Faculty Connection to Institutional Identity
Higher education began in America with a decidedly religious flavor.[1] However, as George Marsden and James T. Burtchaell found in their examinations of the origins of America’s colleges and universities, “in their rush to conform to the demands of modernity in a post-Christian world, American Christians sacrificed both relevance and identity.”[2] In many cases, the historic religious roots of institutions became something to be downplayed or ignored, because they came to be seen as inimical to academic freedom and, ultimately, to higher learning. Much of this was due to the modern university’s embrace of German thought, but as both Marsden and Burtchaell articulated, it was not quite so simple. In fact, those most deeply connected to the religious roots of institutions were often those most instrumental in removing their influence. In light of this, it is imperative that Christian colleges and universities intentionally enculturate their new faculty to the mission, vision, and identity of their institutions, even more strongly than to their respective academic guilds, to help preserve that identity.
Without recounting the entire history of American higher education, most institutions founded in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries began as denominational institutions to prepare individuals for church ministry or international missions. The very earliest institutions often patterned their program of study after the medieval model which included a broad liberal arts curriculum. Later universities were more exclusively ministry focused but evolved over time to include a liberal arts grounding and training for prospective teachers. Others went further, adding professional programs as well. The development of these schools differed, depending on several factors, including the prevailing mindset of the founding denomination and the influence of presidents and key faculty.
The nineteenth-century brought with it the growing influence of German thought in higher education and the advent of positivism. The German system of higher education emphasized graduate school education and called for narrowly focused, inductive methods of research. Positivism was adopted at most institutions of higher learning as being more advanced. Its focus on free inquiry, objectivity, and empirical evidence downplayed the larger questions of religious values and principles. “There [was] to be no orthodoxy except the doctrine of the right to pursue the truth.”[3] German higher criticism also impacted Bible colleges and seminaries and played a role in secularizing religious studies. With these new methodologies and assumptions driving higher education in Europe—and American institutions seeking the prestige those institutions were gaining—the process of moving away from religious foundations only accelerated.
Marsden and Burtchaell have both shown that well-intentioned Christian leaders in many of these institutions were major influences in the process of secularization. Burtchaell has been described as more pessimistic than Marsden, but both historians chronicle decline.[4] As Americans looked to European academia as the standard, it became apparent that some of the country’s institutions of higher learning lacked academic quality. To increase the reputation of their schools, some boards began to reduce the number of ministers in their midst. Presidents responded in kind, seeking to distance themselves and their institutions from their denominational antecedents. Faculty became increasingly attentive to the standards of their guilds and less focused on the teachings of their churches. With the growing influence of positivism, faculty found it more difficult to publish and gain recognition in their fields apart from following the new guidelines for what constituted evidence of original work. Faith was dislodged as a source of truth and increasingly played a diminished role in scholarship and teaching.[5]
Not surprisingly in this changing environment, colleges and universities began to value academic attainments in faculty hiring more than church affiliation. These same institutions began to market themselves as generically Christian—rather than a specific denominational identity. Over time, even these Christian signifiers were abandoned for broader emphases related to moral character or values.[6] While campus ministries often continued, they were increasingly separated from the academic sphere, made voluntary, and marginalized as one of many available extracurricular activities. Both Burtchaell and Marsden found similar processes, finding that often the leaders and faculty involved in this evolution believed that they were preserving the Christian emphasis of the university, gaining the respect of broader academia, and positioning their school favorably for the future. Eventually, it became apparent that academicians had no place in their classroom for knowledge found outside the empirical process.[7]
Douglas Sloan’s book Faith and Knowledge chronicles the debate over the source of knowledge in the changing educational environment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sloan calls the new perspective “the two-realm theory of truth.”
This is the view that on the one side there are the truths of knowledge as these are given predominantly by science and discursive, empirical reasons. On the other side are the truths of faith, religious experience, morality, meaning, and value. The latter are seen as grounded not in knowledge but variously in feeling, ethical action, communal convention, folk tradition, or unfathomable mystical experience. [8]
Some faculty tried to accommodate this bifurcation of knowledge by combining modern science and theological method. The result was another import from Europe, known as German higher criticism, the theological foundation for modern liberalism. Some Christians in America responded by reaffirming the fundamentals of the faith and the notion that divine revelation was not only an acceptable source of knowledge, but the highest source. However, this approach was deemed outdated, anti-intellectual and even embarrassing, resulting in the schism between fundamentalists and academia. Eventually, according to Sloan, a “American theological renaissance” turned to philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard and theologians like Karl Barth who, while attempting to reinvigorate the role of Scripture in modern knowledge, refused to interpret it literally or embrace it as inerrant. This “renaissance,” which included neo-orthodoxy, did elevate Scripture, but not to the authoritative status that it held with fundamentalists. They saw it as a wholesale capitulation to the secularization of the modern university. The only distinction between the secular professor and the new type of Christian professor was that the latter embraced a second source for knowledge. Yet, that second source found no public expression in his or her work because the guilds prohibited it. This bifurcation helps to explain the statements of American Baptist theologian Harvey Cox, who regarded Christian universities as “medieval remnants at best and as oxymorons at worst,”[9] and William DeWitt Hyde, who as president of Bowdoin College suggested, “A church university is a contradiction in terms.”[10] This dichotomy, however, was a wholesale rejection of the historic religious roots of most institutions of higher learning and often resulted in the decline Marsden and Burtchaell had found.
Recognizing what precipitated these foundational shifts in higher education, what can be done to keep Christian schools faithful to their distinctive identity? Burtchaell found the following to be essential:
1. The only plausible way for a college or university to be significantly Christian is for it to function as a congregation in active communion within a church.
2. In every one of its component elements—governors, administrators, faculty, and students—the academy must have a predominance of committed and articulate communicants of its mother church.
3. A Christian college or university must advise noncommunicant members openly and explicitly when welcoming them that the institution is constitutionally committed to its church in a way that must transcend and transfigure the commitments of individual members.
4. Granted the inveterate intellectual mediocrity with the churches and their officers, and the inveterate contempt for faith among intellectual elites, the Christian college or university must expect continual low-intensity distrust from either direction.
5. Lastly, whatever a university or college is committed to must be able to be professed out loud, and honestly.[11]
George Marsden published an article the same year as Burtchaell in First Things titled “The Soul of the American University,” which he, too, later expanded into a larger work by the same title.[12] Marsden concurred with much of what Burtchaell suggested. Marsden found that the separation of religious institutions from their founding churches was a key step in the process of secularization. He was more optimistic than Burtchaell, however, that institutions so separated could still maintain their religious distinctiveness if they had a clearly defined and maintained theological foundation. He concurred with Burtchaell’s other four points, especially on the issues of helping churches understand the importance of education for the body of Christ and defeating the anti-intellectualism that Marsden had found in his earlier seminal work on fundamentalism in America.[13] At the same time, he recognized the need for guidelines to hire faculty who could embrace the mission and identity of the school whole-heartedly. In addition, Marsden and Burtchaell both noted the impetus on faculty to pursue respectability within secular academia and the resulting impact that had on the reputation of the institutions where they worked. The pursuit of academic affirmation at the institutional level resulted in doctrinal challenges that often watered down the distinctiveness of institutions, and at the individual level can be seen in the growing number of publications which were devoid of any discernable faith integration. Turning these indicators around, Marsden would seem to be arguing for Christian institutions that prioritize maintaining their religious identity and hire faculty who are willing to make an integrated approach to teaching and scholarship the hallmark of their careers. Burtchaell’s fourth point seems to recognize that Christian institutions will have to accept some loss of respectability to remain faithfully Christian.
Theologian Robert Benne’s Quality with Soul, brought several of the key factors in maintaining an institution’s distinctiveness together in the following statement: “both religious ethos and the persons necessary to bring that effort to bear are dependent upon an adequate theological vision of a school’s identity and mission.”[14] Note the important point that Benne is making here. While Burtchaell focused on ties to a founding denomination, Benne seems to be suggesting that ties to a church can be important, but absent that connection, commitment to a clear theological position is essential. Benne sees the necessity of a theological core, since, as he notes, in some cases both the church and the institution can lose sight of their particularly “Christian account of reality.”[15] These writers all recognize the critical importance of hiring faculty that are in alignment with the mission and identity of the institution.
While conformity to the changing educational milieu comprises a key threat to Christian colleges and universities, some Christian academicians feared that some institutions would be reactionary, prioritizing faithful living rather than the life of the mind, much, as they argued, as fundamentalists had done in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The eminent historian of American religion, Mark Noll, summed up the resulting imperative for Christian colleges and universities succinctly: “…the most interesting possibilities for the future lie between the Scylla of sectarian separation and the Charybdis of secular effacement.”[16] Richard Hughes articulates this concern about sectarianism in Christian higher education:
…[M]any Christian colleges—and this is a story that Marsden and Burtchaell did not trace—cling so tightly to a particularistic, a priori, Christian worldview that they place limits on the search for truth, largely abandon the Enlightenment-based presuppositions of higher education, and thwart any possibility that they might eventually take their place in the larger American culture as serious colleagues of the highest order.[17]
While this concern is warranted, perhaps a more helpful approach would be to recognize that theological perspectives and their associated hermeneutical methods are important factors in determining an institution’s Christian identity.
Theological foundations are the heart and soul of what make Christian universities distinctive. When defined as “Christian,” there will be elements that are common to all. We should not shy away from elements, however, that make us distinct from one another. These differences manifest faithfulness to our understanding of the Word of God. They are imperative in the competitive marketplace in which we find ourselves because they identify what individual institutions offer prospective students. And, as much of the literature has shown, these distinctions are essential in helping an institution maintain its Christian identity.
I see the advent of the International Alliance for Christian Education as a vital response to the ever-present pressure for Christian institutions to water down their distinctiveness. Herbert Schlossburg reminded us of the importance of not allowing “respectability” in the guild to become more important than our Christian distinctiveness.[18] We can debate where the line is between faithful service and sectarian separation, but I am thankful for an organization like the IACE that is willing to recognize that the dangers of veering too close to the Charybdis of secular effacement is the more historically weighty problem. I am reminded of the admonition of Bruce Kuklick, a man who claimed no faith, to a group of Christian historians that if they did not have anything distinctive to offer from their faith-based approaches to history, why should he care what they had to say?[19] Perhaps I have digressed too far here, but I think the point merits consideration. Christians will not always agree on what should define their institutions, but this is not a problem unique to higher education. In many cases, these differences will cause an institution to carefully consider theological positions, prompting valuable dialogue and constructive disagreements, and giving opportunity for iron to sharpen iron. At a minimum, they represent an effort on the part of Christian groups to be faithful to their understanding of Scripture.
Distinctively Christian institutions must consider the alignment of prospective faculty with their theological positions. Institutions must evaluate their hires closely, but it does not end there. I value the IACE for recognizing this as well. It is providing faculty development conferences, book groups, and resources to help faculty members develop their integration and pedagogy skills which are essential in maintaining a truly distinctive Christian education.
David S. Dockery has faithfully articulated the need for institutions to develop their faculty in these areas over the course of his long and influential ministry. In that time, he has emphasized four key recommendations for new faculty at Christian institutions:
1. Accept the importance of teaching courses in the core curriculum for freshman and sophomores that have a general (survey) focus to them, even though one’s PhD program pushed towards specialization over a narrow area of knowledge.
2. Instead of having faith as a separate category of one’s life (something reserved for Sunday), we want to invite faculty to bring their faith (the Christian faith) to bear on all aspects of the teaching and learning process (connecting Sunday to Monday . . .).
3. Most graduate students have been strongly encouraged to recognize the guild (in whatever subject matter) as the place where they can make a contribution to their discipline, which is often viewed as the top priority of a faculty member. We certainly want to encourage involvement in professional societies and to develop relationships outside of the institution, but we want to ask faculty to prioritize their commitments to the institution and its mission. The institution is more than a place to hang one’s hat and collect a paycheck so that they can participate in their guild. We want to encourage institutional identity, which involves attending plays, recitals, special events, and even athletic events, realizing how it all fits together to shape the overall student experience and institutional affinity of those who teach, serve, and learn at a particular institution.
4. We want to prioritize teaching. That in no way minimizes research, but it does say that research, writing, and publication are secondary to outstanding classroom teaching.[20]
These admonitions are consistent with this reflection, but I want to highlight the third recommendation. New faculty, especially those right out of graduate school, may have very little education or training in what it means to be a faculty member at a Christian institution. Most graduate schools are secular and train graduates very well for participation in their guild but provide very little to prepare them for truly engaging in the life of the Christian campus. Parker Palmer, in The Courage to Teach, argues that “good teaching cannot be reduced to technique: good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.”[21] In other words, just as maintaining our identity as an institution is critical to our pursuit of transformation in the lives of our students, our personal identity (for us, our Christian identity) is key to our success in the classroom. Palmer argues that our identities consciously and unconsciously influence our teaching. As a result, it is vitally important that the theological identity of a faculty member aligns with the institution.
What new faculty need, then, is clarity on how the integration of personal and institutional identity should occur. At my own institution, we seek “to transform lives through excellent education and intentional discipleship in submission to biblical authority.”[22] To what end? To prepare young men and women with excellence so they can employ their vocation as a platform for gospel ministry. The emphasis of Dockery’s third recommendation was introduced to me in the course of a book discussion sponsored by the IACE. During one of our virtual discussions, Nathan Finn mentioned the need for Christian institutions to orient new faculty in such a way that engrafts them more tightly to the institution than to their guild. It was one of those moments where a fuzzy concept became crystal clear to me because of a succinct and apt statement. During further conversation with Finn, he noted that this concept had been a focal point for Dockery for years. In my current role, we had revised our new faculty orientation in various ways, but we lacked an articulated guiding concept to drive our presentation. We now have it.
At Cedarville, we have developed several ways to help ensure that faculty are a good fit with the institution. After they are hired, we provide resources and accountability to help enculturate them into the community. As a part of the application process, prospective faculty are asked to interact with each point in the doctrinal statement and provide their level of affirmation. They also provide their current church and its doctrinal statement. It takes time to review these things and talk through nuances with the candidate, but it is time well spent. Once hired, new faculty undergo an orientation that includes presentations on the institutional vision and mission, the history of the institution, and the resources available to them through our Center for Biblical Integration, assisting them as they build their courses on a biblical foundation. The university provides faculty development events that focus on pedagogical techniques as well as integration topics. Each summer, the director of the Center for Biblical Integration provides a workshop for new faculty focused on integration. The Center also maintains a library of biblical integration resources for faculty.
Faculty are expected to write an integration essay within the first three years that they are at Cedarville. That essay includes five key sections: 1) foundational beliefs and worldview; 2) the correlation between their faith and their field, including aspects of the discipline they can affirm, those they reject, and those that can be redeemed; 3) their commitment to Christian higher education; 4) their spiritual disciplines as expressed in their lives and vocations; and 5) examples of how their courses integrate biblical truth with the content and what assignments are being used to increase students understanding of integration. This integration essay is a living document that faculty revise and update throughout their career for each review and at the time of promotion consideration. Feedback is provided by peers, chairs and deans, and the vice president for academics. Ultimately, in order to continue to receive contracts, faculty must demonstrate effective biblical integration in the classroom and commitment to the theological foundations of the institution.
As means of further accountability, faculty must be actively serving in a church that is aligned theologically with the institution, are expected to attend chapel regularly, and must annually affirm the doctrinal statement and workplace standards when contracts are issued. After a rigorous hiring process, Cedarville works hard to provide the resources needed to help new faculty become actively engaged members of the university community and be successful at what God has called them to do here for as long as He has them here. We are not perfect and are intentionally seeking to learn from others additional means by which to engraft our faculty well to our community.
Dockery’s recommendations are not saying that orienting new faculty with a focus on enculturating them into the campus community must be done at the expense of allowing faculty the opportunity to be involved members of their guild. Rather, they are designed to help new faculty keep first things first. Since as we saw in recounting the history of higher education in America that the guilds are not committed to the timeless principles of Scripture, involvement in the guild can only take us so far in fulfilling the call of God on our lives. We need Christian faculty to be engaged in their fields, however, or we will be guilty of ceding academic fields to those who maintain the two-realm theory of truth. Involvement in our guilds can provide opportunities to impact our fields in biblically distinctive ways and to open the door to gospel conversations. For faculty at Christian institutions, however, there is another imperative. We are preparing students not just for their field, but for a life of service to our King. As a result, the blessing of serving at a Christian institution comes with a stewardship expectation. Helping new faculty embrace this stewardship becomes a key part of the orientation process. For some, this focus on discipleship is what draws them to Christian institutions in the first place. For others, it is not something they have had the opportunity to ponder much at all.
Successful faculty at Christian institutions are intentional about their discipleship role in the same way they are intentional about their teaching and scholarship roles. It is the product of a faculty member making the institutional focus the priority rather than the demands of the guild. So, it goes back to the recommendation to orient new faculty well. Regardless, what is interesting here is that this focus on orienting faculty is not only about preparing them well or even the impact that they, as well-trained faculty, will have on students. It is about increasing the ability of their institution to remain faithful to its identity—an identity rooted in the timeless teaching of Scripture. The history of Christian higher education teaches us that prioritizing the engrafting of new faculty into the ethos of the institution more so than into their guilds, is essential to maintaining the important Kingdom work of Christian colleges and universities.
Thomas S. Mach
Vice President for Academics and Professor of History | Cedarville University
Notes
[1] Portions of this essay were originally presented at an event sponsored by the Center for Biblical Integration on the campus of Cedarville University in 2021.
[2] Stephen R. Haynes, ed., Professing in the Postmodern Academy (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2002), p. xi; James Tunstead Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities From Their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998); George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
[3] Manning M. Pattillo, Jr. and Donald M. MacKenzie, Church-Sponsored Higher Education in the United States: Report of the Danforth Commission (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1966), p. 10.
[4] Robert Benne, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2001), p. 3-8; David L. McKenna, Christ-Centered Higher Education: Memory, Meaning, and Momentum for the Twenty-First Century (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), p. 28; Douglas Jacobsen and Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen, No Longer Visible: Religion in University Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 21.
[5] As an example, the president of the American Historical Association in 1949, Kenneth Scott Latourette, gave a keynote address at the AHA annual meeting entitled “The Christian Understanding of History.” It is hard to imagine a secular academic conference with a similar presentation today. More recent addresses struggle to analyze the past using constantly shifting ideological schools of thought. Examples include “White Freedom and Lady Liberty” by Tyler Stovell in 2018 and “Slave Trading as a Corporate Criminal Conspiracy, from the Calabar Massacre to BLM, 1767–2022” by James H. Sweet in 2023.
[6] Perry Glanzer, Theodore Cockle, and Jessica Martin have recently published a book examining the role of empirical signifiers of Christian colleges and universities today. Perry L. Glanzer, Theodore F. Cockle, and Jessica Martin, Christian Higher Education: An Empirical Guide (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2023).
[7] James Tunstead Burtchaell, “The Decline and Fall of the Christian College (I), First Things (April 1991): 1-33, http://www.firstthings.com/article/1991/04/002-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-christian-college#print; James Tunstead Burtchaell, “The Decline and Fall of the Christian College (II), First Things (May 1991): 30-38, http://www.firstthings.com/article/1991/05/004-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-christian-college-ii.
[8] Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), p. ix.
[9] Mark R. Schwehn, “A Christian University: Defining the Difference,” First Things (May 1999): 25, http://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/05/a-christian-universitydefining-the-difference.
[10] Burtchaell, “The Rise and Fall of the Christian College (I), p. 17.
[11] Burtchaell, “The Rise and Fall of the Christian College (II),” p. 38, italics in the original.
[12] George M. Marsden, “The Soul of the American University,” First Things (January 1991): 1-32, http://www.firstthings.com/article/1991/01/005-the-soul-of-the-american-university#print.
[13] George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Pub. Co., 1991).
[14] Benne, p. 45-6.
[15] Benne, p. 47.
[16] Mark A. Noll, “The Future of the Religious College: Looking Ahead by Looking Back,” in Paul J. Dovre, ed., The Future of Religious Colleges: The Proceedings of the Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges, October 6-7, 2000 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2002), p. 91.
[17] Richard T. Hughes, “Introduction,” in Richard T. Hughes and William B. Adrian, eds., Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Survival and Success in the Twenty-First Century (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1997), p. 1.
[18] Herbert Schlossberg, “Scientific History in Christian Perspective: A Comment on Mark Noll’s Article,” Fides et Historia 14 (Fall-Winter 1981): 41.
[19] Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart, eds. Religious Advocacy and American History (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1997), 59. In fact, what he said was that if their interpretations offer nothing distinctive, “they are worthless.”
[20] David S. Dockery, email message to author, December 10, 2024.
[21] Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, 10th Anniversary Edition (San Francisco: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), p. 10.
[22] Mission Statement of Cedarville University, https://www.cedarville.edu/why-cedarville/mission.
Thomas S. Mach
Vice President for Academics | Professor of History
Cedarville University | Cedarville, Ohio