Finally, professors should articulate what it means to place Christ and their Christian identity first in life. Students, who are learning to prioritize and combine their own multiple identities and loyalties, surely profit from such wise counsel. Professors can constantly remind students that they are more than students. Their grades do not constitute their worth and identity.

The history of American higher education might have changed radically if Harvard College had pulled off an incredible feat when looking for its first president. The college’s Puritan founders offered the position to the most innovative Christian educator of the time, the amazing Czech John Amos Comenius. He never came.

Comenius’s fame derived from his theological and practical advances. He set forth the theo-logical proposal that all people, including women and the poor, should be educated, because all are made in God’s image. He created educational techniques that appealed to all the senses—for example, his Latin grammar text Orbis Pictus was the very first illustrated book in print history.

When it came to the purpose of higher education, however, Comenius shunned innovation. His illustrated book hints at what he saw as a primary aim of education. An invitation at the beginning bids the reader, “Come, Boy, learn to be wise.” He later described the university as “a permanent assembly of wise men” and “a factory for wisdom.” Comenius represented the expectation, now nearly 400 years old, that universities should help students cults the mark of wisdom (3:13).

Today, however, the idea that professors should dispense moral wisdom is passé. Contemporary universities consider themselves sources of technical expertise for professional practices. If their professors dispense advice beyond their discipline, it usually concerns matters of public policy or political life.

Consequently, professors operate with a narrow conception of their vocation. As one professor admitted, “There are many of my colleagues who would say, ‘Look, we are at a university, and what I do is math; what I do is history. Moving into [moral or spiritual development] is not my competence.'” I have found not one secular college mission statement that claims to provide students with wisdom.

What caused this shift away from wisdom? And are Christian colleges and universities any different from their secular counterparts?

Increasing Secularization
Many historians lay blame for the abandonment of the pursuit of wisdom on the development of the research university in 19th-century Germany. Faculty who taught and trained at these universities grew more concerned with producing knowledge and passing it along than with forming the whole student. As one historian has described it, the student became “a mind to be loaded with facts like a tank car with oil.”

Research professors also began to change their view of knowledge. Knowledge simply became technical expertise in one’s discipline. A recent book by Yale professor Anthony Kronman, Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2008), contends that this approach marginalized broad topics related to life as a whole, as subjects beyond one’s narrow field of expertise began to seem like unprofessional distractions.

Professors can remind Christian students that their vocation entails not merely studying and acquiring knowledge but also loving God.

But these factors do not fully explain the change. Early research universities still thought they should form students morally. In 1876, Daniel Coit Gilman, the founding president of America’s first research university, Johns Hopkins, claimed that “everyone agreed” that the job of the university and its faculty was “to develop character—to make men.” The university “misses its aim,” he continued, “if it produce[s] learned pedants, or simple artisans, or cunning sophists, or pretentious practitioners.”

But these factors do not fully explain the change. Early research universities still thought they should form students morally. In 1876, Daniel Coit Gilman, the founding president of America’s first research university, Johns Hopkins, claimed that “everyone agreed” that the job of the university and its faculty was “to develop character—to make men.” The university “misses its aim,” he continued, “if it produce[s] learned pedants, or simple artisans, or cunning sophists, or pretentious practitioners.”

What eventually changed the priorities of many universities pertained more to their constituency. Prior to the Civil War, church-affiliated colleges educated 90 percent of undergraduates in America. Later, with the help of the Morrill Act in 1862, the state increasingly dominated the creation of colleges and universities, resulting in increased secularization. A century later, more American students would attend secular state colleges than private colleges. Today, public universities educate over 73 percent of American undergraduates.

This shift transformed higher education in two fundamental ways. First, state legislators expected these universities to produce technical experts and civil servants, not liberally educated, wise humans. It comes as no surprise, then, that a recent study reported that 62 percent of students never had professors encourage discussions of life’s meaning and purpose.

Second, state-funded institutions do not have the freedom to form the whole person. Unconstrained by religious mission statements and denominational ties, they may enjoy a certain kind of academic freedom. But government oversight and Establishment Clause strictures preclude more vigorous forms of moral and spiritual instruction. Thus, public universities aim simply to form professionals, citizens, and broadly defined leaders, to whom they provide generally defined capacities such as critical thinking.

As a result, secular universities have transformed into “multiversities”—institutions with no unifying core of knowledge or identity that can provide students moral wisdom for life. Without agreement on life’s purposes, any rationale for character development disappears. In an article about Princeton University, New York Times columnist David Brooks found the university does not “go to great lengths to build character”; as one university administrator claimed, “We’ve taken the decision that these are adults and this is not our job …. There’s a pretty self-conscious attempt not to instill character.”

The Christian Difference
When it comes to the moral dimension of education, are Christian colleges and universities different? Actually, they are. Evangelical college and university mission statements are filled with language about moral goals and ideals. Sometimes they even mention wisdom. For instance, Indiana’s Huntington University seeks to “educate students broadly for a life of moral and spiritual integrity, personal and social responsibility, and a continued quest for wisdom.”

But does it matter in practice? Research shows that Christian, particularly evangelical, institutions demonstrate a marked moral difference in five areas: (1) faculty attitudes; (2) Bible, theology, and ethics in the curriculum; (3) measured or reported impact on character or moral attitudes; (4) students’ moral reasoning; and (5) alumni views about moral education.

Read More

[Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]