A Brief History of Christianity in U.S. Higher Education

Andrea Turpin, Associate Professor & Graduate Program Director of History at Baylor University, sits down with Dan Hummel to give an overview of the ways Christianity has influenced U.S. higher education, and how the relationship between the two has changed over time.

Learn about Andrea Turpin & Baylor University

Check out Andrea's book: A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837-1917.

With Faith in Mind is produced at Upper House in Madison, Wisconsin and hosted by Director of University Engagement Dan Hummel and Executive Director John Terrill. Jesse Koopman is the Executive Producer. Upper House is an initiative of the Stephen & Laurel Brown Foundation.

Please reach out to us with comments or questions at podcast@slbrownfoundation.org. We'd love to hear from you. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:05

Hello and welcome to With Faith in Mind. I'm Dan Hummel, today's host and the Director of University Engagement at Upper House. This episode is part of our series on Christian education at the Crossroads, and we're welcoming Dr. Andrea Turpin to the show. Hi, Andrea.

SPEAKER_02 0:19

Hi, Dan.

SPEAKER_03 0:20

So today we're going to explore the history, the long history of higher education, and particularly the role of religion in that history. I don't think we could have a better guest to help us navigate this bri pretty broad terrain and for many of us unfamiliar terrain. So a little about Andrea. Andrea is associate professor of history at Baylor University, where I guess you've you've taught for uh 10 years now, Andrea, is that right?

SPEAKER_02 0:45

Yes, I started in fall 2011.

SPEAKER_03 0:48

Awesome. So over 10 years, yeah. Uh Andrea's the author of uh many articles. She's the author of uh award-winning book, A New Moral Vision, Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, which came out which came out with Cornell a few years ago. And also, and this is uh this was really helpful to me. This is an article, um, Andrew, that you wrote a couple years ago for the a handbook on higher education. And it's the history of religion in American higher education. It's a 60-page tour de force. I don't even know how many books are referenced in the bibliography of that thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:20

They asked for that link, yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:22

She's very helpful, very informative. Um, and she's the author of many other articles as well that um span from the more academic uh to the more accessible. Um, Andrea also blogs uh uh for pathos and and other things. Um and currently she's on a sabbatical grant for researchers from the Louisville Institute for the 2023 year to do research on an uh another project. Um I think many people would want to know, Andrea, what is it like being on sabbatical for a year? Is it I I'm sure some people might imagine you're dining in coffee houses and taking in movies in the early afternoon. Is that what it's like?

SPEAKER_02 2:05

My sabbatical started January 1st because I actually have a calendar year sabbatical, which is unusual. And on January 1st, I was on a transatlantic flight and I caught COVID. So I'll let you know.

SPEAKER_03 2:18

Okay. Um We'll spend one more minute on the sabbatical. So, of course, uh the the sabbatical is meant to give you a break from your teaching and other duties at Baylor so you can focus on research.

SPEAKER_02 2:32

Uh, what's the title of the the project you're doing uh for the working title is a debate of their own, women in the fundamentalist modernist controversy. And the book project explores how Protestant women and particularly Protestant women's organizations navigated that theological and political and social controversy of the early 20th century. It's generally talked about as a tale of men yelling at each other, right? Like uh pastors, editors of religious journals. But during this time, every single Protestant denomination, at least every major one, had a major women's organization dedicated to missions. That was women's ministry at the time. It was women who got together to pray for, raise money for, and learn about missions, particularly missions by women. And so they had a sort of a separate culture, and so they had unique takes on those issues. And the book explores those takes and what the effect was when people listened to them and when they did not.

SPEAKER_03 3:28

Excellent. Very interesting. I will resist from going down that rabbit hole because that's a topic I find very a lot of interest in. Um, however, I do think the the um question of gender in higher education will come up later. So that that is a tie through uh with your current project as well. Um okay, so uh there's an introduction. I want to start off with one just personal question or question about um how you came to this topic. So, what made you interested in studying higher education as a not just to be, you know, to sort of exist in institutions of higher education, but actually study it as a subject of inquiry.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

So I am part of that famous joke that all historians are really writing autobiography. I uh was at seminary at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, getting a master's degree in church history. And I I knew that I wanted to go on and get a PhD, and I was thinking through how to uh do my work as a historian as a Christian. And I was taking a course uh with Garth Rosell, he's a scholar of American evangelicalism, and he had assigned one of his own pieces. This is why you should always assign your own pieces in a course. I do. Um he designed a piece that he did on Charles Finney, the great revivalist of the 19th century, that is less well known for also being the president of Oberlin College and one of the pioneers of the seminar discussion method, at least in theological education. And so he wrote this piece on how Finney was using seminar discussion method in theological education. And for the first time, I realized you can study studying, right? So and he and I was like, I want to do this. I it's so meta. And so then he recommended that I use Mount Holyoke College because it's in Massachusetts, like Gordon Conwell, and so easy access to the sources was founded by an evangelical woman interested in missions. And so then I read many of her letters, and she did this wonderful thinking through how you could use uh beliefs about gender difference to advance God's kingdom if you used it to convince people that women should be educated and could do this special role. And so I was like, oh, this is fascinating. I could study myself, I can study Christian women in higher education. So maybe it was just really narcissistic. But it it was this, but it was this entry point into realizing, you know, my life has this deep history. And that's how I got into it.

SPEAKER_03 6:00

That's great. And I identify with the same, I call it navel gazing. I I guess autobiography is a little more elevated of a of a practice, but um, yeah, I think that's all maybe that's uh I wouldn't say it's particularly true. There are a lot of religious historians in particular who end up studying something about the religious tradition that they grew up in. Um okay, well, um thanks for sharing that. We'll jump into the uh topic here of uh higher education and religion. So just setting the stage, if if you were to, and I'm sure you've done this, teach a course that would basically be around this topic, where would you start and what were what would be sort of the things you'd emphasize um as just as an orientation to thinking about this big uh what is now a massive industry of higher education? It's a key institution in our society, um it and and religion, which is also a key institution in our society. But um many people today might see those as separate, um, in in some cases entirely separate, and they should not be mixed. Um but of course, if you go back historically, that's not the case. So, where do you try to orient people when you um try to introduce the intersection of these two major topics?

SPEAKER_02 7:09

First of all, I should say that I've never taught an entire course on the history of higher education, believe it or not, uh, but I have taught units on it that I incorporate into all my other courses. I tell my students that because this is a specialty of mine and it's unusual for a historian in some ways, I can tell them why they're there. And so I'm very interested in this question. Like, why do you do which why are you in this chair? Like, what made you do that? And so I think one of the important things to simply to realize for people today is that college hasn't always played the role in our society that it does now. So originally, and by originally, we're gonna go back to the colonial era, um, college as a concept inherited from Europe and but very, very big priority, right? The first American college, Harvard, founded by the Puritan settlers within six years of getting here because they cared so much about an educated ministry. And at the time, you went to college for one of four purposes. You wanted to be a minister, you wanted to be a doctor, you wanted to be a lawyer, or you wanted to be a quote unquote educated gentleman, part of the international community of letters that would um talk through ideas and have this common set of readings. And I say a common set of readings because colleges had a set curriculum. It was uh largely Greek and Latin. You had to speak both to gain entrance into college. So you read a lot of the classical literature. It was believed to form your brain by doing hard things, but it was also that the text of the New Testament is in Greek, the text of medical texts were in Latin, inherited from the Middle Ages, um, and likewise legal texts. And then if you ever wondered why all of the founders of the United States reference the same kinds of random Roman stories, it's because they had the same education and they all read that stuff there. Um about 1% of the population went to college, all men. So it was not a normal thing to do. So ministers were often honestly not as wealthy as other people, but more educated than other people in this context, in the colonial context. And in the American context, uh, where we didn't have an established church that was the same in all the colonies, you ended up with denominational colleges functionally. Um congregationalists in in Massachusetts, in Presbyterians in New Jersey. I myself am a Princeton graduate that was founded by Presbyterians, right? Anglicans in William and Mary in Virginia. So but that said, all colleges were understood to serve both the church and the state. And this is an important dynamic that was present all the way through into the 20th century. So it's meant to do good for God, but also to do good for the people at large. And this is sort of a tension. Um I can go on and on and on. So you might want to ask an additional clarifying question at this point about where you want me to take it.

SPEAKER_03 10:06

Well, there's a number of threads there, and uh I wonder if um one of them is I I'm I'm trying to anticipate sort of um, I don't know if they're they're necessarily myths of higher education, but just sort of assumptions about what higher education has been because of what it is now, um, that people might project back. And so I think one one thing you just mentioned was that um for at least for uh the 17th, 18th, maybe all the way through the 19th century, um, most colleges or universities were understood to be serving both uh the the the public or the state um and the church. And um I wonder um uh I'm sitting here at UW Madison, a public university that um uh has a complicated history with that, but would definitely today define itself as serving the public good, would never sort of reference itself as serving any type of religious entity. Where does that um uh where do you see historically that development start to happen? Like when do you start seeing different institutions charting out different missions that don't hold these things uh together in the same way that they did uh going all the way back to to Harvard?

SPEAKER_02 11:16

Well, in some ways, the University of Virginia, right, founded by Thomas Jefferson, and he wanted it to be um more secular, but there were still even even state universities, um, other state universities like uh Wisconsin, Michigan, uh University of California, they had chapel. So even even when it was a public university that was not associated with a particular religious denomination, while in the 19th century, Protestantism was very dominant culturally uh in the United States, parents didn't want to send their children to an education to an education that they would consider godless. And so state universities they marketed themselves as being sort of broadly Christian, they were quote, non-sectarian, not narrow, but not atheist or infidel, right? So that it's like your kids will go to chapel, they will be taught by people of good upstanding Christian character, most of whom are in fact actually Christians. Yeah, and so it's it had to do with not being affiliated with a particular denomination or church, not to having a total absence of religion as part of the experience. You know, and there are pros and cons to that. It could be difficult for Catholic students or Jewish students, right? So I mean, but it was a very dominant liberal, broadly evangelical shifting to liberal Protestant space, even at uh state universities when they first arose in the 19th century.

SPEAKER_03 12:49

And I think of there's an interesting book by uh a you a University of Virginia professor, uh Harry Gamble, um, that came out a couple years ago called God on the grounds, and it was a history of religion at UVA. Um and even there, so you know, the the the mythos and and in fact the reality of the sort of secular vision that Jefferson had lasts basically until Jefferson dies, more or less, which is very early in the in the history of the university. And and even at UVA, by the end of the 19th century, um there's a major the YMCA is the official student center on campus. Um they have a chapel.

SPEAKER_02 13:22

As it was almost everywhere, right? Like that's that's what the Y did.

SPEAKER_03 13:26

Right. And they have and they have a chapel at UVA in the late 19th century. Um, all these things that would make you never know that there was this sort of um secular vision, uh, this sort of real secular vision in a sense of a separation, um, that maybe Jefferson had, maybe a few other people had, but the sort of population of Virginia um did not have. And I'll just say at Wisconsin it was a similar thing where uh the chapel was official until the 1870s, um, and they got rid of it, uh, or they they moved it to voluntary and then they got rid of it. And the people who got rid of it were not doing it because they were secular. Um, the the person who actually got rid of it was a guy named Um John Baskom, who was a minister himself, um, but had started developing a different way of thinking about spirituality, I guess you could say, which is something you talk about a bit in your in your book as well, this shift from vertical to horizontal spirituality at a lot of these schools. Could you just get into that sense of um I think we're tracking here sort of what's the shift from uh into a more uh 20th century vision of education and what role is religion playing in that?

SPEAKER_02 14:28

Sure. So there's a whole historians love the time period between the Civil War and World War I, and I am among those historians, but particularly as it relates to the change in American higher education. There's a ton of things that are going on after the Civil War, like the US looks up and was like, oh, lots of things. So Darwin published uh Origin of Species in 1859, but we were a little busy in 1859, so we noticed after the Civil War. Um and this this raised questions about the interpretation of Genesis. And to be honest, a lot of Protestant scholars actually were fine with it and just sort of meshed it. But it raised these issues of what is the relationship between um science and religion. Also, you have the rise of the research university for the first time, which Wisconsin is, um, other state universities like Michigan, but also um changeovers like Johns Hopkins, new new upstarts and chain Harvard and Princeton moving in those directions. So this is the rise of the ideal that you don't just transmit inherited knowledge, but you learn new stuff. And in order to do that, you do it sort of dispassionately without presuppositions, what we might call the scientific method. That raises questions about how religion integrates with that. You also see the rise of disciplines. This is something we totally take for granted in college now, that you have a major. The idea that you spend the first two years of your college education taking all these different courses in sort of a breadth, and then you zero in for two years in a major is a compromise position we reached in the early 20th century between two poles of the inherited system of having a set curriculum versus what Charles William Elliott, the president of Harvard, tried where you do nothing required. Like they're adults, they can figure it out. So then you end up with this sort of middle space of like, well, why don't we require some breadth and then allow people to specialize? Because there's an explosion of knowledge that comes with the research ideal, not just in the sciences, but right in history, in sociology, uh, in politics. You you have the every every academic discipline. So, like you and I are members of the American Historical Association, right? It dates to the late 1800s. It's all they're all founded then because it's the rise of discipline. And one of the things that that does is there used to be this capstone course in college that tied together everything you learned from a Christian lens. But when everybody's learning something different and you're all doing it in your own way, it just knowledge gets much more fragmented. And that's sort of a question about well, how do you bring religion into the academic experience then as well? So there's just a lot of change in the nature of higher education, and people start to think, well, what role does religion have here? And there are a lot of different answers that are offered. Um, what you were asking me to actually answer was that simultaneously with all of this, there was also a theological shift going on among leading Protestant um scholars, from roughly speaking, evangelicalism to which would later become in the 1920s an offshoot of that known as fundamentalism, um to roughly speaking, what we call modernism or more, which is a particular type of more broadly Protestant liberalism. And the way that I explained that shift for my readers, that I think is relevant to the way that um leading educators approached the role of religion in higher education is as a shift from what I call vertical spirituality to what I call horizontal spirituality. So vertical both Christians in general, particularly Protestants, believed that there is something broken in our relationship with God and in our relationship with other people. And vertical versus horizontal spirituality go about repairing it by focusing on the opposite piece. So evangelicals in the 19th century and those who continue in this belief system into the 20th century believe that the primary break is with God. So you repair that break through faith in Christ's death and resurrection on our behalf that grants us forgiveness and our break is repaired with God, and then we get a new heart that overflows in love towards other people. The the modernist or more liberal approach is to say what grieves God is our break in relationship with one another. So if we uh think carefully through how to treat one another, if we grow in love towards one another, if we think about how to create more just social relations, uh, then we repair our breach with one another, and that automatically repairs our breach with God. And so these are different approaches to how you would integrate religion into the college experience, depending on how you think you need to go about repairing that breach, about repairing the world. And I should say here, it's not that evangelicals were not concerned with social action or social justice. They actually were. Um they just thought that you needed to get people uh fixed in their hearts first in order to do that effectively. Um it's in the 20th century that you see that what I consider a tragic separation between conversion and activism.

SPEAKER_03 19:21

And do you see a um is this is as simple as saying that Christian higher education, what we'd call Christian higher education today, is the branch of that story that goes into the vertical mode and and sort of prioritizes that, and that the rest of higher education prioritizes the horizontal, or is it is it more complicated than that?

SPEAKER_02 19:41

I think that's broadly fair. The more complication piece is of course that certain types of institutions of higher education that would be considered, quote, state secular now, but were state or public then, um, or even uh denominational but broad, were big spaces. So there are people in those spaces who take a variety of approaches. And the big piece here that's relevant is campus voluntary religious life. You referenced the YMCA earlier. And so even at these other institutions, I mean, there are places like Upper House, right? That's a different phenomenon that has its own history. But what students do outside of class may not be what's the philosophy of the university in general. So there are these spaces for more evangelical religion at many colleges, whether the whole college is oriented in that direction or not.

SPEAKER_03 20:39

Right. Yeah, I guess I was asking, yeah, you're right. That that's a good correction. So thinking from like this sort of top-down institution, there might be one story. Another one, if you emphasize sort of student life or or the spiritual life, and I think of just using UW as another example, um, geographically or architecturally, there are churches that ring this university. Um, and and some of them have quite prominent buildings. And you wouldn't even, to the outsider, and I'm sure many people do confuse or sort of look up quizzically, these churches look like they're on campus because there's no clear demarcation between where the campus ends and where the church begins. That's a product of these churches coming and and serving students who um come into UW and leave as devoutly religious people. Um, even if uh what they're learning at UW might challenge some of those beliefs, there's sort of a there's a different story happening um at the ground level. And uh and uh that can be overlooked if you're just looking at the top-down uh sort of institutional or administrative or even what the faculty are are talking about. Um there's often two different stories there.

SPEAKER_02 21:41

Yeah, I guess I would say yes. But when you're talking about the top down, which is the question you were asking, um if you are one of the things I point out is if you believe that you need to repair the breach with God first, you have to have some kind of doctrinal specificity because you need to know like who is God and how would I repair that breach. Uh you need Less doctrinal specificity to repair breaches with other people. You need an elaborated ethical system. And so institutions that go towards a more horizontal spirituality often go in that direction by conviction, but also because it can be a bigger tent for students from a variety of, say, monotheist theistic religions to be welcomed in or who disagree on different aspects of Christian doctrine, even if they're all Christians, and say, okay, well, we have a sort of ethical commitment. Our education is for the public good. You think about how what you're studying connects with that. You go to chapel, but the talks are much more broad. So it religion pervades it, but in a sort of what you might see from the outside is a more gentle way, though it's not necessarily experienced with gentle if you're Jewish, right? So I mean there's a there's it's messy. But that's that's sort of the horizontal approach, whereas the the vertical approach would probably say require a chapel, which might be more uh optional at a horizontal institution, it would likely have a course in Christian doctrine, which universities used to have, even state universities, but it was more like Christian evidence like here's how nature points to God.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Right.

SPEAKER_02 23:16

Uh but you might have more specific doctrine passed on um as part of the college experience explicitly in those types of institutions.

SPEAKER_03 23:24

Yeah. And I I think of um uh at UW, the the uh by the way, UW used the frame, the the term non-sectarian as founding. That was its way of distinguishing itself, but it was actually competing with denominational schools. That was basically what was in Wisconsin in 1848. And um and but this was one of the defining sort of, you could even think of it in marketing terms. Like if you want the vertical, if you want the Presbyterian take or the Methodist take, you go to Lawrence College or Carroll College. If you want the sort of uh the non-sectarian or or sort of um broader approach, you come to UW. And um, it's an interesting way where those those framings, um, not to just reduce it to marketing, but sort of how you'd appeal to students to come, um, I would really shape uh the curriculum as well and and how you'd uh talk about religion uh on those campuses. Um okay, I want to think about uh Christian higher education. If that's a if that's sort of a framing that's emerging in the 1920s or about that time, um, and maybe maybe that's not the right timing, but within Christian, there's a lot of uh diversity. Uh, and I think about uh Catholic and Protestant being quite different. African American education has its own story. How do you think about those in relation to each other, or should they not be thought of in relation to are we sort of grouping too much when we say Christian higher education?

SPEAKER_02 24:53

So there's two answers to that question. One is what people think of when you say Christian higher education, and one is what is Christian higher education? So my personal conviction, right, is that Christian higher education is a big tent full of experiments by people of Christian faith who are trying to think about how to do higher education as faithful believers. So it's a it includes women's colleges in the 19th century that were founded. That's been part of my own research for Christian purposes. It includes African-American colleges that were founded for Christian purposes, it includes Catholic colleges that were founded for Christian purposes, and it includes evangelical colleges that are founded for Christian purposes, and includes denominational colleges that are founded for Christian purposes that may not identify as evangelical. So I think Christian higher education is all of that, but we think of it as the slice of sort of evangelical colleges, I think, in a common parlance of today.

SPEAKER_03 25:55

Why do you think that is? What uh is it just because uh well, I'll I'll put myself, is it just because I come out of that that world and so I use this general term for a more specific um uh thing I'm referring to? Or is there a reason why those those particular schools, places like Wheaton and and Baylor, uh where you're at, are are sort of what come to mind with Christian college. Um yeah, is there is that accidental or is there a reason for that?

SPEAKER_02 26:22

Well, there's an organizational reason, which is the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, uh, which I think you guys are interviewing uh representatives from there as well. Yeah, that in the I think 70s uh started to get together a lot of these groups of people to have a an identity together and to talk with one another and to think through issues together. So there really is an affinity. Um so there's there's an organizational reason. There is probably a political reason um in the way that uh Christianity is perceived in the public sphere sometimes as equivalent to evangelicalism of a particular type. And so I think that there's probably just a public mindset type of equivalency there. And possibly there is the fact that this is this is not true across the board. So some Catholic universities do this true as well. So there are certain types of universities just spend more time thinking about their Christian identity and theorizing it and trying to work it out and talking about that in public. And so I'd say certain leading Catholic universities do that, and certain leading evangelical universities do that. And a lot of denominational colleges, either they're just not on the public radar, they're doing it much more privately, or they're trying to keep everybody happy and it's like and they're just not theorizing it as actively.

SPEAKER_03 27:44

Yeah, that's interesting. Um, I think about um how we use that term uh uh sort of instinctually now. Um I'm gonna use it right now again, and maybe uh I'm I'm I'm rethinking that. But um I did want to ask you, just historically speaking, and you can bring that up to the present. You can even talk about your your situation at Baylor. What is distinct about Christian higher education? Like what would you um what would you say are the defining marks that set it apart from um other types of higher education offerings, uh, both historically and and uh and I guess up to now? Um what is what are the what is the distinct uh perspective and contribution in a general sense that Christian higher education offers?

SPEAKER_02 28:28

So to take it historically briefly, I will reiterate what we've talked about that almost all colleges were Christian colleges in the United States until the late 1800s. So historically, Christian higher education is all of it, right? But being done by different in different ways. Um in my judgment, and here I tell my students, right, I have a seminary degree from Gordon Conwell in church history that is about half of an MDiv and additional church history coursework. And then I have a PhD from Notre Dame in American history. So I will sometimes in class, because I teach at Baylor, which is a Christian university, and so I'm able to speak as a Christian as appropriate, but our students are of many faiths and none. Um, and so I'll like physically like take off a hat and put on a different hat, put on my theologian hat. And so this is a little bit of a theologian answer rather than a historian answer. So, what makes a Christian college? A Christian college is a college that is attempting to integrate the um formation of its students in a holistic manner in keeping with the Christian faith. There are a lot of ways to go about that. Uh, you can, for example, um, and I'm a big believer in institutional pluralism. I believe that um Christians ought to be salt and light in a variety of different types of institutions, and that we ought to have a variety of different types of Christian institutions. So the I'll I'll talk about the advantages of different types and the approaches that they take. And this is a more of a contemporary statement. So you have a very um well-defined, typically small, highly elaborated statement of faith denominational style college. Think maybe Christendom within um a Catholic college, or Dort within your Reformed uh Protestant.

SPEAKER_03 30:26

Close by here, by the way. Only a few hours, only a few hours away from Madison, Dort College.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

There you go.

SPEAKER_03 30:32

Dort University, I think I might have shifted to university now.

SPEAKER_02 30:36

And or even a place like Calvin, which gave birth to an entire intellectual movement in the field of philosophy because everybody started out with certain beliefs in common. Right. So if you if the student, if the student body has a certain set of beliefs in common, if the faculty has a certain set of beliefs in common, and they're a pretty well-defined set of beliefs, the advantage is that you can take a lot for granted and go deep. Right. Um rain, but what you don't do is get the input from Christians or people who are not Christians who see things from other perspectives.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

Right.

SPEAKER_02 31:13

So it's uh you have advantages and you have disadvantages to that model. And then say you have a different model that's say broadly evangelical, like a Wheaton or a Whitworth or a Messiah or an Eastern, right? So the big, broadly big quote unquote, b broadly evangelical colleges. And then you at these places you have a statement of faith for students um and for faculty, but it's it's less detailed, it's more essentialist. Like we're all Christians, maybe we're all Protestant Christians, depending on the institution. Um, and so there are things you absolutely take in common and you go deeper, but you get more voices from different perspectives, and they're they're having a conversation uh higher up on the spectrum, I guess. And so you can't, in one sense, get as deep with as many people because you don't have the same sets of things in common, but you're likely to be more wide-ranging.

SPEAKER_03 32:05

Right.

unknown 32:06

Right.

SPEAKER_02 32:06

And then you can go all the way to someplace like Notre Dame, which retains its Catholic identity in a variety of ways, partly having to do with the fact that the Catholic Church is an established international organization with a hierarchy. So it's easier to keep a Catholic identity in some ways than a Protestant identity that doesn't have that. And but they have 51% of their faculty be members of the Catholic Church. And that's how they do it. Right. And then they offer all of this stuff on campus for uh Catholic life. So every dorm has mass, right? That I mean, I was at Notre Dame for six years, so I experienced this myself. And so they have a certain type of conversation that's possible, like the church and the world, because the world is there and the church is there, right? And the other 49% are not Christians, right? Many of them are Protestants, but uh nevertheless, right? It's a it's a different type of conversation. Baylor is, in my judgment, the only way a Protestant university can be a research university, which is here's its and still be robustly Christian and be a research university. Here's its policy. All faculty and staff are members of a Christian church or Jewish synagogue of their choice. So that means they are invested in the Christian tradition bodily, like they show up in local worship. And that means that they can have a variety of theological and political positions. In fact, it's in some ways more politically diverse than you might get in certain secular settings, but it has the whole spectrum. And students don't have that statement of faith. So many students select in and are Christians, a third are Catholic. And so that's a fun fact for a Baptist university. But chapel is run by Anglicans, also a fun fact. I'm Anglican, so I shout this out. But um, so they but but students come from a variety of perspectives, and so you get a mix in the classroom of people um speaking from their faith or from uh not their faith. It creates a different kind of position. So I guess I already sum up, there's different aspects of being a Christian institution. One is are your faculty Christians? And I'd say having at least some of them is essential because minimally you want students to have resources as they are learning their intellectual fields, learning about the world, to discuss those things with someone who has a mature faith or um, have options on campus to do that. Right. Another would be some kind of formal religious instruction. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:34

No, yeah, I'm just thinking about your your mission, uh your sort of definition of a Christian, Christian higher education as institutions that are trying to form students uh within the sort of Christian tradition, it makes sense that some of the faculty doing that forming would be bought into that tradition, right? That there'd be a sort of buy-in. Uh you mentioned Baylor and its role as a research university and as a uh a site of teaching and uh all that other stuff. And that that that's interesting to me historically too, because um, if you look at most of the schools that we call uh Christian colleges and universities, they tend to be pretty teaching heavy. Um many of the faculty do publish but research, but that's usually not the primary thing. Um is there a historical explanation? Is it as simple as this it's resource intensive, and so these schools just don't have the resources to dedicate to uh original research? Or is there a deeper explanation for why most uh particularly Protestant, but but I'm sure most Catholic colleges also tend to be very teaching heavy and not as research heavy as, say, um the Ivy League schools or major public universities?

SPEAKER_02 35:44

Interesting question. Um When I was uh researching my book, my first book, I remember sitting in a bed and breakfast in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Wellesley, the women's college, is the first set of sources that I used and was in their archives. And processing some aspect of this, I remember concluding in August 2008 that the only way, right, like the to have a research university would be to basically do what Baylor was doing. And this is a numbers game, I think, straight up. So again, the more specific you make your statement of faith, the fewer people you can get to sign that in good conscience. And God does not call all of them to work at your institution, right? So some of them are going to be called to work at the University of Wisconsin or at Wheaton or not in a professor position. And it you have to get a to get a number of people, you actually have to broaden and broaden and broaden. And so what Baylor is doing is honestly pretty impressive because it's a 20,000-person institution where everyone goes to church in in the faculty and staff. And so I I think there is some lack of realism in some corners about what you can do given a certain size.

SPEAKER_03 37:15

That's interesting. And it reminds me of um D you know the story of Cr Crusader You? Have you have you heard the story of that?

SPEAKER_02 37:22

Yes, yes, I do.

SPEAKER_03 37:23

So that's the that's the potential um university that the Billy Graham, Billy Graham and people around him wanted to create, I think, in the 50s or 60s. And this was going to be a top-tier research university on the I don't know who they they're probably comparing themselves to Harvard or something at the time, but it was going to be very confessionally evangelical. It was going to be um probably even more specific in doctrine than than Baylor is. Um and as I as I know the story, they basically couldn't even get this thing off the ground, in part because they couldn't agree on like uh student life uh ethics. Like what could students do? Could they go, could they drink, could they not drink? What would they wear? Um and it's just indicative of like, man, if you can't even like it's such a narrow, it's a numbers game in that sense, which is there's you can't even get it off the ground because no one can agree on some very basic things that reveal sort of the the maybe the narrowness of the traditions um that they were trying to uh tap into for that. But uh I think of that because that that's um you don't hear many stories like that where there are sort of evangelicals uh trying to get together to build a R1 a research university. Um and maybe there's a good reason why you don't hear many of those stories, uh, because they uh they all sort of end like that before they even get started. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_02 38:41

And I want to reiterate that I don't think every institution should be an R1 institution. I like I said, I believe in institutional pluralism. I believe we should have small, robust denominational colleges alongside that.

SPEAKER_03 38:51

Yeah. Um well I want to um ask uh just a few more questions. Um one of them is returning to our our original you know setting of like it we've been talking as if um uh hopefully it's uh a new student or someone not familiar with this um history of higher education can sort of follow along with the conversation. What is I I I assume you answer this question a lot, what is the use of knowing a history like this? Uh as we're sitting here in 2023 thinking about uh higher education along this series that we're doing, what's the use of knowing sort of this deeper history of where higher education has come from in the US and where in particular Christian higher education has come from?

SPEAKER_02 39:36

I became an American historian at all because of this conviction that it's so easy for all of us and college students in particular to assume that the way things are is the way they've always been and the way they should be. And when you look back at American history, you can say, oh, wait, wait a minute, the way things are is because people made a series of decisions in response to certain circumstances, and we ended up with this. And we need to know that so that we can fight to keep the good and fight to change the bad. And the bad will just keep on going if you don't change it. So um, having that kind of perspective helps you under it expands your mind. Wait, things don't have to be like this. They weren't always like this. They could be some other way. Um, which is not to say we should go back to some golden era. I don't think anything was perfect in the past either, but it gives us fodder for creative thinking. For, okay, what oftentimes people have had these conversations before, like, what should higher education be about? Um, how does Christianity relate to it? Is it better done in a public setting as one of many options in a pluralistic sort of way? Um, is it better done in a private setting? Again, my thought is both, right? But that's that's my take. Uh so that perspective allows us to think creatively about the present. And one of the big issues of the present is that is the cutting of the humanities in many institutions. Um the utilitarianism direct direction to higher education, which stated more sympathetically has to do with how expensive it's gotten and the desire for an ROI, a return on investment on a very expensive degree. Uh, you want to be able to turn that into some kind of money, unless you came from money. Um, and that's fair. Part of the justice of higher education is wanting it to serve people from a variety of backgrounds. And I'm a big believer in that. So what the removal, this is uh in his new sort of redone version of Soul of the American University, George Morrison puts this issue forwards, which I and I think he does it in a good way. That the conversation, right, when religion was removed as the unifying factor, because people didn't agree on it broadly enough in culture anymore, in higher education, we were left with this gap of like, okay, like what is the moral purpose? Like, what are we training people to do in a good way? And so the people that I talk about in the late 1800s, early 1900s, um, very much oriented, like, your education is for the public good, and they were channeling men and doing this kind of public good and women and doing that kind of public good. And I talk about the details of that. But later, at least they were channeling people into doing the public good, right? Later, people, people they they gave up on that in some ways. And there's a value of pluralism now, in a good way, it in higher education, in learning to respect people from a variety of different backgrounds and granting sort of equal advancement. But beyond that, we don't have an articulated common vision. And I think realizing that people tried for that in the past, that it's something higher education has been about, it is something that Christian institutions of higher education or Christian groups within institutions of higher education can offer, perhaps in a non-combative way, a vision of how holistically forming young adults and of how advancing knowledge can contribute to the public good in some kind of a way that is more purposeful than, well, y'all just go find a job.

SPEAKER_03 43:34

Yeah. Well, and that it's music to my ears. That's how we often frame what we're doing at Upper House. Um, though I I will say there's a there's a humility to that too when you go when you when you understand the history, that there have been people basically, I don't want to reduce the change over time, but there are people who have basically come up with um ideas, uh critiques of the university and ideas about how to fix it every generation. And so that's one thing I've I've noticed. Is um we we are nothing we we are nothing new um what we're doing here in the 21st century. We're often the the debate lines are a little different or the topics are a little different. Um, but but some of these issues have been perennial or at least deeply embedded in higher education for a very long time, which can both make you feel humble and in some ways comforted. I don't know that like we're not at some new ultimate crisis point.

SPEAKER_02 44:24

It's just it's sort of every generation thinks there's a crisis in higher education, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 44:28

Right, right. Um, right. And and that's not to dismiss that there are real problems right now, but but is to say um keep it in in context. Okay, I'll end with this question. Um you talked a bit about the um some of the the sort of concerns you have about where higher education is now. Is there one bright spot, and maybe you you can either go broad higher education or just Christian higher education, uh, one trend that you find very encouraging since your time teaching or as a historian, um, one thing that you uh would you know just sort of encourage the higher education space in general to continue doing uh the way it's doing? Is there anything that comes to mind?

SPEAKER_02 45:08

I will talk about Christian higher education specifically in that answer. And there is a there's a lot of contentiousness politically among Protestant Christians about diversity. Um but one of the real strengths that I have seen, I'd say even in the last 10 years, um, I mean, again, this is in my setting at Baylor, uh, but also across different institutions of Christian higher education, is that Christian higher education can at its best serve as a location where Christian scholars from a variety of different backgrounds, racial backgrounds, um men and women together, people from different countries, people from different Christian traditions can get together in the same department, um, in the same institution, and talk together and think together. And that is a locus for the vision that we see in revelation of people from every tribe and nation and tongue coming together to praise God and each bringing and all the nations bringing their wisdom into the heavenly city, um, each bringing a different perspective on their experience with God and their understanding of God's world and talking together. And the church is stronger for diversity. This is the Paul, the argument that Paul makes when he describes the body of Christ and each of us's different parts. And churches can get ghettoized, and Christian higher education can be an opportunity for people from a variety of churches to come together. And I would say that I have seen that taking place increasingly over the last decade.

SPEAKER_03 46:48

Well, thank you, Andrew. That's a good note to end on. Um we uh endorse that here at Upper House as well. Um, so thank you for your time. Thank you for the work you do and for giving us a helpful perspective on the history of higher education in this series.

SPEAKER_02 47:02

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_03 47:04

Thanks for joining us. If you've enjoyed today's podcast, be sure to subscribe and give us a rating on your favorite podcast app. Also, be sure to check out our upcoming events on upperhouse.org and our other podcast, Upwards, where we dig deeper into the topics our in-house guests are passionate about. With Faith in Mind is supported by the Stephen and Laurel Brown Foundation. It is produced at Upper House in Madison, Wisconsin, hosted by Dan Hummel and John Terrell. Our executive producer and editor is Jesse Koopman. Please follow us on social media with the handle at Upperhouse UW.