Christian Colleges: Status Go

For America’s Christian colleges, status quo is not 1965’s slogan. The babies of the “boom” are laying siege at admissions offices. Uncle Sam is preparing yet more millions in college aid. Long-cherished academic patterns are facing harsh searchlights.

The 1965 Christian college landscape includes the ultra-modern lines of Oral Roberts University (see story on page 47), but Upland College in California is dead, and New Jersey’s Shelton College may be dying.

There are hybrids: Azusa Pacific College, merging Los Angeles Pacific and Azusa College; the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, from two Lutheran seminaries of different denominations.

Independent Bible colleges still dot the continent, from the tropical campus of Miami Bible College to the near-wilderness outpost of Sexsmith, Alberta, where the Peace River Bible Institute survives cold and isolation. But the trend is toward a broadening curriculum (the Assemblies of God decided August 30 to call their Central Bible Institute in Springfield, Missouri, a “college,” in line with an expanding liberal arts program), and Bible labels seem to be out of vogue (latest defector: the Disciples’ College of the Bible in Lexington, Kentucky, which opens this fall as Lexington Theological Seminary).

Even the grand old lady, Chicago’s tuitionless Moody Bible Institute, has joined the self-examination corps. For two years the staff has mulled its destination, polling both alumni and students for ideas. This month, what is described officially as “an innovation” will be proposed to the board. If approved, it will be carried out next year.

Most unusual program change this fall is Northwestern College’s “quinary calendar.” The Minneapolis school now parcels its year into five eight-week terms. Students will take two or three courses at a time and graduate after three years. Electives are being weeded out in an “economy and efficiency” drive.

Wheaton College in Illinois plans similar but less extreme consolidation. It is limiting students to four courses (except in music and graduate work) and counteracting the “natural proliferation” of specialized elective courses, reports Dr. Hudson T. Armerding, installed as president earlier this year.

Wheaton’s sagging summer school turnout spurred a special study to be completed by January. Calendar and other revisions could result. In 1963, the college had 1,059 students (cumulative) for two short summer terms. The 1965 figure was 753. Expanding summer offerings at other Chicago area campuses make “competition three times as keen,” Armerding said.

Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, also expects to install a three- or four-course plan, under a quarterly calendar, probably by fall of 1966. Also on tap are team teaching (several teachers lecturing in one course), honors and individual study, and emphasis on study abroad. Unlike Northwestern, Westmont hopes to reduce the general education requirements and allow more electives.

Westmont is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary with completion of a $.2 million dormitory. Soon it will break ground for a library-classroom building and chapel addition as part of a $4,375,000 ten-year plan. The school president, Dr. Roger J. Voskuyl, speaks for a new look at federal aid:

“We would like to be entirely independent, but support from private sources too often has been inadequate.” He is not unhappy at the results. “Never once has the federal government tried to tell us what kind of building to put up or program to run,” he stated at a recent meeting of the seventy-six-member Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges, which he once served as president.

Current federal aid to colleges will look like loose change if the Senate approves the higher education bill that passed the House August 26. The bill would provide $580 million for college construction during the next fiscal year, as well as $64 million in scholarships to needy students, backing of loans for middle-income students, $129 mil lion in payments to low-income students for jobs on campus, $50 million for community service projects by colleges, $70 million for library science aid, and $30 million to bolster “underdeveloped” colleges, mostly Negro ones in the South.

Typical of colleges tempted by federal money is Taylor University, which faces major building needs at its Upland, Indiana, campus, because it froze construction for five years awaiting a move to Fort Wayne that never materialized. A $7 million program is on the boards for the next five years or so. A new residence hall was begun in April and opened this month. In a year there will be three more new buildings, including a science center that got a $410,000 U. S. grant and a $517,000 loan. It will be the campus’ first structure not built by private funds.

Dr. Milo A. Rediger, who will be installed November 10 as Taylor’s new president, said, “We can’t act as if there is no federal aid. If we do, we may have to get out of education.…” The college still holds generally to its traditional Christian principle that “people ought to pay for their own education,” he said.

Cascade College in Portland, Oregon, less than one-third as big as Taylor, landed a $1.5 million dormitory loan last month.

Among those rejecting aid is the country’s biggest fundamentalist school. Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. It is just opening a $1 million dining hall that will serve the entire student body of 3,500. Wheaton’s biggest men’s residence hall, tagged at $2 million, will be built this year with private money.

Among schools wholly dependent on private support, Columbia (South Carolina) Bible College has an unusual “faith” plan in which faculty pay (“allowances”) is not guaranteed. The monthly gap between $12,500 tuition income and $20,000 payroll must be filled by gifts.

Last year, this worked ten months. In the other two, 85 per cent allowances were paid. Some belt-tightening resulted, with the staff reduced by six and certain “peripheral” programs cut, such as required social service for freshmen. Another casualty was practice teaching of Bible courses in Carolina schools, but Dean Janies M. Hatch said court decisions have eliminated this as a career possibility anyway.

CBC also raised its tuition, formerly one of the lowest in the country, and President G. Allen Fleece says the school is now in the best financial position ever. It has built a new $2.5 million campus on a hill overlooking South Carolina’s capital city but carries an indebtedness of only $400,000.

The largest Bible school in Canada, the 700-student Prairie Bible Institute, is planning a new academic building to add to a plant that already includes a 4,300-seat auditorium which would hold the population of its locale, Three Hills, Alberta, three times over.

The flight from center city is an ongoing pattern in Christian education. An example this fall is Bethel Theological Seminary, which has moved out of St. Paul, Minnesota; a companion undergraduate college will be relocated by 1971. Seattle Pacific College (Free Methodist), which is marking its seventy-fifth anniversary, operates a 100-acre field campus fifty miles from the main campus.

Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has already invested $10 million in its Knollcrest campus outside Grand Rapids and got another $5.5 million from the Christian Reformed Church this summer. Half the classes are now held downtown, half at Knollcrest, with the complete move expected by 1972. With 1,000 freshmen arriving this month, Calvin is one of America’s biggest church-related colleges.

In nearby Holland, Michigan, the largest school related to the Reformed Church in America—Hope College—marks its centennial this year and expects 1,650 students.

Also on the anniversary list are two American Baptist schools: Keuka College of Keuka Park, New York (seventy-fifth), and Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (fortieth).

While some celebrate, others mourn. Some 125 students and twenty-two fulltime faculty members were left looking for a new campus home July 30 when Upland College dissolved. The college, located in Upland, California, merged with up-and-coming Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania (regionally accredited two years ago, and with a 30 per cent jump in students this year).

Messiah offered to accept all Uplanders, but only a few have made the cross-country switch. Others have gone to Pacific College in Fresno or LaVerne College near Claremont.

Upland, no fly-by-night, was forty years old and held regional accreditation. But financial support sagged. It severed ties with the Church of the Brethren (Messiah’s sponsor) three years ago in a bid to broaden its constituency, but things only got worse.

On the surface, the myriad problems of Shelton College involve accreditation and disputes with its home town of Cape May, New Jersey, and the state. But there was an internal squabble even before the State Board of Education in June withdrew Shelton’s authority to grant the B.A. degree.

Last spring, all three top executives and three-fourths of the faculty quit in a disagreement with the college’s board and its controversial president, Dr. Carl McIntire. The trouble started over relations between collegians and the staff of the Christian Admiral, McIntire’s beachfront hotel which is providing temporary dormitory space for Shelton. Dr. Arthur E. Steele, then president, said his disagreement with the board produced an unexpected “choosing up of sides” and brought “latent anti-McIntire feeling” to the surface. After the resignations, the state board voted not to renew accreditation, a decision later overruled by the Superior Court pending further hearings.

McIntire is now Shelton’s president, with his son, Carl Thomas, handling administrative tasks. The younger McIntire offered no guess on how many students will show up this fall but predicted victory in court. About the faculty turnover he said, “We made some adjustments on our own for academic reasons—there were not enough Ph.D.’s on the staff and we were required to adjust.…”

Whatever happens in Cape May, Steele plans to open a new four-year Christian college next fall in St. Petersburg, with a staff including his dean at Shelton, Dr. Nathan A. Willits, and twelve of the ex-Shelton teachers. Another faculty fragment hopes to start a new college in the North.

Willits, who quit with Steele, expressed melancholy. “I didn’t want to leave. I left tenure, retirement benefits.… I had expected to spend the rest of my life there.…”

Religion And Academic Priorities

At big-name campuses across North America, religion as an academic discipline may be on the rebound. For long decades the study of man’s ultimate concerns has been in virtual exile from most centers of higher education. A chair in religion has been almost as rare as a genuine antique of colonial times, when private Christian initiative was the dynamic that created Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a host of other prestigious universities.

But the worst seems to be over. Indiana University, one of the nation’s largest, announced last month a major expansion of its comparative religion program with “a top-flight scholar” as director. Indiana follows in the train of a number of state universities that have slowly been building up a religious studies curriculum since World War II.

By contrast, many of the Christian colleges are de-emphasizing their theological orientation in favor of broader liberal arts pursuits.

Behind the establishment of higher education in America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was an evangelistic zeal and a desire to ensure a learned clergy. Harvard began from 400 pounds and 320 books bequeathed by the Rev. John Harvard, and was conducted as a “theological institution” from 1636 until 1692. Yale was founded in 1701 partly on the suspicion of Harvard’s laxity in matters of religion. William and Mary was opened in order that Anglicans might have a seminary, that youth might be “piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God.”

The Great Awakening was a further stimulant to higher education. Princeton University was born out of it in 1746, for the special purpose of educating clergymen. Brown, fonnded in 1764, had a similar aim. So did Dartmouth, originally a missionary school for Indians. Columbia started with a grant of land from a church, and to this day its seal bears the scriptural “milk” citation of 1 Peter 2.

The latter part of the eighteenth century and to a lesser extent the nineteenth century saw Protestant initiative continue to produce institutions of higher education, especially in the northeastern United States. “It is no accident,” says the noted historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “that almost every education leader and reformer in American history … has been a New Englander of Puritan stock.”

Morison also notes Christian impact upon education in the South. There, he says, religious bodies were responsible for most of the colleges and universities that sprang up during the Revolutionary War and shortly thereafter. Northwest of the Ohio River, higher education was stimulated by the historic Ordinance of 1787, which encouraged establishment of schools in the same sentence that noted that “religion, morality, and knowledge” are necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind (under the ordinance was founded the University of Michigan, which began with a Presbyterian minister as president and a Roman Catholic priest as vice-president). In Canada, noted universities such as McMaster, Dalhousie, and Toronto got their start under religious auspices.

The land-grant college movement stole the initiative from Christian educators in the nineteenth century. About the time of the Civil War and immediately thereafter, however, a number of distinguished women’s schools, including Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley, were founded on Christian purposes. The last of the great universities with Protestant beginnings were Chicago (1890) and Southern Methodist University (1911).

For religious studies at the big state universities, the road back from the academic periphery is a long one. Most curriculum efforts are interdepartmental, with courses parceled out to denominational representatives. But there are schools of religion at Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, and Wyoming. Although Iowa is the only state university offering a Ph.D. in religion, a number of others seem to be moving in this direction, particularly in terms of cooperative programs with nearby seminaries.

Last year, the University of California at Santa Barbara opened a department of religious studies. Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are understood to be studying similar moves.

Dr. Robert Michaelsen, former director of the Iowa Religion School and now chairman of the Santa Barbara department of religion, predicts an increasing interest in religious studies by state universities: “Students today seem more inclined toward the study of religious subjects in such an environment. There is perhaps less push than in distinctly Christian or denominational colleges.”

Indiana’s announcement of an expansion in the comparative religion program cited not only increased student interest but “recent Supreme Court decisions [which] have clarified the terms under which academic instruction about religion may properly be given in public institutions.”

For evangelicals, the interest in religious studies shown by the state universities is a phenomenon worth pondering. The trend will most likely be toward uncritical acceptance of higher critical presuppositions, thus deferring biblical perspectives to speculative approaches. But an even deeper issue concerns the nature of the truth-claim associated with the Christian religion, at a time when many philosophy departments dispute the possibility of cognitive knowledge of transcendent realities. On American campuses, where philosophical idealism held sway in the forepart of the century, there has been a marked trend to philosophical naturalism, and to skepticism over religious realities. It is also noteworthy that philosophy and religion departments in the universities tend to be intolerant of evangelical associates.

If the university religion faculties make room for competent evangelical scholars, the development of such religion departments will afford new opportunities. Evangelical scholars manifest a vital personal experience of Christian faith at a moment when the Protestant alternatives of liberal, dialectical, and existential theology are clearly on the defensive.

Entirely True, Entirely Open

A new Christian college preparatory school for girls opens September 27 on Long Island, New York. The Stony Brook Girls’ School will be across town from the well-known boys’ academy. While it proposes to echo the philosophy of the older school, it is separate in organization.

The headmistress is Miss M. Judy Brown, 27, who has studied at Duke, Harvard, the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Miss Brown says her school will be “entirely true to biblical religion, and entirely open to scholarship in general.” She contends that “most Christian high schools don’t believe that God also redeems the mind.”

Thirty girls, mostly from the Northeast, are expected for ninth-and tenth-grade classes. The boys’ school mailing list was used to advertise for students, but so were Vogue and the New York Herald-Tribune, and Miss Brown expects to have non-Christian students. “Our primary purpose is not to convert, but to teach,” she said. However, programs are being planned so that faculty members can express their convictions informally in chats with students outside the classroom. There will be two compulsory chapels a week, and daily periods for prayer and Bible study.

‘Spiritual Life Center’

Methodist-related American University in Washington, D.C., has a new $425,000 interfaith chapel with a 16-foot 600-pound bronze and gold flame on the top, symbolizing eternal life.

The chapel will be known as the Abraham S. Kay Spiritual Life Center after a Washington builder who made the first contribution toward its construction.

The structure will be formally dedicated October 3, when a two-week forum on religion and society is scheduled to begin. Charles Parlin, a president of the World Council of Churches and a trustee of American University, will give the dedication address.

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