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This is a reasonably good Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post (“College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one”) by the president who signed my doctoral diploma at the University of Iowa a few years back. I agree with its general drift.
What it lacks, however, is an honest recognition that the vocational (commodity) turn in higher ed has largely been imposed and sustained by academics themselves. University scholars, researchers, and administrators have been willful participants, playing along and profiting quite nicely from the commodification of higher education for at least two generations.
A call like this one for the media and the public to stop treating higher ed like a commodity can’t be taken seriously as long as university faculties and administrators continue to lust after government and industry grants, and market their programs to unsuspecting potential student consumers with hollow promises of jobs and lucrative careers, if they only sign up for the right major, with often misleading or unsubstantiated job placement rates.
Academics have only themselves to blame for the commodification of higher education.
May 14, 2015: Ascension Day/Commencement Day
Final Charge to the New Saint Andrews College Class of 2015
Dr. Roy Alden Atwood
Past President and Senior Fellow of Humanities
Members of the Class of 2015:
Congratulations.
As your former college president, it is my privilege to give you, as former college students, your final charge. Put another way, this is the final word of one has-been to the latest class of NSA has-beens.
You have been a good class and it should probably be you up here instead of me.
After all, you finished your work at NSA in about four years or less; it took me more than 20 years to finish mine.
But whether our Moscow captivity has been two years or 20, this is a glorious occasion, fittingly punctuated by the fact that today is Ascension Day.
The Ascension is, sadly, the most neglected, least understood, and least celebrated part of the redemptive story in the church today.
Tim Chester & Jonny Woodrow, in their delightful little book, The Ascension: Humanity in the Presence of God (2013), explain why, when they write,
“Let’s be honest: the ascension of Jesus is weird.”
It seems strange indeed to most of us that the final act of Jesus’s earthly ministry should be him floating off into the clouds and out of sight.
But it only seems weird until you realize that it was the capstone moment of Jesus’s earthly ministry that was absolutely essential for our redemption.
It was the Second Adam returning, with us who are in Him, to the fellowship and very presence of God the Father.
It was the Second Moses returning to the impenetrable cloud on the Mount.
Without Christ’s ascension there is no consummation to our salvation, no Holy Spirit, no great commission.
We’d be like the prodigal son returning, being forgiven, even given a new life, but then receiving our Father’s cold shoulder with no celebratory feast, no reconciliation. That would be even weirder.
So the ascension is weird, but only in the most redemptive and glorious sense.
And I believe there are some interesting parallels between the ascension story and our story here as those who have completed our work at New Saint Andrews today:
- Just as it was not enough for Jesus to merely take on human flesh at his incarnation, it was not enough for you to have merely been admitted to NSA—more was needed.
- Just as it was not enough for Jesus to merely suffer and die on the cross, it was not enough for you to merely suffer through all those classes, books, declamations, recitations, Disputatios, lectures, papers and a thesis —more was needed.
- Just as it was not enough for Jesus to merely rise from the dead on the third day, it was not enough for you to merely complete your graduation requirements and to receive your diploma today—more is still needed.
One more thing was required of Jesus after the resurrection, just as one more thing is required of you after graduation.
When Jesus ascended into heaven, he took his incarnate-crucified-and-resurrected human body and restored redeemed humanity to full fellowship with our Heavenly Father. By his ascension we now have the full rights and inheritance as adopted sons and daughters of the Lord of the Universe.
In a similar way, if you were only admitted, studied and graduated from the College, then your story would be radically incomplete.
What you must now do is rise to the occasion as those who have been admitted-educated-and-graduated, and go forth faithfully and joyfully to serve our Ascended King and his Kingdom as alumni of New Saint Andrews. This is your ascension moment.
St. Paul put it this way, in Colossians 3
(1) If then you have been raised with Christ, seek those things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. (2) Set your minds on things above, not on things on earth. (3) For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
So my final, three-fold charge to all of us who bid New Saint Andrews farewell today is this:
- Remember that, just as Jesus’s final act of ascending to heaven was to reconcile fallen humanity to God the Father, once and for all, so too you, as alumni of New Saint Andrews and the adopted children and heirs of the King of kings, must be busy doing the Kingdom work of declaring the crown rights of Jesus over every square inch of all that exists.
If you are in Christ, this is your call. If you are an NSA alumnus, this is your call.
If we fall short of that, then our NSA experience and your graduation today will have been in vain.
- Second, never allow any friends, spouse, child, family, clan, college, career, congregation, community, nation, ideology, or dream to displace our First Love and highest priority. Let nothing in our lives or devotions distract us from our chief end to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.
- And finally, be weird. That will probably be easy for some of you. But remember each Ascension Day, the anniversary of our Last Day at NSA, that what seems weird is sometimes the most important and necessary and glorious thing of all.
When everyone else is taking the easy road to success or fame, be weird by choosing a more faithful direction.
When everyone else is camping only where it is safe, and comfortable, and smugly self-satisfied, then be weird and pack up your tent and follow the path Abraham took.
Go where there is the greatest need, rather than where you can make the most money.
Go where your gifts and abilities can best serve the least in Christ’s Kingdom, rather than producing one more widget for some godless corporation.
And be shapers, not consumers of culture—for Christ’s sake.
In doing so, we will, together, fulfill the mission and capstone experience of New Saint Andrews, namely, to become “leaders who shape culture through wise and victorious Christian living.”
Class of 2015, I hope every Ascension Day hereafter will remind you of your chief end and greatest privilege.
Make this your own ascension moment. Rise to the occasion. Take your rightful place next to Christ’s ascended side and advance his kingdom to every corner of Creation.
May our Ascended Lord guide and bless you all your days. And may they be many, joyful, fruitful and wonderfully weird.
God bless you!
Closing Prayer
Let’s pray:
Holy Father,
Holy Spirit,
Holy and Ascended Lord,
We thank you for these graduates who worked so hard and faithfully these past few years. Bless them for their labors.
Go before them.
Guide them.
Protect them.
And most of all embolden them to serve you all their days without fear or faltering.
Make these graduates, as your adopted children, to be like their ascended Lord:
humble in spirit,
pure in faith,
self-sacrificial in love,
fervent in godliness,
steadfast in the truth, and ever joyful in hope, according to the sure promises of your Word.
Lord, thank you, too, for their families, especially their parents, who sacrificed so much that these graduates might be better prepared for service in your kingdom.
Multiple their blessings 10- and 100-fold for their faithful nurturing of these children you entrusted to them.
Now dismiss us with your Triune blessing, we pray,
In the strong name of our ascended Lord, Jesus,
Amen.
The U.S. Senate’s bipartisan “task force” committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), released its report on ways Congress and the U.S. Department of Education could streamline and hopefully reduce federal regulations now overwhelming America’s 6,000 colleges and universities–especially the nation’s approximately 4,000 private institutions–while still protecting students and holding schools accountable to taxpayers.
According to the committee’s press release, “The task force’s objective was to provide specific recommendations on reducing, eliminating or streamlining duplicative, costly or confusing regulations and reporting requirements to Congress and the administration in anticipation of the ninth reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.”
Senate education committee Chairman Alexander said, “The stack of federal regulations on colleges and universities today, which stretches as tall as I am, is simply the piling up of well-intentioned laws and regulations, done without anyone first weeding the garden. This report will guide our efforts to weed the garden and allow colleges to spend more of their time and money educating students, instead of filling out mountains of paperwork.”
Alexander announced a hearing on February 24 to discuss the findings of the report.
You can read the committee’s report here in pdf.
A report in a recent edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education raises this and other important questions about the state of undergraduate specialization in American higher ed. For example, “how often do graduates end up working in fields unrelated to their major? Frequently, it turns out.”
The article rightly notes that “College officials, of course, think that the specific discipline students pursue matters little to their ultimate success because so many people end up working in fields unrelated to their college major.”
Unfortunately, the article goes on to report that “majors don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. In fact, students keep getting more of them to choose from. Colleges have sliced and diced academic disciplines in many different ways in the last two decades to create clusters of new majors. From 2000 to 2010, the number of majors on campuses increased by some 20 percent, according to data collected by the U.S. Education Department.”
Read more here.
If today’s social, cultural, political and economic myopia is due in large part to the failure of today’s post-secondary institutions to educate the next generation broadly, not just in narrow academic or vocational specializations, as I suggested in my last post, “Through a Pipe Darkly,” then the pressing challenge is how to correct that problem.
How can the academy help restore our peripheral vision? How can it recover a perspective that is integrative rather than intrinsically fragmented? That may be a tough challenge, given the assumptions of our increasingly secular and crudely pragmatic society, but I believe the place to start (but not end) is recovering the Christian liberal arts.
The liberal arts have been mocked pretty mercilessly over the past 50+ years (you know, English majors are highly qualified to work at McDonald’s, etc.), but those cheap shots are born of a smugness that doth protest too much. For one thing, the common undergraduate liberal arts experience today has little or no resemblance to the historic liberal arts known before WWII. What goes by the liberal arts label now is little more than a random cluster of isolated courses that focus as narrowly and myopically as any professional training program (e.g., accounting, engineering, etc.). They lack almost universally any intentionally integrative, connective ties to the rest of their closest liberal arts curricular kin. Yet, I’d submit that without such an integrative relationship in the liberal arts, those studies are neither liberal nor an art–just more weak training to produce future widgets for our political and economic machinery.
For another thing, the claims about the the job placement of those graduating in supposedly “real majors” (meaning not in the liberal arts) have been so exaggerated (especially by self-interested academic departments trying lure unsuspecting students and their parents into their lair), so absurd, that it is a standing joke on most campuses.
Again, just ask any modest-sized group of folks to raise their hands if they majored in college, and then have them keep their hands up if they still work in the field of their major. Watch all the hands go down and the laughter begin. The proportion of those dropping their hands who studied outside the liberal arts will be as high or higher as those who majored within the liberal arts. A 2009 National Science Foundation study found, for example, that only about 38 percent of those who majored in the so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math–often touted as exemplary “real majors” that lead to “real jobs”) still work in “their field” after just a few short years.
If one is going to mock majors, one must compare apples to apples and salaries to salaries over an entire working life. When you do, it’s pretty hard for most majors to be very smug when matching up to liberal arts grads (even with their rather fragmented approach today). They all suffer from largely the same problem and that approach is helpful neither to the workplace nor for recovering peripheral vision in the public sphere.
But regardless of the job prospects for liberal arts grads, the integrative liberal arts, as historically understood and taught, are crucial to recovering peripheral vision in our collective public and social lives, and the body politic.
The Corrective Lens of the Classical and Christian Liberal Arts
The university was a Christian invention in the Middle Ages (the earliest established between A.D. 1100 and 1200), designed to give students a holistic vision of the world and a foundation for future learning. That was the original purpose of the classical liberal arts (meaning, the arts necessary to be a free citizen and not merely a slave trained to perform tasks for others, as Aristotle explained long ago). For almost a millennium, Christian universities taught the classical liberal arts–sometimes known as the seven liberal arts which were divided into the Trivium and Quadrivium:
- The Trivium, or the Three Ways, stressed the good structure of language (Grammar), the way to discern truth (Logic), and the way to express truth beautifully and persuasively (Rhetoric)—all to encourage a student’s life-long love of goodness, truth, and beauty with respect to words and language, as typified by The Word Himself (see John 1:1-14).
- The Quadrivium, or the Four Ways, encouraged a life-long love of goodness, truth, and beauty in the right use of numbers (Arithmetic), numbers in space (Geometry), numbers in time (Music or Harmony), and numbers in space and time (Astronomy). Numbers examined in these ways reveal the unity and diversity of creation and of our Triune Creator Himself (Deut. 6:4, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one,” and Matt. 28:19, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”).
Together, the Trivium and Quadrivium, the original seven liberal arts, offered students essential insights into the harmony and wholeness of God’s gloriously diverse world and into the interrelated truth, goodness and beauty of its Triune Creator. They didn’t just give students isolated or fragmented information, “facts” or technical skills for a job or function in the economy, but the crucial tools for lifelong learning across many (perhaps all) fields and situations–and from a distinctively Christian perspective.
An education that does not teach us how to see the wholeness of God’s creation, and to equip us to understand how all things cohere in Christ, inevitably misses the big picture about creation and creation’s God. It is a partial, incomplete, distorted education. It is myopic and lacks peripheral vision.
What an integrated Christian liberal arts education provides is the framework and perceptual skills to see both broadly (peripherally) and to see how one thing connects or relates to another. It gives students the essential tools for learning that apply to all their various callings as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, neighbors, citizens, providers, voters, buyers and sellers in the marketplace, and parishioners. Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Kuyper, C.S. Lewis—all the greatest leaders in our Christian tradition—were so educated in the traditional, integrative liberal arts of the Trivium and Quadrivium.
An education in the classical Christian liberal arts is certainly no panacea by itself, but it is a start–an important and absolutely crucial start–to recovering the peripheral vision we have lost in our secularizing culture and in the Christian community. Simply getting more of higher ed as usual, more of today’s highly specialized and fragmented university education, will only deepen our spiritual decline and exacerbate our current social, cultural, political, and economic myopia.
Academic specialization and task-specific career training has had the unintended negative consequence of narrowing and restricting our culture’s perspective on the world. That “narrow-sightedness” spawns narrow-mindedness and decreases our ability to anticipate and adapt to change, to think creatively “outside the box,” or to engage meaningfully, fruitfully with others outside our own narrow spheres. This approach to education and training has produced fewer, not more, creative problem solvers and visionary leaders and weakened our social, political and ecclesiastical communities. We have a generation that knows only how to look through a pipe darkly. As a culture, we have no peripheral vision. It is self-inflicted cultural blindness.
The modern university has made academic and vocational specialization a cultural norm.
College students are pressed from Day One (of high school actually) to declare-and fixate-on their “majors,” their supposedly long-term career goals, as if little else mattered. Short-sighted businesses and HR offices look for graduates who can fill the pigeon hole of immediate need. They often treat graduates (from assembly-line degree mills) like replaceable parts. If the freshly minted graduate doesn’t work out so well, they toss him or her out and grab another narrowly trained fresh-faced widget off the academic shelf.
The results have not been pretty.
We do not have better educated students, a more skilled workforce, or a more informed citizenry. Instead, we have a generation of mostly instrumental functionaries with tunnel vision. They may know how to look through and navigate the tiny world within the narrow confines of “their little pipe,” their niche area of specialization, but they are pretty much useless beyond it. There they are condemned to be little more the dutiful consumers of the commodities of our increasingly secular culture. They have not been equipped to be makers or shapers of culture. To the contrary, they don’t have right intellectual breadth or cultural horsepower for that higher level of engagement.
But they can feel pretty darn good about themselves when compared to the bar set by “Dumb and Dumber To” in the theaters.
Academic specialization and task-specific career training has had the unintended negative consequence of narrowing and restricting our culture’s perspective on the world. That “narrow-sightedness” spawns narrow-mindedness and decreases our ability to anticipate and adapt to change, to think creatively “outside the box,” or to engage meaningfully, fruitfully with others outside our own spheres of training and function. This approach to education and training has weakened our social, political and ecclesiastical communities to such an extent that it will take years to repair the damage, even if we could change things tomorrow.
We have a generation of university graduates who know only how to look through a pipe darkly. As a culture, we have no peripheral vision. Ours is self-inflicted cultural blindness.
Historically, the integrated classical Christian liberal arts have provided the world with men and women who have peripherial vision, who see the relationships between different aspects of life, who can anticipate change, who solve problems creatively, and who understand the bigger picture. The liberal arts help them understand where they are on the map of life and creation, where they’re headed, and why. Classical liberal arts graduates are some of the few who have a wide-angle perspective and peripheral vision to lead and to shape culture today. We need more. Many more.
Next Entry: Recovering Peripheral Vision
If you’ve been looking at college costs lately, you know it isn’t pretty out there. But it’s encouraging to see just how well NSA stacks up against both its private Christian peers and our regional state-funded universities and colleges.
The bottom line is this: the net price for attending New Saint Andrews College for one year is almost $8,000 less than the average comparable Christian college and only about $2,000 more, on average, than our closest regional state universities and colleges.
But the biggest (and often hidden) difference shows up on the matter of student debt. New Saint Andrews College offers no federal or commercial bank loans, so our students (freshmen to seniors) simply accumulate no debt burden. By contrast, students at comparable Christian colleges end up with an average of almost $16,000 of debt in their freshman year alone! Students at our closest regional public universities aren’t much better off: the average public university full-time freshman can expect to be almost $14,000 in debt at the end of his or her first year. No wonder total student debt now exceeds the nation’s total credit card debt.
So not only does New Saint Andrews have one of the lowest tuition rates and average net prices (after financial aid) among most public and private colleges and universities in the United States, its tuition is less than what the average full-time freshman will accumulate in loan debt at those other institutions. NSA is simply a great value.
The numbers pretty much speak for themselves (and, yes, please do read the fine print!):
Gordon College, a Christian liberal arts institution in Massachusetts–ironically, the original American colony founded to preserve and protect religious freedom, has been threatened with loss of its regional accreditation for not allowing “sexual relations outside of marriage” and “homosexual practice.” Its regional accreditation body, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, is no longer hiding its role as an agent of secularism and its hostility toward any higher education institution that actually takes Christian ethics and beliefs seriously.
According to the blog, Stands to Reason,
“Gordon College has been given 18 months to recant. If they do not change the standards for sexual behavior in their “life and conduct statement” (which prohibit “sexual relations outside of marriage” and “homosexual practice”), they will lose their accreditation*:
The higher education commission of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges met last week and “considered whether Gordon College’s traditional inclusion of ‘homosexual practice’ as a forbidden activity” runs afoul of the commission’s standards for accreditation, according to a joint statement from NEASC and Gordon College.
The commission asked Gordon College to submit a report next September. The report should describe the process by which the college has approached its review of the policy “to ensure that the College’s policies and procedures are non-discriminatory,” the statement said….
In its joint statement, NEASC and Gordon College called the review process a “period of discernment” that will take place over the next 12 to 18 months…. [The president of NEASC’s higher education commission] said the long time frame that Gordon College has been allowed for the review is appropriate considering that Gordon College’s policy is “deeply embedded in the culture of the college” and such things “don’t change overnight.”
How reasonable of the commission to give Gordon College 18 months to come to terms with overturning the thousands-of-years-old Christian view of acceptable sexual behavior.
This 18-month reprieve is nothing but theater, of course. Gordon College will not convince the commission their standards are “non-discriminatory.” Gordon College will explain the difference between behavior and identity, between a person with same-sex attractions who agrees with the biblical standards and one who doesn’t, and the difference between banning a person because of his sexual orientation and banning particular behaviors among all students that go against the biblical view. And then the commission will reject it.
How do I know this? Because this is what happened earlier this year when Gordon College publicly argued for the “right of faith-based institutions to set and adhere to standards which derive from our shared framework of faith.” That controversy ended with the termination of their city contract to maintain Salem’s historical Old Town Hall and their student teachers being removed from public schools.
This assault on Christian higher education was launched earlier this year by Peter Conn in the Chronicle for Higher Education. So this latest action from NEASC is the logical extension of this kind of liberal hegemony against all things Christian. First Amendment–and multiculturalism–be damned.
Luke Sheahan, a professor at the Catholic University of America, has written an article (Humanitas, Vol. XXV, Nos. 1 & 2, 2012, pp. 44-65) outlining two different approaches to academic freedom, one articulated by Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind (1953) and the other following William F. Buckley, one of conservatism’s more articulate firebrands and author of God and Man at Yale (1951). The comparison is instructive on how conservatives remains divided: one side embraces power (just like liberals), only for use in opposition to its arch political antagonist; the other embraces the idealism inherent in rationalism (just like liberalism), without recognizing that deeply engrained cultural practices often/usually trump the most noble ideas (and ideals). Sheahan sums up the differences between their positions this way:
“The primary difference between Kirk and Buckley is that Buckley sees in academic freedom only a dissembling mechanism used effectively by the left and the irreligious to conceal the true power struggles in academia. Hence he argues that conservatives must tear the mask off that struggle and assert their own power. Kirk defends the pursuit of what is higher in human life than base material existence, including temporal power in the academy. It is possible for an institution to protect the search for thruth for its porfessors as Guardians of the Word. Kirk does not deny that many professors use academic freedom to cover their own indoctrination efforts just as Buckley decries. But all that is not naked power is not necessarily dissembling rhetoric. There can be a place where the mind and the higher imagination are cultivated in a spirit of prescriptive freedom, where a community of scholars pursues truth in its particular manifestation without hindrance. This is the dignity of the academy that is inherited from humanity’s long search for truth, and it still enlivens the philosophers in its midst. This is Russell Kirk’s conservative vision for academic freedom.”
For Sheahan’s full article, click here.
Thx: Micah Matix/Prufrock
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