Susan Wise Bauer wrote recently about how her time at Liberty University was “horrible,” and has quite a bit to say, as you’d imagine.Â
One of her observations resonated with something I’ve noted since I began teaching at a Christian liberal arts college lo these many decades ago: “Even though this was a ‘university,’ the scorn for intellectual inquiry was evident in almost every class; questioning and real uncertainty was disdained, and academic expertise was treated with scorn.”
To be clear, her experience seems much worse than my own. But to some extent, I suspect that that dynamic inheres in Christian higher education by necessity. This isn’t at all surprising: American evangelicalism has a significant strain of anti-intellectualism in it, as do most (maybe all) religious traditions. Yes, even Catholicism is touched. Philip Gleason has written about how–especially in the first half of the twentieth century–a commitment to research at Catholic universities was periodically challenged by skeptics who doubted much research was necessary: the truth was already completely possessed in the depositum fidei.
Protestants sometimes entertain similar conceits. At Liberty, Bauer says, “questioning and real uncertainty was disdained.” At what institution of higher learning in the US won’t you find that attitude, at least among some students? What’s important is whether the attitude is prevalent, or present. At Christian schools, chapels will be important here (along with whatever preparation on the topic the students got in youth groups, if they attended).
The biggest cheer I ever heard in our chapel was for a speaker who bellowed, “Jesus didn’t die so you would have to study!” I once surveyed a class: “Who here has ever heard a sermon where you were told ‘What we need is less head and more heart’?” Every hand went up; one student muttered “Only in every sermon I’ve ever heard.” Less common, but more heart-breaking, are examples like the student, near-tears, telling me she had asked a question in a theology class that day and was told by the instructor that anyone asking such a question didn’t belong in this school.
These are the sorts of things institutions could address if they wished, but largely do not (in my experience). Chapel speakers could be told that running down the intellectual side of the institution’s mission will be as unwelcome as denigrating its spiritual concerns. Faculty could be better mentored, and talked to when they crush student curiosity and concern. Harder–perhaps impossible–to address is the deeper, we might say existential, structure of the institution that hampers (and at times does lead to disdain for) any truly deep questioning and uncertainty.
My own undergraduate education was thrown into an entirely new light for me when I began teaching at a Christian liberal arts college (something I’d never experienced–nor was I familiar with the intellectual culture of church youth groups). My experience at an urban state university in the Northeast was one of wide-open, no-holds-barred, real-life inquiry where students were actually struggling with the kinds of questions–Is there a God? Do we have free will? Why is there evil? What does it all mean? and so forth–that students at Christian schools typically encounter primarily as classroom exercises.
My students encounter the arguments for atheism in philosophy class; they don’t encounter a lot of informed, articulate atheists–not as fellow students making arguments in class, and certainly not as the faculty person teaching the class. My professors–and even more, my fellow students–included atheists, Jews, Mormons, Buddhists, Marxists, Randians, Muslims, etc. They were as dedicated to refusing and even defeating my worldview as I was eager to defend it and introduce them to an intellectually robust version of the Christian faith. It wasn’t just grades that were on the line in our discussions, it was our lives, to some extent.
It’s just not possible–in the nature of the case–for a Christian professor to make the case for, say, Nietzscheanism, with the same passion and conviction as an actual Nietzschean. Even if they do make a vigorous argument in the classroom, everyone knows this is play-acting. There is nothing outside of artificial academic concerns actually on the line. This is, of course, by design, and not altogether to be lamented. Nineteen year-old American evangelicals raised on whatever the 21st c. equivalent of flannel-graphs is, who have never experienced the ground-shaking that comes with living in a society battered by the traumas of total war or economic collapse, are probably not ready to confront a real-life Nietzschean or Marxist or even a Catholic, especially if those have a Ph.D. and years of experience in the classroom. But the consequences for the intellectual life of the community are predictable.
I suspect one manifestation is that it’s been a very long time since an evangelical Protestant sat on the Supreme Court, for example. To get really good at coming up with answers–not just the kind that might convince an antagonist, but that will truly satisfy the deepest yearnings and most unsettling fears of believers themselves–you have to wrestle with real questions, where everything is on the line, the game isn’t rigged, there’s no net to catch you when you fall.
I don’t know that much can be done about this. Christian institutions of higher education simply can’t be the kinds of places where the challenges encountered are anywhere as real as out in the world. They would be undermining their own mission if they were. And, in truth, that dynamic obtains in all educational institutions to some degree. Wrestling with the problem of evil, or studying PTSD, just doesn’t have the urgency that, say, the death of a child, or talking with a combat veteran, does.
I would note that, where possible, blending adult students in with the traditional population can have salutary, even dramatic effects. In my experience, adults are genuinely invested in the kinds of questions and topics addressed in the liberal arts classroom. If they happen to be veterans, all to the good. And then there was the seventy-something Black woman in my history class who prefaced a comment by saying “My grandparents were born into slavery in Mississippi …”
Those are, however, questions for administrators, who structure the institution with more pressing matters in mind than what makes for the best classroom experience. Maybe the most practical thing we can do about Christian higher education is simply to pray for it.
Dear Dr Haas – you were wonderfully patient with me last time, so maybe what I need to learn is simply that you are writing for a very different kind of reader than me and I need to learn to let it go. I will, however, try one more time here. Has God called you to serve at a Christian college in the Midwest or not? If not, is it really not possible for you to move on to your right or congenial place in the world? If he has, can you not – perhaps at least as a kind of Lenten discipline – work on serving with gratitude and joy? I at least read you as serving with a sense of superiority – of disdain for the communities you serve. Can you imagine writing a piece in which you honored these communicates and communicated affection and respect for them? Thanks for listening. Blessings.
I could not disagree more with Mr. Larsen’s comment, and read in Dr. Haas’ article an important critique of Christian universities not out of a sense of superiority, but actually because he feels called to teach at a Christian university. I’ve been teaching at my current Christian university for almost a quarter century now, and feel deeply called to continue working here. But there are some parts of my experience that wholly resonate with what Dr. Haas has written. It is because of my calling to teach at a Christian university that I want my institution to do better, to be a place that challenges students to ask robust questions about their faith and about the world, perhaps even deconstructing the faith they were raised on. Similarly, I read in Dr. Haas a desire for Christian institutions to reach for a kind of Christian education that would best serve students about to launch into a pluralistic world.
Melanie, you’re right about the deepest motives of the piece. Thanks for your comment, and blessings on your work.
Timothy, I won’t say there’s never a hint of “superiority and disdain” in pieces like this–even when that’s not embraced or intended–and to the degree there that there may be, or just that there may be the appearance of same, you’re 100% justified in bringing it up.
I suspect any time we are finding fault or exposing what appears to us a problem, our attitude can be described as betraying a sense of superiority, just in the sense that we believe there’s a better way, and that we know what it is. That would indeed apply in my case to those professors who reject students’ hard questions, and even criticize the students for asking them. I won’t say that’s the majority practice at my school at all, but it’s not entirely absent, and its effects can be immense as far as the student is concerned. It also, of course, sends a signal that there are questions out there that we should be afraid of, that maybe even God isn’t able to answer, and that implication I reject most thoroughly. (I’m sure you do too, Timothy.) If my saying “It’s better to wrestle with the hard questions together with the students, or to honestly admit we don’t have an answer right now” counts as exhibiting a sense of superiority, well, I guess I’m guilty as charged.
I note–not without gratification–that you do not dismiss my observations and anecdotes as so much fanciful twaddle. Rather, you seem to be saying that either these phenomena aren’t common enough to present a problem, or, even if they are, I shouldn’t be noting them, and should instead be serving with “gratitude and joy,” and writing in a way that exhibits “affection and respect.”
My first instinct is to object, to say that one can serve with gratitude and joy and at the same time draw attention to problems, and, likewise, that one can have affection and respect and at the same time–at least for the space of a blog post–accentuate the negative, as it were (if I may paraphrase Der Bingle). However, it’s hard for me to believe that you don’t believe that also, and hence it must be that something about the piece that is off. That very well may be. I will reflect on that (as part of my Lenten discipline).
I don’t want to blame Professor Bauer for what I said, but, honestly, I wasn’t trying to write a comprehensive assessment of Christian education at the university level. It was simply that what she wrote resonated with some of my experiences and observations, and I shared them. The hope was that, at a minimum, others who had been saddened or concerned by similar experiences would read it and say, “Oh, I’m not alone,” and possibly even spark conversations that could play some very small part in encouraging those who are determined to do better.
I guess I assumed that by ending the piece by saying we should pray for Christian higher education, I was assuming a number of implications would be apparent: that Christian higher education is a good thing and should continue, that it needs to be better and can be, that God wants to bless it, that it’s not hopeless, that whatever the #emptythepews folk are advocating, that’s not me. But perhaps all that needed to made more explicit. I thank you, Timothy, for giving me the opportunity to do so.
A fuller and more gracious response than I deserve for sure, John. I was pairing this piece with your critique of the Midwest in “Ain’t that America?” I think I was partially led there by the contrast in this new article with the idyll of your “urban state university in the Northeast”. It made me wonder: Is that the world you respect or where you think you belong? You are, of course, right in the criticisms you are making – and it is of course right and necessary to make such criticisms. To the extent that you are a voice and advocate for your frustrated students who deserve better that is, by my lights, a particularly important form of service. I can’t judge what is going on – and the extraordinary way you always engage with me makes me suspect that I am the one who is off – but there is a criticism that comes from a place of respect and investment and I hope that is the calling you and I are living out. Blessings.
I’ve spent eighteen years in public institutions and eighteen in private ones, two that are evangelical and the remaining private institutions church related, including two HBCUs. I am retired and can now reflect on the incredible diversity within all of these combined institutions and I am thankful that we live in a country that offers an education from Bob Jones University to Cal/Berkeley and other deliberately conservative like Hillsdale and Grove City to intentionally liberal like Oberlin and Bard. The point is we can choose, both Christian’s and secularists, where we desire to learn. There should be few surprises if you do your homework.
Hiring faculty equipped and dedicated to a Christian college’s creeds, who are just as dedicated to scholarship within those borders, may be more of a luxury than we imagine. My own small Christian college, and those employing friends and acquaintances, often navigate a thin line between the duties of a discipline, and honoring what feels like increasingly stringent interpretations of theological and biblical authority. This seems even more difficult in the humanities broadly conceived, in which definitions of human nature, questions of meaning, and faithfulness to the interpretations I just mentioned, appear most provoking. Professor Haas and Professor Mock testify to such difficulties, recalling how administrators of Christian institutions may feel obligated to honor interpretations of theology and Scripture, over against the duties of “the life of the mind.”
Christian colleges hiring faculty trained to analyze argument and evidence, while telling them some questions cannot be asked, some topics cannot be addressed, seems an exercise in futility. Once I cannot in good faith subscribe to the creeds upon which my college leans, I should probably resign—if possible. In this brutal job market for humanities faculty, the winnowing of staff at small Christian colleges according to stringent creedal commitments, while many self-censor to survive “rightsizing”, feels cruel if not inhumane.
These evaluations seem contingent upon administrative temperament, circumstances, and staying on the “right” side of the hot button issues of the moment. Little of this suggests the intellectual risk taking I associate with academic versions of the “foolishness” of the Good News about the Kingdom of Christ. But I’m not a very practical person, nor am I very good at Christianity.