“To understand why the negative prejudice [with regard to the claim that God is Creator and Sustainer of all] is so strong now, just reflect on how the entire system of human expertise, as represented by our many-tiered structure of certification and accreditation, has a tremendous vested interest in ruling God out of consideration.  For, if it cannot do that, it is simply wrong about what it presents as knowledge and reality–of which God is no part….God currently forms no part of recognized human competence in any field of knowledge or practice.  But if this actually is God’s universe, the current lords of knowledge have made what is surely the greatest mistake in human history.  Believing the world is flat or the moon is cheese would be nothing in comparison to their mistake.”

Back to the point, namely why money won (unearned) isn’t sweeter than money earned and why the project of educating towards a virtuous citizenry matters now more than ever: Lottery studies have shown that money won is negatively correlated with long-term happiness about life in general (see Brooks, pp 75-81).   If this is true, then the current generation of college students is being sold a bill of goods about how this economic mess will get fixed once and for all.  Brooks argues that “If money without earned success does not bring happiness, then redistributing money won’t make for a happier America” (81).  I agree with him.  But redistribution has been the underlying (although often an unspoken term by its advocates) strategy to counteract the recent evils of Wall Street.  So what?  What bearing does all this have on educating the millennial generation? Brooks points out that a majority of late teens to early thirty-somethings tend to be quite comfortable with socialist policies.  A 2010 Gallup poll proves it.

I’m simultaneously concerned and not concerned about these stats.  Not concerned because it won’t take long for millennials to understand the hollow promises of an increasingly socialist-leaning government.  Concerned, because once we start down this road as a country, it’s really hard to right the ship.  Earned success increases overall happiness about one’s life, unearned success doesn’t, and those of us who have been in the working world for longer than a few years know it.  If higher education has anything to do with helping young bearers of the imago dei to flourish in the deepest sense, then can we really afford to continue educating on this issue in the smorgasbord-kind-of-way that has become the norm?

The point of the graveyard exercise was to remind these young leaders that, in one sense we’re all destined to become part of the earth once again and that our days in this life are just a few handbreadths (Ps. 39:5).  Given that fact, how do we hope our epitaphs will read?   What legacy will we leave?  There was another point to the activity, however, namely to crystallize in their souls a hope-informed understanding of human existence that flows out of God’s plan to redeem the created order itself and make all things new and to remind them that the degree to which they live with an eternal perspective in this short life is the degree to which they will be participating as God’s vice-regents in restoring all aspects of his original design—of living in this world coram deo, before the face of God through a deep awareness of creation, fall, redemption and finally, yes, consummation.

This coed really knew more than what she realized.  As we discussed her question in greater depth, she began to see how all the worldview studies and related ethical issues we had covered last year in the formal classroom ethos as well as service to others outside the classroom has eternal value.  The nature of learning itself for creatures made in God’s image is such that studies and practice in the various disciplines, whether the humanities, music, art, business, or the helping professions, will change us, literally forever. Our formal college studies as image-bearers ought to so shape us that we gain new depth of insight about how we should treat each other at the beginning of life, how we do or don’t love God and neighbor inside the covenant of marriage or in the workplace, how we care for the elderly in their frailty.  How we think and act in these spheres of life will necessarily change us in such a way that will affect how we live out the rest of our days on earth as well as affecting our souls’ capacities to glorify Him fully in the new heaven and earth.  The redeemed human disposition to learn and serve others as a response to what we learn isn’t something that passes away because our physical bodies are mortal.  What we learn in this world and how we live that out in this brief life will have implications for both the scope and depth with which we glorify God when we are resurrected in the next.

The inquisitive coed student would agree with N.T. Wright that the Christian “mission must urgently recover from its long-term schizophrenia. The split between saving souls and doing good in the world is not a product of the Bible or the gospel, but of the cultural captivity of both.”  Seems to me that unlike evangelical boomers and x’ers who have demonstrated more susceptibility to the residual effects of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, millennials are less willing than their predecessors to settle for Dwight Moody’s “sinking ship” understanding of the culture and the rather thin view of hope that corresponds to it (“God has given me a lifeboat and has said ‘Moody, save all you can’”).  They are far more likely, once made aware of it, to embrace C.S. Lewis’s paradigm:  “Hope…means…a continual looking forward to the eternal world….It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is.  If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”  So may it be for those of us who are called to teach and mentor this millennial generation of Christ-followers.

James Burtchaell’s 9 steps of Alienation in Christian Higher Education

1. A period of stagnation is evident in the life of the institution; a dynamic typically attributed to “depressive influence” by the institution’s sponsoring denomination.  This is then often followed by a time of social unrest and intellectual turbulence in both the denomination and the institution, because “fresh findings and methods and disciplines [raise] fearful philosophical challenges to theology.  Spokesmen for the church’s concerns, by a compound of incapacity and animosity, [exacerbate] the apparent hostility between the church and rigorous scholarship” (144).
2. An administrator, usually the president, is convinced of the need to raise the institution’s level of academic prestige and overall excellence.  However, the institution’s sponsoring denomination is seen as an adversary—or at best, an irritating obstacle—to the achievement of this goal (149).
3. Estrangement from the sponsoring denomination occurs during a time when it is financially profitable for the institution to accept funding from secular sources.  Further, the institution may justify the estrangement on the basis of the sponsoring denomination’s inability or lack of willingness to provide funds sufficient to meet the institution’s academic ambitions (152).
4. A “loyalty shift” occurs, i.e., there is a transfer of primary loyalty from the denomination to the academic guild.  This especially holds true for the faculty (153).
5. There is a decline of support for any institutional policy which requires active communion in church as a qualification for entrance to its constituencies, including its governance (board), administration, faculty, and student body.  A secondary effect of this dynamic is the university’s inability to identify itself as a unit of the sponsoring denomination (156).
6. There is a “progressive devolution” of institutional representatives who identify with any church at all.  Typically this involves a significant percentage of staff and faculty who first abandon the distinctives of the sponsoring denomination in their language and practices (i.e. from “Methodist” to “Christian”), then to generically religious and finally to overtly secular (157).
7. There is an anxiety and sense of urgency generated by the tension created when the institution attempts to appeal to one constituency (e.g., the state, intellectual elite, donors, etc.) while simultaneously trying to avoid antagonizing another constituency (e.g., the church and its campus representatives).  The solution to this tension is often to replace religious identity with “reductionist equivalents,” e.g., identifying the Christian mission of the institution with making contributions toward a more prosperous and socially conscious American public.  Additionally, a common substitute for deep religious faith was “morality;” the institution persists in its dedication to cultivate moral character within its students (158-60).
8. Theological studies/church ministry studies are separated from the academic center of the institution.  In the Vanderbilt case, this move was seen as an enhancement of autonomy and academic freedom for these departments, but in reality it was a marginalizing factor (161).
9. Active Christians are typically more effective in alienating colleges and universities from their faith-communities than are hostile secularists.  Historically, this change has occurred in three stages: a) First there is a “muting”—usually enacted by Christians—of all or most overt claims of the institution to be a functional limb of a particular denomination.  Statements, decisions and symbols that were historically public and unapologetic become private and bashful in their tenor.  b) The period following is often a time of high morale on campus due to the perception that academic standards and aspirations are rising, as are prestige and funding.  Faith is “mute” but still present.  c) This third and final period is marked by institutional control via a new breed of intellectuals whose obedience is fully to the academic guilds and their foundational assumptions, which are radically divorced from faith commitments or religion in general.  It is at this point that the institution becomes completely secularized.

* Taken from “The Alienation of Christian Higher Education in America: Diagnosis and Prognosis.  In Schooling Christians: “Holy Experiments” in American Education

by Stanley Hauerwas (Author), John H. Westerhoff (Editor) Eerdmans 1992.

“As the minimum function of the administrator is ordering the means, so his highest function is discovering and clarifying and holding before his institution the vision of the end. As the qualifications for the administrator’s minimum function are courage, fortitude, justice, and prudence, so the qualification for his highest function is philosophical wisdom.

It is one thing to get things done. It is another to make them last.”

Robert M Hutchins, “The Administrator: Leader or Officeholder?” in Freedom, Education and the Fund: Essays and Addresses, 1946-1956 (New York: Meridian Books, 1956).

-C.S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time” (1939).

Here is the real-life case study I brought to Thursday’s roundtable. A social work student I met several years ago at a large state university said this to me in a follow-up email to a conversation she and I had about the merits of the Federal Marriage Ammendment (2004), which would have outlawed (by way of Constitutional amendment) same-sex marriages:

“I think I was most troubled by the concept of an objective moral reality. How can you prove that it exists? If everyone were to follow certain steps, would they each come to the same conclusion about this moral reality? Morality is certainly not inherent in each of us ? we are taught the morals of our culture. Similarities between cultures regarding taboos and mores indicate that certain activities or practices contribute to survival or well?being. I allowed your argument that nobody would agree with torturing babies as a premise in our discussion on Tuesday night, but I’d even like to retract that. Maybe some people think it’s okay. Female genital mutilation is still practiced. How do we know it’s okay to eat animals? How do we “know” it’s not okay to eat people? Or is it? Our knowledge is not innate. From research, I can say that we are social creatures, and without society we do not develop.”

Responses, anyone?