Christian colleges: A dying light or a new refraction?

Christian Century, April 21, 1999 by Mark U. Jr. Edwards

AS A PRESIDENT of a church-related college, I find much criticism of church-related higher education to be well-intentioned but wistful nostalgia. Critics such as James Burtchaell, whose book The Dying of the Light was reviewed in these pages by Ralph C. Wood (February 3-10), have simply not indicated realistically how, in the face of massive changes in society, church and human knowledge, church-related colleges could have maintained their traditional church-relatedness in all its 19th- or early 20th-century glory.

Consider a partial list of developments since just World War II: a broad national decline in denominational loyalty, changes in ethnic identity as hyphenated Americans enter the third and subsequent generations after immigration, the great explosion in the number of competing secular colleges and universities, the professionalization of academic disciplines with concomitant professional formation of faculty members during graduate education, the dramatic rise in the percentage of the population who seek higher education, the sharp trend toward seeing education largely in vocational and economic terms, the rise in government regulation and financing, the great increase in the complexity and cost of higher education, the development of a more litigious society, the legal end of in loco parentis, an exponential and accelerating growth in human knowledge, and so on. To put the matter bluntly, the world and the churches have changed substantially over the preceding decades. So why do Burtchaell and George Marsden, to name the two most prominent recent critics of church-related higher education, expect that colleges of the church would not have to change as well? Do the changes that have taken place at church-related colleges constitute the "dying of the light"? Or are we only seeing a different refraction of the light as the prism of society changes?

In The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (1994), Marsden offers an elegiac account of the way in which the effort by liberal Christians to identify Christian ideals with Western civilization may have served to make many church-related colleges and universities halfway houses on the way toward a secularity that Marsden sees as hostile to Christian influence. In The Dying of the Light, Burtchaell surveys 17 church-related colleges and concludes that the liberal accommodation of culture led, in the words of his subtitle, to the "disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian churches." Both authors stress that at least in the earlier phases the disengagement was unintended, although Burtchaell, the more condescendingly sardonic of the two authors, emphasizes the role of self-deception and presidential hubris.

"Culture Protestantism," to use Karl Barth's term for the liberal accommodation that Marsden and Burtchaell deplore, deserves more charitable treatment. Christian service to the world through higher education does not cease to be Christian when many of those providing and receiving the service are no longer Christians, much less members of the college's founding denomination.

Two types of church-related colleges have dominated the American landscape. They correspond to what H. Richard Niebuhr in his classic midcentury study Christ and Culture termed the "Christ transforming culture" model of the Reformed tradition and the "Christ above culture" model of the Catholic tradition. My college, St. Olaf, and other Lutheran colleges and universities represent a third Niebuhr model that has had its own successes, but is less well known on the national scene: "Christ and culture in paradox."

Burtchaell writes out of a Roman Catholic tradition that sees Christ as a supernatural fulfillment of the aspirations of culture, in the same way that grace is seen as perfecting nature and theology as perfecting philosophy. This ideal was generally framed in neo-Thomist terms, with first philosophy and later theology acting as the intellectual glue that united the disparate academic disciplines. All learning pointed, with the assistance of revelation and grace, toward the supernatural source of the world and reason and toward the supernatural end of humanity, which is the contemplation of God. The hierarchy implicit in this vision was historically reflected in the way in which Catholic schools tended to be centrally governed and answerable to church authorities. The great strength of this approach is that it holds out hope of integral, unified knowledge of the world and of God; it is an intellectual vision that has epistemological and political consequences. The particular challenge it faces is whether it can fulfill that hope, even imperfectly, without absolutizing a particular, culturally conditioned view of the world, of right reason and practice, and of God.

In the past several decades Catholic higher education has undergone significant change. In the late 1960s and 1970s Catholic colleges and universities adopted independent lay boards of trustees and put governance issues in the hands of the college itself. At the same time, Catholic professors criticized their institutions for intellectual mediocrity, redefined "academic excellence" in line with the standards of leading graduate schools, and turned (with equivocal success) to theology to provide what Holy Cross historian David O'Brien has termed "the bridge between the older Catholic identity and the newer, more excellent version of Catholic higher education." The 1990 Vatican document Ex corde ecclesia reflects a somewhat belated attempt by the Vatican to reassert juridical control over Catholic higher education and (some fear, others hope) to return it to its earlier unifying intellectual moorings. Not surprisingly, Ex corde ecclesia is hotly debated by Catholic educators, and Burtchaell's book may be viewed as a salvo fired from the neoconservative camp.