Christian Colleges and Financial Dilemmas
Greetings, CT Books readers, from the mountains of Appalachia—or “apple-apple,” as Ezra likes calling it. Speaking of the little fellow, he turns four today, and in keeping with recent tradition, we’re celebrating with both sets of grandparents in Princeton, West Virginia, where “Mimi” and “Pappy” (that’s Amber’s set) keep a cozy, comfortable home.
As it happens, I’m writing much of this newsletter in Amber’s hometown (nearby Bluefield), tucked away in the library of Amber’s home church (Westminster Presbyterian), whose pastor and staff were kind enough to lend us a quiet working environment while Ezra entertains the grandparents with his high-energy antics. We’ll worship there Sunday morning before heading back to Chicagoland.
Let’s start this week with a subject Ezra, blessedly, won’t have to consider for some time: the cost of a college education, and the uncertain financial picture prevailing across much of the higher-ed landscape.
Joshua Travis Brown, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University, looks at the staying-afloat strategies pursued by different schools in a recent book, Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed. Brown’s case studies feature Christian colleges, which often face wrenching dilemmas as they balance the imperatives of maintaining financial health and preserving biblical fidelity.
In her review for CT, Elizabeth Stice, a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University, highlights troubling trends Brown discovered in Christian colleges that shifted most of their eggs into the revenue-seeking basket.
“One problem facing all tuition-driven schools is the price of the traditional college experience,” writes Stice. “The physical architecture and in-person classes, the support staff, and the country club–style amenities are expensive. So is the technology a university requires. Schools have found that financial support may come from increasing tuition, admitting more students who will pay full tuition, seeking philanthropic gifts, and instituting online programs that cost less to run, among other avenues of revenue generation.
“Such survival strategies might preserve the traditional college experience, at least temporarily. But they threaten a school’s mission. To keep traditional buildings, schools ultimately become nontraditional and operate like for-profit entities. They diversify their products. They hire companies to increase enrollment. They take on loans and issue bonds. The end result can be buildings funded by online students who will never use them, underqualified students saddled with debt, questionable admissions tactics, overworked faculty, weakened relationships with students, and university traditions swept away.
“Brown shows, too, that when schools operate like for-profit organizations, they tend to compromise core aspects of their respective missions. For example, the universities that pursued greater prestige downplayed their commitments to serving the disadvantaged and meeting needs in their communities.
“Growth itself was destabilizing in many schools. Admitting too many students puts a strain on faculty, staff, and facilities, making it difficult to deliver on promises of small class sizes and personal care. The imperative of constant expansion can devolve into a Sisyphean quest for mere survival. Outsourcing course and curriculum design and de-emphasizing professors can weaken the distinctiveness of Christian higher education.
“In each university Brown studied, faculty and administrators experienced burnout and struggled to find purpose in their work. The employee testimonies in his book are often very moving in documenting the effects of institutional drift.”
The Bible’s ‘Little Bible’
Reading the Psalms as Scripture: The title of this book, written by a seminary professor (James Hamilton Jr.) and a pastor (Matthew Damico), might seem like an exercise in needlessly stating the obvious. How else would we read the Psalms?
Yet as Blake Adams shows in his recent review for CT, Hamilton and Damico aren’t just underscoring what their readers already believe. They want to emphasize how deeply the entire book—not just a handful of individual chapters—is woven throughout the texture of God’s Word. Taken together, the psalms form a cohesive, unified depiction of redemptive history as it points to Christ. They interact extensively with earlier biblical writings, just as later biblical writings interact extensively with them.
“By emphasizing the Psalter,” writes Adams, “the authors hardly mean to exclude the rest of Scripture. As Martin Luther taught, the Psalter ‘might well be entitled a Little Bible, wherein everything contained in the entire Bible is beautifully and briefly comprehended.’ Moreover, as Hamilton and Damico take pains to point out, the Psalter is connected to the rest of Scripture and meant to be read alongside it. Even so, it is a unique microcosm of the entire Bible, elevated in song. Unlike, say, a historical book we can reading and understand, a psalm remains unfinished until it is sung. That is what makes it a psalm.
“We cannot read the Psalter in the same way we would read any other book of the Bible. On this, Hamilton and Damico are clear. Memorizing is a good devotional practice for, say, a letter of Paul, a section of a Gospel, or a story from Old Testament history. With the Psalms, however, memorizing and singing is how we actually ‘read’ them. To be sure, Hamilton and Damico don’t wish to exclude all other hymns or spiritual songs from the church’s worship. Yet they acknowledge that the Psalms do something these other songs don’t. Once we understand the Psalter as a messianic text whose ultimate subject is Christ, we can see how it defines the church’s prophetic existence within the world.
“Through the Psalms, we can reassert our Christian identity in a secular age. ‘If we know the “little Bible” inside and out, we are on our way to knowing the whole thing,’ write Hamilton and Damico. ‘And if we know the whole thing, we’ll know what it looks like to love the Lord and walk in wisdom, and we will not be lured by the prevailing narratives and vacuous promises of the world around us.’”
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in the magazine
As developments in artificial intelligence change daily, we’re increasingly asking what makes humanity different from the machines we use. In this issue, Emily Belz introduces us to tech workers on the frontlines of AI development, Harvest Prude explains how algorithms affect Christian courtship, and Miroslav Volf writes on the transhumanist question. Several writers call our attention to the gifts of being human: Haejin and Makoto Fujimura point us to beauty and justice, Kelly Kapic reminds us God’s highest purpose isn’t efficiency, and Jen Pollock Michel writes on the effects of Alzheimer’s . We bring together futurists, theologians, artists, practitioners, and professors to consider how technology shapes us even as we use it.
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