Note: From Academically Speaking (Eerdmans, 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
I have spent three decades in academia, have visited nearly one hundred campuses and have made a concerted effort these past few years to keep academic leaders informed about the state of Christian higher education. I’m sometimes asked, therefore, for my advice regarding the future of the movement. Have I discovered any silver bullet that will help Christian colleges weather the current storms and thrive in the future? Unfortunately I have not, but I do have some thoughts on the subject nonetheless.
Time to Quit Reshuffling Deck Chairs
Needless to say, the big picture seems daunting. Carleton College economist Nathan Grawe has become the go-to downer at academic conferences in describing the demographic realities of fewer high school graduates, especially in the Midwest and Northeast (which, of course, also happen to be the regions with the highest density of colleges and universities). In The Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Change, Grawe argues that low US fertility rates over the past decade will result in a significant decline in the number of potential college students by the mid-2020s. While these trends have already impacted the Midwest and Northeast, they will affect other areas as well. Thus, colleges will continue to grapple with declining enrollments and the ripple effects on campus budgets and infrastructure.
In August 2022, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a feature article, “The Shrinking of Higher Education,” which noted that in spring 2022, enrollment at colleges and universities nationwide was down 7.4 percent from spring 2020, and demographic trends continue to look ominous for the future. Moreover, surveys indicate that public confidence in higher education is declining, and employers demonstrate an increasing openness to hiring employees without a college degree. Not to be outdone, that same month, Inside Higher Ed featured a piece by Temple University president Jason Wingard entitled “Higher Ed Must Change or Die,” which reinforced these alarming trends. It’s no wonder that a veteran provost once remarked to me over a pint at an academic conference, “We’re all just in the business of managing decline.”…
Christian colleges and universities need to look more deeply than programs and buildings to understand their core value. For such institutions, their primary asset is not high-tech classrooms, gourmet food, stimulating chapel speakers or trendy majors. It’s their ability to provide students not just with what students think they’re looking for – preparation for a successful career – but with what we as Christians know they’re really looking for: authentic community.
In The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, Andy Crouch observes that the most basic human need is to be known. We are wired for embodied, dependent relationships with other humans and cannot fully develop as humans without such community. Writes Crouch, “Only when we know and are known by others can we become fully ourselves.” [Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, 29] Throughout history, however, humans have sought to insulate themselves from relationships and to control nature and other humans. The features of our technological age, such as digital devices and social media, amplify this age-old tendency and give us ever more effective tools to attempt to control our environment and to create simulated rather than real community.
Crouch identifies the deeper threat in our technological age as what Jesus called “Mammon” – a force at work in the world throughout history that seeks to treat humans as objects for economic gain. Crouch writes, “God wishes to bring forth the flourishing of creation through the flourishing of persons. Mammon wants to put all persons into the service of things and ultimately to bring about the exploitation of all of creation.” [Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For, 78] Or to put it differently, our core problem isn’t that we’re hooked on iPhones and our attention is being co-opted by algorithm-based advertising. It’s that we inhabit a technological society that fundamentally tilts away from the qualities of community, embodiment and presence that make us human and give us fulfillment. That’s why sociologists today often point to loneliness as the quintessentially modern epidemic.
The Christian Edge: Authentic Communities
Christian institutions, however, can provide a compelling alternative. At its inception, Christianity asserted a countercultural way of life in which people were valued as real persons who formed authentic communities, even across the traditional social boundary lines of male and female, Jew and non-Jew, slave and free. Concerning Christian higher education, therefore, while there’s no secret formula that will magically produce success, if Christian colleges and universities have any edge on the competition, it’s this: because of their rootedness in Christian truth, such institutions have the opportunity to create authentic communities that are most attuned to the basic desires of the human soul. As David Brooks wrote in The Social Animal, “Your unconsciousness wants to entangle you in the thick web of relations that are the essence of human flourishing.” [David Brooks, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Char- acter and Achievement, xviii] In fact, the remarkable growth of the Christian study center movement stems in large part from the ability of such centers to create vibrant communities where students and faculty find a sense of belonging within a large and in some cases impersonal public university. For Christian colleges and universities, the key to institutional flourishing, I would suggest, is not one single thing, but a variety of features united by the common theme of providing students, faculty and staff with the ability to be truly known.
Fortunately, authentic community is not just a Christian add-on to university life, but is an important contributor to quality education as well. Robert Detweiler, in The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs, surveyed graduates of US universities to ascertain the key features of undergraduate education that yield the most successful long-term results. The most important factors, he concludes, are a course of study that spans a broad range of subjects, engaging pedagogy, and most importantly, “relational learning” – that is, a sense of authentic community characterized by meaningful relationships between professors and students. So if authentic community is crucial both for human flourishing and for quality academics, how might Christian colleges capitalize on that insight?
Formation in Community in and beyond College
First, colleges may need to invert the approach to undergraduate education that many institutions take – that of starting with the student’s major and building out around it. Resource-challenged colleges often assign lower-level general education courses to adjunct professors or create introductory “supercourses” of hundreds of students so that they can devote their primary institutional resource – full-time professors – to upper-level major courses. But if students form communities early in their college experience (or don’t form them at all), and academic mentoring is truly important, it makes more sense to invest full-time professors in those lower-level general education courses that are formative to students’ academic and personal growth, and to keep those courses to a manageable size. Moreover, it’s more likely to be upper-level specialized courses, not general education, that benefit from adjunct professors who are active in the professional world.
Of course, shifting the educational model from preparation in majors to formation in community means hiring professors who are primarily committed to engaging with students and developing mentoring relationships with them, both inside and outside the classroom. Christian colleges and universities have done much to overcome Mark Noll’s “scandal of the evangelical mind” in the past two decades, and they should continue to hire and support Christian scholars. But a key concern in the hiring process must also be identifying professors who are also committed to the formation of their students. It doesn’t have to be one or the other. The best scholars in my university experiences – John Walton and George Marsden – were also my most formative mentors….
If the chief asset of a Christian college is authentic community, it can also benefit by extending that sense of belonging to students beyond graduation. In other words, a thriving Christian institution will view students as clients who engage in the academic community in various ways throughout their lives…. A more authentically human approach to education, as described in Chris Gallagher’s College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World, is for institutions to view their students as lifelong clients in the learning process, whose need for education in our fast-changing society will continue throughout their lives. A wise, discerning use of online education, for example, can enable colleges to cultivate learning communities across the generations, yielding both educational and financial benefits.
Reconceiving a college’s prime value as providing a vibrant learning community entails a risk: its value is not as readily apparent to outside observers as a new media center or an indoor climbing wall…. That’s why, to return to an earlier theme, sales is important in academia. When I was a young professor, I assumed that it was Admissions’ job to fill my classroom with students; my job was to teach them. That was naive then, and it’s unrealistic in today’s environment. Professors are colleges’ most valuable assets, and they would do well to put aside any academic scruples about “sales” and enthusiastically promote the value of their school to prospective students and parents. Christian colleges need to develop a shared language to describe their value and ensure that everyone, from the grounds crew to the president, embraces their roles as spokespersons for a campus rooted in authentic community.
Adaptability on a Human Scale
Of course, creating academic communities in which each member knows and is known by others has implications for size. Human-centered education cannot be scaled up infinitely because a skilled professor can only teach and mentor a finite number of students, and Student Life staff members can only invest in the lives of so many individuals…. Like a roller-coaster ride, formative education takes place in groups small enough to fit into the actual cars that careen around the tracks….
As individuals, we are called to contentment, to disciplined living within our means. Continually chasing a bigger house, a higher salary, and more stuff is a sign of spiritual immaturity, not wisdom. Perhaps Christian colleges and universities can adopt a similar mind-set. Doing so would require that we learn to see our primary value not in the new things that we initiate but in the healthy communities that we cultivate and the daily activities that take place on our campuses. While that might sound like a simple change, it may be quite radical. Imagine a college president going to a board meeting not with a list of new programs launched or the latest building project, but with a compilation of how many students visited professors in their offices, how many classes under twenty-five students the college offered or how many non-music majors performed in the university’s musical production.
That’s not to say that we no longer seek change or innovation. As I have suggested, the Christian college with a strong communal core can become more adaptable, not less, in its peripheral programs and offerings…. Christian colleges that prioritize the human scale will foster innovations that enable them to be healthier, more thriving communities, not simply ones that promise continual expansion….
Second-Mountain Colleges: Called to Faithfulness
Twenty-seven years ago, I emerged from Notre Dame, PhD in hand, ready to take on the academic world. A $28,000 starting salary at Grand Canyon University wasn’t a lot, but it was a foothold in professional academia. From there, I climbed the academic ladder for two decades, and it was easy to assume that progress toward bigger and better things was the Christian’s inevitable calling. Eventually – in the fall of 2018, to be exact – I discovered otherwise. God calls us to faithfulness, not to progress, and the direction of that calling might be upward or downward, at least from a secular perspective. Through no plan of my own, I became what David Brooks calls a “Second-Mountain” person for whom the quest for professional success is overshadowed by devotion to deeper qualities of faithfulness, community and meaningful service.
What would it mean for Christian colleges and universities to become Second-Mountain institutions, less concerned with achievement and outward success and more devoted to becoming the sorts of academic communities in which individuals know and are known by others, colleges that perhaps do not increase in size or resources but grow in faithfulness to their calling? Such institutions need to be wise and market-savvy, of course. But in a broader perspective, being market-savvy means understanding what kind of life students as human beings desire and organizing themselves accordingly. Doing so might be not only their competitive advantage in the contested terrain of higher education, but also their deeper contribution to the common good in a troubled world.
Rick Ostrander, executive director, Michigan Christian Study Center
