Some Questions for the American System of Education: Part Two—My Answers

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Today, I want to propose some answers to the questions I asked in my previous post. But I want to make it clear up front that it is not my purpose to propose simple (or complex) solutions to complicated and likely intractable social problems. My goal is to shed light on these social problems so that we as individuals, families, and churches can make the best decisions in areas over which we have some immediate control.

What’s the Purpose of Children’s Education?

1. Why are there more illiterate people today than before the government took over most children’s education?

I am recalling this from my reading in the history of education in America, but I remember that the literacy rate in Massachusetts in 1780, when all schooling was private, was about 90% . Clearly the Massachusetts Puritans valued universal literacy. I can only speculate about the deterioration.

I think the decline probably reflects an underlying social, moral, and spiritual breakdown in culture: (1) the breakdown of the traditional family—divorce, fatherlessness, and decline of church going; (2) the decline of the buying power of the average income and the accompanying increase of two-income middle class family; (3) the increase of an entitlement mentality and the decrease of the notion of sacrifice; the rise of “I-deserve-a-little-happiness” thinking; (4) the transformation from thinking of education as a privilege to be treasured to a right that can be taken for granted; (5) the rise of the permissive society, especially permissive parenting. Very few children are self-motivated. They need guidance and discipline; (6) The fatalism and lost of hope in some subcultures that getting an education is the way toward economic and cultural advancement.

2. Why does it take 12 years to educate a child?

I am certain that I could have learned everything I learned in 12 years in half the time. I wonder why such a waste of time? This 12-year calendar must be more about modern theories of child psychology and development than intellectual progress. Nowadays, kids don’t grow up until 30 years of age, at least the ones that go to college. What’s the problem?

If the entire 12 years were spent efficiently on academics, high school graduates would be prepared for professional and graduate schools right out of high school. They would not need to take remedial English and math courses or learn basic history in colleges. However instead of academics, schools seem to take on the general task of parenting children through the developmental stages of their lives. Not only so, schools take on the quasi-political role of socializing children into their vision of a diverse and pluralistic society viewed through the lens of the oppressor/oppressed and privilege/prejudice analysis. In obvious ways, those who benefit from expanding the scope of the public school system, promote such a whole of life philosophy.

3. Why is high school called “high” school?

High school was called “high” because it taught advanced subjects and skills beyond those learned in grammar school. The term, though not the modern institution, originated in the Middle Ages. In colonial times most college students were minors from 13 to 16 years of age. Their main preparation for college was learning math and language skills in schools or via private tutoring. Colonial and early American colleges prepared students to study for the professions in medicine, the ministry, and law. High schools in America were not originally designed for college preparation but to prepare students to transition to professions that required literacy and mathematical skills but not classical professional training.

Needless to say, modern high schools are no longer “advanced” and many students graduate with a high school diploma but not a “high” school education. Moreover, high schools differ dramatically in the quality of education they provide. Clearly, grade and degree inflation have eroded the value of high school and four-year college degrees.

Why has this happened? I think it has to do with the six problems I dealt with in question #1. When education becomes a right, it will be taken for granted. Schooling will replace education and diplomas will replace knowledge and skills.

4. Why do public schools teach to the average student when this practice results in intelligent and interested students not learning up to their potential and the less than average students getting overwhelmed?

Let’s face it. We are not all born equal in every respect. Each person has their own gifts, and there are different kinds of intelligence. But calculus, chemistry and logic are not for everyone. Some children can be amazing mechanics and plumbers. We need them and should celebrate their skills. But not everyone will make a good Wall Street analyst. So, let’s help each child find their gifts and make their particular contribution to the common good.

Perhaps we should rethink our naive view of the meaning of equality, democracy, and equal opportunity. We could begin to direct and track children at an early age—always leaving open each track to all in case we misjudge a child’s abilities and interests. Every child is precious, but it does not honor their value to press them all into the same shape.

5. Why do the sociopolitical aims of the public education system rank so high among its priorities?

Why are schools so political these days? And why does their politics lean so heavily to the left? I have lots of opinions on why this is the case. But first, we need to remember that the political public school classroom is not a recent development. The public school system has always been political, but explicitly so at least since around 1830 when Horace Mann succeeded in getting the State of Massachusetts to set up its public school system modeled on the German state system. Public schools were designed from the beginning to serve the purposes of the state. It may not seem like it, but measured by the culture of their day, the first public schools were progressive, and they are still that way today. Only what counts as progressive has changed.

Public schools were never primarily tailored for students’ and parents’ aspirations as individuals and families. Their function has always been to serve the socio-economic interests of the governmental and business classes. “Public” means publicly funded and administered and designed to serve the “common good” as defined by those in power. Again: nothing “public” is designed specifically for you, your kids, and your family. Once set up, however, the public system, like all institutions, takes on a life of its own and puts its survival and comfort above all things. Public school teachers, whatever noble motives many of them have as individuals, are trained in teacher education colleges, which are some of the most liberal/progressive places in left-leaning American academia.

5. Why don’t parents demand a better education for their children?

The lives today’s parents want to live is built around having their kids from years 5-18 occupied for 8 hours per day five days a week by schools. They seem to think they have no alternative. Parental abdication gives schools too much power over your flesh and blood. Schools become the defacto (and while they are on school grounds the legal) guardians and protectors of your children. But who guards the guardians? Who teaches them what is good and bad, right and wrong, normal and perverse while you are not in the room? Again, why don’t parents demand a better education for their children? Some do, but those who don’t avoid it because it’s easier not to do so.

Next Time: Who Needs A College Education and Why?

Some Questions for the American System of Education (Part One)?

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Today, I want to ask some questions about the way we educate our youth in the United States. In a follow up post, I will present my perspective on those issues. As you have opportunity, think about how you would answer these questions.

The Mind of an Educator

I come from a family of educators. My mother taught junior math for 30 years in the public school system. One of my brothers, my sister and my sister-in-law also taught in public schools. I admire them and others like them for their competence as teachers, their dedication to the public good, and their love for their students. I spent twelve years as a student in public schools and 13 ½ years in private universities. I am about to finish my 36th year teaching in a university. My opinions about education have been percolating from my junior high days. In view of the huge ferment that is roiling higher education these days I’d like to reflect on the context in which we must exercise our God-given responsibility as parents, learners, teachers, and citizens.

Questions: What’s the Purpose of Children’s Education?

1. Why are there more illiterate people today than before the government took over most children’s education?

2. Why does it take 12 years to educate a child?

3. Why is high school called “high” school?

4. Why do public schools teach to the average student when this practice results in intelligent and interested students not learning up to their potential and the less than average students getting overwhelmed?

5. Why do the sociopolitical aims of the public education system rank so high among its priorities?

5. Why don’t parents demand a better education for their children?

Questions: Who Needs A College Education and Why?

1. Do you think that 62% of high school graduates belong in college?

2. What is a college education for?

3. Why does a college education cost so much?

4. Why are there are 1.4 million college teachers in America?

Coming Soon: Part Two

Christian Stoic or Social Justice Christian?

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The Stoics

Like all philosophical schools in the ancient world—Platonists, Epicureans, Academics, et al—the Stoics sought the truths, attitudes and conditions that would facilitate a good human life. They observed that such negative emotions as fear, desire, and anxiety are generated by thoughts about attaining or avoiding that over which we have no control. Clearly, these negative emotions are incompatible with the good life. The best life is one of undisturbed contentment with the gift of existence in our inner being wherein we are always in the immediate presence of good things that cannot change. For the Stoics, there is only one thing and one place over which we have control, that is our own free will. It is the only thing that we can have purely by willing it. The external world, including our bodies, operates under other laws over which we have no immediate control and to which we must adjust. And the free will of other human beings is completely beyond our control because it is totally under their control. To banish negative emotions, we must refrain from desiring to control that over which we do not have immediate and total control. Stoics determine to accept the flow of the events that happen in nature as their lot. These external events cannot threaten or even touch the inner world of free will unless we allow it to do so.

Social Justice Christians

There is a kind of Christian ethics that in effect proposes that we ought to remain in a state of discontent and outrage until we right every injustice done in the world. And because we cannot accomplish such radical changes in the world by appealing to the free will of others by doing good, speaking truth, and setting good examples, these same Christians resort to using force: intimidation, insults, rudeness, disruption, legal action, and, yes, even violence.  Apparently, these social justice Christians think that the coming of the kingdom of God depends on our human efforts to establish their ideal political order that includes everybody, believers and non-believers, saints and sinners. They turn the Stoic understanding of a good human life inside out. What matters most are the external conditions of life: equal access to bodily pleasure, equality of material goods, equality of social respect, and equality of external freedom. Because this level of control over the external social, political, and natural order is impossible, these social justice Christians ensure that everyone is angry, unhappy, fearful, and offended all the time. Not a happy life.

The Christian Stoic

There are, of course, great differences between Stoic metaphysics, cosmology and theology and the Christian view of God, creation, salvation, and providence. Jesus’s teaching concerning God’s providence and against the need for anxiety, however, bears some resemblance to the Stoic doctrine of limiting our concern to the place where we have immediate control, our free will. Jesus tells us to trust and align our wills with God’s will. Also, neither in Jesus’s teaching nor in the rest of the New Testament is there the slightest hint that Jesus’s disciples ought to seek to remake the world into a social justice paradise by political means. That day is an eschatological hope dependent completely on God’s power. To attempt to control the world in the name of God in a way only God can produces only tyranny and rebellion. The only community in which there is a little hope for an approximate realization of the kingdom ethics taught in the Sermon on the Mount is the church, that is, the community of those truly converted to Jesus Christ in their inner being. But history demonstrates that this kingdom community has never become a concrete reality even in the church, the community divinely commission to become such. Much more is it a vain dream that it will be realized in a society of the unconverted!

What is the Christian Stoic to do? First, we must understand that apart from God’s grace in the Holy Spirit our free will is not free in the most radical sense, that is free to know and love the true God above all things. Only God can make God present to our minds so that we can know and love him in this way. But given God’s grace, we can love God in return for his love for us. In loving God above everything else we live free from anxiety about all those things over which we have no control. Moreover, we know that the God who loves us possesses power to control all things for our good.

Christian Stoics know they cannot right every wrong and transform the world into a social paradise. This task is not under their power and therefore is not their job. Their main job is, with the help of God’s grace, to allow themselves to be transformed into the image of Christ. From that transformed inner world they can turn outward to do good, speak truth, and love neighbor and enemy. God may use their good works and words to transform others.

Christian Stoics refuse to be unhappy because the external world does not submit to their control. We have come to know that our primary task in life is purification of our own souls. That in itself is a dauting task and the work of a lifetime.

Christian Colleges Are Academically Sound and Socially Necessary

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Today I want to flesh out an idea I introduced in the previous essay: “Can Christian Scholars (and Colleges) be Academic?” Secular critics of the idea of the Christian college charge that such colleges cannot live up to the ideal of a university. As I observed in that essay, according to the reigning model of academia,

to be a real college or university, that is, to live up to the ideal of academia, the institution must not presuppose the truth of any belief. No theory, hypothesis, belief, description, method, etc., can be given privileged status. Professors must be left completely free to go wherever their minds and hearts take them and share these thoughts with students and the public.

Christian colleges and universities violate this principle by presupposing the truth of Christian faith. Hence, they are not true colleges and universities.

An Abstract and Unworkable Ideal

University Not a Street Corner

Notice first that the ideal of the university as articulated in the above principle is abstract. It has never been realized in any real university; nor can it be. Every real university embodies a host of value judgments, social goals, methodological principles, and truth claims. And it excludes many theories and truth claims from examination because it considers them false, immoral, irrational, or irrelevant. It seems to me that the “ideal” of a free-for-all discussion fits better in the general space of society governed by the First Amendment right of freedom of speech than in the university where speech is governed by rules far more restrictive than freedom of speech. You don’t have to possess a PhD to express your opinion on the street corner. But possessing a PhD is the minimum qualification to teach in a university classroom; and by the time students complete their PhDs they’ve already been socialized into the elite world of mainstream academia.

A Fallacious Argument

Second, academic critics of Christian colleges and universities make a fallacious argument. They apply an abstract ideal to Christian colleges but not to the secular university. Secular universities will not allow the geocentric theory of the universe or the idea that the earth is flat to be taught because they “know” they are false. They will not allow racist or homophobic or sexist ideas to be expressed by professors because they “know” they are immoral. The list of proscribed theories and dogmatic certainties is long. I am convinced that the real reason secular critics reject the idea of a Christian college is that they believe that Christianity is false or immoral. Or, is it that they are afraid it might be true?

No University is Universal

Third, no university is universal. No particular university can house research professors from every discipline and study every problem. Nor can any one university create programs and employ teachers in every possible subject. Many significant problems will suffer neglect and resources will be wasted pursuing ephemeral winds of change. Universities possess limited resources and draw on a finite pool of prospective students. They compete with each other for resources, professors, and students. They vie with each other to construct the most appealing “brand.”

No Professor is An Island

Fourth, the idealized principle quoted above makes it seem as if professors work in complete isolation, boldly experimenting with ideas, daring to think for themselves, having no settled opinions, and beginning every morning with a clean slate and a clear mind. This image completely misrepresents how academia really works. Professors work in disciplinary departments—chemistry, sociology, psychology, biology, history, and philosophy. And though there are always inner departmental controversies and rivalries, departments have a tendency to hire like-minded professors. It is sometimes called ideological inbreeding.

Professors also belong to national and international associations devoted to their discipline: The American Chemical Society, The Modern Language Association, The American Historical Association, and hundreds more. These societies develop professional standards and give professors a sense of identity beyond their local universities. Perhaps even more significant, every subject area is further divided into rival theories held by communities of adherents that are often called “schools of thought.” No one is just a philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, language scholar, theologian, biblical scholar, or political scientist. These subjects divide into rival theories bent on refuting each other. Some of these rival communities have existed for decades or centuries and some for over 2,400 years.

An isolated researcher, a member of no community, without adherence to a school of thought can make no progress. Progress in any field of study is marked by extending the explanatory scope of a paradigm or theory held by the community of scholars to which one belongs. People like Galileo or Newton or Einstein come along once in a century. In the meantime, thousands of scientists work out the implications and applications of their theories to new areas of experience. Mathematics, physics, and Chemistry best exemplify the possibility of progress. But every discipline taught in the university imitates these sciences insofar as it can.

Every modern university conducts its business according to this method or pretends to do so. For only in this way can a university claim to advance knowledge, provide a sound education, and therefore justify its existence.

The Christian Philosophy

Secular universities as institutions adhere to rules, principles, values, and certain truths that distinguish them from a gathering on a street corner, and research professors and teachers conduct their work within departments, disciplinary societies, and among rival schools of thought. There is no such thing as an uncommitted, neutral academic institution or enterprise. Academia is about testing, extending, and applying theories and paradigms that researchers believe are reliable guides to discovery and progress. Therefore, I believe I am fully justified in rejecting the secular criticisms of the idea and practice of the Christian college based on the abstract principle quoted above.

How may the existence of a Christian college or university be justified in view of the actual practice of research and teaching in American colleges and universities as I described it above? What if we think of Christianity as a “school of thought” in analogy to such philosophical schools of thought as Platonism, Stoicism, Idealism, or Empiricism? These philosophical paradigms can be, and in fact are, taught in state and private secular universities. Many philosophers who teach courses in Plato or Stoic literature argue for the truth of these philosophies in part or as a whole. Why couldn’t Christianity be taught in secular universities alongside these philosophies, some of which are very theological? As long as professors argue in rational ways and deal fairly with objections rather than merely asserting Christianity dogmatically, I can see no rational or legal objection to the practice.

Sadly, state universities appeal to the United States Supreme Court’s decisions about the First Amendment’s prohibition of government-established religion to forbid professors from arguing for the truth of Christianity. But more than that, there is a huge bias against Christianity in both state and private secular universities. Hence Christians need to establish their own colleges and universities to explore the implications and applications of their Christian faith.

The exclusion of Christian theology from academia is an important academic rationale for the existence of Christian colleges and universities.* Because of the bias against and legal restrictions on teaching Christianity as possibly true, beautiful and good in secular universities, theology has been exiled from the curriculum. In my view, this exclusion is a dereliction of duty based on animus—a betrayal of the true academic ideal. Christian colleges and universities are doing for American society what secular colleges and universities culpably neglect to do. Christian colleges and universities serve the Tens of millions of American Christians and other believers in God by seriously exploring the implications of their faith for all aspects of life and in providing an education for their children that takes their faith seriously as a truth claim. And these institutions keep alive for society as a whole a very influential and profound viewpoint on the perennial questions about the human condition.

*There are many other rationales for establishing Christian universities and colleges. I am focusing on one academic reason that secular academics should acknowledge even if they are not sympathetic.

Can Christian Scholars (And Colleges) be Academic?

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For the past year I’ve been reading about higher education in America, about 10 books in all. I wrote blog reviews of 5 of them. Most of these books focus on secular private and state-controlled colleges and universities. Whenever they mention “denominational,” or “sectarian” schools, the clear implication—if not the explicit declaration—is that these colleges are not truly academic. Indeed, they cannot be academic, because they exempt certain religious dogmas from critical scrutiny and prohibit professors from teaching or writing anything that contradicts them. To be a real college or university, that is, to live up to the ideal of academia, the institution must not presuppose the truth of any belief. No theory, hypothesis, belief, description, method, etc., can be given privileged status. Professors must be left completely free to follow where their minds and hearts take them and share these thoughts with students and the public…and be given career-long security and a salary to do so.

Academic Hypocrisy

I think you can see already that this ideal of academia is unworkable. It is skepticism of the most cynical kind that envisions academia as a game to be played for its own sake. If students, parents, and the government came to believe this, would they pay professors and administrators to play this game? In fact, however, the secular description of academia is a cynical ploy designed for one purpose: to make it seem irrational for a college to presuppose Christian faith, traditional morals and common sense as guiding principles. Secular colleges and universities have no intention of living up to this ideal.

The whole point of anything we might call an academy is to rise above the undisciplined and emotion-driven conversations of the street. The academy claims to be a social good because it uses time-tested and critically proven methods of assessing facts, perceiving logical coherence and causal connections, and weighing probabilities to approximate truth. And in order to carry out this process, scholars work within traditions, schools of thought and communities to work out the implications of the dominant theories. Apart from accepting well-supported theories at least provisionally, scientific progress is impossible.* The same holds true in all areas of academic research—from fine arts to history to economics. It is precisely the methodical, rational exploration of (provisionally) accepted theories that makes academia academic!

Christian Academia

Christian scholars, colleges and universities conform to this model of academia as well as secular colleges and universities do. If you think of basic Christian doctrine in analogy to a well-supported theory, Christian scholars seek to work out the full implications of this theory in religion, theology, ethics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc. Christian colleges and universities gather Christian scholars from all disciplines to work together on this grand project and to share the results of their study with students and the public.

Objections and Replies

1. But you may object that Christian colleges presuppose only one grand theory, whereas secular colleges gather scholars that presuppose many theories, which are allowed to clash. In response we might point out that secular colleges exclude many theories from consideration. Just try exploring the implications of belief in divinely revealed moral law or the resurrection of Christ at a secular university. Or try teaching a class arguing for rejection of the theory of human-caused climate change or that there are only two genders. Larry Summers was forced to resign from the presidency of Harvard just for suggesting that the disparity between the numbers of men and women in the STEM subject areas should be researched to see if it might be biologically based. Secular colleges’ and universities’ claims of neutrality and all-inclusivity are clearly disingenuous.

2. Some would object that Christian faith is not a “well-supported” theory but a set of beliefs based on faith. But this objection misses an important truth about Christianity. Christianity claims to be true. Belief in God can be supported by many lines of argument that many people find compelling. The distinctive beliefs of Christianity are based on events that it claims really happened. Christian scholars assert that Jesus Christ really lived, taught, died on a Roman cross, and three days later rose from the dead. The tomb was empty and Jesus was seen alive by many people, including Saul of Tarsus. One may argue that these beliefs are false, but note well, you have to argue that they are false! And if something is worthy of arguing about, that makes it worthy of academic study! If Christians believe that basic Christian doctrine is true, that of itself makes engaging in scholarship to explore the implications of this truth and creating an institution to facilitate that exploration an immanently reasonable (academic!) thing to do.

*This is a major conclusion of Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Revolutions come along generations apart. In between, scholars work within traditions or paradigms. Kuhn calls the activity within these interim periods “normal science.”

Who Hijacked the American University?

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I just finished my second reading of The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it Happened, the Damage it Does & What Can Be Done by John M. Ellis (New York: Encounter Books, 2021). I think you’d find this book illuminating even if you don’t teach in a university; many of you attended one or you may want your children to do so. If you attended a college 25 or more years ago, you may have fond memories of great teachers and classes. I certainly do. But this book will help you to see that today’s university is not the same place as the one where you or your parents received their education.

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?

Is Liberation Theology Christian?

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I am taking a break from my essays on higher education to ask, “Is Liberation Theology Christian?” A few years ago, I would have answered this question, “It depends.” Perhaps that was because I knew it only from books. But now my first impulse is to say “No!” because I find myself surrounded by “liberation” theologians, and I know firsthand where they are coming from. It does not matter what they focused on in graduate school—biblical studies, church history, systematic theology or practical theology—everything is about liberating the oppressed. They’ve multiplied like rabbits. It seems that within the past 10 years, every theology graduate program in America decided that the only subject worth studying is oppression and liberation. Everybody is a social ethicist and a political activist. And you advance your academic career by discovering new classes of oppressed people and ever more subtle ways oppressors oppress their victims.

Before I go further into my complaint, I should probably define liberation theology. Liberation theology is a general term for any system of theological thought that privileges “liberation” as the lens through which it views all the topics usually studied in Christian theology. It evaluates every theological utterance by its tendency to oppress or liberate some group of people. There are no neutral theological statements! Everything is political, and everyone has an agenda. The purpose of liberation theology is to critique theologies that justify oppression and construct theologies that justify the efforts of designated oppressed groups to liberate themselves. It is not to listen to the word of God, repeat it to the church, and obey it.

What kind of oppression does liberation theology have in mind? Not sin, death, and the Devil! These three are the classic oppressors of humankind from which traditional Christianity sought liberation through the gracious saving action of the Father, Son, and Spirit. In liberation theology, the oppressors are human beings and the social structures they create. Liberation theologians work to expose and critique the capitalism, patriarchy, white racism, homophobia, colonialism, transphobia, etc., that they see permeating American society. Liberation theology focuses on political liberation. And it draws on the socio-political analysis of Karl Marx and his contemporary followers often called neo-Marxists. They divide the world into the oppressor classes and the oppressed classes. It’s a very simple analysis of a very complicated world. And from this simple analysis liberation theologians derive a simple theology that divides people into good and bad, guilty and innocent based on group identity. The oppressors can make no defense and the oppressed can give no offense.

What gives these liberation theologies the appearance of being Christian? The simple answer to this question is that they argue that the God of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus Christ always took the side of the oppressed. Liberation theologians select such prooftexts as the Exodus story, some of Jesus’s statements, some of his interactions with the poor and rich, and a few other isolated statements in the Old and New Testaments. They sprinkle these quotes within an already complete system of social and political thought derived from Karl Marx and lead the reader to leap to the conclusion that the whole system springs from the essence of Christianity. But Christianity is completely superfluous to the doctrine. It is added to tickle Christian ears and, frankly, to deceive them.

Why do I say that liberation theology is not Christian? (1) Read any liberation theology you please—feminist, Black, womanist, gay, queer, and Latin American—and you will always find that the subjective experience of these groups is considered a divine revelation as authoritative, if not more so, than Scripture. No reading of Scripture, no matter how obvious to the ordinary reader, will be allow to subvert the “truth” of the subjective experience of oppression. But in any theology worthy of the designation “Christian,” Scripture must be acknowledged as the norm of all theological doctrine and ethics, and to reject this norm is to cease to be Christian. To continue posing as Christian is to lie and deceive. (2) Liberation theology selects one theme within Scripture—liberation—and subordinates everything else to it. Liberation theology does not therefore present the fulness of the gospel or the apostolic teaching; and this distortion through omission is a textbook definition of heresy.

Who is Responsible for Keeping Christian Colleges Christian? (Part Two)

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In part one of this series, I summarized the central storyline of Larry G. Gerber, The Rise & Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University (Johns Hopkins, 2014). Today I will venture a brief assessment of the book, after which I will focus on a concept pivotal to Gerber’s argument for faculty shared governance: faculty expertise. Gerber’s book focuses almost exclusively on state and secular private colleges. I will examine the scope and limits of faculty shared governance with Christian colleges in mind.

The Story and the “Slant”

The Rise & Decline of the Faculty is a very good book. Of course, all history books have a slant, but Gerber strives to tell the story fairly and accurately. As for the “slant,” you can see it in the title of the book. It’s the story of the “rise & decline” of faculty governance. Clearly for Gerber, the “rise” is a good thing and the “decline” is lamentable. He praises professionalism in higher education and condemns commercialism. Maximizing faculty control over the educational and academic aspects of the institution is a desirable aspiration and its diminishment is regrettable. Throughout the book the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities serves as the standard by which to judge an institution’s commitment to faculty shared governance. To quote from the Statement again:

The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process…

Faculty status and related matters are primarily a faculty responsibility; this area includes appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal. The primary responsibility of the faculty for such matters is based upon the fact that its judgment is central to general educational policy. Furthermore, scholars in a particular field or activity have the chief competencefor judging the work of their colleagues; in such competence it is implicit that responsibility exists for both adverse and favorable judgments.

Moreover, genuine “shared governance” should include those rights mentioned in the AAUP Committee T’s 1940 report on the Place and Function of Faculties in College and University Government:

(1) opportunities for direct faculty communication with trustees; (2) faculty involvement in the selection of administrators (president, dean, department chair or head); faculty exercise of primary responsibility for appointing and promoting colleagues; (4) meaningful faculty participation in the budgetary process (Quoted in Gerber, pp. 75-76).

The Limits of Expertise

Gerber and the AAUP appeal to disciplinary expertise to justify granting the faculty a share in institutional governance. Professors possess expert knowledge in their area of study that can be assessed for its academic quality only by academic peers. Likewise, they know what students need to study to become competent in their discipline. Having gone through the process of mastering their fields and having years of experience of mentoring students, professors know best how to chart the path from novice to expert. Hence the faculty should be given the “primary responsibility” for the curriculum, faculty hiring, promotion, and granting or denying tenure. They should exercise control over teaching methods.

There is of course a certain plausibility to this argument. Administrators, donors, or trustees would do well to rely on the professors in the chemistry department to determine the quality of a chemistry professor’s research, the curriculum, and teaching methods within that department. Likewise for all the hard sciences. And yet even a non-scientist can tell when chemists, physicists, or biologists stray outside their expertise and begin to express metaphysical, religious, political, or moral opinions. Being an expert in one area does not make you one in other areas. Hence not even professors in the hard sciences should be allowed to use their expertise in science as a license to control other aspects of departmental life.

When you move out of the hard sciences into the social sciences and the humanities, the reign of expertise becomes even more questionable. Because these areas involve reflection on human beings’ free acts and creations, it is almost impossible to separate these subjects from the moral, political, religious, theological, metaphysical commitments of the professor. Your expertise in the descriptive methods of sociology or economics or your mastery of the history of the Roman Republic or knowledge of Buddhism or Christianity gives no greater authority to your opinions on morality or religion than a person without this knowledge. Being a good doctor does not make you a good parent or a good Christian.

Every university accepts the obligation to uphold certain legal and moral as well as academic standards. Plagiarism and falsification of research data are moral as well as academic infractions. Offenders’ disciplinary expertise cannot legitimately be used as justification for illegal or immoral behavior. Christian colleges have codes of conduct, faith commitments, and mission statements that express their Christian character. These moral, religious, and theological commitments are declared or made obligatory for faculty by the college’s charter or official policy statements. They are not subject to revision or revocation or disobedience or governance by way of faculty claims of academic expertise. For they are not academic judgments at all but axiomatic, foundational or legislated values and can be modified only by boards of trustees.

Shared Governance or Collegiality?

In my view, then, “governance” is the wrong word to describe faculty responsibilities. And its use in university policy statements is misleading. Faculty do not have ultimate authority to do anything. They must pursue the priorities and execute the policies of the university, which is under the governance of its board of trustees. They work under the guidance of the administration, which is also answerable to the board of trustees. Faculty are indeed selected because of their “expertise” in their fields, and in view of their knowledge and skills, they are granted a certain leeway for exercising professional judgment in carrying out their responsibilities. For this arrangement to work effectively, however, professors must use their freedom wisely to fulfill their responsibilities faithfully as befits professionals. For administrators to fulfill their responsibilities faithfully, they must listen to the faculty as it explains what it needs to carry out its duties effectively. And the flow of information must ultimately reach the board of trustees, so that they, too, can fulfill their responsibilities. I suggest dropping the word “governance” and replacing it with collegiality. Collegiality names an attitude of collaboration and mutual respect in working for the same cause.*

Professional Practice

Governing is not within the proper scope of the profession of “professor.” Just as such professionals as doctors and lawyers practice medicine and law, professors practice their highly specialized craft. Every profession has its tradition of credentialling, “best practices,” and code of ethics that defines its scope. And usually, professions have some means of regulating themselves. But doctors who work for hospitals or HMOs and lawyers who work for law firms combine the identities of professional and employee. In the same way, professors are professionals, but working for a college makes you an employee also. Employees do not govern the institutions for which they work. Professionals are responsible to the ideals of the profession and employees are responsible to the boards of trustees and administrators who themselves are responsible to seek the long-term welfare of the institution. Only open lines of communication and mutual respect can make this marriage work.

*The term “collegiality” was used by mid-twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologian Yves Congar to describe a relationship of cooperation and mutual respect between the Pope and the bishops. It was designed to soften the hierarchical view of the relationship without denying the ultimate governing authority of the Pope over the church.

Who is Responsible for Keeping Christian Colleges Christian? (Part One)

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Today I continue my series on the contemporary challenges to the viability of the Christian college. In past essays I’ve focused on academic freedom. In this essay I want to explore the concept of “shared governance,” that is, faculty participation in the decisions that determine the academic quality and educational effectiveness of the college. In the literature I’ve read, academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance are held to be the mutually entailed rights that transform college teachers from employees into professionals. Apologists for the profession justify granting professional status and bestowing these three privileges on professors by appealing to their disciplinary expertise and their unique contributions to democratic society.

It should come as no surprise that even professors in Christian colleges desire such privileges. But will giving them such powers tend to preserve or erode the Christian character of the Christian college? I am a professor and have never served as an administrator or on the board of trustees of a college. I am content in my role as a thinker, teacher, and researcher. For many reasons and much bitter experience, I am very clear that the faculty is not a reliable guardian of the Christianity of a Christian college. Boards of Trustees and administrators—especially presidents—must serve as the guardians of the Christian mission of Christian colleges. That is where I am headed, but first we need to get clear on the history of the concept of “shared faculty governance.”

I will get us into this subject by reviewing, analyzing, and applying Larry G. Gerber’s The Rise & Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University (Johns Hopkins, 2014). Gerber is a historian of twentieth-century America with a long-term interest in faculty governance and a career of involvement with the American Association of University Professors. The book contains an introduction, five core chapters, and a conclusion. Typical of history books, each chapter covers a time span marked off from the preceding and the following by a turning point of some kind. The periods are; before 1876, 1870-1920, 1920-1940, 1940-1975, and 1975 to the present.

College Governance Before 1876

In the Colonial era and beyond, American colleges were organized under governing boards of trustees and “strong presidents” (p. 15), a pattern that continues to exert strong influence today. Education at these colleges focused on character formation rather than “on intellectual inquiry and discovery” (p. 16). The faculty were usually younger, recent graduates headed for the ministry or another profession with no plans for a lifetime career as a professor. In 1817, Yale president Jeremiah Day took a significant step toward shared governance by inviting the Yale faculty to participate in the appointment of new faculty (p. 17). As more and more faculty studied abroad and came to see themselves as subject area experts, they began to expect more respect from administrators and boards of trustees. Under the influence of the German model of higher education, Henry P. Tappan, president of the University of Michigan, speaking before the university senate in 1861, urge that “no laws or regulations should be made without the concurrence of the faculties; and the appointive power should rest with the University Senate” (p. 21). Even into the 1870s, however, “the idea of a formal academic career was still in its infancy” (p. 25).

The Emergence of a Professional Faculty, 1870-1920

Between 1870 and 1920 several factors contributed to the growing professionalization of the professorate and the corresponding demand for greater faculty control over the academic aspects of the university. Over 5,000 American scholars studied in Germany between 1870 and 1900, and they returned intent on implementing the German model in American universities. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins University patterned itself on German educational principles to a great extent. The newly founded universities of Cornell and the University of Chicago as well as the older universities, Harvard, Columbia and the University of Michigan, competed for faculty from the best scholars available. Because of their growth in size and increasing specialization, the university department became the center of day-to-day academic life. Professors began to root their identity more in nation-wide specialty areas of study and professional organizations than in their local college or university. It was in this era that the PhD became the required credential for teaching at elite universities. Under pressure from these forces, boards of trustees and administrators began to acquiesce to professionalized faculty demands for more shared governance, academic freedom, and tenure. Gerber summarizes these changes in words that focus on academic freedom but apply to faculty shared governance:

The more rigorous and specialized postgraduate training required to become a faculty member at American’s emerging universities provided a basis for claiming both the right to, and the need for, a more robust form of academic freedom than had been known in America’s antebellum colleges. Expertise was thus a crucial component of the emerging concept of academic freedom (p. 46; emphasis added).

This era saw the founding of the American Association of University Professors, about which I have written in previous essays.

The Development of Faculty Governance 1920-1940

In this chapter and in the rest of the book the newly founded AAUP takes center stage. Gerber recounts the three stories of what he and the AAUP consider arbitrary and authoritarian conduct by university presidents and boards. These episodes take place at Washburn College, Clark University, and the University of California (pp. 61-65). In 1940, the AAUP’s Committee T on Place and Function of Faculties in College and University Government report highlighted four areas of concern voiced by faculty nationwide:

(1) opportunities for direct faculty communication with trustees; (2) faculty involvement in the selection of administrators (president, dean, department chair or head); faculty exercise of primary responsibility for appointing and promoting colleagues; (4) meaningful faculty participation in the budgetary process (pp. 75-76).

According to Gerber, in 1940 very few faculty in American colleges enjoyed these rights, which are clearly aspirational for the AAUP.

Developing Consensus on Shared Governance, 1940-1975

The AAUP’s 1966 Statement

The years between 1940 and 1975 saw unprecedented growth in student population, public financing, and world-wide prestige in American colleges and universities. Demand for qualified professors outstripped supply. By 1973, a “consensus” had developed within higher education of “the advisability of granting faculty primary responsibility for making most academic decisions” (p. 82). One of the most significant landmarks of this era was the publication of the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, a joint statement of the AAUP, the ACE (the American Council on Education, and the AGB (the Association of Governing Boards).

Section 1 introduces the document. Section 2 deals with the “joint Effort” in which the trustees, administration, and the faculty participate jointly. These include general education policy, internal operations, and external relations. Sections 3 and 4 deal with the duties of the governing board and the president respectively. Section five lays out the scope of faculty duties and privileges:

The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process…

The faculty sets the requirements for the degrees offered in course, determines when the requirements have been met, and authorizes the president and board to grant the degrees thus achieved…

Faculty status and related matters are primarily a faculty responsibility; this area includes appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal. The primary responsibility of the faculty for such matters is based upon the fact that its judgment is central to general educational policy. Furthermore, scholars in a particular field or activity have the chief competence for judging the work of their colleagues; in such competence it is implicit that responsibility exists for both adverse and favorable judgments.

The chair or head of a department, who serves as the chief representative of the department within an institution, should be selected either by departmental election or by appointment following consultation with members of the department and of related departments; appointments should normally be in conformity with department members’ judgment.

Agencies for faculty participation in the government of the college or university should be established at each level where faculty responsibility is present. An agency should exist for the presentation of the views of the whole faculty.

Professional Association or Trade Union?

For most of its existence the AAUP stood firmly against faculty unionization. Indeed, most faculty at elite research universities shared this rejection, because the notion of professional expertise and faculty shared governance, which focus on quality of education and the common good, seems incompatible with the self-interested goals and adversarial methods of trade unions. In 1971, however, the AAUP relented and accepted collective bargaining as one way to achieve its goals. The debate about the compatibility of the two approaches still rages within higher education.

This era saw the high watermark of faculty shared governance. But by 1975 storm clouds began to darken the horizon: the dramatic rise in the use of “contingent faculty,” the advent of the “for profit” university, and the influence of the market, consumer, and corporate model on higher education.

Corporatization and the Challenges to Shared Governance, 1975-Present

Changing Social Conditions

By the mid-1970s, the flood of students from the baby boom generation slowed to a trickle. Just as the undergraduate student population declined, a glut of new job-seeking Ph.Ds. entered the job market. States like California and Michigan that had poured money into their systems of higher education in the booming post-World War Two era reduced their support by a third. At the same time, states and the federal government imposed a huge number of new regulations, which diverted funds from professors to the ranks of new administrators, compliance officers, and support staff (p. 155).

Responses to the Challenges

Responses to these challenges were predictable. Cost-cutting, reorganization, competing for students by appealing to their and their parents’ immediate wants, and turning to lower-paid graduate students and other contingent faculty to teach courses. By the 2010s, when you include graduate students, 60% of teaching was done by part-time faculty (p. 147). Currently, less than one third of faculty in American colleges and universities serve in tenured or tenure-track positions (p. 9). According to Gerber, this shift amounts to the “deprofessionalization” of the faculty (pp. 146-147). Contingent faculty do not have the benefits of tenure, full academic freedom, or participation in faculty governance.

The Management Revolution

In his highly influential book, [Academic Strategy: The Management Revolution in American Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], George Keller argued that American colleges and universities faced “the specter of decline and bankruptcy” (p. 123). This crisis was brought on by a “leadership crisis,” a “breakdown of leadership” (p. 123). Governance must not be divorced from “concerns about an institution’s financial condition and future economic viability” (p. 123). Keller “criticized the effectiveness of faculty senates and the increasing tendency of faculty members to focus on their own individual interests rather than the collective well-being of the institutions in which they worked” (p. 123). According to Keller, the AAUP’s view of faculty governance was “stuck in a historical freezer” (p. 123). Every organization needs “a single authority, someone or some body of people authorized to initiate, plan, decide, manage, monitor, and punish its members” (p. 123). For colleges and universities, this authority naturally falls to the president and the board.

Limits on Unionization

As we discussed above, drives to unionize college faculty seemed to many professors to be at odds with the push toward greater faculty participation in governance. This tension factored heavily in the Supreme Court case NLRB v. Yeshiva University (1980). The Yeshiva University Faculty Association appealed to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for the right to represent the Yeshiva faculty in collective bargaining. Yeshiva University argued that the faculty already enjoyed a share in the governance of the University and therefore it should be considered management instead of labor. The Court agreed with Yeshiva. Private college faculty members are not eligible for collective bargaining under the rules of the NLRB; they are “managerial employees” “involved in developing and enforcing employer policy” (p. 132). This case effectively ended efforts to establish collective bargaining at private colleges and universities in America.

Other Responses

The rise of for-profit colleges and universities (e.g. University of Phoenix), which hire mostly part-time faculty to teach administratively designed curricula, is a huge thread to shared governance and to the ideal of a liberal arts university, which views education to be a service to the common good (pp. 145-146).

To make adapting to changing economic circumstances easier, some administrators wish to shift tenure from being a university-wide status to applying only to a department (p. 153). Should a department prove economically unviable and become subject to reduction or closure, tenure will not protect a faculty member from being released. In another development weakening tenure, and consequently academic freedom, most universities now require tenured faculty to undergo periodic post-tenure reviews.

Recently, the Association of Governing Boards, which joined the AAUP and the American Council on Education in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, retreated from full-throated support of faculty shared governance (pp. 155-156 ff). The AGB’s 1998 Statement on Board Responsibility for Institutional Governance, lamented “academia’s appetite for the kind of excessive consultation that can bring the institution to a standstill” (p. 156). The Statement calls for giving greater authority to the president to reshape the university in situations wherein changes must be made rapidly.

Shared Governance and the Future of Liberal Education

In his conclusion Gerber again laments the “commercialization” of higher education and the threat it poses to “the validity of ideal professionalism—and ideal premised on the possibility of individuals using their expertise in a disinterested way to advance the common good” (p. 165-166). In a final call to action, Gerber urges

If any group is to take the lead in standing up for academic values and the importance of a liberal education and trying to prevent the further degradation of the quality and narrowing of purpose of our colleges and universities, it must be the faculty, who must reassert their commitment to a broad conception of their professional rights and responsibilities…The practice of shared governance that developed in American colleges and universities were thus not simply a privilege and perquisite of the professorate; they were a necessary condition for the development of a system of education that became the envy of the rest of the world. Reinvigorating the practices of shared governance on American college and university campuses will be critical if the United States is to maintain its position of global leadership in higher education (pp. 169-170).

Next Time: How does the concept of “shared governance” apply to Christian colleges?

Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom: The Cases of Dartmouth, AAUP Declaration, and Rabban, Academic Freedom

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In this post, I will follow up on my previous essay of January 13, 2025, “Can Christian Colleges Survive.” In that essay, I reviewed and responded to a new book by David Rabban: Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right (Harvard, 2024). I want now to explore a connection I noticed when reading Rabban’s book, that is, the connection among the State of New Hampshire’s rationale for rewriting the Dartmouth College charter, the American Association of University Professors’ rationale for asserting its theory of academic freedom, and David Rabban’s argument for making academic freedom a First Amendment right.

As with the earlier post, I hope you will read it and pass it on to other interested parties, especially to trustees, administrators, and faculty in Christian colleges.

Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819)*

Legally, there were two issues in this case: (1) Is Dartmouth’s charter (1769) a “contract” under the “impairment of contracts” clause of the US Constitution (Art. I. 10. 1); and if so, (2) did the NH legislature “impair” said contract in its 1816 legislation changing the charter of the college?

In its legal defense of the legislation, New Hampshire denied that Dartmouth’s charter is a contract subject to constitutional protection or that the legislature impaired the “contract” through its action. The Trustees argued in the affirmative in both cases. In this essay, however, I want to focus not on the legal but on the moral/social utilitarian arguments made by the NH legislature to justify the legislation.

The NH legislature argued that the Dartmouth charter was granted for the public good, therefore Dartmouth is a public institution and falls under the authority of the state of NH to regulate matters involving public welfare. The first paragraph of the New Hampshire law in question reads as follows:

WHEREAS knowledge and learning generally diffused through a community, are essential to the preservation of a free government, and extending the opportunities and advantages of education is highly conducive to promote this end, and by the constitution it is made the duty of the legislators and magistrates, to cherish the interests of literature, and the sciences, and all seminaries established for their advancement—and as the college of the State may, in the opinion of the legislature be rendered more extensively useful ; Therefore…(p. 539).

Then follows a series of changes that amount to confiscation of the college by the State of New Hampshire.

Daniel Webster presented the case for the Trustees against the State of New Hampshire. Webster refutes the idea that a contract among private parties to carry out education and other works advantageous to the general public makes an institution a public institution in the legal sense. Webster emphasizes this point over and over in different contexts:

The granting of the corporation is but making the trust perpetual, and does not alter the nature of the charity. The very object sought in obtaining such charter, and in giving property to such a corporation, is to make and keep it private property, and to clothe it with all the security and inviolability of private property. The intent is; that there shall be a legal private ownership, and that the legal owners shall maintain and protect the property, for the benefit of those for whose use it was designed. Whoever endowed the public? Whoever appointed a legislature to administer his charity? Or who ever heard, before, that a gift to a College, or Hospital, or an Asylum, was, in reality, nothing but a gift to the State? (p. 574).

…

The case before the Court is not of ordinary importance, nor of everyday occurrence. It affects not this college only, but every college, and all the literary institutions of the country. They have flourished, hitherto, and have become in a high degree respectable and useful to the Community. They have all a common principle of existence, the inviolability of their charters. It will be a dangerous, a most dangerous experiment, to hold these institutions subject to the rise and fall of popular parties, and the fluctuations of political opinions. If the franchise may be at any time taken away, or impaired, the property also may be taken away, or its use perverted. Benefactors will have no certainty of effecting the object of their bounty; and learned men will be deterred from devoting themselves to the service of such institutions, from the precarious title of their offices. Colleges and halls will be deserted by all better spirits, and become a theatre for the contention of politics. Party and faction will be cherished in the places consecrated to piety and learning. These consequences are neither remote nor possible only. They are certain and immediate (pp. 598-99).

In sum, Webster’s point is this: charitable institutions (a college in this case) aim to benefit the public. The state has an interest in promoting the public good. But this overlapping interest does not give the state a legal right to assert control and manage the institution.

Mr. Joseph Hopkinson, Webster’s co-counsel, drives the same point home quite vigorously:

It is true, that a college, in a popular sense, is a public institution, because its uses are public, and its benefits may be enjoyed by all who choose to enjoy them. But in a legal and technical sense, they are not public institutions, but private charities. Corporations may, therefore, be very well said to be for public use, of which the property and privileges are yet private. Indeed, there may be supposed to be an ultimate reference to the public good, in granting all charters of incorporation; but this does not change the property from private to public. If the property of this corporation be public property, that is, property belonging to the State, when did it become so? It was once private property; when was it surrendered to the public? The object in obtaining the charter, was not surely to transfer the property to the public, but to secure it forever in the hands of those with whom the original owners saw fit to entrust it (pp. 616-617).

Chief Justice Marshall writes for the Supreme Court in its decision favoring the Trustees of Dartmouth College against Woodward. In his carefully reasoned opinion, Justice Marshall argues that the New Hampshire legislature violated the US constitution’s stricture against the impairment of contracts. Dartmouth is a private charitable institution and not a public institution subject to state control:

That education is an object of national concern, and a proper subject of legislation, all admit. That there may be an institution founded by government, and placed entirely under its immediate control, the officers of which would be public officers, amenable exclusively to government, none will deny. But is Dartmouth College such an institution? Is education altogether in the hands of government? Does every teacher of youth become a public officer, and do donations for the purpose of education necessarily become public property, so far that the will of the legislature, not the will of the donor, becomes the law of the donation? These questions are of serious ‘moment to society, and deserve to be well considered. (p. 634).

Marshall concludes:

But the Court has deemed it unnecessary to investigate this particular point, being of opinion, on general principles, that in these private eleemosynary institutions, the body corporate, as possessing the whole legal and equitable interest, and completely representing the donors, for the purpose of executing the trust, has rights which are protected by the constitution.

It results from this opinion, that the acts of the legislature of New-Hampshire, which are stated in the special verdict found in this cause, are repugnant to the constitution of the United States; and that the judgment on this special verdict ought to have been for the plaintiffs. The judgment of the State Court must, therefore, be reversed (p. 654).

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward for the freedom of private institutions to conduct their business free from state interference. And as we shall see, the principle established in this case is still of great importance today. The insidious logic of the NH legislature is still being employed—under different guises to be sure—to reduce the autonomy of private non-sectarian and Christian colleges. And Daniel Webster’s argument and Justice Marshall’s decision are still the most potent responses to a government’s assertion of a right to control higher education in private colleges.

AAUP 1915 Declaration

In the American Association of University Professors’ 1915 “Declaration on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” we meet again, I shall argue, the NH equivocation between the word “public” used to mean “people in general” and to mean “publicly owned and governmentally controlled.” The Declaration argues that institutions that call themselves colleges and claim to promote the public good are “public trusts” and must therefore accept a definition of academic freedom and tenure commensurate with their self-incurred obligation to serve the good of the public as a whole. That is to say, a college’s claim to promote the good of society obligates it to adopt a non-sectarian stance. Like the State of New Hampshire of 1816, the Declaration imposes its own definition of the “public good” on all institutions that lay claim to the title of college or university. All other ways of serving the public are “proprietary” (“private trusts”), not true universities. The Declaration does not argue that a college’s claim to promote the common good places it within the sphere of direct state control (as in the Dartmouth case). It asserts, rather, that “proprietary” colleges are not truly academic institutions and that their claims to benefit the public, and therefore to be worthy of public support, are misleading or false:

Trustees of such universities or colleges have no moral right to bind the reason or the conscience of any professor. All claim to such right is waived by the appeal to the general public for contributions and for moral support in the maintenance, not of a propaganda, but of a non-partisan institution of learning.

Colleges that do not acknowledge “unfettered” academic freedom are not truly academic, not truly a benefit to the public; they are second rate at best.

The Declaration argues that any college that claims to benefit society at large and appeals to members of the public for support is a “public trust” and therefore must become truly “non-partisan” and free from all religious, political, or commercial interests. Hence it must allow unfettered academic freedom to its professors. This is the same argument made by the New Hampshire legislature for its right to confiscate Dartmouth college and rejected by the Marshall Supreme Court. However, in this instance the argument is used not by a state to justify confiscating private colleges, but by an elite professorial class to discredit, intimidate, and shame colleges founded to serve the church or other private causes.

Rabban and the First Amendment right of academic freedom

David Rabban in Academic Freedom: From Professional Norm to First Amendment Right,** intensifies the AAUP’s argument outlined above and transforms academic freedom from a professional norm into a First Amendment right, thus justifying (like NH in the Dartmouth Case) the intrusion of the government into the heart of the university–private as well as state owned .

As I documented in the previous essay,** Rabban argues (1) that the public benefit generated by professors justifies protecting their academic speech as a special First Amendment right; and (2) that since 1957 the Supreme Court has steadily moved toward asserting a First Amendment right of academic freedom.

Without explicitly saying so, Rabban in effect argues that the claim by a college to be an institution of higher learning that provides a good to the public and employs “professors” to function in this role should come under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment. Clearly, Rabban resurrects the utilitarian/quasi-legal reasoning used in the New Hampshire legislature’s legislation in the 1816 takeover of Dartmouth college. Professors, precisely as members of the professorate, Rabban argues, should have the constitutionally protected right of academic freedom against state or institutional abridgment.

The academic speech of individual professors, no matter where they teach, has become legally protected speech as long as it is truly “academic,” which determination must be made solely by the professorial community. Whether or not a professor’s speech is academic cannot be decided by trustees, judges or administrators. Therefore, the authority to regulate professorial expression has been transferred from the trustees of the college to the government, specifically the US government. States may also decide independently to give academic freedom special state constitutional protection.

This theory aims to achieve what the New Hampshire legislature attempted to achieve in Trustees v. Woodward. However, instead of taking a top-down approach, using the sovereign power of the state, opponents of private institutional autonomy start from the bottom, pitting individual professorial constitutional rights against state legislatures and college trustees. By freeing professors from responsibility to the trustees in the use of their “academic” speech, the profession, backed up by the federal courts, takes control of the core activity of the college. It’s a kind of nationalization of a college’s faculty backed up by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Academically, it levels or homogenizes all colleges and universities in the US.

In other words, treating academic freedom as a special First Amendment right accomplishes what the NH legislature attempted to do to Dartmouth in 1816 and failed to accomplish. But instead of handing control to state legislatures, it places it in the hands of the federal courts. It gives constitutional backing to the AAUP Declaration’s utilitarian and moral arguments.

*This hyperlink takes you to the complete, 199-page record of the case, including the original 1767 charter, the full texts of the 1816 New Hampshire law taking over Dartmouth college, the arguments of the plaintiff  (Trustees of Dartmouth College) and the defendant (Woodward, New Hampshire’s recently appointed treasure of Dartmouth University), and Chief Justice Marshall’s decision.

**See my previous post “Can Christian Colleges Survive” (January 13, 2025).