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Today
our major universities are revealing themselves to be hotbeds of leftist
propaganda, with their students often graduating with enormous debt
without the knowledge and the skills that they and their employers need.
It has gotten so bad that much of the public is turning against the
higher education establishment, with many employers realizing that they
don’t need to require a college education after all.
Meanwhile,
colleges—small so-called liberal arts schools, many of them
church-related—are closing right and left. Reportedly, an American
college is closing every week. As much as they try, they can’t compete
with better-known schools. Their enrollment declines as expenses soar
until they have to shut down.
Surely,
this is not the time to start another college, is it? Actually, it is the
best time.
Today’s
crises make clear both the failure of current approaches to higher
education and the urgent need for a better approach. And because it is
easier to start a new institution than to reform an old one, the time is
right for a school like Luther Classical College.
Today’s
universities are in thrall to postmodernism, the dogma that truth is
relative, that truth claims are nothing more than the construction of
those in power and are thus acts of oppression, and that the business of
education is to “de-construct” those truth claims as a way to liberate
oppressed groups (namely, women, homosexuals, the transgendered, racial
minorities, and Islamic terrorists).
Naturally,
such a climate will be actively hostile to learning. It will require
subjecting students to intense propaganda and indoctrination. This will
include discrediting the legacy of the past, punishing ideological
dissent, and pressuring students to discard not only their religion but
also their belief in objective reality.
Students
who succumbed to this indoctrination are bringing such thinking to
elementary schools, government bureaucracies, and corporate offices. Many
students, to their credit, do not take the “woke” ideology seriously. And
many professors dissent from the party line, though they lay low lest
they jeopardize their careers.
No
wonder academic achievement is in decline! How could it be otherwise? But
“Queers for Palestine” demonstrations, “woke” workplace seminars, and the
madness of transgenderism are turning much of the public against the
higher education establishment. This is good news. This kind of education
needs to collapse.
Small
liberal arts colleges have provided a valuable alternative to the big
research universities, prioritizing teaching rather than research and
emphasizing the liberal arts, a term deriving from the Latin word for
“free” (liber), meaning the kind of education designed to form a free
citizen.
Christian
liberal arts colleges, hundreds of which were founded by churches in the
19th century, have been especially valuable in transmitting the Christian
intellectual tradition in the face of the scientific materialism that was
dominant in modernist universities, as well as the relativism and leftist
politics dominant in today’s postmodernist universities.
Sadly,
though, many liberal arts colleges, wanting to emulate the more
prestigious schools, have turned themselves into mini-research
universities, multiplying their programs, reducing the liberal arts into
specialized humanities courses rather than a broad-ranging cultivation of
the mind, and buying in to the modernist or postmodernist ideology of the
universities.
The
problem is that small private colleges lack the resources of
taxpayer-supported state universities or the huge endowments of the
prestigious private universities. Most small liberal arts colleges depend
on students’ tuition for most of their income. As costs rise, they must
attract more and more students. And yet they must charge them tuition
that far exceeds that of most state schools, which usually have much
better laboratories and other facilities.
That
financial model will be hard to sustain, unless a small college can
somehow develop a strong reputation, either through the quality of a
program or some distinct ethos that makes the school stand out from the
crowd.
More
tragic is what has happened to many church colleges. Many Christian
colleges have responded to these financial challenges by toning down
their Christian identity. Sometimes this is not intentional.
Successful
marketing brings in students from other churches or even non-believers.
In adding new programs to attract new students, colleges often cannot
find new faculty with the needed expertise among their church members so
new teachers are brought in from outside. Often, church members become a
minority, both in the student body and on the faculty. Of course the
church identity, even the Christian identity, will be weakened. Some
colleges go further, jettisoning their theological commitments altogether,
eventually adopting the same ideology as the rest of the higher education
establishment.
The
conformist strategy generally leads to school closings. In this climate,
only colleges that are distinctive from all of the others, that fill a
particular niche, have a good chance of surviving.
I
am not condemning the Lutheran colleges in the Concordia University
system, though they have had to struggle with all of these syndromes.
Speaking as a long-time professor and administrator at one of the
Concordias, I can say that they have navigated these challenges better
than most church colleges. But a number of our schools have been closing.
Some
of the new leaders in the Concordias seem to recognize the problems and
are working hard to recover the Christian educational distinctives and to
build up their institutions’ Lutheran identity. That is a hard task. It
is worth doing, but it will take a while to accomplish. We should pray
for their success.
In
the meantime, Luther Classical College is building a new institution with
a distinct identity and a unique niche: both the faculty and the student
body will be confessional Lutherans, ensuring a comprehensive Christian
and Lutheran ethos. The curriculum will recover the Lutheran educational
tradition—that is, the classical liberal arts, in all of their
liberating, mind-expanding, and civilization-forming power, combined with
robust theological catechesis. The school will focus on preparing church
workers, grounding future seminarians in the Biblical languages and
preparing teachers for the burgeoning classical education movement in our
parochial schools. It will also prepare lay people for all vocations by
giving them a solid educational foundation and then connecting them to
the professional training they need.
This
is very close to what the classical Reformation universities did. Luther
Classical College is highly innovative in higher education today, but it
also has the advantage of being time-tested. May God continue to bless
its founding.
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