How’s this for a college recruitment slogan? “Bethel University: you might not come back, but you will not be the same” No? What if we had Sir Ian McKellen intone it, as in the first part of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, when Martin Freeman’s Bilbo is being encouraged by McKellen’s wizard Gandalf to go … More The Christian Liberal Arts as Tolkienesque Quest
Well, my vow not to parse any more college rankings lasted about five weeks. Right up until… wait for it… Now. Last week the New York Times highlighted a website called PayScale.com, which released its annual ranking of just over a thousand American colleges and universities. Here’s the hook: PayScale doesn’t look at reputation (U.S. News) … More Well-Paid (or Meaningful) Work as a Measure of Higher Education
To what degree do Protestant denominations continue to support the colleges and universities they founded? Even setting aside schools whose historic Christian identities are now nominal, what of institutions in a consortium like the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU)? While some of its best-known members are nondenominational (e.g., Wheaton, Westmont, Gordon, Taylor), most … More Declining Denominational Support for Evangelical Colleges?
There are lots of factors contributing to the financial crises afflicting higher education in general and my employer in particular. However, since Bethel is a Christian college that has retained more than a nominal relationship with its founding denomination, I’ve sometimes wondered just how changes in Converge Worldwide (Baptist General Conference) have affected our situation. … More Bethel, the BGC, and the Decline of Denominational Financial Support for Christian Higher Education
9/14/13 – That Was The Week That Was will be a few hours late while I attend a retreat at church. Meanwhile, let me suggest that you use the time you’d normally devote to perusing my suggested links and instead read Tracy McKenzie’s latest post. It’s not only a model of how to respond to … More Tracy McKenzie on “Thinking Christianly about the Past”
We’re teaching our kids to say “I don’t care for” rather than “I hate” foods that they find distasteful. But I can’t summon the energy to be polite about the sham going by the title of U.S. News Best Colleges. And just because I’ve resolved here not to parse college ranking systems doesn’t mean I … More Reasons to Hate the U.S. News College Rankings
You wouldn’t expect a Baptist Pietist university in the American Midwest to be anything remotely like a hotbed for interest in the Middle Ages, but there’s been a mini-revival of matters medieval here at Bethel University. Leading the charge is church historian Chris Armstrong, who has branched out from his interests in Wesleyan and Holiness … More A Baptist Pietist University Gets Medieval
On Friday I led our department’s welcome sessions for new majors. For a while now I’ve made sure to dedicate part of that time to preemptively addressing the concern, “What do I do with a History major?” We’ve got better at making what sound to us like effective arguments — ruthlessly pragmatic explanations of the … More Christian Liberal Arts as Cathedral-Building
I’m about to head up to the second and final day of Bethel‘s annual faculty retreat, a venerable tradition meant to help us reconnect after a summer away, engage in some professional development (e.g., yesterday I sat in on a session about open access publishing and digital humanities), hear from our leaders, and worship together. … More The Christian Liberal Arts as Spiritual Retreat
I don’t see a lot of stories from north of Minnesota’s border catch fire in my social media circles, but this one showed up on my Facebook page and Bethel’s faculty listserv last Friday: Laptops have replaced pen and paper for many post-secondary students but a Canadian study suggests using computers during lectures could be … More Do Laptop Computers Inhibit Learning?
The Pietist Schoolman 