Salt and Light

What Christian colleges can offer American society

“Universities face an existential crisis,” wrote Abram Van Engen last week at ARC. It’s not just that the Trump administration is slashing their funding or deporting their students, or that some such schools are shrinking or closing altogether. It’s that none of these problems troubles the “huge portion of the American public [that] no longer sees their point or purpose.”

So how do universities make the case for themselves? Not by “focusing on individual consumers” in a nation where less than two in five Americans earn a bachelor’s degree, but by reiterating the benefits of higher education for the larger society:

President Trump’s ability to attack universities depends in part on a public that does not understand the link between higher education and basic improvements in life. Imagine an ad that focuses on a single important bridge (pick any!). Who designed it? Where were they trained? What gave them the knowledge to build it? University education built the bridge, but no one needs a college degree to cross it. Make an ad. Show the work….

Van Engen points to the role of universities in sustaining and improving everything from health care to national defense to parks, zoos, and archives. “The key,” he concludes,

is not to divide the public into two camps, those who have gone to college and those who haven’t. We badly need everyone. (My house is held together by a series of contractors with no college degrees.) The point, instead, is to tell people, those with college degrees and without, what universities are doing for the general good. The public gains from higher ed every single day, but they seldom link the benefits to the source. We need to make that link. We need to show our work. The problem with universities is not the content, but the communication.

Van Engen happens to be a Christian scholar. Last year his book, Word Made Fresh, won a Christianity Today Book Award for “[showing] readers how poetry is for everyone—and how it can reinvigorate our Christian faith.” But he teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and is primarily concerned with challenging such secular research universities to make a more effective case for themselves.

May God bless any such endeavor. R1 institutions like Van Engen’s have done much to make American higher education what a Republican presidential commission called “one of our greatest success stories,” and what that group said nearly twenty years ago is still true today: Americans shouldn’t “take our postsecondary superiority for granted.”

But reading Van Engen’s essay last week made me wonder how smaller Christian colleges and universities like my own could make their own case for benefitting not just the relative handful of Americans that they educate, but the larger society.