This week I’m engaging in a time-honored academic tradition: gathering with other scholars as we share our research through reading papers, and as we problem-solve challenges in our disciplines through workshops and panels. It’s a history conference. This time it is in one of the most beautiful places one could imagine doing scholarship—Rosario Beach, a marine life study center on the coast of Washington near the San Juan Islands. But the conversations are running fast and deep as we sit with our hot drinks looking over the bay and walk along the beach and visit each other in the cabins we are staying in. And we feel the stakes are high.
This is the Association of Seventh-day Adventist Historians’ (ASDAH) triennial gathering. We are Adventist scholars who teach mostly at Seventh-day Adventist universities (there are 11 in North America), though many are also independent scholars, librarians, or teach in other settings. I was asked to serve on a plenary panel session assessing the politicization of history teaching in our current climate. I found the discussion to be illuminating, encouraging, and reflective of the diverse contexts we all operate in.
Two big ideas from this conversation are going to affect my perspective going forward. The first has to do with the unique context of teaching in a particular denominational setting. And the second has to do with the bigger threat to the study of history—the capitalization of higher education.
Historians who work for Christian colleges with strong identities have faced the close inspection of parents, constituents, active board members, and concerned students for generations. Having one’s class content investigated for doctrinal orthodoxy, or even “tone” has been one of the side effects of being entrusted with disciple-ing the next generation of a denomination. In conservative Christian contexts, young people who have not been exposed to fiction or theories of evolution or even the idea that other Christian traditions might have legitimacy can find such conversations threatening. Parents sometimes identify education or engagement with ideas outside the church as moral hazards. So all of us know of people who have lost their jobs or been intimidated or pressured because their teaching was seen as suspect. This was well before any of the recent spate of state laws regulating secular universities and their classroom teaching. We have had lots of experience in this space.
Historians who work on church history, especially denominational history, also face difficulties in their scholarship. This particular ASDAH conference features books and panels on the 1970s and historians who were doing SDA history at that time and whose work was considered to be a threat to the church’s understanding of itself. Some scholars of that era were indeed critical of the church, but most just wanted to do accurate history. Now, 50 years later, some of them are still alive to reflect on what going through that time of crisis was like, and how it has shaped both their own scholarly trajectory and the climate of the church. Christian scholars who have particularly strong identities have many stories to tell that mirror what we sometimes see in the academy on both the right and the left with “cancel culture.”
So, for this gathering, the current climate of rigid control or micromanagement of the classroom is in many ways nothing new. We have had to face the criticism and suspicion of some of our most beloved communities as we tried to do good work and serve them well. This week we are sharing strategies for how we have worked to introduce important ways of thinking and methods of scholarship in our classroom in faith-affirming ways. We talk about “tone” a great deal, and how to use a vocabulary that reflects the values of our students while bringing them along the path of maturity, critical thinking and expanded understanding. We do this not for any manipulative or self-serving purposes, but because we truly think that what we are teaching will build stronger Christians and community members.
But the larger problem for all of us, and for higher education in North America, is the continued focus on career outcomes as the primary evaluation of a college degree. For History departments (liberal arts and humanities in general, of course), this might be more of a threat than politicization. As we are increasingly told that we need to say exactly what careers we are preparing our students for, the monetization of our educational outcomes seems to demean what many of us think we are doing in the academy.
And yet, again, for those of us in the Adventist university tradition, this tension is nothing new. Adventist schools (like many other Protestant colleges at the time) were set up one hundred plus years ago to be missionary sending institutions. The goals were practical—healing, education, and preaching. Adventist colleges were part of the late nineteenth century educational emphasis pioneered by Berea College that valued labor and encouraged practical education in agriculture and industry alongside the service professions for the church. Most of us still teach at schools that try to have industries or hire their students to work on campus in cleaning, landscaping, and food service. The dignity of work is alive and well.
Still, the goal of education, as we articulate it in my tradition, is to restore or develop “the image of God in humans.” We have spiritual goals that go beyond the mere pragmatic. So we have some experience in trying to meld lofty ideals of spiritual development with skills that are useful in the world. This seems to me to be similar to what academics in the traditional arts and sciences attempt to communicate about critical thinking alongside employability on the other side of graduation.
It isn’t giving up on the goals of education to emphasize that our grand values of critical thinking and research and disciplinary traditions are compatible with getting good jobs. As a historian I can’t just assume everyone should realize how valuable historical thinking is for jobs in finance or recruiting or management or law enforcement or entrepreneurship. I have to make the case for this. Just as academics on conservative denominational campuses have been making the case for their areas of academic study as useful for being an active evangelistic and service-minded Christian. We’ve done this before, and we can do it again.
After twenty-four years of teaching in this context and having conversations with my friends at more traditional state schools or research institutions, I am convinced that those of us in these small quirky college situations have something to offer our friends in this moment. It is possible to survive and sometimes even thrive in these times. It takes intentionality. It is easier to do with friends and allies. It takes lateral thinking. But, as one might expect from a historian, I take comfort in the fact that it has been done for generations, and I can be strong enough to do it too.
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