The Grim Alternatives in Christian Higher Education

There is a Maginot Line mentality among evangelicals that shows up in many particulars. While we valiantly hold the line on some item, the panzer divisions of evil sweep right around our defenses and conquer the rear. One of these areas is federal aid to higher education.

As a youth I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the orthodox position on separation of church and state. I could also recite the evils of “Romanism” and the evidence for political machination. Much of the evidence was stale, though, and certainly it did not take into account the ways in which American Catholicism is now adapting to the American scene and to the democratic or pluralistic way of life.

What the orthodox Protestant position on separation of church and state, no matter how noble its theory, really seemed to mean, as I now look back upon it, was, “Don’t let the Catholics get anything.” Therefore our strategy and our activity were aroused wherever we could smell a possibility of tax support for any Catholic project—we were automatically against it. Our efforts were not necessarily wrong; but while we were trying to hold that bastion, the real and much greater enemy swept around us and conquered.

To put it baldly: While we were saving ourselves from the Catholics we sold out to secularism! We kept the Catholics from getting tax dollars and at the same time allowed those dollars to be used to subsidize irreligion, atheism, godlessness, humanism, naturalism, mechanism, and other idolatrous anti-Christian creeds. One reason why this happened was that in the heyday of liberalism, evangelicals, under the banner of evangelism, became anti-intellectual. The result of anti-intellectualism was the naïve assumption that secularized education was merely a neutral lack. We fooled ourselves into thinking that secular education was harmless as long as we could keep the Catholics, or some other denomination, from using it to teach their particular views. We still live in this naïve view, as is proved by the vast number of evangelicals who send their youth to secular universities and colleges, supposing that, aside from Bible and religion courses, subjects have the same content and are taught in the same way in both secular and Christian schools.

Let there be no mistake about it. There is a very real difference between the secular and the truly Christian institution. The difference is found in the classroom. It makes a difference whether the whole range of arts and sciences is seen within the framework of a Christian world view. In the specific disciplines the difference is probably least in mathematics (which Brunner said was least disturbed by the Fall). But in some of the more sensitive areas it is almost a life-and-death matter.

In science, for instance, when theories of origins are under consideration, it makes an enormous difference whether the door is left open for creation or whether it is arbitrarily and blindly ruled out. In sociology and psychology, it makes all the difference in the world what basic view of man is adopted. Is he a cog in the relentlessly turning wheels, just a part of a machine? Or is he free? Is there anything more to man than his observable behavior? Are norms for his conduct to be determined by statistical averages that show what most men are doing? Or could there be a revealed standard? Is man the hopeless, meaningless, idiotic, and pathetic creature reflected in the art, music, and literature of our day? Or, on the other hand, is he still the thing of glorious beauty and value about which the humanists talk? Is our view of man to be idealistic or pessimistic? The Christian, of course, is a realist. He knows both the sublimity and the wretchedness of man—his wisdom and his foolishness. But he sees him as redeemable. That is the third dimension. It is hope.

These considerations are not just theoretical. We must face the facts. If we evangelicals are to have youth prepared to live in a society in which Christians are increasingly a minority and are surrounded with increasing paganism, they must, in addition to a personal experience of Christ, which is basic, have an intellectual understanding of their faith and its relation to the arts and sciences. The personal experience of Christ may be maintained by students in a secular university. But many who do so permit a dichotomy in their lives. Their personal faith is one thing, their intellectual life another. This is not good enough for leadership in the days ahead. Because an intellectual understanding of the relation of the liberal arts to the Christian faith is not given in the secular university, keeping the evangelical colleges alive and relevant is a life-and-death matter.

By relevant is meant, of course, that these colleges must be as strong in their attitude of open inquiry as in their commitment to Christ. The two things must be self-consciously kept in balance. There are church colleges whose inquiry is so open and broad that it precludes any commitment. There are others whose Christian commitment is so dogmatic that it precludes any real openness of inquiry. The relevant Christian college has to keep these in real balance and not allow either one to transcend the other.

In the forties, undergraduates were about evenly distributed between private and tax-supported colleges. Today the trend away from private and toward public higher education has become a tidal wave.

There are, perhaps, three special reasons for this tide. First is the simple matter of costs. Tuition in private colleges has gone so high that multitudes of students do not even consider these schools. A student can save at least half by going to a state instead of a private institution. Secondly, there is the assistance given by planners. There are many, both in the Office of Education in Washington and outside, who see no future for the private college. These persons openly desire a national system of education in which the standardization of education would come, not from the innovative experimentation and excellence of private institutions, as in the past, but from the planners in Washington. One can sympathize with their desire to bring the schools of impoverished states up to standard, but the loss of private education would be horrendous. The third reason for the growing tide toward tax-supported institutions is their greater permissiveness about student conduct, something that appeals to growing numbers of youth.

The major educational associations of our day have joined the prestigious American Council on Education in asserting that the problems of all institutions of higher education are now so great that they can be solved only with massive federal aid. Present aid directed to special projects is inadequate, they say, and must be supplemented by direct block grants to the institutions.

In my judgment, this kind of aid is inevitable. But when it comes, will it also be available to private institutions? The tax-supported institutions will oppose this, for they want it all for themselves, and most of them would be glad to see the demise of private education in the interest of a nationally (or state) controlled system. There is also the question of constitutionality. It is difficult to predict what the Supreme Court will do. Many church colleges, including Catholic institutions, are cutting their official ties with churches by setting up independent boards of trustees in the hope that this will let them under the line. Still, it is possible that the court will take a new line, as it has on other issues, like school buses.

If that should happen and grants become available to church colleges, evangelicals may have to rethink their position. They may have to wrestle with the question whether it is better to have tax dollars support religious colleges—Jewish or Mormon or Catholic or Protestant—for their respective constituencies, than to have a tax-supported system that is exclusively secular and godless.

Some will insist that there is a third alternative: keeping private schools alive through private funds. There was a day when this argument was realistic. It is no longer. Educational costs have advanced in such astronomical ways that, for a few already wealthy institutions, small church colleges have about as much likelihood of financing their future out of their present resources as private industry has of managing the space-exploration program without the government.

There is a better way of solving the problem, but it is much less likely to be adopted nationally, though we might make the effort. It is through tuition-equalization grants to the student. This grant would help pay the difference between costs at a tax-supported institution and costs at a private college. Several states already have such provisions. If this kind of aid could be made available on a national basis and in amounts large enough to allow institutions to charge the real cost of education in tuition fees, the problem of the private college might be solved. Still another method is to allow parents to claim tuition that they have paid for their children as an income-tax credit.

President Upton of Beloit College has proposed an extension of this idea, making it the basis of all tax support of higher education. He suggests that the tax-supported institutions arrive at a cost-per-student figure, which would then be the standard tuition fee. All state and federal aid to education would be paid, not as grants to institutions, but as grants to bona fide students to cover this standard tuition charge. The student could use the grant in the school of his choice. This would get around the church-state issue, really cover the cost of education, preserve the right of the student to choose his type of education, and preserve the life of the private college if it was good enough to attract students. This plan seems by far the best to me, but I suffer from no illusions about its acceptability to tax-supported institutions.

Any plan by which the grants are made to the students has the advantage of helping to restore the student’s right to choose the kind of education he feels to be suitable for him. We have become very sensitive to this right in the case of those who have suffered from racial or economic discrimination. When will we become sensitive to the discrimination against religion in education that is part of the present injustice? It has been assumed that basic education should be made available to all with tax monies and that religious education was a luxury open to those who could afford it. But what about the students who believe no education is basic that leaves God and religion out? Their fundamental right is being sabotaged with our tax dollars. We are subsidizing irreligion. Government, in effect, is saying to students, “Come now, leave God out of your education and we will pay most of the bill.” To some of us this is tantamount to subsidizing inadequate, not to say bad, education.

In a pluralistic society, should Washington planners have the right to say what education shall be subsidized? If the rich man’s son is subsidized in a secular college, should not the religious student have a right to an equal subsidy in the college of his choice? I think there is a fundamental bit of human right involved here, and we have been silent about this injustice much too long.

Evangelicals must wise up to the danger of secularized education and the necessity of keeping Christian colleges alive and vigorous. To do so, we must take a searching look at the legitimate ways in which tax money may be used to help. Either we must agree on a program and fight for it, or we must face the alternatives. They are just two. One is to let Christian colleges die and secularism triumph. The other is to undertake the private financing of Christian colleges, and this would call for the kind of zeal that hitherto we have shown only for evangelism and missions.

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