Is there an Iron Law for Christian Academic Institutions?

Want to keep your school on track? Thirty years of observation and reading have given me an idea of how to do it.

I have observed Christian schools (from elementary through university) after these Christian schools became different from what the founders intended and not in a good way. Elvis leaves the building, founders age and die, and then the homogenized, poll watching credentialed fix things by ruining them. Generally this drift occurs in whatever way the surrounding culture is going. If “hating your enemies” is in favor, the school starts making excuses for war and hating the Hun. The abandonment of pacifism during the World War I era at many Christian schools was less about theology and more about social pressure. I am not a pacifist, but it is a shame when people change their doctrine and hijack a school based on the cultural moment and not principle. More talked about in my circles is a traditional Christian school that ends up not-traditional: these schools pick the safe path of being the academic dominant group’s court Christians.

Change is not always bad, but change done badly is.

Even discussions about particular changes at school become useless when confused with partisanship. If you like the way the cultural wind is blowing, you applaud the change. If you do not, you get snarky about how that school was “stolen.” Nobody sees the root of the problem: a failure of calling and commitment.

The failure comes by confusing our calling with immediate cultural relevance and our commitment as being only to our contemporary counterparts and not to both our past and future.

Assume for a moment that the change is good. If a Christian school is founded with a wrong idea (let’s say racism), then it must change. However, that change should come at the end of academic discourse and spiritual discernment, not because we want to fit in with a culture moment. Good change done badly taints the benefits of positive change with the rot of cultural accommodation.

No intellectual program can remain healthy when the present opinions of the ruling class set the agenda.

In fact, most changes that come from the press of culture are bad. The rise of the administrator in our schools at the expense of the teacher comes from aping instead of thoughtfully leading the educational community. Like CS Lewis’ evil ape in The Last Battle, Shift, we seek present comfort at the expense of the integrity of our mission. Our motto should be: No shift that is mere aping.

Good schools will avoid this problem by doing two simple things:

Develop firm ties to a clear theological tradition and keep them fresh. 

You cannot defend a vague set of platitudes, nor are schools good at policing themselves. To avoid drift, a school should cultivate a strong external tie to a body of belief that is outside herself. If the school has a parachurch history, tied to no denomination, it should develop a strong statement of orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Having one without the other is a disaster.

Hire broadly in Christendom from those who are allies to the mission. 

Oddly, this clear vision of what the school stands for must be coupled with broad “mere Christian” hiring. I can promise this: if a school will only hire its “own,” demanding all faculty be on the same team, the school will move leftwards. There are simply not enough academics, even in the Roman Catholic world, to staff a first-rate school with only members of a particular group.

Hire as broadly as possible with like minded people who agree to honor the statement of faith, but will live out the lifestyle standards. One can dissent intellectually and a school remain sound. Bad ethics, however, is intolerable. Why? One can dissent with an idea, if one honors the school’s approach, and education is enriched. One honors the idea by dissent. However, bad ethics has no value.

To dissent from virtue is is damnable, though often tenurable at Christian schools.

In this era, any school that will not hire Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant faculty will either be tiny and good, second-rate and large, or large and liberal. There are not enough traditional faculty in any one tradition to avoid this particular drift in our era. The school that narrows down on hiring to one tradition, or worse a sub-group (only King James only Baptists!) cannot survive as a quality, sizable institution.

The school that will not drift will not be insular, withdrawn inside herself. She will invite her own critics to speak, debate, and lecture. She will be in the academic community and not withdrawn from it. A good school will never lose connection to priests or pastors as spiritual overseers or an organic connection to the local church. Parish life is more important than student life: one is a vision of eternity and the other is artificial. Being cut off, either from the common folk or the broader academic community, will breed the very problems that lead to a crisis that precipitates bad change.

The school will be teacher/professor run on a daily basis and not by all powerful families (see the televangelist schools) or narcissistic administrators cut off from the daily life of a teacher. Both kinds of “top-down” and insulated schools are particularly prone to abuse of power that leads to change precipitated by crisis or to rapid change caused by nothing other than a change in the heir to the family academic empire. At the same time, visionary leaders will be chosen to lead… to bring needed innovations. This is a wholesome and creative tension.

So here is an Iron Law: good change and stability will come from a school with strong, worked out church ties and broad hiring in conjunction with that clear vision. 

Such schools (k-12, college, or both) can be a different voice, so a valuable voice, in any age.