The Christian College as Labyrinth

An alternative metaphor to "pathways"

I’m not sure that this metaphor is still trendy in higher ed leadership circles, but for a few years at least, I heard presidents, provosts, VPs, and the self-styled innovators and disruptors they hired as consultants insist that college should offer students clear, direct “pathways.”

The idea was that we should do whatever we could to help college students get from point A (their high school lives) to point B (their future — usually their profession) as quickly and painlessly as possible, removing bureaucratic and even curricular roadblocks and detours that can slow or complicate the trip.

It’s easy to understand the appeal of the pathway, since American higher education remains both extremely expensive and extremely hard to understand for most people. For example, I think it makes all the sense in the world for the Minnesota State system to have a single transfer curriculum that allow students to make a seamless transition from a community college to a four-year institution, reducing the cost and confusion that often comes with transferring between schools, while helping the state better identify and train the workers most needed to address the needs of our fast-changing economy.

But while it’s undeniably a good thing to reduce the cost and confusion of college, I think the “pathway” metaphor runs two risks when applied to a setting like Bethel, which has a different mission that that of regional state universities. First, it can mislead students about what actually happens during those key developmental years; and second, at a university like mine, it tempts us to strip away the most mysteriously valuable aspects of a Christian liberal arts education.

So let me propose a different metaphor and suggest that Christian colleges are meant to take their students on a more complicated, less predictable journey: not the straight and narrow of the pathway, but the twists and turns of the labyrinth.

The metaphor came to mind late last fall, while I was in a room at Bethel walking the labyrinth above. This one was printed on a mat laid on the floor. But you can find more permanent versions in and around Christian churches around the world. I first walked them in Europe: the famous one in the sanctuary of Chartres’ splendidly Gothic cathedral; and another in a garden outside an English church.

Like every metaphor, this one falls apart at a certain point. The labyrinth is typically a solitary discipline. (I was alone in Bethel’s for a fifteen-minute bloc until someone else took their turn.) The very word college implies that it’s done in community.

But I still find the analogy fruitful, having thought about it for a few months now.