so for an institution any more than it does for an individual. The New Testament book of Acts reports that “the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch” (Acts 11:26). In the course of history there have been many reasons why people called themselves Christians. But the only reason I will acknowledge as legitimate is that you confess and live by the same faith that the disciples in Antioch held and that Paul, Peter, and John preached: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised from the dead on the third day…” (1 Cor. 15:3-8). Paul says in another place,

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved (Rom 10:9-10).

There is more to say about what it means to be a Christian, but at minimum professing to be a Christian should be a clear sign that you believe that Jesus is Lord and Savior, crucified and raised from the dead. It should also go without saying that you are committing yourself to live according to Jesus’s and his apostles’ teaching.

The “Christian” College

In the same way, for a college or university to designate itself as “Christian” should mean at minimum that it confesses the same faith that believers in Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, and Rome, under the guidance of the apostles, confessed: Jesus is Messiah, Lord, and Savior, crucified and raised from the dead. A Christian college must live out its institutional life under the guidance of this faith. I will not acknowledge as genuinely Christian any college that will not make this confession before the world and conduct its affairs on this basis. There are, of course, differences between the ways Christian colleges and individual Christians live out their faith. Universities do not have hearts with which to believe or mouths with which to confess that Jesus is Lord. As corporate entities, universities exist in and act on the basis their charters, policies, mission statements, codes of conduct, and desired outcomes. In Christian universities, these institutional identifiers must affirm Christian faith clearly at every level, from charter to desired outcomes. Moreover, these commitments mean little unless they are taken seriously in hiring, retention, curriculum, teaching, and student life. Christian colleges must remember that their existence makes sense only as a protest and an alternative to the dominant culture of academia.

To be Continued…

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