Religion Is a Fourth `R' at Grove City College

Insight on the News, March 5, 2001 by Stephen Goode

President John H. Moore tells Insight that his school maintains its commitment to higher education by remaining faithful to a 125-year-old religious heritage.

Since June 1996, John H. Moore has been president of Grove City College in Pennsylvania -- a school made famous by its decision to refuse to accept federal financing of any kind so that it can remain independent of government influence.

But Grove City College has other virtues, too. It's a Christian school founded as a nondenominational college 125 years ago that has managed to avoid the rampant secularization which has turned most of the nation's once-religiously affiliated schools into institutions that no longer are defined or even influenced by traditional religious faith.

And it's a college that steadily has improved its own intellectual standards during the last several decades despite rejection of the federal monies that have allowed many other colleges around the country to enlarge their student bodies, build new facilities and fatten faculty salaries. Grove City College's success at going it alone is a very American story chocked full of such familiar themes as self-help, ardent individualism and independent thinking.

Insight: What do you say to a student who asks why your college struggles to be independent of government influence and control? What's the big deal about that? How does such independence benefit Grove City College and its students?

John H. Moore: The first thing I would say is that we have plenty of substitutes for federal help and our students don't have to worry about not being able to get adequate financial aid.

I would tell the student that I think one of the great advantages we have is that our costs are low to begin with, and I would say that we have a very good private-loan program that substitutes for the [federal] Stafford Loan Program.

Then I would explain that the reason we take this stance is to be sure that we continue to be able to do our mission. We take our stand so that part of the federal government with the ability to do it -- namely, the Department of Education -- can't move in and say, "You can't do this, or you can't do that." We want independence from government guidance and regulation.

I would say to the student that we want to be able to teach the courses that we teach and have the Christian environment that we have without interference from government. I think there's implicit pressure on Christian schools around the country, and many of them have professed this to me, to develop their programs and do what it is they're doing in a way that will not set off some kind of a reaction from the federal government.

I go to meetings with a lot of college presidents, a lot of them presidents of small schools similar to Grove City, and find that many of them have abandoned all pretense of being Christian--they don't have chapel anymore; very few of them try to teach a Christian curriculum. I have a feeling that part of this is due to their concern that, if they did otherwise, they would be subjected to some kind of, shall we say, discipline.

Insight: Government regulations raise school costs, too, don't they?

JHM: The costs of complying with [federal] regulations is a burden. There are thousands of regulations, and you've got to have at least one full-time person and support staff to keep up with them. It's so complex, and there are so many of them that you never can be sure if you're in compliance. You'd always worry -- I would, at least -- that we might have missed something, opening the way for the government to punish the institution.

Insight: How does Grove City go about creating a Christian environment on campus?

JHM: I'll start with the faculty first. When we hire a faculty member, we require that he or she write out a statement of faith. We don't have a specific statement of faith that someone has to sign because we are recruiting from among people with many different kinds of creeds. But we want to make sure when we hire people that they are believers in Christ and in Christian doctrine broadly writ. They will be expected to provide a Christian perspective for students.

No. 2 is the curriculum. We have a core set of courses that every student takes regardless of major -- whether engineering, science, education, business or whatever. We have what we call the humanities core, and its purpose is explicitly to develop a Christian worldview. Every one of the six courses is designed with that in mind.

No. 3 is that we require attendance at chapel, and it is real chapel in the sense that it's not just a school assembly with announcements. It's a worship service with Scripture readings, prayer and then a message, either from the dean of the chapel or a visitor.

No. 4 is that in student life there probably are about 100 organizations on campus, of which roughly about 20 are Christian groups. Most students at Grove City are Christians of one kind or another.

Our largest denomination is Presbyterian, at about 18 percent. Second is Catholic, 14 percent. We have a Catholic priest who comes a couple days a week to minister to the Catholic kids and he has an office on campus. After that, I think it's Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans and then you trail off into other denominations. I'm not sure there are as many now as when I came to Grove City, but we used to have a fair number of charismatics on campus and I still think we have a few.