A visit to Faulkner University

On Friday I was in Montgomery, Alabama where I was honored to be the plenary speaker at Faulkner University’s Institute of Faith and the Academy Conference. Faulkner is affiliated with the Churches of Christ and it is very serious about the integration of faith and learning. This year’s conference was titled “For Such a Time As This” and the organizers asked me to speak about how Christian institutions should think about the discipline of history. My talk drew heavily from my book Why Study History: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past, but it also had some original material. Here is how I opened the lecture:

Reformation University is Christian comprehensive college in North America.  The school has roots in the Bible college movement and continues to require students to take one-third of their coursework in biblical studies and theology.  The history department at Reformation is small, but it contains several young and promising scholars trained at some of the top universities in the country.  Some of these faculty members are frustrated because the administrators at Reformation are ignorant about the place of history in a liberal arts curriculum.  Still operating under a Bible college mentality, the academic officers at the school believe that the history department’s primary role is to offer courses designed to meet general education requirements and pre-requisites for students seeking teacher certification.  The members of the history department teach large courses that cost the college very little money to deliver.  Apart from these pragmatic and economic benefits, the administration has no idea how to explain the importance of the discipline of history to the university’s mission.  And frankly, in an economic climate where pre-professional programs attract student tuition dollars, the administration is not losing too much sleep over this fact.

Savior University is also a Christian comprehensive university in North America.  It has recently started an honors college that attracts many bright students to campus who otherwise would have attended a university with a higher academic profile. Rather than take courses with the general student population, first year honors students are immersed in an intensive two semester program centered on the “Great Books” of the Western tradition.  Savior requires that all of its students—both honors and non-honors– take a course in Western Civilization as a requirement for graduation.  The honors students have such a course built into their first year curriculum, but the honors college does not have a full-time faculty member with graduate training in history who can teach the class.  Since it is important to the leadership of the honors college that first year students take courses from faculty members with full-time appointments in the honors college, the dean of the honors college petitions the Savior administration to allow the Western Civilization course to be taught by an honors college faculty member who is trained in philosophy. The members of the Savior history department, who all believe that Western Civilization should be taught by a historian, oppose the honors college’s petition.  In the heat of the debate, the dean of the honors college says that his philosopher can do just as good a job with the course as the historians.  This philosopher, he argues, is equipped to teach the great ideas of the West and should have no problem getting up to speed with the rest of the “facts” needed to deliver this course.  The administration agrees.  The message to the Savior history department is clear:  anyone can teach history.

Mary just received her Ph.D in American history and is applying for a job at Billy Graham University, yet another comprehensive Christian college in North America.  As part of the interview process she is scheduled to meet with the school’s dean of general education.  The dean looks over Mary’s resume and notices that she has earned a Master of Divinity degree from a well-respected Christian seminary.  After walking Mary through the college’s general education requirements, the dean tells her that she is just the kind of person that will fit well at Billy Graham.  It is clear to the dean that Mary will be able to teach a lot of non-history courses—the kinds of courses, he says, that “really go to the heart of the mission here at Billy Graham.”  Moreover, the dean envisions that Mary will write books and articles that will have “practical application” for people’s lives, unlike her colleagues in the history department at Billy Graham who write scholarly monographs on “small and inconsequential” subjects.  Mary leaves the meeting a bit confused.  She knows that the history department at Billy Graham is first rate.  The members of the department have published monographs with some of the best academic presses in the country and are well-respected in their specific sub-fields. This, after all, is why she decided to apply for this job in the first place. Yet, according to this dean, the members of the history department, with their supposedly obscure research agendas, are not contributing in any significant way to the mission of the university.

These fictional scenarios are based roughly on true stories I have heard from colleagues at a host of Christian colleges and universities throughout the country.  All three of them reveal a certain ignorance among non-historians and administrators about the place of history in the college curriculum.  All three of them seem to suggest that the discipline of history is important in order to meet standards of accreditation or the general education requirements needed to achieve a baccalaureate degree, but the subject is ultimately something to “get out of the way” (as in “getting my gen-eds out the way).  This view sees the discipline of history as merely peripheral to the mission of a Christian university.  As you might imagine, and I realize I am preaching mostly to the choir here, I think such a view is fundamentally wrong.  It is wrong because the study of the past can be a spiritually transformative discipline that goes to the heart of the mission of a Christian university.

I want to thank the conference organizers, Taten Shirley and Andrew Jacobs, for their work on the conference program and their gracious hospitality during my visit to Faulkner.