Feature
Course Corrections
Whither the Evangelical Colleges?
In the heavenly city of American Evangelicalism, there are many mansions—high-profile mega-churches (Willow Creek, Saddleback), international NGOs (World Vision), advocacy groups (Focus on the Family)—but the most valuable of these mansions are the 110 colleges that make up the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). With over 325,000 students and 22,000 full-time and part-time faculty, the CCCU schools are the intellectual pumping-stations of Evangelical creativity. Rick Warren, the senior pastor of Saddleback, is a graduate of a CCCU school, as is Bill Hybels of Willow Creek; so is Wess Stafford of Compassion International, and Peter Greer of Hope International.
Yet, the network of Christian colleges that gleams in the sunlight as the ivory tower of Evangelicalism is neither as stable nor as influential as it wishes or appears. Five years ago, I surveyed the overall state of Evangelical Christian higher education in the United States, and came away impressed by three ominous developments:
• That the financial health of Evangelical colleges was eroding even in the midst of record good times for higher-education funding;
• That the need to survive in this environment was driving Evangelical colleges to recruit ever-downwards on the scale of qualified students, simply in pursuit of warm, tuition-paying bodies, and ever-upwards in pursuit of managerial presidents; and
• That the faculties of Evangelical colleges were sitting surprisingly loose beside the tenets that were inscribed in their employers’ faith-statements.
When I called attention to these things, the response I got included a few amen’s and a few injured rationalizations for the incidents I’d cited. But mostly they elicited a frozen silence, the kind you hear when the divorced father shows up at his kiddies’ birthday party.
Silence, however, is not a healthy environment for truth, and the truth of the last five years has plainly been that the instability within Christian higher education has only gotten more pronounced, especially in the midst of an epic economic downfall.
Markers of Health
For the sake of benchmarking, let’s focus on the 110 colleges and universities that make up the CCCU; and let me focus within that on the fifteen schools with which I’ve had some practical contact over the years, so that I can speak from what I know. This sample includes Wheaton, which is acknowledged on almost all hands as the “flagship” of Evangelical higher education’s institutions, plus a number of the CCCU’s top-tier schools: Gordon, Calvin, Westmont, Covenant, and Messiah.
Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College, and a member of the National Council for the Humanities. He is currently the William Garwood Visiting Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.
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