The academy is a foreign land for the uninitiated. Misjudged and misunderstood by critics, admirers, and those who aspire to join its ranks, life in academic communities must be lived for awhile, and even then, the foreign customs, habits, and practices often make little sense, even to the academy’s own inhabitants. Doctoral students, attempting to join academic communities during their studies, often express confusion and surprise at the start of their graduate work. Is the academic community really this competitive? Why do my undergraduate students only care about getting jobs? How can the subject I love so much seem so boring to my students? Christian graduate students may struggle even further to understand how the values and habits of an increasingly secularized academy may align with their faith. They may experience value conflicts and find themselves resisting what they see as pointless habits and unhappy dispositions of their professors. Or, they may avoid their conflicted feelings by abandoning their usual Christian practices and church communities for a time, seeing the doctoral years as a season to focus solely on one thing: finishing the degree.
Given the confusing and overwhelming season of doctoral study, would it be helpful if Christian doctoral students (and the faculty who mentor them) understood themselves as “servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries God has revealed” (1 Cor. 4:1)? As scholars in the academy, if we were to view our task as stewardship, a careful tending and sharing of the intellectual gifts God has given to us, what difference would that make to our daily lives as Christian academics? In this introductory chapter we will explain how this question has impacted our professional and personal lives and eventually led us to create the community of respondents that would produce this volume. Drawing from recent work in each of our disciplines, higher education and theology, we will consider how stewardship might serve as a useful framework for our academic lives. How might we practice stewardship with humility and gratitude , while learning hard lessons from theological distortions that led the church into dangerous misuses of stewardship language? Throughout the chapter we will reflect on our own experiences of gathering with other Christian academics to “practice the practices” intended to form us into better stewards of our academic gifts.
As editors of this volume, the two of us lived with these ideas of stewardship and formation for about three years, met weekly to discuss them, and engaged other Christian academics in conversation. Together, we represent the current and future generations of faculty life. From our different vantage points we found this framework of stewardship prompted us to think more deeply and critically about the promises of doctoral education for Christian scholars.
Jennifer Howell (Jenny) was completing her doctoral studies at Baylor University while our conversations were ongoing. Like the other doctoral students writing essays for this volume, she faced important questions about the academy’s future. Our universities are driven by fear as our nation falls in the global economic and social rankings when we compare ourselves to the rest of the world. We are forced to adjust quickly to shifts in technology that are drastically changing how higher education is offered. In an intellectual era that prioritizes specialization and intellectual property rights, education is often discussed as a commodity, where the end goal is to “out-expertise” other experts in the field. As a theologian, she wondered, in particular, how Christian faith, pedagogy, and vocation fit together in light of these trends. Jenny spoke often with her doctoral student colleagues about how Christians in the academy might respond to some of these challenges. She desired to create communities of support that would help her think through how to counteract some of these worrisome trends. In addition to the creation of the Conyers Scholars program, which we will turn to briefly, she helped form a writing group of friends who met weekly to read one another’s work and offer constructive feedback, and she participated in a group with other graduate students and faculty to discuss approaches to pedagogy that challenge students to think of education in an integrated, holistic way. By the time she graduated, Jenny had gathered several intellectual communities around her to consider the academy’s future as she entered the job market.
Terisa Laine Scales (Laine) is Professor and administrator at Baylor University and, like the other faculty mentors writing essays for this volume, works with doctoral students learning to navigate the rocky terrain of the academy. Looking toward the future, she reminds her doctoral students regularly: “You are the next generation of Christian faculty and administrators who will inherit these universities with their problems and opportunities.” Rather than letting graduate students get stuck in their criticism or their fears of university life, she asks them, “What will you do to make it better, when you are leading the way?” When doctoral students think in these terms, they begin planning as stewards: they consider what they hope to preserve and what they want to change about the academy in years to come. Imagining themselves in charge, these future faculty and administrators explore in conversation with others how to steward both the academy and their Christian faith in light of our current challenges. Laine collaborates with other leaders to facilitate regular student gatherings to talk seriously about the academy and its future. In these gatherings, Christian doctoral students form habits and practices of community dialogue that transcend disciplinary boundaries. Laine’s hope is that doctoral students will carry these practices into their faculty roles after graduation, creating their own transdisciplinary communities. Several essays in this volume are extensions of conversations graduate students started within these gatherings. Now the authors take the dialogue outward in new directions as they live into their new faculty positions.
Stewardship and the Educational Process
Appropriating the word stewardship as an ideal for doctoral education is not original to us. We were inspired by the work of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID), a forward-thinking research group conducting a five-year study as the twenty-first century began. The CID concluded that forming “stewards of the disciplines” is an essential goal for doctoral education. Their study goes on to provide data and examples from a diverse group of programs in the study. The CID researchers explain this “provocative framework” of stewardship in their book, Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century; their conclusions present a bold call for reexamination of our traditional practices. 1 The academic steward, according to the authors, is “not simply manager of her own career,” rather she “embraces a larger sense of purpose” and has been entrusted with the care of her discipline “on behalf of those in and beyond it.” 2 The authors are candid about their intent when borrowing ecclesiastical language to express their ideas:
We do not choose the language of “formation” or “stewardship” capriciously. The doctorate carries with it both a sense of intellectual mastery and of moral responsibility. That the entire process concludes with all members of the community dressed in religious robes and engaged in an act of ordination of the novice by the master with a priestly hood is no accident. 3
For Christians, the call to embrace a larger sense of purpose in our work is not new; discussions of vocation have flourished in the past two decades within Christian circles, particularly within undergraduate education. Using religious language to speak specifically about doctoral education, however, was rather novel in our experience, and we wanted to dig deeper into ideas like vocation, formation, and stewardship to see if we might discern their relevance for Christian academics. There were many resources available. During the same years that CID researchers combed the nation’s universities for promising practices in doctoral education, Christian universities were piloting new programs to prepare future faculty. Sponsored in large part by the Lilly Endowment, these programs focused particularly on how graduates might bring their faith to bear on their work as scholars and teachers. For example, the Lilly Graduate Fellows Program, described by Jane Kelley Rodeheffer (Chap. 8), offers opportunities for mentoring and dialogue to prepare doctoral students for faith-informed faculty life. The Lilly postdoctoral fellows at Valparaiso offers practical opportunities for Christian scholar-teachers in the years between their doctoral work and first faculty appointments. Baylor University’s Conyers Scholars program, described later in this introduction, focuses on cultivating particular practices aimed at shaping Christian scholar-teachers. Each of these programs aims to form the next generation of Christian faculty, but with different methods and emphases. This volume engages members of these and other groups as it weaves together threads of discussion among doctoral students, faculty mentors, and clergy. Together we consider the question of how we might envision and inhabit a Christian understanding of the concept of stewardship within the academy.
Listening to the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID)
What convinced us that the voices of the CID were the right ones for us to hear? Was this really a conversation we wanted to join? We found the CID’s conclusions compelling as they came from a multidisciplinary group of experts and were backed up by a long-term research project of both public and private universities. While carrying the Carnegie imprimatur, well-known for educational innovation, the CID challenged the status quo in ways we found courageous. Project leaders demonstrated what they challenged other academics to do, namely, to “preserve the best of the past for those who will follow,” and to consider how to “prepare and initiate the next generation of stewards.” 4 The CIDs progressive and creative recommendations appealed to us and gave would-be reformers a rationale for rethinking doctoral education while still showing respect for the traditions that should endure.
The CID’s work was also appealing to us for its practical examples derived from real programs. While our dialogue would eventually expand to other universities and programs, it began within the walls of Baylor University. Baylor is relatively new to larger scale doctoral education. The work of the CID appeared just as we were exploring ways in which Baylor’s graduate programs could be aligned with the university’s commitment to being distinctively Christian as a research university. Since an overwhelming majority of Christian colleges and universities serve undergraduates, models for Christian research universities with robust graduate programs were few. The CID’s practical examples of graduate student formation inspired our own thinking regarding possibilities.
Finally, the familiarity of the CID’s metaphors, while startling at first, drew us in and made us feel “at home.” Words like formation and stewardship were “church words” that we had been exposed to in congregational life. We were surprised to find this language in a field like higher education that can sometimes be allergic to its Christian roots. Beyond the CID’s work, we had access in our immediate circles to theological and historical resources for exploring these terms more deeply and in different directions than the CID had done. What might we contribute to the formation of future faculty if we expanded upon the work of the CID and carefully considered with our graduate students the academy’s future? Drawn toward this orientation that combines past, present, and future, we began our exploration with the idea of the steward.
According to the CID, stewards engage in three interrelated tasks: generation, conservation, and transformation. Generation is often the first thing we imagine when we think of a scholar: conducting original and important research. Scholars move their fields forwa...