In addition to Perry Glanzer’s article on Christian colleges educating for wisdom, the March 2012 issue of Christianity Today also includes Timothy Morgan’s interview with Wheaton College president Philip Ryken and Gordon College president D. Michael Lindsay. Reading it, I couldn’t help but think back to a much older CT piece that I ran across during some research into the educational philosophy of former Bethel president Carl Lundquist, who joined four fellow Christian college presidents and Christian College Consortium president Gordon Werkema for a conversation with CT editors that was published in the magazine’s November 7, 1975 issue. (I’ll admit that I missed it the first time, being just a couple of weeks old.)
CT’s online archives only go back to 1994, so I can’t provide a link to the 1975 article, but let me note a few similarities and differences in how evangelical educational leaders talked about the challenges facing Christian colleges. For each, I’ll provide the issue and then two or three answers. See the key below to find out whether each answer came from 1975 or 2012.
1. Financial Pressures: Higher Costs, Rising Tuition, Declining Enrollment
a. “Because of their concern over these matters, our trustees have held down the cost increase to only 3 per cent this year. The majority of our students are from middle-income families, and they are hit hardest. They can’t pay the full amount themselves, but they aren’t eligible for grants offered by the state to low-income families.”
b. “…[Christian parents are willing to pay more] because of their commitment to the purposes of the institution. From the secular point of view it would be called a safe school, and you pay for the safeness. From our point of view it is because they are committed to Christian higher education, representing values of home and church they hope to see perpetuated.”
c. “I find it astonishing that people are questioning the value of Christian higher education. If I have to put my finger on the defining difference between what we offer and what our peers at [secular] institutions offer, there is something about the level of commitment that emerges from shared faith between faculty and staff and students. It’s qualitatively different.”
2. Leadership: The Role of Christian College Presidents
a. “The college presidency is perhaps the prototype for the way leadership gets exercised in our society today. The notion that somebody can issue a directive that everyone follows, if that ever was true, is certainly not true today. It is especially not true on college campuses. Persuasion is the coin of the realm in leadership. This is the ability to persuade other folks to catch a vision that you articulate and to mobilize energy and resources behind that. The college presidency has to do that day in and day out.”
b. “The president is the living embodiment of the ideals of the institution…. For me, the paradigm for spiritual leadership is the three-fold office of Christ, which has a priestly dimension of prayer and of living with the people carrying their burdens. It has a prophetic dimension of not just speaking to the future (although that’s part of it), but also discerning the present moment and speaking God’s truth into that moment. It has a kingly dimension because there’s an appropriate exercise of authority. The leadership calling is multidimensional. It, in some way, is patterned after the life of Christ and his leadership.”
3. Diversity: Recruiting Students and Faculty of Color
a. “When I look at it half-full, I compare barely a handful of students of color on campus when I was here… to nearly 400 students of color on campus now. That’s required a lot of intentionality. We’ve done better with our student body and our staff than we have with our faculty. We want to have relationships that live out what it means to work, play, worship, and study together with a full expression of what it means to belong to the kingdom of God.”
b. “…[Hispanic students] seem to fit in better than blacks. We also have Orientals, and there is no difficulty with them. Even the good efforts on the part of white students seem not to be received well by the blacks, and the blacks easily become isolated…. We have had Black Emphasis Week in chapel and also special speakers with a black point of view at other times. In planning campus social events we have tried to keep everyone in mind and have made a point of asking minority students to plan some events. We have even served “soul food.” We have tried, but we have failed to recruit black faculty members. Overall, I take no pride in listing our attempts to include minorities because I do not think we have succeeded at all.”
4. Christians and Culture: Secularization, Relationship with “the world”
a. “The theological issue that we’re grappling with is cultural pluralism—what’s the appropriate response for us as a Christian community to those outside the Christian community. We’re going to have more pressure to accommodate on some issues and uphold positions in others. There’s not clear agreement within our own community on how to best do that.”
b. “I don’t think [recent] changes represent any deviation in theology or disloyalty to Christ. In our school we emphasize that we are to penetrate the structures of society for Christ and be a part of the world. The world setting itself is amoral, and many of its prevailing moods are neither good nor bad. It’s simply the medium in which we work.”
1. Financial Pressures
a. Lyle Hillegas (Westmont, 1975) / b. David McKenna (Seattle Pacific, 1975) / c. D. Michael Lindsay (Gordon, 2012)
2. Leadership
a. Lindsay (Gordon, 2012) / b. Philip Ryken (Wheaton, 2012)
3. Diversity
a. Ryken (Wheaton, 2012) – he was comparing to his own experience in the 1980s / b. Hillegas (Westmont, 1975) – using “Orientals” and “soul food” might have been a give-away here…
4. Christians and Culture
a. Lindsay (Gordon, 2012) / b. Carl Lundquist (Bethel, 1975) – he was referring to a question about perceived liberalization of lifestyle regulations (e.g., “length of hair, style of clothing, and hours spent in the dormitory”). On his recurring use of phrases like “penetrate the structures of society” in describing the goals of a Bethel education, click here
It’s tempting to file this under “the more things change…,” though there were some clear differences in emphasis. Financial pressures were much more central to the 1975 conversation than the more recent interview, and the presidents from the Seventies spent much of the interview discussing a topic not even mentioned by Lindsay and Ryken: Christian colleges’ relationship with the federal government (e.g., whether it was possible to seek greater government tuition assistance without sacrificing Christian distinctives like required Bible courses and chapel attendance — points raised by Hillegas). Also in 1975, each president — besides Hillegas, McKenna, and Lundquist, the group included D. Ray Hostetter of Messiah and Lon Randall of Malone — was eager to talk about then-new initiatives in course/curriculum design and faculty development that encouraged faith-learning integration, a concept that was touched on only briefly by Ryken and Lindsay (who instead spoke to issues like interfaith dialogue, the church-college relationship, and the theological boundaries — if any — of evangelicalism).
The Pietist Schoolman 