[Presentation Outline]
Roy Alden Atwood
New Saint Andrews College
Association of Classical & Christian Schools ▪ Atlanta, Georgia ▪ June 2004
Introduction
Where colleges lead, primary, secondary, and home schools soon follow. Schools build on the academic and cultural foundations laid by their teachers’ teachers. Unfortunately, Christian high school educators rarely think about the kind of education colleges provide except when their seniors are taking college entrance exams or they’re hiring someone to teach third grade. Christian parents, who unwittingly adopt the dominant pragmatic assumptions about university education, are just as prone as pagans to ask what kind of jobs their children can expect when they graduate from this or that college. As Christian parents, they would never allow the state to take over responsibility for their children’s education, yet they expect colleges to take over the responsibility of businesses and industry for training up the next generation of employees and workers. Even Christians with a classical education background (i.e., those who should know better) tend to follow the received secular wisdom on post-secondary education, which makes “practical” knowledge an idol and a high paying, “secure” job the chief end of man. The disconnect between high standards for our children’s classical Christian primary and secondary education and a general acquiescence to the dominant secular and pragmatic paradigm for their post-secondary education is a kind of academic schizophrenia. That we have grown comfortable with such a dualistic outlook means we have either fundamentally misunderstood or inadequately explained (or both) the presuppositions and goals of classical Christian education itself at all levels. If we don’t understand the connection between high school and college, realize that secular vocationalism is at war with Christian education at every level, and recognize the strategic importance of a classical Christian post-secondary education, then the classical Christian revival at the primary and secondary levels will be short-lived indeed.
I. The American Academic Civil War: The Morrill Act’s Assault on Classical Christian Higher Education
The abandonment of the classical Christian model in higher education and the ascendancy of vocational-technical training at the collegiate level began in earnest with the 1862 Morrill Act, Congress’s opening of the higher education front in America’s “civil war.” It was no accident that the federal government passed what amounted to a direct attack on classical Christian higher education in the midst of the War Between the States, for this war was not just about ending slavery or preserving national unity, but about ending the fundamental relationship of Christ and Christendom to the New Republic. The predominantly Unitarian North opened the academic front in the War with the clear purpose of undermining the place and prominence of America’s historically Christian colleges and universities, whose classical and Christian curricula had mentored virtually every major leader in the New Nation since Harvard’s founding by devout Puritans in 1636. Horace Greeley, the militant abolitionist and socialist editor of the New York Tribune (infamous as the American publisher of Karl Marx’s communist editorials), declared in 1858, “We want a seminary which provides as fitly and thoroughly for the education of the Captains of Industry as Yale or Harvard does for those who are dedicated to either of the Professions.” The Morrill Act was a critical component of the North’s strategic move to displace over time Christian culture with a secularized American civil religion. It attacked America’s classical Christian education tradition and sought to reconstruct the nation on purely economic, technological, scientific, egalitarian, and secular (and most definitely not Christian) foundations. The leaders of this federal academic assault were devoted secularists who understood better than most Christians the religious issues at stake in the national culture war. Horace Mann, the so-called father of the American government schools and a Calvinist-turned-radical-Unitarian, made a show of encouraging “daily reading of the Bible, devotional exercises, and the constant inculcation of the precepts of Christian morality in all the Public schools,” knowing full well that such rhetoric would disarm critics but allow his secular vision to overwhelm American education. Using the rhetoric of religion, Mann sought to outflank Christian evangelicals with meaningless god-words while establishing a new educational system at war with the Word of God (Marsden, The Soul of the American University, pp. 115 and 87). The Christian community has been living in the ruins of the academic civil war ever since.
A. From Covenantal Faithfulness to the American Civil Religion
The Morrill Act changed American higher education by radically shifting the mission and purpose of a college from the shaping of a qualified student’s life and character through faithful Christian nurturing and rigorous study of the classical liberal arts to the egalitarian vocational-technical training of all men and women for business and industry. Before 1862, a young man would pursue his vocation through apprenticing with an experienced, respected mentor only after his Christian worldview foundation and broad, liberal arts education were firmly established. By contrast, the land grant model jettisoned the Christian worldview and marginalized the liberal arts to get to the “real” purpose of education: job training. With federally funded government universities taking the lead, education was fundamentally redefined as vocational training intended to serve the American people and the National Will, not some sectarian interests like serving Christ or His church. Colleges were expected to produce student-workers for industry, to rebuild the nation, to promote the American way, and to boost the economy. Egalitarian democracy needed devotees to the American civil religion and universal education for the masses, regardless of academic abilities, intellectual gifts, or even work ethic, was the way to achieve that goal.
In 1870 there were only 563 colleges in the country and they enrolled few students. They awarded only 9,371 B.A.s, no master’s degrees, and only one doctorate that year. In 1872, Harvard’s freshman class of 200 was the largest in the country, Yale with 131, and Princeton with 110, were next in size. Many schools counted themselves fortunate to attract fifty entering students. Today, there are about 3,600 colleges and universities in the United States, some with more than 40,000 students, but fewer than half of these institutions report having liberal arts programs (http://www.act.org/college_search/fset_col_search.html).
B. Pragmatism’s Rejection of the Classical Christian Model for Higher Education
In the first half of the 19th century, colleges were firmly in the hands of classicists and clerics, and there was considerable academic disdain for the study of experimental or applied science and even more for the teaching of the “useful arts.” Technical education in the United States, therefore, developed in the struggle with the classical colleges, both inside and outside of them. Up until 1816 the number of engineers, or of men who called themselves engineers, never averaged more than two per state; the early internal improvements in the country and the planning of the national capital were directed by European engineers. But the surge of canal building following the success of the Erie Canal created a demand for technically skilled workmen to oversee the operations, and the development of the railroad and machine industries intensified that demand. Amos Eaton established a school in Troy, NY, in 1824 “for the purpose of instructing persons . . . in the application of science to the common purposes of life.” Eaton, an applied scientist who studied chemistry with Benjamin Silliman at Yale, joined with Stephen van Rensselaer, a wealthy landowner and capitalist, to start the Rensselaer School in 1823. In 1849 the school was reorganized by B. Franklin Green, after a careful study of technical education in Europe, along the lines of the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures. Renamed the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, it signaled the ascendancy of professional training for engineers in America. At the same time the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which had incorporated applied science instruction in the curriculum, began to produce civil engineers with training in chemistry, physics, and higher mathematics as well as practical engineering.
The success of these pioneering efforts outside of the established colleges had its effect on them, at first with the inclusion of experimental science and later with the incorporation of practical studies in the curriculum. Not until 1854 did the first engineer graduate from Harvard, and by 1892 there had been only 155. Harvard’s reluctance to redirect its mission toward vocationalism was an important factor contributing to the establishment of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1862, the year the Morrill Act was passed. At Yale in 1846 the corporation reluctantly allowed two professors, John P. Norton and Benjamin Silliman, to establish extension courses to teach agricultural chemistry and other practical subjects, largely in response to the pressure of Norton’s father, a powerful alumnus of the college. Until 1860 the enterprise was housed, ironically, in the chapel attic. That year Joseph Sheffield endowed the venture, thereby creating the Sheffield Scientific School. It was this school that granted the first Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States and offered the first course in mechanical engineering. Others quickly followed. By the late 1870s, scientific research in chemistry had begun in earnest at Johns Hopkins, and courses in “industrial chemistry” or “chemical technology” were undertaken at various colleges.
These developments were not without opposition, of course. When Ira Remsen went to teach chemistry at Williams College and requested funds for laboratory facilities like those in German universities, school official responded: “You will please keep in mind that this is a college and not a technical school. The students who come here are not to be trained as chemists or geologists or physicists. They are to be taught the fundamental truths of all sciences. The object aimed at is culture, not practical knowledge.” But after the Morrill Act began giving federal aid to the state for the support of agriculture and the mechanic arts, legislatures that had been deaf to all appeals for technical instruction quickly accepted the federal money and voted to support these new types of schools. Soon even the liberal arts colleges were caught up in the federal and industrial funding spree and added departments of engineering and other applied fields. (David Noble, America By Design, pp. 20-31)
II. The Triumph of Pragmatism and Vocational-Technical Training
The drift away from the classical liberal arts at the undergraduate level had many reasons: a failure to teach subsequent generations why the liberal arts were important, the rise of the Industrial Giants and the financial pressure they put on the academy, the increased demand for better technology and technical proficiencies, and the federal encroachment into higher education through the Morrill Act. But these developments alone do not adequately explain why educators so readily abandoned the liberal arts with a biblical worldview for a secularized job-training program over a short 30-year span. The collapse of education’s Christian and classical foundations was due primarily to the church’s drift into spiritual and theological liberalism and the ability of American pragmatism to fill the vacuum the weakened church created. Pragmatist scholars William James, John Dewey, Robert Park, George Herbert Mead, and others all contributed to the theoretical justification for educational pragmatism and “practical” learning. Many of these prominent Pragmatists had grown up in Baptist and evangelical circles. They embraced a sacred-secular dichotomy and believed practical skills could be taught without religious assumptions and that such practical neutrality could unify an increasingly ethnically and religiously diverse nation (thanks to massive post-Civil War immigration from Europe). The country could be built, they reasoned, on practical and useful skills quite separate from religious concerns. An economically productive America was more desirable and more important than an America established on the truth, beauty, or goodness of the Christian Gospel.
A. The Wedding of Industry and Higher Education
Many of the early technical colleges and programs were funded generously by the fabulously wealthy Captains of Industry at the turn of the 20th century. The DuPonts, Rockefellers, Stanfords, Carnegies, and others made millions in oil, chemicals, electricity, railroads and communication, often using less than ethical means. To improve their public images and to provide better trained workers for their businesses, they turned philanthropical and created colleges and universities, libraries and other educational institutions. For example, Joseph Pulitzer, one of the late 19th century’s two (with William Randolph Hearst) scandalous but very wealthy “Yellow Journalism” publishers, wanted to improve the reputation and social status of his papers and of the journalism craft itself. Pulitzer offered about $5 million to any Ivy League college or university that would start a journalism school. In a day when the average annual salary was about $100, the sum was astronomical, but Harvard, Yale, and others all turned him away because they did not (yet) want to sell out their classical liberal arts program for a mess of vocational pottage. However, Columbia University was facing serious financial difficulties at the time and in 1912 decided to take Pulitzer’s money and start a school of journalism. The prestigious Ivy League thus prostituted itself to industry. Thereafter, most liberal arts colleges would merely quibble over the price.
B. Specialization Takes Command
After America’s industrial giants and the federal government provided the funding necessary for colleges to “add” vocational programs in “useful” and “practical” skills, even the staunchest classical Christian liberal arts colleges felt parental, alumni, and peer pressures to embrace the new “specialized training.” Soon the undergraduate liberal arts were reduced to an anemic “core curriculum” and specialization took command in the form of academic majors, the first being offered at Johns Hopkins University in 1878. Within 50 years, almost every liberal arts college had succumbed to offering “majors” or specialized degrees at the undergraduate level. Specialization that had once been reserved for the “masters” level was now displacing the general education of the classical liberal arts degree. General education was reduced at most institutions to half or less of their four year baccalaureate curriculum. Students identified themselves by their major or degree program, which only encouraged further disdain for the liberal arts and general, i.e., non-professional, education. Some fields like law and medicine kept a liberal arts bachelor’s degree as a prerequisite, but many other fields like engineering preferred to abandon the undergraduate liberal arts core with its own voc-tech regimen.
In the first decade following the passage of the Morrill Act, the number of engineering schools jumped from six to 70. By 1880 there were 85 and by 1917 there were 126 undergraduate engineering schools in the United States. Between 1870 and the outbreak of the WWI, the annual number graduates from engineering colleges grew from 100 to 4,300; the relative number of engineers in the whole population multiplied fifteenfold. The Morrill Act specified that the new land-grant schools shall, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies . . . teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts . . . in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life.” While some engineering educators, seeking to enhance their professional prestige, tried to emulate the liberal-arts professors, others attacked such pretensions as elitist and vacuous. Professor Robert Thurston, scorning the inclusion of culture studies in the engineering curriculum, argued that mixing “literature, history, and other non-professional studies with engineering” was ridiculous, especially as “in one now famous institution of learning, [where] ‘biblical exegesis’ constituted a portion of the regular course in civil engineering.” Engineering schools (and their accrediting bodies) are notorious to this day for pressuring university curriculum committees to reduce the number of liberal arts requirements in their already gutted core curriculum (Noble, America By Design, p. 30).
III. The Dissolution of the Christian Higher Education: Sowing the Seeds of Our Own Destruction
Christian colleges historically have been more resistant to such forces for change and to the temptations of easy money, but they are not immune. After the Higher Education Act of 1965, and the dramatic increase in the availability of federal financial aid, most Christian colleges became intimately tied to state institutions. And they became increasingly difficult to distinguish.
A. Professionalism in Education: From Character to Credentials
Professionalism and professions became the buzzwords of the new secular vocational learning. Law, medicine, engineering, and other disciplines yearning for “professional” status soon formed associations that specified the technical training required of their members, the ethics of their practitioners, and the licensing system by which to limit entrance to the professions. Such professionalism meant that one had the proper technical credentials, and non-technical factors such as character, religion, and personal beliefs were irrelevant or even undesirable. For a time, Christian colleges that accepted federal money could insist on “spiritual” and character qualifications for their faculty, but once affirmative action became the norm, Christian institutions were forced to end such “discriminatory” practices. Professional credentials, of the paper, secular sort, became the primary standard by which to judge prospective professors. Shared religious beliefs, shared spiritual values, common moral standards, and other presumably non-professional qualifications slowly drifted from the scene. And with them went the Christian character of the institutions.
B. Accreditation: By What Standard? By Whom?
Accreditation is supposed to be a peer system of quality assurance in higher education, yet in the past 20 years it has become a means of imposing secularism and ideological uniformity. Academic quality is less important than social and political conformity to secular ideologues. For example, in 1990, the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools deferred accreditation of Baruch College of the City University of New York on the grounds that it has a “paucity of minority representation on the faculty and in administration.” This predominantly Jewish institution had 18 percent minorities on its full-time faculty, but with 70 percent minorities among its student body, the faculty minorities were deemed “insufficient.” Baruch’s president Joe Segall later wrote, “It is hard to decide whether higher education has entered a new era of McCarthyism or a Kafkaesque trial process.” What he found particularly offensive were the accusations of “racism” if the college did not bend to the accrediting team’s capricious racial quota demands. In 1991 the Mid Atlantic accrediting body brought pressure against conservative Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, for its position on forbidding the ordination of women and thus restricting women from positions on its board. It took political pressure from then Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander to delay the accreditation reauthorization of the Mid Atlantic States Association itself for its heavy handed tactics of threatening institutions with a loss of accreditation to impose its particular ideological whims on religious colleges and seminaries. Robert Atwell, president of the American Council on Education, declared “diversity” as the driving engine of academic accreditation, even though such “diversity” would create unhealthy uniformity among institutions: “The regional accrediting bodies are made up of widely varying colleges and universities, which are quite vigorous in defending and maintaining their distinct identities and missions. However, diversity among institutions does not satisfy the need for diversity within institutions . . . [M]any people in higher education have come to understand the critical importance of recognizing and cultivating the diversity that exists among the various cultures that compose the United States” (Marsden, The Soul of the American University, pp. 436-437; Roche, Fall of the Ivory Tower, pp. 119-121).
C. Universal Education: Egalitarian Neutrality and Multicultural Relativity
One of the important secularist principles driving the Morrill Act was universal education. With a messianic view of education, secularists believed that ignorance is one of the greatest evils in society. “No child should be left behind” lest evil ignorance endure and corrupt society. But with the vocational-technical turn in college curricula and the professional turn in faculty qualifications, the principles of egalitarianism and relativity were simply extended to the student body and institutions overall. Stories of the absurdity of political correctness and multicultural irrationality on today’s secular campuses are legion. What is more absurd is that Christian institutions are now embroiled in similar controversies because of the loss of their spiritual backbone and Christian worldview have transformed them into the image of their financial creator: the Federal Leviathan.
D. The Federal Financial Aid Leviathan
The escalation of college costs and the degradation of faithful Christian colleges over the past 40 years is directly related to the federal encroachment into higher education through its “financial aid” program. The student financial aid system, established under the Higher Education Act of 1965, produced a system of fiscal irresponsibility and lack of accountability that increased college expenses far ahead of inflation. The major cost factors today are:
1. Faculty and administration: Student population in Washington State declined in the 1980s, but during the same period each public university’s administration more than doubled, and the University of Washington’s actually quadrupled. Between 1975 and 1985 faculty grew 6 percent, student populations grew 10 percent and non-teaching staff grew 60 percent. Now there is one non-teaching staff member for every 8 college students, outnumbering faculty two to one.
2. Benefits: With federal and state monies behind colleges and universities, higher education went on a spending binge adding generous benefit packages to its personnel costs: health insurance, retirement funds, eye and dental care, and much more. As the faculty and staff receiving these generous benefits have begun to retire, the real costs are coming home and putting institutions at financial risk.
3. Government regulations: These cost American businesses between $600 billion and $1.6 trillion annually. Most campuses must have attorneys and “compliance officers” whose only jobs are keeping up with the latest edicts from Washington, D.C. Key regulatory areas that cost schools are “assessment” (required of all institutions receiving Title IV funding), OSHA and ADA requirements for safety and handicap accessibility, Title IX affirmative action policies, and the Federal Student Financial Aid system itself.
4. Programs/Facilities/Services: Vocational-technical education, unlike liberal arts programs, makes enormous and expensive demands on institutions to have the latest computer systems, media, technical libraries, labs, technical services, career placement centers, etc. To prepare graduates for their industries, colleges must look more and more like those industries, but as schools they do not generate industry profits. Without industry subsidies, soaring costs soon overwhelm them.
5. Admissions/Student assistance: In six years the costs of admissions budgets increased 64 percent. Harvard has more than a dozen staff members and a half million dollar budget. One college recently spent $700 per student on admissions information materials alone. Between 1990 and 1993, University of California’s need based financial aid increased 88 percent from $49 million to $92 million a year (no wonder California is bankrupt);
6. Deferred maintenance: Most of the nation’s biggest institutions have deferred maintenance and repairs so that actual costs to fix their crumbling infrastructures will run into the billions. Michigan’s 14 institutions have a total of $492 million in deferred maintenance waiting for funding. California’s public universities need nearly $6.5 billion in maintenance and seismic upgrades; and
7. Overexpansion: Between 1950 and 1990 college and university enrollments grew 400 percent (see Roche, The Fall of the Ivory Tower, pp. 176-177). This expansion was possible only with the infusion of federal financial aid dollars and the admission of
E. The Church’s Abdication on Higher Education: Waffling on Creation and Eschatology
Only six years after their settlement in Massachusetts’s wilderness, the Puritans established what soon became one of the world’s most reputable Christian colleges. Higher education was for them a high priority in community and civilization building. During its early decades, New England had one of the highest per capita concentrations of university-educated men anywhere in the world. By establishing a college so early, the Puritans laid the foundation for New England’s dominance in American higher education for the next three centuries. As late as America’s first modern universities, few of the key leaders lacked New England connections.
The Puritans of the 1630s, it is helpful to recall, were living as close to the era of Thomas Aquinas as we are to theirs. So while we inevitably refract our understanding of them through what has happened since, a more balanced appreciation of their concerns may be drawn in terms of their own history. They were still in many ways people of the Middle Ages. The Reformation had modified their medieval outlook, and glimmers of modernity exerted some influence on them. Still, the problems they addressed were largely those of medieval Christendom. Nonetheless, they were steeped in the Scriptures, orthodox theology, and the historic confessions and creeds. They understood the strategic value of Christian higher education because they understood its place biblically and historically. They took for granted some deeply entrenched patterns that had defined advanced learning for centuries in the Western world; but as reformers they were also ready to bend the patterns to suit their purposes. Education was a key covenantal part of their Christian mission.
The church’s abdication on higher education today is not surprising considering that the church has compromised on its alpha and omega, the beginning and the end: creation and eschatology. With churches so muddled on biblical first principles, it is not surprising that they find it increasingly difficult to maintain a distinctive Christian mission and to avoid parroting what the secularists are doing in their apparently successful institutions.
III. Christian Colleges Remade in the Image of the Secular University
A. Majors Unlimited: Abandoning Education for Specialized Training Ad Infinitum
The idea of an academic “major” is a curricular newcomer, barely 125 years old. Introduced into American education at Johns Hopkins in 1878, it has become the centerpiece of college curricula to such an extent that “what is your major?” is one of the questions most commonly asked of undergraduates on and off campus (Mannoia, Jr., Christian Liberal Arts, p. 25). Christian colleges followed the secularists in adopting specialized training, but now face the daunting task of providing majors in virtually any and every lawful field. Once they abandoned the classical model, they were left with no curricular brakes. Why not offer any and every major a student wants? Nothing in principle can stop the explosion of academic majors. Only the practical problems of staffing and facilities stand in the way of them becoming all things to all people all the time.
B. Enrollment-Driven Institutions
The push for universal educational democracy made increased enrollment a goal in itself. State and federally funded colleges became dependent on increasing enrollment: the more students, the more money they received from the government. Attracting more students meant appealing to them by giving them anything they wanted: more majors, more fun and games, lower admission standards, less work, fewer “core” courses, etc. The dumbing down of post-secondary education was off at a full gallop.
C. Faculty Members as Replaceable Parts
Once enrollment-driven colleges and universities became prominent, and more and more students poured through the doors, colleges were forced to increase the professorial ranks just to keep up. With statist, “non-sectarian” schools driving the higher education system in the country, faculty selection became dependent principally on paper credentials, earned degrees, publications, service activities, etc. Moral character, spiritual maturity, and “non-professional” qualifications began to fall off the list of required and even preferred qualifications. Once affirmative action and multiculturalism got their clutches into the system, nothing but “professional” credentials mattered. All references to character were either outlawed or restricted.
D. Dorms and Rec Centers: Institutionalizing Cultural Immaturity
Enrollment-driven institutions are easily trapped in a vicious cycle of building more and more housing and entertainment facilities to handle their bloated student numbers, and they must keep those expensive dorms and rec centers at full capacity or they become financial drains. Thus, they must keep attracting more and more student hordes, qualified or not, to feed the beast they’ve created. More dorms and play rooms—with fewer and fewer rules and moral restraints—are needed to keep the immature and immoral students happy and coming back for more. Dormitories dominate housing on virtually every college campus, Christian or not. But dorms, by their very nature and design, tend to breed immaturity, immorality, and irresponsibility. This is consistent with the radically anti-Christian origin of modern college dormitories, dating from the early 20th century when German Bauhaus architects quite deliberately applied their modernist-socialist vision to apartment living and created college dormitories as "living machines." Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus movement, invented the modern university dormitory at Bauhaus as a way of promoting communal living, breaking down sexual mores, and reinforcing a revolutionary, socialist way of life. Despite four-color brochures to the contrary, no college can provide adequate supervision or accountability for sometimes hundreds of 18- to 21-year-olds living in the same space with other 20-somethings typically acting as the “residence advisors.” Anyone who has lived in a dorm knows that the reality of life there usually contradicts the institution’s official rhetoric and the Bible’s standards for holy living in a covenant family.
E. Federal Financial Aid Hegemony
The takeover of student financial aid by the federal government, ostensibly to “help the kids,” became a way of exerting the state’s coercive influence over colleges, especially historically Christian ones, and establishing a deeply entrenched culture of financial dependency on the state. In 1992, Congress reauthorized the Higher Education Act and took over complete control of the student financial aid system (that Act is currently up for reconsideration in Congress now). The government nationalized financial aid by removing private banks and lending institutions from the aid process and began making loans and grants directly to students through their aid beneficiaries—the colleges and universities themselves. But the one who pays calls the shots. By taking complete control of the national student financial aid process, the government removed the personal responsibility and accountability that banks or lending institutions previously demanded of students and their parents to show. Default rates have soared. The federal financial aid system has encouraged colleges and universities to be lazy and inefficient, but federal aid is used to cover up the costs of institutional bloat and bureaucracy. Students now graduate with massive debt. At Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, an historically Christian institution, 67 percent of its students graduate with an average debt load of $33,649. Sixty percent of the students at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, WA, graduate with an average debt of $24,272. At Simpson College in Iowa, a whopping 91 percent of graduates leave with an average debt of $20,940 (“America’s Best Colleges, 2004,” U.S. News and World Report). Despite all the tax dollars thrown at students to “aid” them, student indebtedness is pandemic and growing worse each year. Worse, the federal government has used its massive and nearly pervasive college financial aid system to enforce the dominant secular social and political agenda—multiculturalism (polytheism), “diversity,” political correctness, etc.—on the students and colleges that take its money. Christian colleges dependent on the federal aid will soon likely face the threat of loss of aid support if they “discriminate” against same-sex couples in their admissions policies. Christian college graduates may long to serve Christ alone, but most will have become slaves to two masters in the process of paying for their education. Government subsidy of higher education has not only removed most financial constraints from college and university administrations, but put Christian colleges and their graduates at the mercy of their federal master they have bowed to for years.
F. Career Placement: The End of Christian Higher Education
What is the purpose of a college education? Why do Christians go to college? The common answer is (though not put this way), “Seek first a job with college voc-tech training and all those other religious things can be added later.” Since the Morrill Act, Christian students, parents, faculty, boards, and churches have more and more regarded colleges as job placement centers. In this, they have blindly followed the secularist agenda in undermining Christian higher education and creating a culture of dependency on the state. Industry wants trainees trained at taxpayer expense. Businesses compete for the best college trainees and ignore the rest (who now have no job, a poor education, and a bucket-load of debt). Job placement and career services have become major selling points for choosing a college. How many of graduates got jobs last year?
IV. The Reformation of Christian Higher Education Is Intimately Tied to the Reformation of Other Key Areas
A. Reforming education
Recovering a vision for classical Christian higher education is crucial to the reformation of Christian education at all academic levels. Secular higher education has convinced Christians that college is where job training begins. But Christians should know better and stop swallowing the secularist propaganda first offered with the Morrill Act. The messianic character of American education, as R.J. Rushdoony put it, is but a cheap rip off of Christian education rooted in the character of the Messiah. Those involved in classical Christian education must recognize the difference at the collegiate level, if we are to have a reformation of Christian education that lasts more than one or two generations.
B. Reforming business
Because of the messianic character of American education, businesses have looked to higher education to solve its research problems, personnel training needs, and more—all conveniently at taxpayer expense, of course. Until Christian businesses (including classical Christian schools) reform how they raise up the next generations of Christian workers (through business-sponsored apprenticeships, for example), Christian higher education will suffer from their abdication of covenantal responsibility. Businesses will continue their dependence on government-funded vocational training of poorly educated widgets and pressure colleges to do their job of training workers for them.
C. Reforming government
The church, Christian families, businesses, and Christian educators have all abdicated their higher education responsibilities to the state. Extracting the state from our socialist education system and putting it back in its covenantal place will be no easy task. But until we do, classical Christian education will face the enmity of our messianic state system.
D. Reforming the church
A church that fails to keep troth to her Lord by promoting and supporting Christian higher education cannot be surprised when subsequent generations exchange the nurture and admonition of the Lord for a mess of secularist vocational pottage. And a church that supports Christian education only through high school is double-minded and sowing the seeds of its own destruction.
Conclusion
Higher education inevitably influences education downstream at the primary and secondary levels. If we expect the nascent reforms in our classical Christian schools to endure, we must give more careful attention to the revival of classical Christian higher education. The truth is that even today’s brightest college graduates, with the best classical Christian high school education available, would not meet the minimal admission standards of almost any classical Christian college 150 years ago. Our classical Christian secondary schools today have made great strides, but we still have a long uphill climb—just to reach bottom. Colleges routinely produce highly trained, poorly educated graduates, and that threatens the very future of the classical Christian schools where these academically feeble graduates will inevitably teach. We need to reform our thinking about and approach to Christian higher education following the same biblical principles that inspired our classical Christian school revival. We must stop abandoning the principles that have guided the revival of classical Christian education when we face the college campus gate.
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