For those unaware, Patrick Henry is a startup college, Christian and highly politically conservative, catering to home schooled college graduates. It has been in the news not only because of its provocative ideology but also because it has struggled to attain accreditation and has alleged ideological bias from the accreditors.
The short story on the brouhaha is this: PH's president, despite the college's overt commitment to the liberal arts, has squelched faculty members who have required students to interact with the Western philosophical tradition (really out-there stuff like Augustine!), objecting that these thinkers' ideas were not genuinely biblical and questioning the faculty's commitment to a biblical worldview. In response, faculty members are resigning.
Gentle readers should read for themselves, but we offer the following observations based on our deep-and-wide experience of Christian higher education:
- Some college presidents, especially those of an entrepreneurial bent, don't know when to loosen the reigns. I recently attended a dinner at which a professor at a liberal arts college with a loose connection to the United Church of Christ recalled that their previous president was known far and wide for personally patrolling the parking lots to write parking tickets. Good presidents do what SWNID's president does: facilitate without fine-tuning. Smart, committed people deserve to be left alone and are most effectively led that way.
- Any institution of higher education with an ideological commitment (on any side, of course: remember this recent story?) will find itself dealing with conflicts over the discussion in the classroom of ideas not fully in accord with institutional ideology. Everyone supports critical thinking until they start to worry that a student, invited to think critically, will reject the reigning ideology of the institution. Then come the cries to protect and indoctrinate. Only those who believe in the vigor of their institution's ideology will be able to remain committed to that ideology and still carry on wide-ranging, critical discussions of all kinds of ideas. Those who insist that certain books not be read or certain ideas not be discussed betray their fear that their ideology will lose in a fair fight.
- Christian colleges always face the pressure from constituents, especially parents of students, to create a "safe" place for Christian students. Unfortunately, safety is not usually central to institutional mission statements, which to be fulfilled demand engagement with stuff that's threatening. "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one." "Of course he's not a tame lion. But he's good."
- Christian higher education is a pretty mature industry. There's not a lot of room for new institutions in the market, especially as existing institutions, in possession of growing resources, expand their scope and increase their enrollments. We admit to a high degree of skepticism about the need to start any new Christian liberal arts colleges in the United States. Case in point: we count the following Christian liberal arts institutions along I-69 between Indianapolis and the Michigan border: Anderson University, Indiana Wesleyan University, Taylor University (Upland and Ft. Wayne campuses), Huntington College. There may be others that have escaped our memory, but they seem to outnumber Waffle Houses in the same corridor.
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Those with an interest might want to search for an audio file of the Fresh Air interview with the prezzie of Patrick Henry that aired on 5-25. We caught a few minutes and found it unexceptional, but there's more that we didn't hear than that we did.
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