Back in January, Pres. Obama used part of his State of the Union address to generate enormous traffic for a page at the Department of Education (DOE) website: a “College Scorecard” that provided easy-to-understand data on the net cost, graduation rate, debt burden, and loan default rate for institutions of higher learning in this country, … More The Affordability of Evangelical Colleges and Universities
As part of a larger controversy boiling over at Cedarville University, its board of trustees last month voted to cut the school’s philosophy major, approving a recommendation made by the Academic Council earlier in January. Reporters and commentators tended to associate the elimination of philosophy (along with the resignation of the school’s president and vice … More Philosophy at Evangelical Colleges
Having been out of the country and out of my routine for almost all of January, I find myself with more flagged, starred, bookmarked, and otherwise highlighted links than I could possibly list in one Saturday links post. So instead I’ll be putting out three best-of-January posts, each clustered around one of the three stated … More That Was The Month That Was: Education
Preach it, Dr. Richard Gunderman! The nation’s 80,000 medical, 20,000 dental, and 180,000 nursing school students might think that lectures are dead, or at least dying. Health professions curricula increasingly feature small-group, interactive teaching, and successive waves of enthusiasm have arisen for laptops, PDAs, and tablet computers as the new paradigms of learning. Commentators frequently … More No, the Lecture Isn’t Dead
Reading this morning that American colleges and universities have accumulated over $200 billion in outstanding debt thanks to a “decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students” reminded me of this post from last November… I’ve mentioned once or twice before that my … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: College Architecture and Christian Simplicity
Are evangelical colleges and universities becoming more cautious about identifying themselves with political (not theological) conservatism? This month’s issue of Christianity Today features a brief story following up on the recent resignation of conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza from the presidency of The King’s College (TKC), a conservative Christian school in New York City. Reporter Melissa … More The Depoliticization of Conservative Christian Colleges?
I’m very happy (and humbled) to announce that the Lilly Fellows Program has awarded Bethel a small grant in support of a workshop I’ll be directing next summer — The Pietist Idea of a Christian College: Bethel University. In many ways, this is the culmination of a strange journey that started during a similar kind … More The Pietist Idea of a Christian College
A few stray observations that I couldn’t quite fit in to my earlier posts on social class at Christian colleges: Top 10 Lists Which evangelical colleges and universities in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) do best and worst according to Washington Monthly‘s social mobility index, discussed in yesterday’s post? Here are the … More Final Thoughts on Social Class and Christian Colleges
Does socioeconomic class, with vastly less fanfare than gender or race, present equally significant problems for learning communities centered on a Savior in whom there is no difference of class, gender, or race? As I wrote at the end of yesterday’s post, I was spurred to reflect on this by a Chronicle of Higher Education … More Social Class at Christian Colleges (part 2)
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28) Since I arrived at Bethel in 2003, the phrases “anti-racism” and “racial reconciliation” have been prominent in campus discourse. Bethel leaders had identified a “ministry of reconciliation” (in the … More Social Class at Christian Colleges (part 1)
The Pietist Schoolman 