Top Ten Reasons to go to a Christian College

In these days of multiplying options, I repeatedly come back to the question, "Why would someone choose a Christian college today?" We can break down this question even further:

• In a perfect world, why would or should someone choose a Christian college? and
• How do our Christian universities line up?

Top 10 Reasons
10. Because it's a solid education
This factor must be a given. A Christian shouldn't suffer educationally because they go to a Christian college. The education they get must be on a par or better than what they would get at a secular institution.

9. Because it's accessible
If going into the world to proclaim the good news of Jesus is at the heart of Christian identity, then Christian colleges will not only be "havens for saints" but also will reach out to the ends of the earth with education from a Christian perspective and with Christian values. It makes sense that Christian institutions would have online and satellite programs in the same way that a healthy church reaches out beyond its walls.

8. Because it's affordable
There should be a partnership between the church and Christian universities that evens out (ideally, that even betters) the financial proposition of going to a Christian university. The most efficient way for the church to make a Christian college education affordable is to give directly to the students with scholarships. The church and university should partner in this endeavor.

7. Because it's a safe, quality environment
By safe I not only mean physically but in terms of things like the tendency of many universities toward rampant drug and alcohol use. By all means a Christian university should be fun and full of all the creative playfulness of the late teens and early twenties. But it should not be the party wasteland that is so many colleges and universities today. In fact, non-Christians should find Christian colleges attractive because of the quality environment.

6. Because of friendships
Many of us formed key life friendships in college. This is one strength of a residential college experience over a commuter college or a university where one gets lost among the masses. In this day and age it may be thought a luxury, but it should be a strength of the Christian residential college that you have close, life friends with deep Christian values. You become who you are around. Those who do not go for whatever reason should recognize that they are missing out on a special community.

5. Because of mentors
If a Christian college is working right, a student should form relationships with professors and other mentors that remain for life. Professors should not be "ivory tower" personalities who don't have time for their students. They should be regularly available for conversation on every level. Informal counseling, life coaching--what happens outside of class will probably be of more lasting value than what happens in class. Decades later, these relationships should continue. As I have told students, you're paying to have me as a resource for life.

4. Because of life trajectory
Where you go to college will likely set your life on a trajectory. Suffice it to say, you should be more likely to leave college headed in a Christ-centered direction if your starting point is a Christian college than if your starting point is not. This makes going to a Christian college extremely significant.

3. To be formed spiritually
A Christian college is not a church but it is a para-church community. Think of it in terms of a small group within a church. You do worship together. You have koinonia. There should be organized discipleship taking place in the dorms and among athletic teams. It should even happen in classes. Spiritual formation is the most important dimension of our lives, and it should be a major dimension of a Christian college.

2. To be formed intellectually as a Christian
Perhaps the focal task of an educational institution in general is intellectual formation. Spiritual formation is more important eternally, but it is not the reason a Christian college exists. There will no doubt be a significant degree of overlap between the learning of a secular and Christian institution, but at a Christian college faith should be integrated with the learning. This integration takes place on several levels: 1) with the faith of the professors and environment, 2) in the way knowledge is applied to life, and 3) in the very presuppositions from which subject matters are approached. A major reason to go to a Christian college is so that one can see one's area of study from a Christian worldview.

1. To be formed in Christian identity
Several of the above points make it clear that the 18-22 years are some of the most formative years of one's life. Where you end up spiritually in your life is more crucial than where you started out. For this reason, the life direction aspect of a Christian college should be of inestimable value. This direction goes beyond what career you choose or who you marry. It has to do with who you are. Because the ideal Christian college is far more likely to form you to be a Christ-follower for life in this most crucial transition period of your identity, this is an incredibly strong reason to go to a Christian college.

The Future of Christian Universities

I was thinking this weekend about how Christian colleges might strategize for the future. More than one threat is converging on us:

• Massive demographic shifts are coming. These will be especially difficult for midwestern colleges and universities. 2025 is forecasted to see around a 15% drop in college age students.
• Part of such demographic shifts is a diversification of the population, meaning that the typical evangelical college is in serious trouble.
• Students are leaving high school with one or more years of college credit. My daughter will graduate from high school this year with an associate's degree (=around 60 credit hours). This fact means that even if they come to you, they will be with you for a significantly shorter period of time.
• Students have lots of less expensive options and the value proposition of a more expensive Christian college is not clear to them or their parents.
• The online market is saturated. It's no longer enough to go online. There has to be a reason to choose you among the many online options. 
• Satellite campuses also seem on the decline.
• My pastor, Steve Deneff, has predicted a backlash against evangelicals whenever the Trump presidency ends. We have just seen the biggest "blue wave" since Watergate. Unless the situation changes, we should expect a similar wave in the Senate in 2020. This dynamic probably does not bode well for Christian colleges associated with evangelicalism.

Strategies?

1. Only make essential replacements. By all means don't panic! Nevertheless, the next 7 years are years to prepare for the Mariana Trench in demographic decline that is coming. There may be some good years coming in the meantime. So use retirements and natural departures to contract naturally in preparation.
2. Diversify. Find ways to hire people and bring students who broaden your audience. Do so on every level--student, faculty, administration, top leadership. I've seen some great movement in this direction at Indiana Wesleyan where I work.
3. Expand or move into graduate programs, especially 3+2 programs. If they are coming for fewer years in undergraduate programs, find seamless ways to keep them into graduate programs. Again, the KERN program at IWU where I work has done this magnificently.
4. Make your value proposition clear. What is your distinctive? What are your faculty's superpowers? What is your region? What is your specific Christian tradition--what flavor of Christianity is your school? What is your identity or identities? What is your online distinctive? Build on what you have!
5. Make it less expensive for as many students as possible. If you have a clear identity, you may be able to find donors who like it and are willing to give to it. If the government stops giving federal loans to students in Christian colleges, we may need some huge endowments to increase scholarships. Possibly start with certain pockets of students.
6. Adopt a "Christian host" model. This approach might be easier for the Wesleyan tradition than some others, but I consider my own college a place where, as long as you are civil, anyone is welcome. The beliefs of the host university are clear, but you will be treated with respect if you are an atheist student. Professors obviously must be believers with a living faith, but we can have professors who respect the Wesleyan host without full agreement on every doctrine. And willingness to live within community ethos is acceptable, even if one's conscience is freer. 

So those are some of my ideas on how Christian universities can continue to thrive despite changing times. 

Science and Math in a University Curriculum

I heard it when I was in high school. I hear it from my daughter today. "When am I ever going to use this?"

So the square root of 48 reduces to 4 times the square root of 3. Who cares, right? What should be an essential part of a college curriculum in math and science and what depends on career and interest?

1. It seems to me that the most important feature of math and science for everyone is somewhat philosophical. People in a democracy need to possess "evidentiary thinking." Unreflective thinking is the enemy of a democracy, where people just believe whatever they want to believe or just follow unthinkingly whatever traditions they've inherited from their environment.

We're overlapping with philosophy here, but the default state of human thinking is "premodern." It is magical thinking. I realize I am on a trajectory of tension with some Christian voices that want to re-enchant the world. But those who completely reject modernism are not only enemies of truth but they are nutters who need to turn in their cell phones and go live on a farm without tractors. They make Christians look stupid.

So a good college education will include competency in scientific method.

2. This may sound mean, but one of the most important functions of math and science in a curriculum is to confront us with how stupid we are. In America, everyone thinks their opinion is as valuable as anyone else's. But we are, on the whole, incompetent thinkers. We're blurring into philosophy again, but logic has to be one of the most important elements of a college philosophy class. It is crucial for a democracy that people be able to think straight or at least be able to recognize those who can.

One of the most important functions of math and science is to humble us.

Of course there is often math in specific fields people go into. It would be ideal if the math requirement of a university were tailored to specific disciplines. A ministry student, for example, might learn math in the context of church budgeting, church loans, fund raising, planning for retirement, etc. Economics is, after all, very mathematical.

3. The most controversial aspects of a science curriculum have to do with our understanding of the world. I watched Interstellar last week, and one of the most fascinating moments to me in the movie was where a public school teacher chastises a parent for letting his daughter think that the US ever went into space. Everyone knows, she suggests, that the lunar landing was a story invented by the US to cause the Russians to spend themselves into the grave trying to compete.

(By the way, the movie is fascinating to describe, but a little boring to watch. If I could put together clips and then just tell you what happens in between scenes, I think it would be much more enjoyable.)

Most of us get our science from one of two places--the scientific community or the evasive maneuver machine of America's current situation. Because of my experience in biblical studies, I don't trust the "round up the usual suspects" machine that has evolved in America to talk people out of believing the scientific community on various issues. From a probabilistic perspective, the majority of actual experts in science are far more likely to be correct than the idiosyncratic puppets rounded up to tell people what they want to hear on Fox News.

The situation of the Christian college is particularly sensitive, since there are powerful voices that are willing to throw significant amounts of money at counter-science. I've always been glad that most people aren't smart enough to try to sabotage quantum physics or relativity (although I am curious to know if part of American rhetoric against relativism may go back to an initial reaction against Einstein's theory). Christian nuclear physicists are free to follow the evidence wherever it seems to lead.

In fact, another part of the miracle of us winning WW2 is the fact that Hitler didn't trust the Jewish scientists at the forefront of a lot of nuclear physics developments in the 1930s.

4. Christian colleges have to be very sensitive to these issues, however. They just have to be. I've always felt that if a professor can present options and evidence fairly, the choice of position can be left to the student. I have personally found that, if a person is truly a truth-seeker, the most likely truths have a tendency to gnaw at your soul until you eventually submit to them.

So it is just the case that, at many Christian colleges, professors will have to be very sensitive to these sorts of issues. It's just not helpful to take a "matter of fact" approach. In such circumstances, a good teacher has to re-enact looking at the evidence for the very first time, as if he or she doesn't know where it will likely lead, at least in introductory classes.

And it goes without question that professors really should genuinely have a permanently open mind. Paradigms do shift from time to time.

A Curriculum and Novel Idea

A well-known President of a nearby university once had an idea for a marketplace where a student might convert life and learning experiences into college credit. This was over a decade ago and it was an idea before its time. We see movement in that direction by places like WGU and Southern New Hampshire, who grant a certain amount of "credit by assessment" or "credit by competency."

I had another idea for a novel this week. Not one that would probably be of interest to anyone but nerds like me, but one that could actually be a university curriculum. What if you took the detailed outcomes of a liberal arts education and allowed certain exceptional students to achieve them on their own? I hate that what came to my mind could only be achieved either by those with means or a system with massive financial underwriting.

But what if, to learn world history, you went to study with mentors in various parts of the world? There on site, you could also learn relevant discoveries in science and math, as well as the philosophies of the people there? You would be exposed to the key languages of the world and could be required to learn some basics of each.

What an amazing curriculum that would be! Certainly something I could create in a novel. But it's actually something that some entrepreneurial university could pilot as well. I know there are components of this sort of thing already being done.

Integrating Collegiate Cultures

The last five posts have wandered through Bergquist and Pawlak's 2008 book, Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy. I've expanded their six cultures into four different emphases colleges frequently have and then six variations on those emphases.

Four Key Emphases
1. A research emphasis
Institutions and faculty with a research emphasis see the university primarily as a place were truth is pursued for its own sake. It tends to be a very modernist emphasis that pictures faculty as objective investigators of truth who pursue it by scientific methods. The legitimacy of disciplines that cannot be pursued by such methods are questioned. The assumption is that if you hire excellent enough faculty, they will objectively arrive at more or less the same conclusions if they are given full academic freedom. The origins of this approach are German.

2. A formational emphasis
The origins of this approach are British. The formational approach historically has seen the college as a place where the values of young people are formed for life. This approach tends to be that of the small liberal arts college or the small Christian college. The college exists in loco parentis and continues the formation that started at home in preparation for launch to the real world. The proposal of Steve Lennox for Wesleyan higher education falls into this category in viewing Wesleyan colleges as "sanctifying contexts."

3. A teaching emphasis
With background in the Catholic school, institutions like IWU in the past saw teaching as the primary task of the college. It is not that faculty research was not valued. It was just something some professors did on the side or in the summer. During the contract months, faculty were teachers. They taught a base amount of 24 credit hours a year and the door was wide open for as many overloads as they could handle. You tried to hire "thoroughbreds" who could teach lots of different courses and a lot of them, with little thought for class size.

4. A vocational emphasis
Growing out of the community college, some colleges focus on training students to be able to get jobs once they graduate. This is no doubt the emphasis that most of the public see as the obvious purpose of education. For those parents who are not interested in the formational piece, they likely send their children to college with this goal in mind.

Six Variations
1. A pedagogical culture
An extension of the teaching emphasis can be a managerial focus on course outcomes, course design, and course assessment. Courses come to have a heavy administrative component. In excess, they become highly prescripted and filled with busy work that is a burden to both student and faculty.

2. A developmental culture
Colleges can extend a formational culture to where there is a heavy emphasis on student or faculty development. In excess, a culture can develop where the faculty feels like the university exists to serve them or students are strung along who simply are not college material. In excess, a healthy concern for development can become paternalistic.

3. An advocacy culture
Some colleges have a strong advocacy culture, whether it be for conservative or liberal causes. In conservative circles, these colleges tend to advocate for traditional values or conservative political causes. In other circles they may advocate for people of color, women, or some other people group.

4. A distributive culture
Some colleges have a strong culture of expansion and innovation enabling expansion. It is an impulse to take education to the student rather than expecting the student to come to the university. It is usually accompanied by an online program and may dream of a global reach.

5. A virtual culture
Online programs tend to develop a culture of their own. They are especially susceptible to a pedagogical and developmental flavor.

6. A tangible culture
In reaction to the rise of virtual culture and at times in opposition to it, colleges can develop a tangible culture that puts a primacy on face-to-face education. Alternatively, distinct tangible cultures can develop to maximize the distinct strengths of face-to-face education in competition with online education.
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Integrating Collegiate Cultures
So how should these varied cultures fit together at your typical Christian college?

1. I come back to the fundamentals. A college is an educational business. It has potential customers, and it has products. Legitimately, there are different kinds of colleges with different kinds of emphases. So each college needs to decide what its core products and priorities are:

• vocations
• formation
• cutting edge knowledge

For most "customers," jobs are going to sell the most, the hope of good or better employment. For a smaller subset, formation sells. For an elite subset, cutting edge research sells.

If I were to give advice to the typical Christian college, I would advise that they focus on selling careers within a solid formational context.

2. From a Christian perspective, the formational element is the most important, even if it is neither the primary draw nor the primary task. The primary task of an educational institution is surely education by way of teaching.

But a Christian college will, as Steve Lennox has argued, be a "sanctifying context," one in which students and faculty alike grow closer to God and grow in love for their neighbor. It is a good goal for students to grow in virtue while they are there (the pedagogical culture sometimes resists these sorts of intangible goals because they are hard to assess).

And I believe that a good college will subvert its students by subjecting them to the liberal arts, making them better and more enlightened people against their wills. :-) They'll be glad for it if it happens, even though they might not have signed up to become more profound human beings.

3. The mechanisms for teaching and formation will lead to care with regard to pedagogy and development, hopefully without veering into obsession. Advocacy is only as important as the inequity or imbalance of the institution. However, a college that stands for something stands to gain those who stand for those same things.

Good teachers will stay abreast of the research in their fields. Although most professors at the average Christian college should have teaching contracts, it is perfectly reasonable to put a few exceptional ones on a research contract with less teaching.

Tenure is a controversial issue that must be taken into account for purposes of competition for faculty, but it is really the stuff of a research more than a teaching faculty. And it was really designed for a very modernist and non-confessional context. My recommendation is that it be reserved only for the most exceptional of research faculty and that it not be the norm. In the end, it really has no significance whatsoever other than perception.

Faculty whose behavior or research is outside the moral or ideological limits of an institution can still be fired. Faculty on multi-year contracts still cannot be terminated without cause. The notion that you are not accountable for your work or ideas after a certain point is fundamentally irresponsible and seems destined to be done away with over time. It makes little objective sense, but perception is reality too.

4. Colleges with a distributive and a virtual culture are more likely to survive than those that are banking solely on a tangible one. If you expect students to come to your campus, you had better have something distinctive going on there or have a clear niche market. But mistakes can be made in expansion that tank a place too, like investing too much in an expansion that doesn't materialize or not providing sufficient infrastructure for expansion, resulting in implosion.

At least that's the way I see it... :-)

Cultures 5 and 6: Virtual and Tangible Cultures

1. The 2008 expanded edition of Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy includes two additional cultures: virtual and tangible cultures. I won't summarize the previous emphases and cultures in this post, because I hope to synthesize it all tomorrow. But here is the trail of bread crumbs.

The advent of online education, the ability to teach at a distance through technology, has revolutionized education. Hanna has called it part of an "entrepreneurial" culture. Bergquist and Pawlack connect it to an interest in global education, so perhaps we could call it a global culture, although the limitations of the international context are still somewhat restrictive in this regard. There is also something to be said for a distance emphasis that is not virtual but involves taking education to people. So there is a collection of elements here that may stand better classification than Bergquist and Pawlack have given.

The rise of the virtual and distance culture is arguably giving rise to a sixth culture--tangible culture. When the only option was face-to-face, being onsite was not a distinct culture (I'm taking a position here on a debate). But now in response to the rise of virtual culture, there come to be distinctives of an onsite education over and against a virtual or even a distance one. I believe this culture is in its formative stage, but my experiences suggest some thoughts on where it might go.

2. First, although I agree that there are distinct issues relating to virtual education, I think we might divide chapter 5 into one emphasis and one culture. I would like to call the emphasis a distributive emphasis that some colleges and universities can have. You might call it a "missionary" culture.

Online education is just one mode, even if the predominant mode, in an orientation toward bringing education to the student rather than bringing the student to the education. I believe that those institutions that will be most successful going forward will heavily tend to be those involved in distance education of some sort. With more and more options for students to stay where they are, especially adult students, residential campuses come to dominate less and less.

Online is only one way to achieve the distribution of education. The branch campus has of course been around for a long time. But there is also the intensive class, where the students either come to campus for a week or you go to some convenient location near them for a few days. A hybrid class might start off in a face-to-face format and then finish online (or go online for a while only to end in a face-to-face closing).

This impulse to distribute one's education beyond the residential campus can involve a certain missionary mindset, a drive to see education get out. It can reach globally, either by taking the education to a foreign country physically or virtually. There are distinct issues with global virtual education, chiefly bandwidth and reliable internet. Many think the future of global education will involve the smart phone. The cell phone is omnipresent in Africa, for example.

3. Even though virtual education is a subset of a distributive mindset, it has tended to give rise to its own unique culture. Online education has facilitated the rise of the pedagogical and paternalistic cultures to dominance. Since there was so much skepticism about online education in its inception, individuals involved with it bent over backwards to demonstrate that, in fact, the learning was taking place.

There's mud on the face of those who reacted so strongly against online education fifteen years ago. Where are they now? Are their colleges even still open?

I came across a quote a few weeks ago that you don't need to worry about someone stealing a good idea. Rather, people tend to fight tooth and nail against them. My friend Keith Drury suggested the pattern is that they fight them. Then they fight them even harder. Then after it succeeds they attribute its success to some failure of the world. Then they adopt it.

I don't know why people worry about what others think. Be the benchmark. Don't worry about what others are doing if a group of you believe you have a good idea.

4. There are two approaches to online education. One leans a little more traditional and tends to be done by academic institutions that consider themselves of a higher quality. The other is designed for greater distribution and tends to draw more heavily on adjuncts.

So when I taught online for Asbury, each adjunct created his or her own courses from scratch. Asbury thus expected its adjuncts to be of the kind of quality that they might have teach a course on campus if you lived in the area. Your syllabus had of course to be approved by someone, but you were largely trusted to create your own course.

The other model, which is used at IWU, creates most online courses ahead of time. (In the Seminary, I created a space for full-time professors in rare occasions to create their own online courses without assistance.) In the design of a course, a content expert is brought into connection with an instructional designer. The result was meant to bring the best of three worlds together: 1) the content expertise of a faculty person, 2) the pedagogical expertise of an instructional designer, and 3) the teaching expertise of the actual course facilitator.

Initially, IWU called such teachers "facilitators" rather than professors. That's because their primary task is to facilitate learning and discussion rather than to bring content expertise themselves. We have since moved away from that terminology and I changed it from the beginning of the Seminary. But you can see that the teacher of a pre-created course can but does not have to have as much expertise in the course content as the traditional professor was expected to have.

So this second approach to online education creates the possibility for a certain "adjunct" culture, where perhaps the majority of courses are taught by part-time teachers.

5. You can see how online education has facilitated the rise of the managerial and what I have called a pedagogical culture. Timeliness and feedback become the most important pieces of the puzzle, since the professor is not standing in front of the student. The need for support systems becomes essential. Off Campus Library Services, virtual writing labs, attention to retention issues all become very important.

In a good online class, the average faculty to student interaction will be greater than in a face-to-face situation. The reason is because you cannot hide at the back of a virtual classroom. If you do not engage, you fail. And professors are expected to engage on an individual level, meaning that online education requires much more of a professor than face-to-face. Administrative skills become much more important.

Community can definitely exist in a virtual world. The cohort model, for example, takes the same group of students through a degree program together, which increases community and retention. If such a group is launched in a face-to-face context, the cohesion is even greater. Again, traditional classrooms put random students together class by class. So in this respect, the virtual community of any one class is usually greater online than onsite.

6. In the face of this onslaught, residential campuses will no doubt reinvent themselves. A friend of mine has suggested that, where equivalent onsite and online programs options exist side by side, the online options will eventually kill the onsite ones. The clear implication is that there must be some clear advantage to the onsite campus that counterbalances the convenience of online.

For the typical undergraduate context, the clear advantage is student life. Surely a sizable percentage of college students don't really go to college for the education anyway. They go for the party. So Indiana University is in no danger of losing its undergraduate campus.

Smaller and more obscure colleges will need something else, some other distinctive. Academic reputation is a possibility for some. Clearly Christian colleges will attract with the promise of a certain kind of formation or perhaps shielding (you can sell an anti-party context to many parents). There needs to be some distinctive "sell," though. What can a student get by coming here that they won't get online?

The sell can't be idealistic. Money wins. "I'd sure love to come to campus but I've got to work." The liberal arts aren't going to cut it in most cases. "Our campus has a roller coaster that runs through the dorms. You can ride it to class," is more what the doctor ordered. "Come join a battle." There has to be something that taps into strong human impulses if you want to beat the practicalities of money and convenience, not to mention those who are tapping into those strong human impulses.

No doubt "tangible" cultures will develop rapidly to compete with virtual and distance ones. It will be exciting to see what they come to look like.

Academic Cultures 4: Advocacy Culture

1. The fourth chapter of Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy looks at what Bergquist and Pawlack call an "advocacy culture. I've been reworking their categories to create a list of emphases that exist not only for universities as a whole but, perhaps more importantly, as different unexamined streams within the same university. Getting these out in the open, I think, might really help a university become more intentional about what direction it takes.

So far, here is the list I've developed out of Bergquist and Pawlack's book:

• The research emphasis - sees the primary goal of a university as the advancement of knowledge by its professors by way of scholarship, publication. Emphasizes academic freedom.
• The formation emphasis - sees the primary goal of a university as the formation of young people, making them "educated" or "virtuous" or "Christian." So there might be an emphasis on the liberal arts or on core Christian values.
• The vocational emphasis - sees the college as a place where people are prepared to get a job and thus be able to support themselves through life
• The teaching emphasis - sees the primary task of a college as teaching. Professors tend to have high loading and may teach extensive overloads.
• The pedagogical culture - I am calling this an extreme form of a teaching culture or a managerial culture, where a healthy practice of setting outcomes and assessing them becomes an obsessive preoccupation. Too much detail, overkill on busy-work to be assessed, and a lack of allowance for spontaneity takes over.
• The paternalistic culture - Again, a healthy concern for developing faculty and students can become oppressive with a bureaucracy of hoops to jump through and an unhealthy narcissism on the part of faculty.

You'll notice that I've begun to distinguish between core emphases a university or part of a university might have and "cultures," now going with the language of the book.

2. Chapter four introduces another culture, an "advocacy" culture. If I have understood this culture correctly, it is a culture that focuses on standing up for something. This emphasis can be either conservative or liberal. All it needs is a cause.

This culture might advocate for different things depending on its context. So it might advocate for anything from people of color to political causes to issues of sexuality. Young people often have significant energies in these areas to harness.

So there are colleges that feed off conservative political angst or anger. They recruit students who want to stand against liberalism or who want to stand for holiness as their subculture understands it. They want to fight against the world, the flesh, and the Devil.

Opponents of a certain different kind of advocacy culture might call it a "politically correct" culture, but there are all kinds of advocacies. And they are simply different expressions of the same human impulse to fight for or against something.

3. In an IWU context, there may be students or individual faculty who are strongly motivated by politics, but IWU does not, in my sense of things, have an advocacy culture that centers on politics. Although IWU has a strongly Republican constituency, this is not an area in which IWU advocates or recruits.

Because of its religious convictions, IWU strongly affirms that all people are valuable in God's eyes, regardless of their orientation, but it does not advocate for anything more than the necessity to love all people in this area. The equality of women is assumed at IWU, and certainly the theological faculty at the university would be fully egalitarian rather than complementarian. We would advocate strongly for that but it does not seem to be a problem at IWU in general.

So the area in which IWU is currently a strong advocate is in its multi-ethnic push. Across the university right now is a strong push to hire more faculty of color and to recruit more students of color.

4. This is a noble aim and a more diverse campus holds the hope of a more rich environment. There are of course dangers. If your base culture is not diverse, then diversity must come from outside your culture. That immediately changes your culture. The hope is of course that such changes are positive, but it also runs the risk of changing features of prior culture that were actually strengths or distinctives.

It would be unreflective to think that diversity in itself is intrinsically more valuable than every feature of prior culture that you might lose. So hiring for diversity must be done with great intentionality. There is a great deal of unreflectivity in this area, it seems to me, in an advocacy culture. The effort necessary to bring diversity to an institution in a healthy way is extremely hard work.

Another key caution is that a poor hire in the name of diversity actually sabotages the overall cause. It is essential that diversity hires be just as competent as whatever non-diversity persons they might be in competition with. Otherwise it demeans those of color that you are trying to hire and reinforces prejudices of inferiority. I know a situation where an entire program was more or less sabotaged for ten years because of an inappropriate diversity hire.

5. Advocacy is a core Christian value because it is an expression of the love of our neighbor. But it can be done in smart ways and in not so reflective ways.

Academic Cultures 3: Developmental Cultures

1. In the last couple posts, I've been looking at Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy, but cooking the categories a little differently.

a. the research emphasis - sees faculty research at the center of a university, emphasizes academic freedom

b. the formational emphasis - sees college in terms of forming students in some way, whether through the liberal arts, Christian worldview, or some other set of core values (e.g., Lennox's "sanctifying context")

c. the vocational emphasis - sees college primarily in terms of equipping students to get a job

d. the pedagogical emphasis - focuses on extensively delineated outcomes, expectations, and assessments as the key focus of the academy

Chapter 3 is about what Bergquist and Pawlack call a "development" culture. Looking into this chapter, I can see that what I have called a "pedagogical" emphasis really relates more to what they are talking about in this chapter. (In their view, the developmental culture grew out of the managerial culture as they talk about it.)

2. So to create another category that relates more directly to the other dimension of chapter 2, how about the teaching emphasis. 

This emphasis refers to the institution that focuses extensively on teaching, where faculty are not so much expected to write or do research as to teach. So it is not uncommon at institutions like this one for the basic loading for a professor to be outrageously high from the perspective of a faculty member at a research institution. Beyond this basic teaching, such professors may also do a lot of overload teaching beyond the minimum expectation. This extra teaching may compensate to some degree for the lower salary such faculty usually have in comparison to faculty at research institutions.

Certainly when I first came to IWU, it was solidly a teaching institution. For undergraduate professors, the basic loading is 24 credit hours a year. For master's level courses it is 21 credit hours a year, and it is 18 credit hours a year on the doctorate level. Overloads were rampant when I came.

I would strongly defend the legitimacy of this approach, as I would the legitimacy of most of the others as well.  The key to me is that we not pick just one and say all the others are wrong. There are those who like to teach, and there are those who like to teach a lot. And there are those who do it well.

Frankly, I do not think even a majority of professors these days will ever produce much of any lasting significance in the area of research. We like to think that we are all researchers, but most professors will be most useful if they know and communicate the truly best research of the time rather than trying to be part of the front edge of research in our areas.

If we think of the university as a business, with students as the primary customer, then those who choose to teach more than research should be highly valued. Faculty with a focus on research should probably be a minority in most colleges today, because only a small number will contribute enough to the reputation of the college to offset the more obvious value of good teaching.

3. So if what I have called a "pedagogical emphasis" is part of the developmental culture of chapter 3, I want to call another emphasis implied by this chapter a paternalistic emphasis.

The chapter is about a culture that emphasizes student, faculty, and employee development in general. This is a good thing, despite the fact that I am seeing the dangers. So it is good to be clear about what the outcomes of a class are, to make expectations clear, and then to assess and confirm that in fact you have met those outcomes.

What worries me is what I see as a tendency to go to the opposite extreme in what I called a pedagogical culture. Too much is detailed and not enough room is given to professors whose classes are more spontaneous. Not only that, but there can be an implicit distrust of professors to do what they say they are doing, not to mention an obsession with administrivia.

4. So also, the idea of supporting faculty in their development is a good thing. It is a service to the employees of the university. If we want professors to be better teachers, then it makes sense to offer seminars to help them. We give them allowances to go to conferences and reward them when they produce scholarship. That all sounds like good practice.

My worry is again what might happen in the extreme. Millennials already grew up with helicopter parents who hovered over them. Dare we say that this fosters a sense of entitlement, expecting service. Employment can be like a wake up call in this regard.

I remember hearing a story of a millennial who took a job as a staff pastor and was a little disappointed that the senior pastor, a boomer, didn't spend more time mentoring him. The advice given was that now that he had a job, mentoring was now his job to do more than to receive.

So what happens when millennials start becoming professors, as they are? Is it possible that they will expect the university to revolve around them? Is it possible that they will have a tendency to see the university as existing for them rather than them for the university. Perhaps now they will subconsciously assess their bosses by how well they serve them.

You can see that this attitude in combination with the collegial culture is deadly. Being a professor comes to be about the university doing all it can do to support their research. Indeed, isn't the university privileged to have them there thinking deep thoughts? Shouldn't I be rewarded for every little thing I do?

Suffice it to say, I'm not too sympathetic to that sort of culture. Even fifteen years ago, we created courses and no one paid us anything. We made new course preps, bought the books, and considered it part of the job. Didn't they hire us because we already knew a little something? Some of us didn't need to be rewarded to write, and we certainly didn't turn in little piddly things that hardly pass for scholarship.

Those of us who teach these days are all fortunate to have a job. There are plenty of others who would love to take our place. All of us could be easily replaced. The administration is not our servant. It is our employer, our boss. We work for the institution, and our primary work is to teach students.

Academy Cultures 2: The Managerial Culture

1. Yesterday I did some exploration of the first chapter Bergquist and Pawlak's, Engaging the Six Cultures of the Academy. I am building my own synthesis off their book's content. Three theses that emerged yesterday were 1) that strikingly different assumptions are present within a university like IWU about what the goals and mission of a university are, 2) that these assumptions are usually held unreflectively--people just assume them in conflict with each other without realizing they are not actually self-evident or beyond critique, and 3) that universities are, when all is said and done, businesses.

The last point is the rock bottom truth. A university can have all the wrong goals from some point of view; it can be of horrible academic quality from some point of view; but if it is financially sustainable, it eats your "quality" institution for lunch. You close. You die. No one remembers you. But the sustainable business lives and continues to reproduce.

2. I believe yesterday's chapter on what they call a "collegial culture" is really better divided into two distinct perspectives on higher education that are themselves potentially two different sets of cultural assumptions:

• I'm going to call one a formational model. This is the in loco parentis model ("in place of the parent"). This tends to be the liberal arts model and is often the model for the small Christian college. It derives from British and Scottish educational influences. It's target audience is youth in its formative adulthood.
• The second model might be called the research model. It tends to be faculty research focused and can almost ignore the student in the process. The individual faculty is pursuing truth with complete academic freedom and the lucky student gets to watch. It derives from German influences and puts a high premium on publication.

3. Today's chapter addresses what it calls a "managerial" culture. It's cultural sources, according to these authors, are Catholic education and the community college.

So Catholic education arose to serve immigrants who were coming in the mid-1800s and were somewhat scorned by the broader society. It had a bureaucratic character to it, focused on teaching and had a goal of preparing the student for advancement in society.

The community college had some similar focus in that it aimed to train a local individual to get a job. It was thus focused on training the student to do something that could be a vocation.

4. As with the last chapter, I would like to re-present this chapter with what I see as two additional models that are often in play within a single educational institution:

• I'm calling the first the vocational model. This model sees the college or university as a place of training and preparation to get a job. It flows naturally from the community college strand.
• The second I'd like to call the pedagogical model. This view of the university sees it primarily as a place where good teaching and learning takes place. This flows naturally from the Catholic strand of American education.

5. The vocational model is almost diametrically opposite to the liberal arts model, and the social origins of these two are quite different. The vocational model emerged from the lower end of the social system, where individuals were looking to move up the social chain. By contrast, the liberal arts college was often the stomping grounds of the upper class, whose eventual financial security was more or less guaranteed and, thus, whose education could focus more on luxury, namely, the arts and cultural formation.

There is, I think, a prevailing assumption by those outside the academy that the primary purpose of college is to prepare students to get a job. This is, after all, what sells a college the most to parents. Parents aren't interested in funding the research of an expert on monarch butterflies unless it will help their daughter get a job somehow. And parents aren't always interested in their son learning Shakespeare.

Since college is a business, these are realities that have to factor into how a college presents itself, like it or not. It doesn't matter that a faculty member thinks he or she knows what they should be interested in. I know that Latin can change a student for the better. But few parents are going to pay for their son or daughter to go to college to learn Latin. Like it or not, reality doesn't care. The wise man builds his house upon the rock.

6. The pedagogical model sees the primary function of the college as teaching and thus of student learning. This was an important corrective to the academy, the rise of the educrats. In the old days:

• In the old days, professors may or may not have given a student a syllabus for a class. Perhaps the professor would give a reading assignment at the end of class or announce a writing assignment due in a week. You more or less found out what came next as you went along.
• You might only have one test at the end of the class or one paper. Your grade might show up and you have no idea how you got it. Grading was more or less up to the whim of the professor.
• Curriculum was more or less a set of required courses. There was no real accountability for what a professor taught in those courses. There was no way of knowing whether the students actually learned anything other than their grades.

It's important to me to say that those days weren't a waste. In fact, wouldn't we normally say that the level of learning was higher in the past than today? Just because you don't have any evidence doesn't mean that learning didn't take place. Anecdotal evidence is only hearsay, but that doesn't mean it is necessarily wrong.

There have been a lot of improvements in the last two decades:

• All courses now are expected to have syllabi, a kind of binding arrangement between faculty and student.
• Courses ideally list the "outcomes" of the course on the syllabus. These are the knowledge, skills, and dispositions you should be able to demonstrate at the end of the class.
• Degree programs should be accessed by way of artifacts in key courses. Data is collected and evaluated.

There is no doubt that these changes are positive. The danger is when this "managerial culture" lets a certain educrat personality go too far. Systems of measurement become an end in themselves. Assessment might try to reach its hands down into every single course every single time in an obtrusive way. Endless data is generated and analyzed. Welcome to the culture of obsessive, pedagogical navel gazing.

At present, most universities recognize that they need to be able to demonstrate that their programs generally do what they say they do. So we hire an Assessment Officer or give load release to that odd faculty person who really loves this sort of thing. Perfectly appropriate.

The danger is when this personality gets too much control and tries to force every professor to become an educrat just like them. Faculty become administrators. Suddenly all the fun is sucked out of teaching for all but those with that particular personality--and it isn't necessarily the personality that students most enjoy or come to university to study with. Students find themselves doing a lot of busy-work that, in the end, doesn't serve their learning but serves the machine wanting artifacts to assess.

Syllabi get longer and longer, like a book, and the likelihood that a student will read it gets less and less. This subculture of the university is especially prevalent among professors of primary and secondary education, who are used to the paperwork of the public school. Instructional designers, if they are tasked to create preformed online classes, also have a tendency to be of this personality and background.

Education becomes one incredibly complex bureaucracy full of complex systems and processes of assessment. Again, I completely affirm the right of certain faculty and disciplines to do things this way. The problem is the unexamined assumption that those who do not do it this way are somehow deficient and need to be fixed.

7. Here are some of the just plain wrong assumptions here:

• Not all personalities want endless details. In fact, many shut down when confronted with too many. Many personalities need to see the big picture and then fill in the details later.
• Responsibility is not the same as learning. Educrats tend to reward the responsible, those who jump through pre-set hoops on time, perhaps even more than those who actually learn. There is a tendency to give full credit for doing what is asked rather than for excellence in thinking.
• There is a latent positivist hangover, as if a tree doesn't make a sound unless someone is there to hear it. Assessment is good practice, and it is preferable that outcomes be accessible. But just because we don't or can't assess something, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
• Intuitive assessment takes place all the time among quality professors. Most of the time, this kind of self- and peer assessment is far more valuable than numbers on a spreadsheet.

There should be a basic trust extended to professors, a presumption of the benefit of the doubt until something prompts more detailed investigation. The presumption of a university should be that if a professor teaches in a classroom, learning takes place. Otherwise, we have failed in our hiring, and it is our fault, not the faculty person's.

Bottom line: No one personality in the academy should have the gall to think everyone else should be like it, especially if the students are happy. ESTJs are not better educators than INFPs.

Sweet Briar College

Events like this one are sad, a hundred years of stories that now will only survive in the memories of alumnae, a cache of historical documents, and a potentially idle property. Here's one person's suggestion for how to turnaround a place like this one.

Gobry's five points are spot-on. This place could be turned around if it dies enough to break its current parameters. That's always the formula for closing: a straight jacket set by the founder, a stubborn faculty, and a visionless administration.

So the all-women piece has to go. A hefty number of majors and faculty has to go. It has to go distance. I personally think bringing in enough technology to have virtual students from afar participate with those sitting in the classroom opens up the floodgates both in terms of faculty and students. Counter-incentives can be put in place for those who choose to come on campus.

He's right on having a target audience. He's right on focus and whittling down all the majors.

Easy-peezy. This college could be turned around in someone's sleep.

Rumors of Degree Cancellations...

Jim Davila has sounded the warning that the University of Manchester is considering closing degree level studies in Persian, Turkish, and Modern Hebrew. These are part of the monumental shifts in education that we have already seen in seminary education.

I had an idea for an MTS once that functioned on a seminar and mentor model. Students would work with an advisor and regularly present individual research at a weekly seminar that included students working on a wide range of topics. It would be on an Ox-Bridge model where the students would pursue an individualized course of study and would largely be self-directed, reporting regularly to the advisor and presenting to the seminar regularly. The number and specificity of the seminars would depend on the number of students in each category, but it would be scaled so that it could work financially with just one student.

I wonder if universities could have something like a "College of Obscure Majors." Obviously I'm joking, but it could function on a model something like this. I do think that the day of the "I know everything there is to know about a subject about a millimeter wide" is mostly over.

Witherington on Employment in Biblical Studies

Some sobering but realistic advice from Ben Witherington. I especially resonated with his comment on the potential for teaching pastors. If I worked at an educational institution, I would suggest developing biblical studies programs that aim at equipping teaching pastors. :-)

Also, if you are going into biblical studies, be prepared to teach primarily online and in distance modes, as he also says.

What's in an education?

Heard an update yesterday on brewings in Washington over educational reform. The basic impression is that whether you're talking about the Department of Education or the Congress, neither really know what they're doing. The DOE wants to regulate, but doesn't have the right regulations. The Congress wants to deregulate and let every whacko and yahoo give you a badge out of a gumball machine.

One thing said is that both sides seem to be convinced by individual stories rather than statistics. Statistics have always and continue to demonstrate without any dispute that a college degree improves a person's likely economic future dramatically. But what moves Congress and the DOE is an individual story by Joe Exception who had a degree but couldn't find a job. (Obviously they need to take a philosophy class)

Do colleges need to find ways to decrease cost and debt? Absolutely. Is an education about more than getting job skills? Ideally it is. Ideally it is also about making people better thinkers and better citizens. Indeed, a Christian college believes an education should be about becoming a better person and a better Christian.

The climate is requiring educational institutions to cut costs and demonstrate that they are worth the money. That can be a good thing. And it is something that can be done.

Thoughts on the future of education...

I had some time to think more about the future of college education this weekend. I thought I'd share some of my thoughts.

1. First, it seems strange, but I think some college professors can begin to think of their job as some sort of divine right, like a king. My job, they might think, is to school the masses. My task is to correct the faulty thinking of the pleb. My God-like task is to bring truth to the fallen mind. I am superior to the student in every way and, like a prison jailer, am justified to show these criminals how wicked they are.

I hope you have not encountered any egregious examples of the above (especially at any Wesleyan college) but, rest assured, they are out there. Nevertheless, I think some professors--without even realizing it--can find themselves behaving as if students are privileged to study with them. Even in ministerial training, seminary professors can behave as if their primary charge is to correct the paltry thinking of future ministers.

I'm thinking of the seminary professor at an unnamed school who (illegally, I think) required students to give him 20 dollars if they slipped up and used a masculine pronoun for God. That student transferred out the next semester to another seminary that is near and dear my heart (whose name I won't mention ;-).

2. Now there are students who will pay to be abused like the above. It becomes a rite of passage, like going through basic training. And of course, then when they graduate they may feel as if they now have the right to berate everyone else for how stupid they are.

I would hope, of course, that a college professor does know more about the subject they are teaching than the student. Otherwise, they certainly shouldn't be the professor. And there are many students who are interested in truth for truth sake. There are students who go somewhere to study with a particular brilliant mind. There will hopefully always be research universities that push the boundaries of knowledge. And I hope most colleges and universities will have a clear place for this minority of students--the ones I love the most.

3. But the previous paragraph is a minority report. Much more fundamentally, education is a business. Colleges are selling something, and students are buying something. Suffice it to say, a company that sells the opportunity to be berated by someone is not a good business model. A company that primarily sells getting to watch a brilliant person write to someone else (that is, to publish rather than to teach) is not a good business model. There are colleges who are selling prestige and that is as valid as the market for it.

But in the vast majority of cases, colleges are meant to sell a concretely better future for the student. Sure, they also sell four years of campus fun, like a four year youth camp. This is the product most students are buying. But parents are buying a better future for their children. They are buying the potential for a better job.

Most are not buying a better person. That is to say, they are not paying money primarily to improve the virtue or brilliance of their children. They are buying a future job. In many cases today, especially in Christian circles, they hope they are actually buying indoctrination, quite the opposite of what many professors are selling.

4. So education is a business, and the consumer is buying knowledge and skills that will help them get a job that will help them have a better life. What does this say in terms of who colleges should hire? It implies that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, colleges and universities should be hiring people who are good teachers, not good researchers. And, unfortunately, it is not just that they need to be good teachers but the consumer needs to perceive them to be such--the students need to feel like they are getting a good product.

Again, there are always those who are interested in truth for truth's sake. And a professor needs to have something to give. The knowledge needs to be there. But the primary task has to be teaching.

5. Now it is true that there is often a divide between what is popular and what is true. This is a challenge. The parent and student want to move toward knowledge that will lead toward success. I hate to say it, but knowledge can actually make a person less successful. Consider the following train of thought:

• If the majority world thinks a certain way that is false.
• And a student becomes educated to think in a way that is true.
• The student may become less marketable in the majority world.

It is deeply ironic that education can actually make a person less marketable. Many institutions in fact exist in part to insulate children from certain ideas in play, sometimes those held by the majority of experts. From the standpoint of the student, even, there can be parts of a curriculum in relation to which they do not see the relevance or usefulness. I'm thinking especially of the liberal arts here.

In a business, it is more important that the consumer think the product is desirable than for it to actually be desirable. Accordingly, it does not matter that we know the liberal arts are useful. Colleges have to package them in a way that they feel useful or pleasurable.

This calls for great care in curriculum planning. In marketing, colleges and universities must emphasize the things that the consumer thinks are most desirable. Yet it is legitimate for experts in various fields to present new options and new ways of thinking. If those ways of thinking ring true, then some students of their own free will will choose them. It is very important in such cases that professors help students know how to hold unpopular ideas in a positive and influential way.

6. Finally, the liberal arts need to be sold for their instrumental value. Many of us believe they are valid in their own right. Good literature doesn't have to do anything but give pleasure to the reader. But in the business context of education, we have to show things like the following (and arrange those courses accordingly):

• Philosophy makes students better thinkers, which makes them better employees. 
• History helps students think in terms of causes and effects, which helps them deal with people and anticipate where certain decisions will lead.
• Writing is so important in so many jobs. Many employers would love an employee who could write.
• Literature enriches our bed-side manner. It makes us more than robots but people with feelings.
• Psychology and sociology can help us get along with others, a key skill for an employee.
• Math and science not only help us be better thinkers, but there are often certain kinds of skills in a job that require some sort of math skill.
• Theology and Bible courses help Christians know the kinds of values that a person should have in life. Not only are these of eternal value but what employer would not want employees that have integrity?

7. To summarize, the successful college of the future will 1) create a campus environment that is full of pleasure and all the enjoyment we all associate with our college years--AND BE SAFE.  It will 2) primarily have good teachers (rather than just researchers) and not only good teachers but teachers that students perceive to be good teachers and enjoy (dare I say good entertainers should be part of this mix).

3) It will be very careful when the majority of experts think differently than the majority of the populace or its market. It must not force ideas on students but it should try to be salt and light, not confrontational. It should help students know how to hold unpopular positions in a hostile environment. 4) It should emphasize the usefulness and benefit of things like the liberal arts, not treat them as ends in themselves.

8. Of course I've had other thoughts before about the question of costs and competition. I have suggested that a BS could be a shorter version of a richer BA. I supported Keith Drury's sense that the competitive general education portions of college curricula may increasingly be online.

So there you have some more thoughts on the future of education in the US...

Daniels, Zinn, and Higher Education

You may have heard that some emails have surfaced from 2010 in which then Governor Daniels expressed his desire to make sure Howard Zinn was not part of Indiana University's training for secondary school teachers.  Certainly we are all allowed to think of various positions as excrement, and special care should be given to what is taught in public schools.

I've only read a couple chapters of Zinn's book, so I can't speak to its excremental qualities. But the situation is a good reminder about what a quality education and, indeed, what the pursuit of truth is really about.  Knowledge of facts is clearly an important element of education, but arguably the most significant element is learning how to think critically.

A quality education will present multiple perspectives and develop a student's ability to arbitrate between them. Quality colleges are not institutions of indoctrination, as if the truth needs us to hide the alternatives. Quality institutions of higher learning try their best to look at each interpretation of the evidence as objectively as possible, both for strong points and weak points.

So if a liberal professor were to disallow all perspectives but that of Zinn, that would be a bad education.  I imagine there is some of that going around here and there. Similarly, if Daniels in his new role were to try to keep Purdue professors from presenting Zinn, it would immediately disqualify him from his job. I don't imagine he will try that.

It is a reminder, though, that those who cry "truth" the loudest are often those least interested in it. God is not worried about the new atheists, because he knows he exists. Go ahead, present your case to the contrary.

If we are really interested in the truth, we are willing to listen as objectively as possible to varying and contrasting perspectives.  We are even willing to change our mind given a sufficient basis.  God would change his mind about his own existence if you could convince him :-)

Anger and militancy can actually be a sign of insecurity about what one believes, a kind of compensation for lack of substance.  Not always, but often.

Feel free to disagree...