Christian higher education is in just as much of a crisis as the rest of the field. The smaller Christian schools are going to have to figure out what differentiates them from the rest of the competition. In most cases, their survival will require a return to the sources of the faith in which the institutions were founded and a willingness to rethink what Christian higher education should be.
Dreaming Dreams for Christian Higher Education by David S. Guthrie, foreword by Bradshaw Frey, afterword by Eric Miller (266 pages, Falls City Press, 2020)
An email newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education the other day began thus: “The current state of higher ed is a seemingly never-ending crisis mode.” This strikes me as both true and a good thing. “Crisis” in its original meaning is not just “a disaster”; it is an opportunity for decision about which way to go. Universities and colleges are generally disasters and have reached the point where they must make a great many decisions about what they are to do. It is not just that the Trump Administration has cut off some of the sources of governmental funding—especially for those universities that have gone furthest down the path of progressive craziness. Parents and students in increasing numbers are deciding that four-year degrees are not worth the increasing debt loads even as the demographic cliff is about to hit.
One might think that Christian institutions, Catholic and Protestant, should be thriving at this moment since they can offer something different. Too many of them, however, have decided to follow the larger institutions down the primrose path—with much less money in their endowments. Many have massively increased their academic administrations, spent money on what might be called the Club Med aspects of collegiate life, deemphasized the institutional religious mission, hired faculty who can only subscribe to that mission by crossing fingers behind backs, and lowered academic standards lest they allow students who are incapable of (or at least unprepared for) academic success but nonetheless eligible for federal loans to escape their grasp.
The result is that many of these Christian colleges have become simply more expensive but less interesting versions of what one can get elsewhere. Given that parents, as my former colleague Bob Kennedy likes to say, generally want three things out of a college education for their children—a college experience, a credential, and a network—it is not surprising that so many colleges have punted on the educational side of things. The result, however, of becoming just like everyone else, especially when you are a smaller institution, is that it becomes difficult to show that your institution has anything particular to offer. You can offer a credential and perhaps a network. But a college experience focused on climbing walls and nice dorms that offers little in the way of distinctive faith or learning—much less integration of the two—is going to pale in comparison to what parents can find for less money at Behemoth U. or for more prestige at the Ivies and their minor leagues.
In short, Christian higher education is in just as much of a crisis as the rest of the field. The older, richer Christian schools that have fully secularized might be able to continue, based on having entered the field of generic private schools. The smaller Christian schools are going to have to figure out what differentiates them from the rest of the competition. In most cases, their survival will require a ressourcement—a return to the sources of the faith in which the institutions were founded and a willingness to rethink what Christian higher education should be.
One academic who has thought over a long career about how to make Christian higher ed discernibly Christian is David S. Guthrie. Guthrie worked as a campus minister, a professor, and an administrator on both the academic and the student affairs side of campuses. A Presbyterian, he worked at both Christian institutions in the Reformed tradition such as Calvin and Geneva but recently retired as an emeritus professor from one of the most behemoth of Behemoth U. institutions—Penn State. One of his earlier books, the 1997 edited volume, Student Affairs Reconsidered: A Christian View of the Profession and its Contexts, was the first attempt at arguing for a specifically Christian approach to the non-academic side of higher education. Dreaming Dreams for Christian Higher Education, published at the end of his career, collects mostly unpublished lectures, essays, and interviews over a twenty-year period.
Many topics in the 266 pages of this book are worthy of treatment: the requirements for university leadership, the changing nature of students in our digital age and how to discipline and motivate them, university collaborations with primary and secondary schools, and more. I will highlight three themes on which Guthrie offers important large-scale recommendations, two with which I wholeheartedly agree and one with which I do not.
The first is related to the topic of his already-mentioned earlier book: student affairs. There is really no getting around the reality that non-academic positions in higher education are nearly as important as the faculty positions. Residence hall and student life staff often spend more time with college students than do the professors, whose names students sometimes forget (even during the semester). It is through student affairs positions that the woke revolution overtook much of the American university system. Even in the absence of left-progressivism, however, many student affairs professionals behave and operate in ways that are less than professional, a big reason why many faculty scorn them.
Two chapters are explicitly dedicated to this theme of professionalizing the non-academic side of the university: “Profiling and Prompting our Professional Persona and Practice” and “What Matters in Student Development?” Both have a note of challenge and even scolding in them. The latter chapter summarizes a two-part agenda. First, those in student affairs have to read more—in general and about their own tasks. If the university is to be an intellectual community, those dealing with students cannot be anti-intellectual or apathetic to the life of the mind. Second, those in these offices actually need to think about their own jobs as jobs and talk to each other about what their tasks are. In a Christian institution, this work must be done by persons serious about living out Christian life fully—work must be informed by prayer, theological reflection, and a life of Christian charity. Student affairs professionals should connect students to learning outside the classroom as a part of Christian discipleship. That requires them to be intellectually and spiritually alive. Though Professor Guthrie does not emphasize it, this means hiring all positions for Christian mission.
A second theme is Professor Guthrie’s desire to reconfigure the university. While the modern university’s specialization has allowed for a great deal of technical progress, it has been much worse for those teaching and learning in it. St. John Henry Newman’s explanation of the “Circle of Sciences” (or as Guthrie calls it, “Objects”) is that all knowledge forms a whole. Each discipline approaches a part of the whole, but a true vision of the world is only possible by looking at it from a variety of aspects taken by those disciplines. The university should have faculty with different disciplinary specialties who are educated enough to engage in conversations with those who have different specialties so that they can explore reality in a holistic fashion together and teach their students to do so. The reality is that, even in small institutions, faculty suffer just as much from the disfiguring aspects of graduate education. They stick to their specializations, and students get a narrow, piecemeal, or, worse, disconnected view of the world.
Professor Guthrie proposes as the “organizing principle” of the Christian university “both [pursuing] interdisciplinary learning and enshrining wisdom.” In “The Project of Christian Higher Education,” a lecture given to Geneva College faculty after his first year as Academic Dean, Professor Guthrie lays out his vision of that institution’s project: teaching from a distinctively Christian point of view; teaching in order that students understand the times we live in and thus discern what is possible and morally obligatory for them; and, relatedly, teaching that emphasizes discerning what God’s calling is for the students’ own lives. To teach for this purpose would require much more of a big picture approach to courses. To do it successfully would require rethinking how academic units are organized and what a university curriculum looks like.
Professor Guthrie proposes at the end of this talk a number of suggestions that were and are anathema to many academics: cutting major course requirements down, revising the core curriculum, and establishing a new Department of Foundational Studies that would be responsible for the core curriculum. In “The Saga of a Christian College,” another lecture given to Geneva faculty, Professor Guthrie describes what he thinks a core should look like: an introduction to the nature of university education, a biblical theology course exploring salvation history, a two-course sequence on discerning the times focused on a theological reading of world history in one and American history in another; two courses on calling that focus on public life broadly in one and private life in another; a course on culture, technology, and media; and a capstone course on the good life as a whole.
I don’t think this is the perfect core curriculum, but I do think this kind of creative approach provides a decent outline of intellectual and spiritual formation. What I think the proposal lacks is a sufficient focus on the history of Christian culture. While Professor Guthrie’s vision is certainly one of letting Christian faith permeate culture, his core requires grounding in the long Christian background that gives students a large storehouse of ways in which visual, musical, literary, and other arts have already been permeated by Christian faith. This criticism may well come out of my Catholic turn: Calvinism, even in the Dutch Neo-Calvinist tradition, has always been weaker in this area, probably because of its less sacramental outlook.
What I like particularly is the idea of a department that would be responsible for the core curriculum and for thinking about how to make learning truly interdisciplinary. In small colleges, it would be ideal if the entire faculty were engaged in making sure this happens. But, when a responsibility is given to everybody, often nobody will step up to take that responsibility. Having a catalyst for thinking about the whole in institutions marked by the silos of specialized education, is a gift.
A third, lesser theme that pops up throughout the book is one that I think needs to be rejected or rethought. Professor Guthrie emphasizes the need for “diversity-enhanced” courses and a focus on “diversity” at Christian institutions. While certain forms of cultural diversity are indeed good, two points are important. One, “diversity,” as well as “equity” and “inclusivity,” have been used to smuggle in destructive ideological thinking that largely reverses the meaning of the terms. Like “feminism,” I do not recommend using any of them since, at best, they will be confusing and, at worst, be the opportunity for importing ideas that will end up swamping Christian understandings of the person.
Part of the problem with even less ideological versions of “DEI” is that they generally skate along the surface even if their poison is largely neutralized. One gets more diversity by reading the classics of the western canon, forged in wide-ranging cultural circumstances and worldviews by authors (even if they are mostly the dreaded Dead White European Males) far more different from contemporary American college students than today’s “diversity” authors, who sometimes have different ethnicity or skin color but inhabit the same worldview as any white left-liberal.
If there is a modern need to deal with questions of human dignity in a new way, it must be met by a robustly and authentically Christian response. Dr. Matthew Petrusek’s framework of dignity, equality, and solidarity based on Catholic Social Thought is a good alternative.[*] There may be others developed by Protestant thinkers that do the same.
Dreaming Dreams for Christian Higher Education was published in 2020, but the perpetual “crisis mode” of higher education was already in full swing. Professor Guthrie’s challenges and proposals to Christian institutions over decades still provoke thought about how they can not only survive but thrive. One final note about themes: Guthrie repeatedly emphasizes that schools from different theological traditions have some specific gifts that they can offer. I think it clear that the successful institutions of the near future will be the ones that lean into their theological identities, while remaining open to the gifts of other Christian traditions. Generic Christianity is not enough. Nor is a watered-down version of it. Young people attracted to Christian faith today are not attracted to the syrupy, undemanding, and intellectually empty versions of liberal Protestantism or Catholicism. They want the real deal.
As a note of full disclosure, I owe a great deal to the author, whom I met early in my college career when he was the Dean of Student Development at Calvin College (now University). This faithful Pennsylvania Scots Presbyterian has remained a valued sounding board, intellectual resource, and friend. As the reader can see, though I eventually became Catholic, Professor Guthrie and I remain sympatico on many, if not all, issues about the rethinking that needs to happen in Christian colleges and universities. To read this book is to hear a familiar, thoughtful, and honest voice in conversation again. One for which I am grateful.
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The featured image, uploaded by Iketsi, is a photograph: “View of the synthetic green on the Lucy McBride Golf Practice Area at the Houston Christian University on 2023-11-23.: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
[*] Matthew Petrusek, “Dignity, Equality, and Solidarity: A Catholic Alternative to DEI.”
