Section 1: Introduction
Section 2: Multiculturalism
Section 3: Feminism
Section 4: Social Life
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For the student.
Do your research. Read absolutely everything and talk to absolutely everyone before deciding on a school. Talk to the head of the Republican, conservative, and Christian groups on campus to find out what they think of the school. Talk to the conservative or Christian professors at the school, particularly those quoted in college review guides. Find out about the town and the political demographics of the area. Look into churches and organizations available off campus; talk to their leaders about their perspective on the school. Find a family in the area that can give you their perspective on the school and that would be willing to “adopt” you for your time there. Read campus and local police reports. Read the college newspaper. Look into the political, religious, academic, and social backgrounds of professors within your major, top professors, and the people/administrators that control the school. Assess their sources of funding and possible regulations that come with that funding. Look into research published by professors and college institutes. Read local newspaper coverage of the school, as well as any national media coverage. Look into the backgrounds of health services and try to find out statistics on rapes, abortions, alcohol poisoning, etc. Truly ask about what the typical college party is like. Try to find specifics if you can (such as where the money goes for the funding of parties). This should be a time-consuming process; but keep in mind that your views probably are not (and probably should not be) completely solid at this point… try to find a school that will not compromise your relationship with your family or your faith, yet will also cultivate your appetite to explore your interests more fully. Even if you can’t eliminate schools based on certain aspects that you find negative about them, you’ll at least know how to prepare yourself for going there.
Along these same lines, you should invest in a good college guide the year that you apply to college. The college guide put out by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (Choosing the Right College) is a comprehensive guide that covers course offerings, student and teacher comments, recent media coverage, and more. It also has a list of questions that you should ask of a school before making your decision to attend.
Consider Christian colleges Consider schools that actively pursue a Christian mission. Use caution in choosing this direction, though, for there are two red flags with regard to Christian colleges. In one regard, some colleges only wear a mask of Christian affiliation, when in reality they are far distanced from their Christian roots (as is, unfortunately, the case with many of the Jesuit schools). On the other hand, some Christian schools are excessively adamant in their Christian reputation, becoming just as guilty of “brainwashing” as the secular humanist schools of the left. Just because they tend to fall to the right instead of to the left, they are no more justified in preventing students from arriving at these conclusions out of their own intellectual curiosity. My concerns in this regard have been alleviated to some extent as I have researched the practices of several Christian schools, such as Grove City College, of which one student said, the school “is rigorous academically and intellectually, and not engaged in indoctrination.”
The benefit of Christian education is that, if to prepare young people for life is to prepare them to know the difference between good and evil, Christian education is most well suited to prepare students for life. Whereas many secular schools focus on preparing students for life by preparing them for their individual career selection, which merely serves private ends, Christian schools nourish their students and educate them in a way that is beneficial to all of society. As Pepperdine University describes its mission, the purpose of the school is “to prepare young men and women for a ‘life of usefulness in this competitive world’ and to help them ‘build a foundation of Christian character and faith which will survive the storms of life.’” By helping students to establish a foundational worldview, it is a necessary by-product that the students will become skilled workers and knowledgeable citizens.
One drawback of Christian education at this point in time (which could easily be changed through legislation, the migration of top professors from secular to religious schools, or with large donations) is that, without accepting federal funds or being able to charge large amounts for tuition, few Christian schools have any hope of breaking into the ranks of the top schools. Additionally, many of the professors at these schools may be overworked, as few of these schools allow TAs to teach classes and many of them put emphasis on small class sizes. This, in addition to the lack of research grants at many of these schools, prevents professors from being able to engage in much research, and thereby prevents them from publishing much work (which is typically a major source of publicity for the school and serves to draw top faculty from other schools). These considerations keep Christian schools from developing nationally-known faculty, thereby making it more difficult for the students to get competitive jobs after graduation.
Note that all of the drawbacks of Christian colleges can easily be overcome. Several Christian colleges have already started to make a name for themselves: Ave Maria (FL & MI), Grove City College (PA), Hillsdale College (MI), and others.
Consider international schools. While many international schools have even less connection with religious tradition than do American universities, many of them stick to a general course of study overall and to the study of the Classics within their humanities curriculum.
The London School of Economics, for example, offers a one-year General Course, which is “not a separate programme of study but a fully integrated undergraduate year.” The school’s course catalog makes no mention of such things as queer studies, women’s studies, or eroticism. The closest that it comes is a few courses offered in the sociology department, such as “The Sociology of Race and Ethnicity” and “Social Psychology, Gender and Society.” It seems that the curriculum is genuinely committed to the idea of “helping you to learn some of the different ways to test your - and other people's - ideas: and, in the words of our motto, rerum cognoscere causas, 'to understand the causes of things'.”
The University of Cambridge has a similarly well-grounded curriculum, with coursework that “enables you to develop your powers of argument, to refine your appreciation of literature, and to sharpen your powers of analysis.” Oxford’s programs of study “aim to make students think logically, laterally and independently,” utilizing “a unique learning experience through the tutorial system, in which students meet regularly with their college tutor, either on a one-to-one basis or with one or two other students, as an integral part of the pedagogic mix.”
There are many other prestigious schools abroad, albeit less well known to Americans than is the Oxford, Cambridge, and LSE. The University College of London, University of Edinburgh (Scotland), University of Manchester (UK), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), and others are well-known schools that offer thorough studies of the humanities and liberal arts. If you think that attending an international university is the best way for you to receive a quality liberal arts education, I suggest looking at a ranking of world universities such as the one put out by the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University or The Times Higher Education Supplement.
Figure out your values. What constitutes your worldview? What principles and ideas do you use to guide your actions and help you to process events in your life? Before you make yourself vulnerable to indoctrination by an educational system that goes largely unchecked, make sure that you have a firm grasp of what you consider important. I am not saying that what you determine to be your beliefs are correct, or that you should hold so firmly to them that you are not open to other ideas. I encourage you, though, to try to understand what you believe and why you believe it. Knowing what you think and why you think that way will help you to better articulate your views in an intellectual (respectable) manner and make it easier to recognize where your arguments are weak and in need of reassessment. For example, if you have been raised in a Christian household and profess the Christian faith, yet are unable to articulate why Christianity is preferable to another religion, you will quickly find yourself questioning your foundations when a teacher calls into question the authority of the Bible or leaders of the church. Living on shaky foundations will make it difficult for you to experience any consistency in processing all of the information to which you will exposed in the four years of college, and will make it much more difficult to gain a balanced perspective within academia.
While you think through your values and try to reason through them intellectually, think also of why you formed those values. How do they compare to the values of your parents? If they are different, how so and why? These are important questions to work through before you arrive at college, because every belief you have held before college will be questioned or challenged at some point during the four years (for better or for worse).
Find a mentor. In the age of individualism, transience, and deteriorating families, the advice and guidance of someone who understands your worldview and can help you apply it to the things you learn is invaluable. This is not to say that a mentor should replace parents or that their advice is infallible. However, a mentor can provide consistency where you might not otherwise have it.
Many schools require you to select an advisor within your major department. If this is the case, select an advisor who will really advise you. On paper, I chose the chair of the department as my advisor because I knew that he would be able to advise me about course selection. In practice, however, I went to another professor for the kind of advice that would grow me within my major and as a person. If your school assigns an advisor, see if you connect with that advisor. If you don’t connect with them, try to find another advisor who you can meet with in addition to the one assigned to you.
On a related note, make sure you know what role your mentor or advisor expects to play. In my opinion, students should not be going to their professors to talk about sexual assaults and eating disorders. They should engage on some personal level, but must be cautious that they do not expect their advisor to fill a role that the advisor simply does not intend to fill. The professors who advised me best were the ones who knew my values and could help me interpret information and make decisions about my education and career based upon those values. They did not know every little detail of my personal life and they did not feel a need to.
Keep records of your college experience. If you think that there is bias in the classroom or administration, save your papers, course syllabi, and anything else that might prove bias. Save email conversations. Journal about your every day experiences. I went through much of my Wellesley experience just writing off violations of traditional liberal arts education and, when my school suddenly pushed me over the edge just a month before graduation, you can imagine the headache it was to have to compile everything from the previous three years.
When I had to go before the honor board at Wellesley to defend myself against two charges that several lawyers I spoke with declared bogus, it was very time-consuming (and impossible in some cases) to find record of the rules that changed between the time of the Dyke Ball Awareness Campaign and the time that the charges were brought against me. The websites we used to collect alumni contact information originally did not have a privacy disclaimer, but a disclaimer had been added to all of the pages by the time I went to print them for the trial (fortunately, the Alumnae Association admitted before the Honor Board that many of the web pages had not had the link before the campaign).
Let people know your experiences. Report your experiences at college (good and bad) anywhere you can – to your parents, to your professors, to administration, to campus police, to alumni, to other students, to organizations working to ensure quality within higher education, to college reviewers, to local authorities and policy makers, in your blog, in the media, etc. It is only through sincere (rather than extremist) exposure that there will begin to be accountability on college campuses. As I mentioned earlier, many colleges turn a blind eye towards problems on their campuses because some problems may in fact contribute to the school’s marketability. For example, many schools allow drinking problems to go unaddressed because they contribute to the school’s attractiveness to prospective students, but the administration will quickly crack down on such problems as soon as they begin to draw negative media attention.
For parents:
Consider alternative schooling solutions early on. Homeschooling, charter schools, private schools, religious schools, distance education, single-sex education. There are a myriad of alternative educational opportunities to help you guarantee that your child gets a well-balanced liberal arts education and can establish a foundational worldview before leaving for college. This is not to say that it is impossible to get these things if your child attends public school; some children are able to do quite well when placed in the right public school. Parents have more control, however, over alternative schooling and can thus have more knowledge of and influence over the material to which their children are exposed.
Educate your kids. Schooling should not be limited to the classroom. Your kids should be informed about things going on in the world through you before they are exposed to them in the classroom. This serves to help them filter the information presented to them at school. This is not to say that young children should be exposed to everything that goes on in the world or that they should be taught to aggressively defend your viewpoint. However, they should not enter a classroom naïve about the events and problems of the world because (1) you should not hand your child over on a silver platter to be indoctrinated by his or her teacher, and (2) your child should not be easily swept up in the “cause of the day.” Many schools present horrific statistics about a given problem of the world, leading students to take hold of those facts and go out and fight adamantly for that cause without any sense of other aspects of the issue. This is what I saw happen at Wellesley with the girl who went out protesting the war in Iraq with the claims that the war was only for oil, yet had no grasp on the geopolitics of energy resources. Similar “cause-of-the-day” situations have erupted relating to the “scandalous” employment practices of Walmart and Starbucks. Just visit any liberal college today and you will most probably see Green Mountain Coffee or another fair-trade, environmentally-friendly coffee brand. This is not to write off these causes, but rather to encourage you to make sure that your children are discerning in the matters that they choose to take up.
Furnish your kids with a foundation of knowledge and solid principles, and teach them to reason through and justify their views. Whether religious or secular, relativist or absolute, make sure that you instill foundational principles within your children and help them to recognize these principles. I personally think that a child is most likely to be able to process the events that occur around him if his views are grounded in religion and an understanding of some moral absolutes. However, regardless of where you stand on this, your child should, at a minimum, be able to articulate why they think the way they do before they go to college. Being able to recognize the views with which they enter college and why they hold them will help your child to process the information presented to him and decide whether he needs to rethink his viewpoint.
Some simple steps that you can take to help your child develop a foundational worldview before they reach college age:
Spend quality time with your child while they are young, as a teenager, and when they go off to college. Family connectedness will help your child to develop respect for you as an authority and as a mentor. They are more likely to respect your values, opinions, and decisions if they respect and trust you as a person.
Some parents get too tired to spend time with their children, and find it an exhausting task to try to “entertain them.” To respond to this, I would argue that it will only become more exhausting as your child develops more and more independence and less respect for your authority; it is better to invest early on rather than deal with substantial problems later on. Other parents are intimidated by the idea of having to develop a trusting relationship with their child – they are scared that they will somehow “blow it.” How much sense does this make, when they are really “blowing it” by not developing a relationship with their child in the first place?
Basically, what I am trying to say is: do not make excuses for not knowing your child. It is worth the investment of your time and energy to develop a relationship with them and you will see the blessings of such investment return a hundred-fold. You can decide how best to get to know your child – whether it is by having a regular “date” with them, buying a pool table or a pool so that your house becomes the house that everyone likes to hang out at, making sure to actually talk during dinner every night, or whatever else you feel will work with their personality. Once they go off to college, make sure to stay involved in their life in a way that will continue to grow their trust and respect for you.
Make sure your kids know your views on the issues that affect them. This touches on the development of principles that I discussed earlier, but stems more from the quality time that you spend with your child. While watching television, talking over dinner, or doing any other activity, articulate your views. It does not need to be an intimidating conversation that makes both of you feel awkward and may send your child into a defensive or argumentative mode of listening. The way that my mom handled this kind of talk while I was in middle school and high school, as I mentioned earlier, was very effective for me. It may not have been effective for someone else. You decide, based on your relationship with your child and your personalities, how best to tell them your feelings on the issues that they will face.
Some topics that are important to articulate your views on include: Online communities, cursing, sexual promiscuity, skipping class, clothing/dress, excessive drinking, smoking, caffeine pills & other stimulants, clubbing/dancing, culture of following celebrity lifestyles, influence of the media, influence of teachers, anti-Americanism, and political extremism. The list could go on and on. There are lots of topics that children, teenagers, and young adults have to filter these days and they will best be prepared to handle them if they know where their parents stand and have been led to wrestle with them before being forced to do so in the “real” world.
Get involved in your child’s academic, extracurricular, and social life. If you are involved in your child’s life from early on, they will see it as just another fact of life and will probably respond better to your involvement as they get older. If, however, your child is already school-age or in his teen years, you can still get involved without seeming intrusive.
Ask your kids about school and life. I don’t know anyone who does not like talking about themselves, so it is just a matter of finding out what will make you child want to tell you about the going-ons of his life. Try to arrange to meet their friends (perhaps by inviting them to visit or treating them to dinner) and talk with them, get to know their interests and personalities. Ask your kids about the things going on with their friends. Make it customary to know their friends’ contact information. This kind of behavior does not need to be intrusive so long as you cultivate an environment of respect within your family. During my teenage years, I felt that my parents didn’t trust me when they asked me to tell them where I was going, who I would be with, and when I would be home. Then, it occurred to me after I graduated from college that my dad always tells my mom where he will be, who he will be with, and when he can be expected home, and vice versa. If the plans change, he always calls the second that they change. When I visit my parents in Austin, they always tell me when they are going out, where they will be, who they are going out with, and when they will be back. It is respectful to tell your family these things, and now that I have been able to recognize that, I always treat my parents with that kind of respect.
Be involved in the college selection process. Read the mission statement of the schools to which your child is applying and encourage them to look at schools that they might not have considered otherwise. You and your child may decide that a traditional college experience could be detrimental, in which case you may want to consider online or distance education. While I am still wary of the quality of many university correspondence programs, they are less likely to stray from the mission statement of the school than are courses taught in traditional classrooms.
If you hire a college consultant, take their background into account before acting upon their advice. Find out where they attended school, the schools that other students they advised have gone, where their own children have gone, the organizations they are involved in and where they have donated. Advisors can do much to encourage your child in applying to and attending a particular school, so make sure that you are aware of what biases they might have in presenting the pros and cons of each school.
Keep in mind that freshman retention rates are not necessarily a measure of how much students like the school. Some of the top schools have high freshman retention rates not because the students like the school, but because they feel that they do not really have the option to leave. There were very few girls that I knew at Wellesley who did not, at some point, talk seriously about transferring from the school. How many actually transferred? In the time that I was at Wellesley, I know of only four girls who actually transferred to another school.
Lastly, exercise the power of the purse, both in determining where your child goes to school and in supporting schools that are headed in the right direction. If you are paying for your child’s education, you have say in where they go. I was astonished when I interviewed a dean at a state school in Florida to find that administrators intentionally avoid disciplining students in some situations (particularly when it relates to alcohol consumption and risqué behavior at parties) because these factors draw young adults to the school. Many students intentionally choose schools because of their party scene, and even the students who choose academically-prestigious schools often factor the social life into their decision. If parents always let their child go to whichever school they want, these schools will continue to get money based on the fact that they cultivate a reputation as “party school.” We will not be able to maintain standards in academia if we continually shape higher education and the university to the desires of the students; academia should be shaped to the subjects taught and students should be drawn to a school based on this. A similar argument can be used against schools that simply appeal to the student’s desire to get a degree to get a job (rather than pursuing higher education for the purpose of learning). As Machen points out, “requirements have been lightened, standards lowered, grades inflated, and instruction narrowed to the supposed requirements of some career opportunity in order to keep enrollments up.” How can we expect colleges to change if we keep reinforcing these trends and how can we expect children to respect the input of parents who just give them $100,000+ to spend on the college of their choice without any stipulations?
Don’t assume that they can make decisions on their own simply because they are 18. Help your child to research his school, professors, classes, and course syllabi so that you and he know what he is getting into. Find out what the school’s disciplinary policies are, as well as the terms under which they notify the parents of a problem. Stay informed of events on the campus, making sure to read the newspaper of the town in which the school is located, the school newspaper, and the campus police log. Go to the campus police station when you visit the college and introduce yourself to the campus police officers; feel free to call them to check up on your child if you ever think there is a problem.
This does not mean that you need to spend all of your time tracking your child’s every move and everything that goes on around them. Just know that you don’t have to be in the dark. Parents don’t need to feel like they are completely helpless with regards to their child who is 1500 miles away at college – there are plenty of resources available to use as you see fit.
Obviously, keep in mind that students will respond differently to these approaches. For me, it always annoyed me that my parents wanted to be so involved, but at the same time, I can admit that they were effective in keeping me out of trouble. Other students might feel that there is a lack of trust in your relationship and will withhold information from you or become rebellious. Just know that these approaches are available to you and that you don’t need to send your child off to college completely unprepared.
For college professors:
Become involved in the life of the college. Mentor a student organization on campus or help students to start a new one. Listen to students when they talk about their weekend before class. You don’t need to be nosy, but you can at least pay attention so that you will have a sense if the college is going astray. It amazes me how out of touch one professor at Wellesley was when he* was quoted as saying, “There’s no drinking problem [at Wellesley]. It’s the most sober campus.” I wonder if he had any idea of the fact that eight students were pulled from a society party with alcohol poisoning and eleven from Dyke Ball the following week?! I imagine that it would be hard for prospective students to believe that Wellesley has an immense sense of community and personal connection between the students and faculty when there is such an obvious disconnect between the faculty and student life.
Follow online community message boards and the campus calendar, and take time to look at the posters around the campus. Of course, keep in mind that events and message boards will not give you a complete picture of the school body, but it will at least help you to stay connected with the campus and avoid drifting off into the research world. It is important even for your research to know in what direction the school is going – if you do not support the same values as the school, there can become tension between you and the administration; if donors don’t agree with the direction of the school, they can cut funding; and if the school starts getting excessive amounts of negative media attention, it can direct the attention of the administration away from academics and possibly affect the school’s ability to provide funding for your research.
Encourage your students in their value-based pursuits. Even if you don’t align fully with their values, encouraging your students to investigate the issues that concern them can help them to become more well-versed and reasoned in their beliefs. In my case, such investigation led me to change my views on many issues and helped me to develop character.
The professor who most helped me to explore my beliefs and encouraged me in living out my values was an economics professor who led her students to become informed on the issues that mattered to them. She taught her students how to find reliable data and manipulate it into a usable form, then use the information they found to come to a well-reasoned conclusion. While she often told us the conclusions that she had drawn from her own research, she did not find it unreasonable for her students to come to different conclusions. She was able to teach us about controversial subjects – such as abortion and welfare – without making the class controversial.
I will always remember the image of her – the 5’2”, 110-pound, always-perfectly-dressed professor hidden away with all of Wellesley’s best economics professors on the top floor of Pendleton East. She graduated at the top of her undergraduate class at Princeton University and with honors from her Ph.D. program at MIT. Her students respected her for her intellect, loved her for her anecdotes, and admired her for her convictions. I wish this could be said of every professor, but unfortunately, this is a rare find. In the three classes that I had with her over my three years at Wellesley, Professor Kearney became a mentor and friend.
During the trials that followed the Dyke Ball Awareness Campaign, her support became invaluable. She never said whether she agreed with my views or not, she simply called me into her office, shut the door, and asked if I was okay. The closest she ever came to expressing her specific views on the issue was in telling me of her disgust with the behavior of some of the girls on campus who disparaged me and spread rumors on the online community message board. However, just knowing that she was aware of what was happening on campus and that she thought to ask me how I was doing was all that I could ever ask from a professor. I have stayed in touch with her to this day and continue to greatly value and respect her opinion and advice.
Find a school whose mission statement, goals, and policies align with your view of the role of academia and your role as a teacher. If there are significant disagreements among faculty on these issues, the school community may be torn by tension or conflict and it will be much more difficult to build a sense of trust among faculty members and between the faculty and the students. If you don’t have to constantly worry about political conflicts erupting on the campus or stress over the security of your job because of political opposition, you can actually focus your attention on teaching and doing research. Please note that this does not mean that you cannot hold different political opinions than your colleagues or students or that intellectual diversity is bad. Intellectual and political diversity can greatly enhance academia so long as they are kept within a shared understanding of their role within academia.
Make it clear to your students what you expect of a class at the beginning of the semester. If you want your class to be a group therapy session, say so. If you only want discussion of research and news without any opinion, say so. If you want students to address each other by title (Mr. Johnson, Ms. Smith, etc.), say so. You can determine the environment of your classroom in so much as you clearly articulate your expectations.
As far as expressing your views on issues or current events, make clear to your students what your intentions are. If you are a liberal and want to use the class to help them understand the liberal perspective of the topic, prepare them for that. If you tend to accidentally slip comments about current events into your conversations, warn them not to take your opinions as sacred word. Keep in mind that it is alright to make your values and opinions known, just avoid making them the course.
For college administrators:
Articulate clear rules and standards from the beginning. Don’t allow your mission statement to be filled with vague statements solely intended for the appearance of altruism. Your mission statement should be an expression of expectations, not just idealistic goals. Goals are never attainable without standards and expectations. For example, Grove City College makes it clear that all students must attend chapel or convocations at least sixteen times per semester. The school also makes it clear that it will not tolerate the use of drugs and alcohol, premarital or homosexual sex or “any other conduct which violates historic Christian standards.”
Compare the mission statement of Grove City College with that of Wellesley College:
“Since its founding in 1876, Grove City College, committed to Christian principles,has striven to be equal in academic quality to the finest four year colleges. It seeks to provide liberal and professional education of the highest quality that is within the reach of families with modest means who desire a college that will strengthen their children's spiritual and moral character.
“When the College was chartered, a broad, Christian-based cultural consensus prevailed in America. By charter, the doors of the College were open to qualified students "without regard to religious test or belief." The founders of Grove City College, consciously avoiding narrow sectarianism, held a vision of Christian society transcending denomination, creeds, and confessions. They were committed to the advancement of free enterprise, civil and religious liberty, representative government, arts and letters, and science and technology. Believing that the fruits of civilization would be destroyed if religious and ethical roots were allowed to wither, the founders intended that the claims of Christ as God and Savior and of inspired Scripture be presented to all. They hoped that through its program of intellectual, moral, and spiritual education, Grove City College would produce young leaders, whatever their creed or confession, capable of pushing civilization forward on every frontier.
"Grove City College remains true to the vision of its founders. Rejecting relativism and secularism, it fosters intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social development consistent with a commitment to Christian truth, morals, and freedom. Rather than political, ideological, or philosophical agendas, objective truth continues as the goal of liberal learning. The core of the curriculum, particularly in the humanities, consists of books, thinkers, and ideas proven across the ages to be of value in the quest for knowledge. Intellectual inquiry remains open to the questions religion raises and affirms the answers Christianity offers. The ethical absolutes of the Ten Commandments and Christ's moral teachings guide the effort to develop intellect and character in the classroom, chapel, and cocurricular activities. And while many points of view are examined, the College unapologetically advocates preservation of America's religious, political, and economic heritage of individual freedom and responsibility." – Grove City College Mission Statement
"The mission of Wellesley College is to provide an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world." – Wellesley College Mission Statement
Which school do you feel more certain of in terms of the quality of education your child would receive? Which school will have an easier time attracting faculty that would have a clear understanding of what their role as professors is to be?
Note that I am not trying to compare apples with oranges here – any schools, Christian or not, can fail in providing a detailed and unambiguous mission statement. Liberty University, for example, uses the same type of altruistic catch-phrases that Wellesley and other secular schools use:
“To produce Christ-centered men and women with the values, knowledge, and skills required to impact tomorrow’s world.
“The mission is carried out for resident students, through a rigorous academic program and structured environment. It is carried out for external students in a comparable academic program but without the structure of the resident community.” – Liberty University Mission Statement
“Skills required to impact tomorrow’s world?” I suppose that is better than producing students with the skills to impact yesterday’s world, but it doesn’t do much to tell us about how the school functions or the quality of education it provides to its students. “Excellent liberal arts education?” Yes, that is better than seeking to provide a bad liberal arts education, but what does that mean? Is it the liberal arts education of which the ancient Greek philosophers would have been proponents, or the post-modernist type? Does that include professional classes or is it limited to study of the classics? What about the statement that it trains women who will “make a difference in the world?” Hitler made a difference in the world; Milosevich made a difference in the world; Mao made a difference in the world. What kind of person does not make a difference in the world? Every person impacts some other person or some aspect of our environment simply by existing. I say that if a phrase can be removed from a mission statement without changing its meaning, the phrase should not be included.
Regent University, a Christian school based in Virginia Beach, has an extensive mission statement with a structure that could serve as a model for any school. It details its foundational commitments under thirteen titles: high quality programs, family of God, student-centered approach, high quality personnel, library, high quality environment, information technology, strategic planning and assessment, financial resources, outreach, teaching, research and scholarship, and community service. Even better models can be found in recently-founded schools such as Olin College and Ave Maria Law School. New schools often have to put more thought into their mission statements and operate more closely to their guidelines and principles than do older schools that may have become detached from their roots.
Decide whether political thought and activism should be avoided or encouraged in campus and academic life. It seems impossible to think of a campus being apolitical, but forty years ago, before Vietnam protests and the implementation of tenure, campuses emphasized knowledge instead of empowerment and tended to distance themselves from political debate. If you want students at your school to be exposed to political trends of the day, decide whether you want to offer them all perspectives on the issue or only expose them to one. This is particularly relevant for schools that have a mission statement that consistently leads them to fall on one side of an issue. For example, Catholic University, the only university in the United States that is directly overseen by the Vatican, will not allow pro-abortion speakers to speak on the campus. The students are aware of this type of limitation when they come to the school (because it is clearly communicated), so such restrictions are not problematic. This will vary according to the school’s purpose and goals.
Some schools state as a goal that they seek to offer an environment of diversity, in which case I would encourage them – if they decide to cultivate a political environment – to develop channels of political debate that allow all sides of an issue to be presented so that the students become well-versed and not limited in their arguments. Other schools pride themselves on a homogenous environment, in which students can maximize their exposure to ideas without constant engagement in debate. This is the case at Grove City College, of which one student says, “This college has the ideal atmosphere for learning. The people are wonderful and very homogenous, which is a great perk. Everyone is conservative and Christian.” A professor at the school echoes this point by saying, “students are surprisingly apolitical; many of them are ‘hardworking suburban kids who just want to get a business degree.’”
Education at a political school will vary greatly from that of an apolitical school. Your school simply needs to decide which direction it is best suited for and articulate that decision to its students and prospective students.
Consider the effects of tenure and a mandatory retirement age and decide if these policies might help your school to live up to its mission statement.
For those who are not familiar with the tenure system that was first introduced in American schools fifty years ago, it is a system by which colleges and universities can judge a professor’s long-term benefit to the school and grant them job security in exchange for lower salaries based on their performance during the first few years of teaching. Tenure was originally created “as a way of insuring academic freedom for scholars who traveled uncharted areas or held unpopular views.” Tenured faculty members are allowed say in determining curriculum and grading within their departments.
The probationary period during which the professor’s performance is reviewed is typically three years for a community college and seven years for a four-year college. The tenure-track professors who are not granted tenure within the probationary period typically have until the academic year following the denial of tenure to leave the school. In a typical year, about one in five probationary faculty members is denied tenure and required to leave his position.
Tenure is, in essence, a lifetime job guarantee. The two groups in our society known for receiving tenure are teachers and Supreme Court Justices, supposedly as protection from undue political pressure. Many argue, however, that tenure is not a lifetime job guarantee. As the NEA explains it, “Tenure is simply a right to due process; it means that a college or university cannot fire a tenured professor without presenting evidence that the professor is incompetent or behaves unprofessionally or that an academic department needs to be closed or the school is in serious financial difficulty. Nationally, about 2 percent of tenured faculty members are dismissed in a typical year.” Keep in mind, however, that tenure does put the burden of proof upon the administration and, in that sense, can take much accountability off of the professor.
Elite schools say that they use tenure to attract the best faculty and to maintain institutional integrity. Some arguments can be made to this effect, but along with these potential benefits, arise many concerns about the value of the tenure system. In the past decade, many people have argued that professors have no incentives for productivity after attaining tenure: they cannot go any further within their own institution and they have no need to develop new specialties. Some critics of the tenure system believe that institutions of higher education would work more efficiently and effectively if they followed a business model of accountability and paid professors at a market salary based on performance rather than on a scale set by seniority. Proponents of the tenure system argue that academia cannot be treated as analogous with business and industry, that “universities are not hierarchical in their structure but are collegial: faculty and administration endeavor work together towards a common goal without friction and without intrusive incentives.” Unlike business, the product created through academia is not something that can be rushed – it does not work under the same principles of efficiency and effectiveness as machine does. While tenure is not a principle suitable for the business world because it would seem to produce inefficiency and ineffectiveness, it is appealing in the world of academia because it allows time for leisurely dialogue and exploration so as to maximize the quality of the final product.
These were the good intentions with which the system of tenure was originally implemented. It has become obvious in more recent years, however, that the benefits of tenure are not so clearly present, or at least do not clearly outweigh the costs. Beginning in the mid- and late-1990s, the media began to critique the system of tenure and bring to light all of the problems associated with it. For example, without tenure, the politicization of college campuses over the past forty years would not have been nearly as extreme.
Following this media attention, several colleges toyed with the idea of abolishing or changing their tenure systems to allow for more curricular flexibility and faculty accountability. Bennington College was the first school to abolish tenure and place all of its faculty members on contracts in 1994. The American Association of University Professors censured the college and several teachers filed lawsuits. Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science and Florida Gulf Coast University soon began to offer non-tenure contracts as an alternative to the system of tenure. The College of the Ozarks, Hampshire College, Grove City College, and several other schools resorted to completely contract-based systems. The University of Minnesota was unsuccessful in its attempt to alter its tenure system and experienced great turmoil and difficulty in attracting new teachers when the Board of Trustees tried to introduce a layoff provision and provisions to allow for salary reduction, threatening to dismiss professors who did not maintain cooperative attitudes. A few mid-rank schools have resorted to changing their tenure system by adding new features such as post-tenure review rather than eliminating it entirely, or have added a substantial number of adjunct professors. These transitions have, however, had unintended and costly consequences which lead me to question the value of changing the tenure system. One consideration that had never come to mind until I began to research the tenure system in greater depth is that the shift towards a greater number of non-tenure track professors has led to the “feminization” of the faculty, which has the potential to add to the number of “feminazis” teaching in the classroom. There are many arguments in favor of preserving, ending, and altering the tenure system, so I would encourage you to consider how tenure and the policies associated with it can shape the academic environment of your school.
As the NEA puts it, tenure is a “human institution with flaws.” The NEA makes some convincing arguments in favor of tenure, but its bias shines through in its arguments relating to academic freedom. One benefit, which is often cited as a cost, is that tenured professors have more time to conduct research. So long as this does not come at the cost of quality teaching, research can improve the teacher’s performance in the classroom and add to the prestige of the school. As the NEA says, “Research and teaching go hand in hand. The best educators are ‘up’ on the latest research and able to inspire students with stories of their own inquiries and interests.” Tenure affords professors the time and flexibility to explore multiple areas thoroughly and increases their chances of being able to articulate and contribute to a new area of research because they do not have to rush to produce (which is often the case with professors in the probationary period, who rush to get publishes and, as a result, often do work that does not greatly add to their field of study). A school can dodge the risks associated with professors who spend excessive time on their research by enacting policies that restrict the proportion of professors’ time spent on research in comparison with time spent in the classroom, making teaching salaries competitive with research grants, and tying promotion to amount of time spent teaching.
Another benefit of tenure is that it clarifies relationships and responsibilities and cultivates loyalty to the school. According to the NEA, “surveys show clearly that tenured faculty generally publish more, serve on more committees and teach more than their untenured colleagues. On average, faculty work 52 hours per week.” With job security, tenured faculty members are more likely to stay at their institution, thereby helping the school to build a stable and reliable faculty and lessening its need to constantly hire new faculty. As we have seen the decrease of tenure in the past decade, more and more colleges have resorted to part-time or temporary non-tenure track faculty members. Part-time professors grew from 22% of school faculty in 1970 to 38% in 1987, to 43% in 1992, to 49% by 1998. Part-timers now constitute ___% of the professoriate. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty showed that 65% of faculty members hired between 1993 and 1998 were part-time, ranging from 53% at public four-year institutions to 80% at community colleges. These professors typically earn very low per-course salaries ($1,500 per course on average) and few, if any, benefits, averaging $20,000 less per year than their full-time tenured and tenure-track peers. Only 56% of these professors hold master’s degrees and only 18% hold doctorates (compared to 67% of their full-time tenured and tenure-track counterparts). They usually do not offer office hours or serve as advisors to their students because they spend much of their time jumping between jobs or running back and forth between different schools (75% of them hold at least one other job). This is very problematic for building a sense of commitment and community at the school, as they are left with little time for “faculty meetings, thoughtful readings of assignments or the one-on-one student contact that even middling colleges once took for granted.” The Chronicle of Higher Education refers to part-time instructors as “invisible faculty who stand at the margins of campus life and disappear when the bell rings.” The NEA’s Higher Education Department argues that it is “hard for demoralized faculty members, always conscious of their vulnerability, to bring into the classroom the confidence and creativity necessary for fine teaching.” While the cost of tenure may be a consideration for your school, these are very costly consequences of increasing the number of non-tenured or non-tenure track professors.
The last argument most often used in favor of the tenure system is that, because it makes it more difficult to fire an established professor, it thereby makes it more difficult for the school to sway with the trends of the day or with the whims of new administrators. In the example of Anita Hill, several Oklahoma state legislators tried to have her fired because of her testimony before the U.S. Senate. Is this accountability or politics? Tenure makes it more difficult to hold professors accountable for crazy statements they make or media attention drawn to them, but it also can prevent them from being attacked every time the political or administrative mood changes. At Bennington College, professors who thought their jobs were secure, were suddenly fired when a new president came into office and decided to change the system. Is it right for a new president to be able to make such rash changes? Maybe yes, maybe no. This again depends on the environment and goals of the school. There is an argument to be made, however, that “if a professor is hired to teach in one way and under one set of assumptions and methods, that professor [should] be protected against future administrators and colleagues who do not share his assumptions and methods.” Furthermore, this can be seen as a check on the power of the administration. We constantly hear about crazy liberal professors who make absurd comments in the media or conduct silly research and we blame the tenure system for making it difficult to fire them. However, there are also crazy liberal administrators who are prevented from firing more traditional or conservative professors held under the tenure system. Granted, it is more difficult for a traditional or conservative professor to gain tenure, but once tenure is granted, it does serve to protect all professors equally. It also gives these professors more authority in determining the curriculum and grading in the school rather than leaving it solely in the hands of the administration.
The issue of accountability is still an issue, however. Switching to a contract system has the obvious benefit of making teachers pay closer attention to what they say and deterring them from making crazy, provocative statements that may negatively affect their students and the image of the school. In the past several years, there have been many examples of professors that have felt comfortable making offensive and inflammatory statements in their research and in the classroom, ignoring – intentionally or not – the fact that their students may not be adequately prepared to judge the truthfulness or reasonableness of those statements.
The NEA and other proponents of the tenure system argue that tenure is necessary to ensure professors the academic freedom necessary to pursue and promote truth and that there are still exceptions within the tenure system to allow for the dismissal of professors proven to be negligent within their field of research. These advocates claim that academia should serve as a “safe haven” for those who challenge the conventional wisdom of academic freedom; that professors must be allowed to make provocative statements that force their students to think and defend their ideas without fear of being fired. This is, in their words, how academia can continue to serve as a beacon in the search for truth. This argument might make sense if it weren’t the case that only professors of a certain viewpoint were able to get tenure. As it is now, it is typically very difficult for anyone who tends away from liberal thinking to receive tenure or to be granted the academic freedom to articulate their opinions in their research and inside the classroom.
I remember one of my professors told me to close the door while I was in her office so that she could encourage me in my work with the Dyke Ball Awareness Campaign without anyone hearing her. I also received anonymous phone calls from staff saying that they supported me, but that they could not do anything to help me because of their job. I was told many stories relating to Dyke Ball via phone calls like this, but all of the faculty members with whom I spoke said that they had never spoken up about their experiences because they were afraid that the administration would fire them or prevent them from being promoted. I have heard many stories of professors not making tenure and not getting funding because of their conservative views, or not being able to get published or receive recognition when their research supported conclusions that opposed arguments made by the left. Liberal professors, on the other hand, can get away with saying almost anything – no matter how offensive and absurd – without any reprimanding or questioning.
As Jim Miller, professor of Economics at Smith College, points out, “95 (percent) of the political views students are exposed to in the classroom are of the angry leftist variety, which assumes that Republicans are evil and stupid.” Miller believes that his views as a conservative Republican were the reason why he was denied tenure at Smith. Having been reappointment with a vote of 11-0-1 in 2000, his tenure was denied by a vote of 3-5-1 in 2002, just months after being published in National Review Online. A faculty member in Miller’s department asked that he be denied tenure because of the article, “in which Jim says, among other things, that ‘professors are mostly left wing’…I find it extremely disturbingly [sic.] that this could be Jim’s image of academia.”
In the 2004 article published about Smith College in FrontPage Magazine, Lisa Makson points out,
“A student who has taken four classes with Miller said he ‘is a very competent and engaging professor’ and deserves to receive tenure. ‘Jim is certainly a professor who enjoys a lively classroom debate. He challenges his students to view economic and social topics from a number of different perspectives,’ former student Kristina Johnson said. ‘He does often bring a different social or political view to the discussion, but he always encourages his students to find flaws in his arguments. I remember a particular class discussion during which Dr. Miller defended the flat tax. His points were well-argued, and though he debates passionately, his views were not radical,’ she said.
“She added that when two students blurted out that Miller’s ideas were ‘just wrong,’ Miller ‘encouraged both of them and the rest of the class to debate’ his views, helping students ‘attack his own view.’ She added that Miller ‘promotes the idea that college is about critically examining one’s own beliefs through learning and understanding the beliefs of others, and that is what makes him such an effective professor.’”
Isn’t that the kind of dialogue that supposedly would be encouraged by the academic freedom guaranteed by tenure? Why then would Smith not want to grant tenure to Professor Miller? In theory, tenure is good for protecting academic freedom, but in practice it hinders the professoriate most committed to the goals of that principle. While tenure committees in many schools have used the denial of tenure to crack down on thoughtful and reasonable professors such as Jim Miller, they have also used tenure to ensure the job security of radicals who promote the liberal perspective.
The NEA argues that tenure does not ensure job security for radicals, saying that it allows for some checks on the academic freedom of radical professors with the example that, it “does not mean that a science teacher can hold students to his or her belief that the sun revolves around the earth, and it doesn't mean professors can act unprofessionally.” However, we just have not seen this to be the case. More and more, professors are getting away with such behavior as forcing their students to act according to their own opinions and beliefs. A survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that “29 percent of students said there are courses in which students must agree with the professor's political or social views in order to get a good grade” and “83 percent of the students polled [said that] there isn't anything on the evaluation form to report a professor's imposing his irrelevant political and social ideology on the class.”
In early 2005, Rhode Island College’s School of Social Work threatened to reduce master’s student Bill Felkner’s grades for not lobbying the Rhode Island legislature for policies with which he disagreed. As reported by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), in his fall 2004 “Policy and Organizing” class, Professor James Ryczek,
“assigned students to form groups to lobby the Rhode Island legislature for social welfare programs from an approved list. If a student could not find a suitable social welfare topic on the list, he or she could also lobby for gay marriage. Felkner did not support any of these programs or issues and asked Ryczek if he could instead lobby against one of them or for the Academic Bill of Rights. This request was refused. Felkner then joined with and participated in a group, but wrote an individually graded paper that argued against his group’s position on the issue. Ryczek failed this paper, writing, “Regardless of the content, application of theory, and critical analysis, you did not write from the perspective you were required to use in this academic exercise. Therefore, the paper is must [sic] receive a failing grade.”
“When Felkner wrote an e-mail to the professor about what he felt was liberal ideological bias at the school, Professor Ryczek responded, “I revel in my biases,” and added, “I think anyone who consistently holds antithetical views to those that are espoused by the profession might ask themselves whether social work is the profession for them.” Ryczek suggested that if Felkner did not agree with the school’s political philosophy, he should consider leaving or finding another line of work. After Felkner made Ryczek’s comments public, the professor refused to communicate any further with him through e-mail.”
This was just months after a scandal in which Rhode Island College tried to censure a conservative professor.
It is very unlikely that you would ever see college administrators treat liberal professors the way they have conservative professors. I do not want to use this time to cry out about “conservative victimization,” but I believe that there are some aspects of this trend worth bringing to light. While professors have petitioned against the rights of conservative professors such as Jim Miller (Smith) and Mike Adams (UNC-Chapel Hill), they have argued in favor of the academic freedom and freedom of speech of such professors as Ward Churchill (CU-Boulder) and others listed in David Horowitz’s 101 Most Dangerous Professors.
Among Ward Churchill’s claims:
Churchill and the 199 CU faculty members publicly defending him claim that academic freedom protects his right to make these offensive comments and also shields him from charges of plagiarism, false claims of Indian status in his affirmative action job application, and misrepresentation of sources in his academic writings. Somehow, the claims of academic freedom in this case seem to stray completely from its original intention of allowing the uninhibited pursuit of truth. As conservative columnist Ann Coulter puts it, “Even liberals don't try to defend Churchill on grounds that he is Galileo pursuing an abstract search for the truth.”
“If a math professor's "speech" consisted of insisting that 2 plus 2 equals 5, or an astrophysicist's "speech" was to claim that the moon is made of Swiss cheese, both of them could be fired by a state university without running afoul of the constitution,” states the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Yet when it comes to political issues, where the lines of truth are not so clearly defined, academic freedom is used to defend everyone. Ann Coulter continues, “Just because we don't have bright lines for determining what speech can constitute a firing offense, doesn't mean there are no lines at all. If Churchill hasn't crossed them, we are admitting that almost nothing will debase and disgrace the office of professor (except, you know, suggesting that there might be innate differences in the mathematical abilities of men and women).”
At some point, the claims of academic freedom stopped being about truth and became completely intertwined with the Bill of Rights’ statements on freedom of speech. Yet even application of this concept is being abused, as proponents of “academic freedom” claim that professors are protected by the Constitution in saying anything. Yet this is not the case. First of all, the Constitution has nothing to say about the private sector’s regulation of speech. Secondly, even those professors who are paid for with tax dollars are only guaranteed the protection from regulation of speech by Congress. The Constitution says nothing about regulation of speech applied to state employees. Free speech and academic freedom have simply become new slogans of the left and have stopped being applied thoughtfully for the purpose of enhancing the marketplace of ideas.
In spite of defensive claims of academic freedom coated in attractive terminology such as “intellectual diversity,” public opinion still held that Churchill was guilty of “conduct which falls below minimum standards of professional integrity." However, instead of using this as grounds for dismissal from his tenured position, CU president Elizabeth Hoffman resigned. This shows that the NEA’s claim that tenure does allow for checks on radicalism is not as foolproof as they make it out to be. Tenure offers enough job security that it puts substantial burden on the school to overturn and can cause much turmoil in the case of professors such as Ward Churchill.
Getting rid of tenure would not only make it easier to fire radical professors already in the faculty, it would also prevent the administration from signing radical professors into long-term positions in the first place. Professors may perform well in new “trendy” subjects of the day and receive tenure within their first seven years at the school, but their value quickly deteriorates when their subject of study becomes obsolete. Getting rid of tenure saves the school the trouble and cost associated with such a situation.
Other effects of eliminating tenure:
There are arguments to be made in favor and against each of these systems (tenure and contract). Basically, how your school decides to deal with the question of tenure depends on how substantial of a concern are the problems associated with it at your school? The answer to that question will help you to determine whether it is best to operate with or without tenure at your school. Every school – regardless of size or philosophy – can agree that full-time, experienced faculty members who are committed to the school (and its principles) are essential for attaining educational standards. The question comes down to whether or not tenure can help your school to build such a faculty.
Some schools have decided that tenure is the only way to accomplish this. For example, every faculty member at Swarthmore College is on the tenure track (with the exception of lab workers and substitutes for faculty members on sabbatical), beginning with a four-year contract and being reviewed for tenure during the sixth year. “We expect our professors to do a great deal of intensive, one-on-one teaching,: says Provost Jennie Keith. “They advise students on research projects and are essentially on call around the clock. We ask a lot of them. It's only fair to give them something in return.”
The schools that have opted away from tenure have seen costs associated with their decision, having greater difficulty attracting long-term faculty and having to spend much more time seeking and hiring new faculty. These schools also have to hire more administrators to keep up with constant hiring and contract reviews. While there is some appearance of accountability in this system, the downside is that there could potentially be problems associated with giving more power to administrators. The administration might be more inclined to make arbitrary decisions about faculty and will have more power to stifle criticism of its political positions. As a result, it is likely that more faculties would become unionized and entering academia will be less desirable.
Note that this is not the case at some schools that are very intentional about their contract system. In order to succeed without a system of tenure, these schools need to attract new professors and motivate their faculty via other means. Grove City College, for example, has all professors on a yearly contract. The school still has a well-qualified professoriate that is dedicated to the school because the teachers that come to the school come because of the appealing feel of the school – its principled organization, the pleasantness of the learning environment, and the commitment of its students.
For schools that cannot offer such benefits to offset the loss of job security, there are alternatives to getting rid of tenure altogether:
The professor’s qualifications should not be judged solely on the number of times they have been published during their probationary period, a few end-of-course student evaluations, and a one-time class visit by a member of the tenure committee. Many of the problems we see with tenure today (as highlighted in David Horowitz’s 101 Most Dangerous Professors) is that colleges often do minimal investigation of tenure candidates before locking them into place. Furthermore, the setup of the tenure committee at many schools often goes either to one extreme of having reviewers who do not work with the professor and are therefore limited in their review to the evaluation of public dimensions of the professor’s work, or to the other extreme of having peers from the professor’s department who may rely on future evaluations by the professor they are reviewing for their own job security. Given these considerations, I suggest that – with or without a tenure system – a large number of people be involved in the discourse surrounding tenure and contract renewal.
In his article titled, “Abolish Tenure?,” William Wyatt points out that, “the standards for granting tenure are elastic and constantly changing, and accomplishments which would have brought tenure years ago are today deemed inadequate.” Help newer professors to succeed in their position by articulating what you expect out of them and how they can improve their chances of receiving tenure. Does your school expect good student evaluations? Do you expect them to publish X number of articles? Do you expect them to write a book? Decide what factors are most important for developing your school according to its mission statement and make certain that all professors have an understanding of what is expected of them to that effect.
Your school can continue to offer these things without emphasizing or resorting to tenure. First and foremost, I recommend that you read some basic books on business management. Yes, academia will never be the same as business, but there are some basic principles of managing employees that apply to all fields. David Sirota wrote a book in 2005 titled, The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want (Wharton School Publishing). He found that there are three basic goals of people at work:
In an interview with Knowledge@Wharton in May 2005, Sirota said, “We are often asked how to motivate employees. Our response is, that's a silly question. The real question is: 'How do you keep management from destroying motivation?' … As a general proposition it is hard to be enthusiastic about an organization that is not enthusiastic about you. Let's look at a few specific things. One is job security. We expect employees to be enthusiastic, loyal and engaged in an organization, but with the slightest downturn or prospective downturn we get rid of them.” If you want to avoid a high turnover rate among your faculty, you have to make your professors feel valuable and irreplaceable. As an example, Sirota points out Southwest Airlines (a company known for its high morale): “After 9/11 it said: 'We will take a hit in our stock price and not lay off anybody.' That's putting your money where your mouth is.” If enrollments are down or fundraising is below expectations, try to find ways to continue to cultivate community – particularly by engaging the faculty in personal dialogue about the problem. If the faculty can see your sincere interest in their welfare, they will feel much more secure in their jobs even at times of financial trouble.
Other aspects that promote job satisfaction and a sense of job security include: avoiding obstacles to performance, such as insufficient training, poor equipment or excessive bureaucracy; preventing misguided or untimely decision-making; and deflecting conflicts among faculty members and between the faculty and administration.
This list does not have every possible solution to the question of tenure. Basically, what it comes down to is whether or not there would be greater value added if the faculty members are more mobile (and probably less committed to the institution and the students) or if they have more protections from attempts to limit their academic freedom? Abolishing tenure is a popular notion, but it will not get at the root of the problem. As Richard Chait, a proponent of alternatives to tenure, suggests, “tenure is the abortion issue of higher education.” The topic pushes buttons and gets a lot of media attention, but the problems surrounding tenure are only symptoms of a greater problem relating to fundamental issues of individual rights and the social good.
Hire based on the big picture: don’t hire faculty members solely for their academic and pedagogical abilities, but for the way that their personal philosophies fit with the stated purpose of the school. Hiring a faculty that will work with the administration towards goals that are well articulated to students and donors will serve to grow trust within the school community and prevent the divisiveness among faculty that often becomes a detriment to the students. This is not to suggest that all faculty members need to be in step on every issue so as to allow for brainwashing of the students towards a particular political agenda; for, as James J. Kilpatrick suggests, “the line that divides propaganda from instruction is a wavering line drawn on shifting sands.” Rather, the goal of such intentionality in hiring is to ensure that all faculty members have a shared understanding of the purpose of higher education.
Some degree of political and religious agreement may be beneficial to the school as well, so long as it does not prevent students from going through a process of exploration and individual search for truth. At Grove City College, “Political controversy at Gove City is substantially absent, [sic.] because the faculty and students who choose to come to campus are a self-selected group.” The benefit of this is that it allows professors to have time to actually teach and concentrate on the intellectual development of the students instead of having to waste time worrying over the politicization of the campus. It also allows professors to feel secure in the reputation of their institution because they can have confidence in the fact that the administration is not hiring radicals whose research may draw attention to the school in a light contrary to its stated purpose (such as is the case of Ward Churchill and other outspoken radical leftist professors).
As David Horowitz points out in his book 101 Most Dangerous Professors, administrators should also be attentive to the political, research, and activist tendencies and backgrounds of potential hires.
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Consider refusing federal money. This decision comes with some difficulties in that students cannot receive Pell grants or Stafford/PLUS loans, but there is a tremendous benefit in having flexibility to determine curriculum, graduation requirements, organizational funding, housing restrictions, and employment and disciplinary policies. Hillsdale College has been among the pioneers of this method, “resist[ing], by all legal means, any encroachments on its independence.” In the 1970s, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) used the fact that some of its students received federal loans as a pretext for requiring that the school submit Assurance of Compliance forms mandated by Title IX of the Education Act Amendments of 1972. In 1979, Hillsdale filed a petition in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati to overturn the decision made by the HEW. In December 1982, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals vindicated Hillsdale's refusal to sign the compliance forms and ruled that government aid to individual students could be terminated without a finding that the college actually discriminated. However, in February 1984, the United States Supreme Court heard a related case – Grove City College v. T.H. Bell, Secretary U.S. Department of Education [465 U.S. 555] – and decided that any college or university whose students received federal aid must fulfill federal requirements. This decision would require Hillsdale to submit the compliance forms. Rather than give in to this requirement, however, Hillsdale decided to persevere in its pursuit of institutional autonomy and turn to private sources of funding. Today, the college turns down federal taxpayer money to the tune of $5 million per year, which it replaces entirely with private contributions.
Hillsdale now prides itself for this independence and the principles by which it fought for it, highlighting the following quote from the Detroit Free Press:
"Hillsdale after all, is famous as the little college that fights for rightness and independence. From the unlikely location of south central Michigan, it gained its national recognition by drawing its sword against the federal government. No trespassing, it told HEW; we'll hire, promote, subsidize, educate and influence with no interference from you." (January 25, 1981)
Revise the curriculum: review current course offerings and syllabi, eliminate courses that work against your stated goals and principles, and avoid instating trendy courses that may not enhance your students’ ability to think critically and function in their future pursuits. As H.J. Massingham puts it, “Modern knowledge is departmentalized, while the essence of culture is initiation into wholeness.” The questions of “how to make” and “how to judge” are the business of education; yet this has gradually shifted more towards the former. We see more and more courses that discuss specific topics without looking at the big picture, ranging from racially-, ethnically-, regionally-, gender-specific courses such as Asian Women on the Move: Transnationalism, Gender, and Ethnicity to career-specific courses such as Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business . At some point higher education stopped being about training students in a greater sense of humanity and public good and started to be a four-year period serving the same purpose that used to be filled by apprenticeships. Universities no longer see that they are meant to educate students not only as trained workers or knowledgeable citizens equipped to fulfill their private ambitions, but as “responsible heirs and members of human culture.” Considerations of marketability are primarily responsible for the shift away from classical liberal arts curriculum. Students want to be trained for specific jobs so that they can start making $80,000+ their first year out of college; skip the apprenticeship phase of working and go right into a specialty. As Wendell Berry points out, core curriculum should prepare a student well both to choose a direction of further study and to go in that direction; it should not cover material that is best learned in apprenticeships. While there is much appeal to career-track curriculum because it keeps higher education from getting too “heady,” it is unwise to tempt children and young adults to lock themselves into one career track too early, before they have a chance to really develop their intellect. Career track education grants students free choices before they are prepared to make them. This determinism imposes adult choices on children and young adults; rather than freeing them, it serves as a limitation on their freedom. Furthermore, it is quite disturbing to see that universities have shifted their entire curriculum to topic- and career-specific courses simply to up marketability by meeting the articulated desires of 18-year-old students who want nothing more than to get an education just to make money so that they can buy whatever they want. If we continue to shape education to the every whim of the students, we clearly can maintain no standards and will eventually lose both the quality of the curriculum and the appeal of universities to students. If schools instead shape education to the subjects and insist on quality curriculum with increasing degrees of complexity, students will be attracted to higher education for the sake of actually learning and becoming better prepared to handle the challenges of life. If students receive a well-rounded education based on the same principles by which education has existed for thousands of years, it is a necessary by-product that students will become skilled workers and knowledgeable citizens.
As J. Gresham Machen writes, “The issue of truth rises out of the comparison of one thing with another, out of the study of the relations and influences between one thing and another and between one thing and many others.” It is only with an understanding of truth that we can actually become effective as workers and knowledgeable and active citizens. This is why a return to a classical liberal arts curriculum is imperative for maintaining the role of the university as the training ground for participation in civil society. As the ISI Guide to Colleges highlights, there should be a return to study of Western history and literature, as well as of the Classics. Schools should avoid (or at least encourage students to avoid) politicized courses that stray from the unbiased pursuit of truth (“such as literature courses that focus on topics other than the great works of literature, such as colonialism, ‘marginalized voices,’ or popular culture”).
Seek to prepare the teachers of the future, not only to be instructors within their subjects, but to be mentors and advisors for future generations. Require that the education major require a double major and be among the most strenuous of majors. These are the people who are going to be shaping the coming generations, so we must hold them to the highest of standards. For example, “this is one of the most serious disciplines [at Grove City College], requiring students who would teach high school or above to double major,” studying both education and the field they intend to teach.
Consider getting rid of mandatory student evaluation of teachers. Instead, promote an environment that encourages students to voluntarily give regular feedback throughout the semester and allows them to give input after the semester has ended. This allows students to give feedback at the moments when they are most emotionally affected by a teachers actions and when they are reminiscing about a class after the fact. At Wellesley, we weren’t allowed to receive our final grades until we had completed an evaluation for all of our classes. I’m sure you can imagine how thorough and sincere the evaluations were under those circumstances. I gave the occasional exceptional review for my most fabulous teachers (some of whom I realized were not so fabulous after I learned more about higher education and the particular subjects they taught).
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Do not resort to using Teaching Assistants; or, at a minimum, do not allow them to teach classes.
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Emphasize the school and community rather than the individual. Once the primary purpose of higher education is personal fulfillment and the acquisition of things necessary to fulfill personal desires, it stops being able to train its students as “heirs of our cultural heritage.” This does not mean that you should neglect personal relationships with the students; rather, it is mean to encourage them. Community is built through personal relationships and the sharing of traditions. Cultivate this. Restore lost traditions. Incorporate the students, faculty, administration, alumni, and surrounding community.
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Establish a Christian Studies Center. The University of Virginia has a model Christian Studies Center whose vision is "to foster serious consideration in the university environment of a biblical worldview" and "to facilitate wise discussion of the Truth in light of the challenges of contemporary culture." It was founded under the pretext of influences such as Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri in Switzerland and Regent College in Vancouver for the purpose of educating laypeople to think theologically, with its mission “to provide opportunities and resources for corporate and individual investigation of the truths of the historic Christian faith in response to the questions raised by contemporary society. We will provide these opportunities and resources first to the University of Virginia, secondly to the Charlottesville community and thirdly to the broader region. Through this mission men and women will be transformed by the Truth which will be reflected in their thoughts and actions, both in their private lives before God and in their public lives as members of society, the family, and the Church.” The center now offers educational programs including courses, lectures, discussion groups, one-day and weekend seminars, special events, movie viewings, and summer seminary classes. It has ministries for undergraduates (women’s ministry, residential program, monthly gatherings, counseling, and a Veritas Forum) and graduates (fellowships for graduate students, MBAs, and Law School candidates).
Other schools that have developed or are located near Christian Studies Centers include Gordon College , Northwest Nazarene University , Boston College , University of Florida at Gainesville , Whitworth College , and Union University. Yet other schools are unable to develop their own Christian Studies Center, so instead choose to promote programs located elsewhere (such as the Dayspring Center or one of the many Christian Fellowships offered in DC, Colorado, Minnesota, Switzerland, and elsewhere).
