Douglas Wilson’s article, “Why Evangelical Colleges Aren’t,” (Vital Signs, September) is provocative but unsubstantiated. It is also quietly self-serving, failing to mention his role as a founder of New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. His assertions about evangelical higher education ought to be measured against the facts of those colleges and against his own practice.

Mr. Wilson elaborates one central conclusion: Christian colleges today reflect rather than confront the dominant culture. His allegation is based on two undisputed facts: Such colleges teach a contemporary rather than a “classical” 17th-century curriculum, and they participate in the American system of regional accreditation. He believes Christian parents will find such institutions damaging to students. He asserts: “A graduate of an evangelical establishment like Wheaton has a far better chance of receiving a diploma in trendy leftism than his counterpart down the road at Leviathan State U.”

“Trendy leftism”? Does Mr. Wilson mean the issues of poverty and suffering that Jesus addressed in proclaiming the Kingdom of God? The commitment that Jesus demonstrated to rebuke racism, hypocrisy, and a cold religious establishment? Jesus’s attack on materialism? In any case, he does not cite the curriculum of any institution.

The issue of curriculum is central to Mr. Wilson’s argument. He argues that the modern curriculum, with its subject matter majors, replaces the “confessional approach to higher education.” He comments, “When colleges ceased to pass on an inherited body of knowledge and began catering to the interests and desires of the public, the destruction was complete.” Mr. Wilson seems to mean that issues such as human fallenness, man’s need for salvation, the atoning work of Christ, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit ought to influence our understanding of humans and culture. I do not know an evangelical college where these truths are not kept before students in classes and in chapel.

Mr. Wilson’s attack on an education system based on subject-matter majors such as English literature or mathematics prizes the traditional liberal arts but ignores 200 years of intellectual inquiry. It also dismisses the core of foundational general education courses that are required everywhere. Almost without exception, evangelical colleges require courses in biblical and theological study. Some mandate a progressive and deeper engagement with faith issues, and some may require a full major (45 semester hours) of Bible and theology together with a subject-matter major.

“Catering to the public”? If students were “customers,” “always right,” we could forget degree requirements. Our goal is to help students grow to intellectual, social, and spiritual maturity: Seniors should be different from freshmen in these areas. Students fail and are suspended and expelled precisely because they are not simply customers.

Mr. Wilson charges that “the Zeitgeist [appears] in raunchy requirements for classes.” While evangelical colleges often challenge students with difficult material, they usually do so in a context of guided discussion and critique. Yet Mr. Wilson’s college offers a colloquium in literature featuring classic “raunchy” works without guidance, instructional support, or comment. Among them are Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Canterbury Tales, Fielding’s Tom Jones, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Byron’s Don Juan, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces. One accidental circumcision, two forced castrations, and a load of seduction and unchastity, one might note.

What “public” does New St. Andrews cater to? Its curriculum will familiarize students with a great deal of philosophy, theology, and culture up to 1870. Its subsequent selectivity omits any American literature later than Faulkner, any woman author after George Eliot, any laboratory science. One can master Latin and Greek, Calvin’s Institutes, Dante and Milton, and return to an age when young white males studied dead white males.

Finally, Mr. Wilson equates regional accreditation with a state imprimatur. As he puts it, “Evangelical colleges have agreed to burn their incense to the emperor, and now regularly come before secular accrediting agencies and boards, hat in hand. Please, sir, may we teach some scratch ‘n’ sniff form of the Christian faith?'” But accreditation in America is granted without reference to the religious commitment of individual institutions. The North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, overseeing more than 900 colleges and universities in 19 states, has no statement regarding an institution’s commitment to religious values. The colleges themselves in association have developed the general criteria for all schools. Individual colleges determine what their mission is; the NCA simply asks, “Do you have a mission? Are your programs consistent with your mission? Are you accomplishing your goals effectively? Is your college financially viable so you can continue to provide quality education? Do enough faculty work full-time for the college to meet the needs of your students? Do you have the library and other resources to support your programs?”

Is Mr. Wilson right that Christian colleges must “remain bland enough not to cross accrediting agencies with anything like a distinctively Christian view of the world”? That accusation won’t stand at accredited, vibrantly Christian colleges like Tabor, Wheaton, Southern Nazarene, Dordt, Calvin, Northwestern, Taylor, Indiana Wesleyan, Malone, several Assemblies of God colleges, and the colleges of the Concordia University system.

Are evangelical colleges “proudly part of the establishment? Not according to the American Association of University Professors, which is horrified that we will release faculty who don’t adhere to doctrinal standards. All of the Christian colleges that Wilson names are explicitly committed to hiring only believing faculty.

One of Wilson’s sharpest statements echoes Jesus’s challenge to the self-praising Pharisees.

The pecking order has been established, and those institutions which are hungry for academic respectability must respect the pecking order. This means that colleges which want accreditation must get their faculty from previously approved institutions, and must vow never to do anything which seriously challenges the existing order. They must determine to be the very model of kennel-fed Christianity.

Even Mr. Wilson’s faculty at New St. Andrews are university trained, so this is specious. But maintain “the existing order”? Evangelical colleges often lead the Church and the professions. The first college I taught at has produced hundreds of pastors to challenge an almost moribund denomination, and hundreds of missionaries who serve across the world, winning people to Christ and building the national churches of those countries. From that college have come scores of evangelical Salvation Army officers, ministering to the poor and offering them the message of Jesus. The education department of that college, explicit in its Christian mission, was selected by the state as a model for teacher training because of its professionalism. Recently, Christian colleges have been intensely involved in the racial reconciliation movement, bringing the message of Christ to one of the most divisive national issues.

Mr. Wilson concludes, “Our only real hope is that the parents currently showing such zeal in the sound education of their younger children will not be too tired, when the time comes, to turn their attention to the establishment of small but genuine colleges.” I actually agree with this self-seeking statement because I believe evangelical Christian colleges are “small but genuine,” offering a quality education which establishes students in the faith.

But what will students gain from Mr. Wilson’s New St. Andrews College? These “Bachelors of Arts in Liberal Arts and Culture” or “Bachelors of Arts with Emphasis in Christian Education” will know languages, classical theology and philosophy, and acquire a perspective on varying worldviews. They will know no history later than Jefferson’s correspondence and the Federalist, no critique of modern culture or the political and social issues of the last hundred years. Asia? South America? Canada? Communism or Nazism? The missionary movement of the last 150 years? Racism? Invisible.

        —Richard J. Sherry
Dean of Faculty Growth and Assessment Bethel College
St. Paul, MN

Dr. Wilson Replies:

Dean Sherry has expressed his disagreements honestly and like a gentleman, straight up the middle. I thank him for it. But alas, there our agreement ends.

First, it would seem to me that the fact that I made no mention of my association with New St. Andrews College would indicate that I was trying to avoid the appearance of being self-serving. Had the article ended with, “For more information, please call the number in the by-line,” the charge would perhaps have some plausibility. But now that I have been outed, I would argue that my involvement with a small college in the classical Protestant tradition appears to show me absolved of any taint of hypocrisy: We do try to practice what I was urging others to do in my article. And even now, under the most severe provocations, I resist the temptation to include an address or phone number.

With regard to “raunchy requirements,” Dean Sherry charges us with inconsistency because of our use of portions of the Decameron, the Canterbury Tales, and other classic literature. He asserts, rather strangely, that we offer these works without “guidance, instructional support, or comment.” But in fact, this is not the case, and in all our assignments we are very mindful of the purity St. Paul had in mind when he told us to “think on these things.”

For the rest, while he is quite right in saying that my charges were general, numerous observers of evangelical colleges recognize the accuracy of the portrait I painted. As Dylan put it, you don’t need to be a weatherman to tell which way the wind is blowing. But for those still desiring specific evidence of my charge that evangelical colleges reflect rather than confront the culture, they need look no further than Dean Sherry’s comments. In his response, we find “dead white males” used as a pejorative phrase, “selection by the state as a model” considered to be a good thing and a sure mark of crackerjack professionalism, and an implicit charge of racism because he can find no evidence that we have joined the current secularist jihad against racism. Further, he sees a distinctively Christian view of the world in the denominational pandemonium represented by a long list of “vibrantly Christian colleges”—when what we should actually see there is the ecclesiastical precursor to the pluralistic bedlam that afflicts our culture now.

Finally, I do admit that I am university trained, but it is too late to do anything about it now.