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The Soul of the American University
Revisited
In this essay I want to reflect on how things may have changed with respect to the role of Christianity in American higher education in the years since the publication of The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief in 1994. I also want to consider how, in the light of such changes, the case for augmenting those prospects may be made more effectively today than it was in that book.
I should say that 95 percent of The Soul of the American University is a pretty straightforward history of the role of religion in mainstream American higher education from the founding of Harvard into the latter half of the twentieth century. Most of this historical narrative is descriptive and analytic, driven by the quest to understand the dynamics that led to the marginalization of most religion in higher education. The last 5 percent of the book, however, is prescriptive. In what I called âConcluding Unscientific Postscriptâ I argued that even while we can understand that there were some good reasons why our pluralistic public cultureâof which mainstream universities are a partâis no longer dominated by a Protestant establishment, have we not perhaps overcompensated for the earlier Protestant dominance by removing all religion to the margins? And so might we find ways to create room for a variety of substantive religious perspectives in such a pluralistic setting? That postscript became, as one reviewer put it, the tail that wagged the dog. So most reviewers responded more to the postscript than to the merits of what I hoped was a nicely crafted historical narrative.
I still stand by the narrative, but I think that today I would write a different postscript. It is not that I have changed my mind on the prescription, but I think I might alter the tone, since I think that led to some misunderstandings of what the whole book was about. More important, I think the situation with regard to religion in mainstream academia has changed considerably since I was writing in the early 1990s, and I want to reflect here on those changes.
A good place to begin talking about where American higher education is headed today is Harvard, both because that is where the history of American higher education began almost four centuries ago and because Harvard continues to be, if not a typical, a sort of flagship school.
In 2006 Harry Lewis, the former academic dean of Harvard College, published a book with the revealing title Excellence without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. In it Dean Lewis reflects on what he sees as a sad decline in Harvard undergraduate education. A Harvard grad himself, he laments the loss of a sense of coherence in the curriculum since the time when he was an undergraduate in the early 1960s. At that time American higher education was still in the âconsensusâ era, and Harvard education was still under the influence of the âBest in the Westâ ideal developed in a famous curricular report of 1945 called âFree Education in a Democratic Society.â (Almost sounds like Grove City.) In the twenty-first century, says Lewis, the college does very little toward contributing to what used to be a major goal of undergraduate education, that is, to âtransform teenagers . . . into adults with the learning and wisdom to take responsibility for their own lives.â1
Having been an academic dean, Lewis has much frontline experience in analyzing why Harvard and other similar universities have lost what he considers should be the âsoulâ of higher educationâthat is, providing wisdom for students that will help them mature into wise and responsible adults. As a dean, one is constantly battered by conflicting and contradictory demands that make principled and coherent reform impossible. Basically, Lewis says, these are the demands of people shaped by the demands of a consumerist society in which everyone is used to choosing their own lifestyle packages. Parents, students, faculty, alumni, other donors, and funding agencies all have their agendas. Parents and most students see higher education as a step toward economic or professional success. Faculty in the meantime are hired on a basis of publishing success in a narrow specialty, and the tenure system offers little encouragement for spending a lot of time thinking about how oneâs teaching might contribute to the general welfare of students. As a result, faculties offer a bewildering number of courses in their various specialties. Although students are required to take courses in broad subject areasâsuch as some natural science, some social science, and so forth, almost no common knowledge is required. Lewis sees this as resulting in a hollow education. Meanwhile, he says, the constant pressures of consumer competition mean that colleges have to expend ever-increasing resources on providing comforts and diversions that will keep the students happy. If this is the situation at Harvard, one can imagine what happens at the universities that the vast majority of Americans attend, which often do not even attempt to provide any more than technical education.
This is not new. In the early 1980s, when I was teaching at Calvin College, I headed a small graduate program that offered a Master of Arts in Christian Studies. For the applications to the program we asked students to send us a writing sample. One very bright applicant from a state university responded that he had never written a paper in college. He had been a marketing major and the best writing sample he had to offer was a blue-book exam that had to do with the importance of good packaging when shipping goods. He was a fine student with an inquiring mind and just the sort of person that our MA program was suited for, but he simply had not received a college education in the traditional sense. In fact, in university education as a whole, the vast majority of what goes on is dedicated to technical research and teaching technical skills. University education has become mass education and overwhelmingly vocational education, so that the percentage of students majoring in the humanities nationally has sunk somewhere well into the single digits.
The shape of contemporary universities is dictated primarily by the fact that they are designed to serve the economic interests of our consumerist society. That is why technical study and vocational preparation dominate most of higher education. A related feature is that universities serve a consumer and global economy by teaching, above all, the values of tolerance and lifestyle choice these are traits that fit well with a consumer society. The highest value becomes the freedom to design your own life, most often signaled by where you live and what you own. In these respects, universities do not differ substantially from the mainstream media and entertainment industries.
If one asks the question, then, as to where traditional religious belief might fit in modern universities shaped by technical and vocational concerns for most things and relativistic pluralism for the rest, it becomes obvious that there is no simple solution to the problem. There is no way, for instance, that it would make any sense to talk about reclaiming American mainstream universities and making them once again Christian institutions. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were once not just Christian but Reformed Christian institutions. But if you study the history of how they lost their Christianity, it will become clear that going back to anything approaching that would be absurd. There is no way in our contemporary cultural setting to turn back the clock on these large-scale historical trends. Briefly put, these universities, as much as the giant state universities, have become de facto public institutions. Huge economic forces as well as concerns for equity dictate that they serve the entire society as pluralistic institutions in which all sorts of unbelievers as well as believers in other religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and the like all have equal standing, and there is no way we can change that. We simply have to work with it.
I make this point so strongly because the most puzzling response to The Soul of the American University has been that some scholars have misread me to say that I am, in fact, suggesting such a revolution or Christian takeovers of universities that once were Christian. In my books I explicitly and repeatedly said that is not what I thought or believed. But a number of scholars who should know better have insisted that this is really what I am sayingâeven when I deny it. They see me as having written a narrative of simple decline in which I describe the loss of a golden age when American higher education was Christian. Such readers then jump to the conclusion that I must be advocating a stock narrative of a return to that lost golden ageâdespite the fact that I do not advocate anything like that in my postscript, and in fact my historical account shows why that could not happen in a society like ours.
So why the puzzling misunderstandings? I donât raise this point just to vindicate myself against misreadings, but rather because puzzles like this are sometimes important clues to understanding a historical moment.
I think these misreadings are related to the fact that the book came out in 1994 at the height of the culture wars. That was the time, you may recall, of the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America. And since I talked about âChristian scholarshipâ and the like, it was assumed that I was, despite my disclaimers, promoting essentially the agenda of the Christian rightâsince they are the most prominent group to use Christian as an adjective. I think it has become a general rule since the culture-war era that when one says âChristianâ (as in the Reformed community people long have talked about âChristian scholarshipâ), many people automatically translate it as âfundamentalist.â
Whatever the merits of the Christian rightâwhich are considerableâone of their demerits is that in their understandable zeal to challenge the secularism of our age they have invoked a sort of Constantinian rhetoric in response. The way they tell the story is that in earlier America, Christiansâthat is Protestantsâdominated the public culture, including leading universities, and so they have talked about âtaking backâ American culture as though we might win mainstream universities back to traditional Protestantism. I am calling such rhetoric Constantinian, not because it literally involves Christianity established by the state, but rather because it looks back to an informal Protestant establishment that had a dominant role in earlier American culture.
One of the basic arguments of The Soul of the American University is suggested in its subtitle: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. Basically I wanted to concede that in the interest of equity in the public sphere, it was unfair to Jews and Catholics or unbelievers to have a virtual establishment of Protestantism in nineteenth-century Americaâs de facto public institutions, such as leading universities and even state universities. So if the virtual establishment of one type of Christianity was wrong in the nineteenth century, then by analogy we can see that the virtual establishment of nonbelief as the privileged view in universities today was equally inequitable. Our society has overcorrected for a virtual Protestant establishment by building a virtual secular establishment.
The point that I was trying to make is that, from a Christian perspective, if we really believe in religious freedom, then we should be opposed to all Constantinianism, including the informal Constantinianism of the Protestant virtual establishment in early America. The problem, however, with that rendering of the story is that it does not fit the usual story told by traditionalist American Protestants. They still speak as though the answer to a secularist establishment is to restore an essentially Christian establishment. So some critics assumed that despite what I said I wanted, what I really wanted was to reclaim mainstream universities for traditional Christianity.
So one thing I think necessary for us all to clarify at this point is our stance regarding pluralism and cultural diversity. Essentially what we should be saying, it seems to me, is that in our pluralistic public culture we want to maximize freedom for all religious expressions. We must be clear, then, that we are not proposing to reestablish privilege in public institutions for our own position. Pluralism should, of course, include pluralism of institutionsâso it is good to have private institutions like Grove City College that strongly represent a particular religious heritageâand such institutions need to continue to be protected so that they can define themselves according to their religious convictions. But if we are talking about mainstream universities such as Harvard or Penn State, we should acknowledge that these are essentially pluralistic institutions that should serve the whole public, and hence we should be advocating freedom for religious expression within a pluralistic setting.
In my own case I have found it helpful in making this point to prove that I am not working from the viewpoint of the old nineteenth-century American evangelical heritage of informal Constantinianism but rather from that of the Dutch heritage in the tradition of Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper, as most readers will know, was a theologian, university founder, and also prime minister of the Netherlands about a century ago. Kuyperâs outlook is valuable particularly because while it is not Constantinian in suggesting that there should be a state religion, it is also not sectarian in the sense of saying that Christians should withdraw from society or mainstream cultureâas early twentieth-century American fundamentalists did. Rather it is, I think, most essentially an elaboration of the position of being in the world but not of the world. It emphasizes, as Reformed Christians long have, that while maintaining a strong sense of our distinctiveness, we should engage the culture and be leaders in education. The whole ideal of the âintegration of faith and learning,â which has become so widespread in evangelical colleges and universities, grows out of this ideal that Christians while not compromising the distinctiveness of their outlook as informed by faith and Godâs revelation, should at the same time engage the best of higher learning.
With respect to the question of the relation of church to state, the Kuyperian heritage is very helpful in making clear that church and state each have a degree of sovereignty in their own spheres. The church should not dictate to the state and neither should the state dictate to the church in matters that are properly theological or ecclesiastical. The United States, of course, has also long had separation of church and state, but for a long time American Protestants ran almost everything so that most American Protestant groups did not develop a very good theory as to how that separation should work. Kuyperianism, drawing from the Dutch heritage and Continental European thought, provides such a theory based on the premise that civil societies should be genuinely pluralistic with respect to religions.
Specifically the Kuyperian heritage affirms, first (over against establishments), that no religion or other comparable quasireligious comprehensive ideology (such as secularism) should be established or have a de facto monopoly supported by the state. But second, one cannot have truly equitable pluralism if all religions are driven from the public arena and relegated to a private sphere of individual choice. And third, that the state and other public regulatory powers (such as public u...