Another take on Christian Universities

Mission, Diversification, and Missed Opportunities

I delayed my regular Monday newsletter until today because last night I guest lectured via Zoom in Chris Gehrz’ “Applied Humanities Seminar” focused on Higher Education. While Chris and I have never met in real life (yet), we’ve written in parallel on many issues of higher education in general and Christian Higher Ed in particular.

The seminar is a capstone course for students in the Bethel University (MN) Department of History, Philosophy, and Political Science. In his newsletter today, Chris summarized what they’d been discussing before I joined the class.¹ I showed up in the last hour of a three-hour class. I probably should have done some TicToc videos.

Chris had me describe what accreditation means and how the criteria and visits work. We spent a while talking about the importance of mission as the central component of a university’s operation. I emphasized that accreditors don’t try to make a Christian liberal arts institution look like a research-based state university but view it within its own context.

Nevertheless, that’s not always seen the same way from the church. One of the major challenges of Christian higher ed is that it operates as both an arm of the church and an expression of the broader academic world. This inevitably creates conflict as those two referent groups pull in different directions. Perhaps there was a point in the history of Christian universities where they could have found a point of stable balance. But for most (maybe all) of the history of Christian higher ed, the conflict has gone on appearing and disappearing with whatever today’s crisis is.

In my ongoing book project, I analyzed a series of Christian university mission statements. They tend toward generality instead of carving out that supposed balance point. They talk of preparing Christian leaders without a clear demarcation of what that means or how it would be achieved.

That ambiguity of mission allowed lots of innovation. Beginning in the mid-1980s, several Christian liberal arts institutions were venturing into the Degree Completion space. Focusing on working adults, classes met one night a week and were usually taught by adjunct faculty. In the early 2000s, I was at a conference sponsored by one of the third-party providers that supported such programs. An administrator from another college told me that their mission was just as real in those programs as it was in the traditional residential program. I challenged him on how that could be guaranteed given the different population and instruction. His response was that the mission statement was in every syllabus and reviewed by the adjunct faculty member who had been through an orientation. I was skeptical of the claim to say the least.

Using the same model, institutions moved into graduate programming. First in education, then business, then religion and health sciences. What does the university mission mean for graduate programs? Can we read it the same way as for undergrads? And if so, does that mean that the mission is so flexible as to lose any strategic meaning?

Which brings us to the latest innovation, online programs. In November, I gave an interview to a freelancer, Hannah McClennan, who was writing for Christianity Today. Her story appeared in the print edition last week. When I saw the story, I wanted to know what the critics of online education had to say. I was surprised when I saw my own name. Here’s what I had to say:

John Hawthorne, a retired sociology professor and Christian university administrator, said evangelical schools have historically emphasized personal and spiritual formation. The move to online models can make that aspect of education more challenging.

“Online, almost by definition, pushes you further down that transactional line,” he said. “And I think that runs counter to the whole Christian formation conversation.”

At the financial level, I understand why Christian universities diversified their programming in the way they did. While we are facing a serious demographic cliff now, the first wave of that decline began in the 1980s.² Rather than re-thinking their broad approach to faith and academics and explaining that to their varied constituencies, universities used these non-traditional models as a buffer.

Early in my time in my last institution, over lunch with the then-president, I argued that diversification is good on the one hand but has built in challenges. The good news is that if one of the diversified programs gets soft, the others can provide a valuable buffer. The downside is that it exponentially increases the complexity of university planning. One has to manage all the programs simultaneously even though the non-traditional programs are even more impacted by exogenous (outside) variables that the traditional program. Changes in teacher requirements, improvements in the job market, dissatisfaction with online education after two plus years of pandemic can drastically impact enrollment with little warning.

I heard this week of a Christian university that is now struggling in all components: traditional, adult learning, graduate, and online. While the administration is currently figuring out how to manage the immediate crisis, the long-term challenges are huge.

Another institution has struggled to maintain traditional enrollment and has fewer Christian students attending as a result. This is not a bad thing in and of itself. Chris Gehrz has written well about the potential offered by removing faith screens and allowing schools to be softly evangelistic as well as evangelical. This is especially important in light of PRRI data suggesting that only 7% of GenZ identify as White Evangelicals.

The corrective, it seems to me, is to clearly identify the core academic mission of the Christian University in ways that resonate with contemporary students. To borrow that old adage about planting trees, the best time to do that work was forty years ago. The next best time is right now.

1. An example of us writing in parallel — Back in the fall I wrote a review of Will Bunch’s After the Ivory Tower Falls, which celebrates the Truman Commission’s work on general education.

2. I didn’t realize it at the time, but teaching in Christian universities in the early 1980s proved to be the high point of Christian Higher Education.