A serious Christian school must have an explicit, orthodox, Christian mission and it has to hire administrators, faculty, and staff for that mission. It has to have a fully informed and committed board that insists on those things happening. Above all, it needs a president committed to an orthodox vision who is willing to insist on a board that understands and supports it, as well as one who insists on hiring according to that vision.

In yesterday’s post, I recounted Burtchaell’s argument about the threats to Christian higher education and my response recorded in the book, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions.1
Burtchaell’s response to me, in a private letter, was quite complimentary but he claimed I was wrong on two types, the critical mass and the intentional pluralism, which he thought would easily secularize. Initially, I didn’t accept his verdict, but as the new century progressed, I was haunted by his judgment that the two types were unstable and would weaken.
First, I had close-at-hand evidence that Burtchaell was right about the instability of my third type, “intentional pluralism,” which was how I typed my own college, Roanoke.
Soon after I returned from by sabbatical at Valparaiso, I was asked by the new president to lead a task force to write a proposal for a substantial Lilly Grant that would enable the college to strengthen the Lutheran teaching on vocation in its curriculum. Our task force wrote a strong proposal, but one that had two fatal flaws. The task force did not prepare the faculty adequately for such a serious proposal, and the president did not take ownership of the initiative.
During one of the longest mornings of my life, a strong majority of the faculty—led by a cabal of secularists—thoroughly rejected the proposal. While I was quite embarrassed about the flaws in our task force’s approach, I think in retrospect that no strong proposal could have survived. The later history of the college more or less confirms that.
Since then, there has been a gradual secularization that has finally led to a complete sanitation of the college’s religious baggage. The final blow came in 2017, when the college was to celebrate the 175th anniversary of its founding, as well as the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Throughout its history the college had taken pause at its anniversaries to reflect on its identity and mission. That always included a grappling with its Lutheran heritage. In 1992 we had done so at its 150th, with a fine program of broad reflection.
In order to do my share in participating in such reflection, I spent four years on writing a history of the college’s relation to its religious heritage. It is entitled Keeping the Soul in Christian Higher Education: A History of Roanoke College.2 I timed its publication to come out during the year of remembrance and vision. As I wrote the book over several years, I submitted each chapter as I wrote it to the president and discussed with him his reaction to each one. He seemed pleased with each chapter, even the last one. In the final chapter I argued that certain steps needed to be taken to preserve the public relevance of the Christian faith in the life of the college.
Upon publication of the book, which the president had the college subsidize, he ordered a large number of copies to distribute to the board, to new faculty, and to display in his office. He even invited me—to my great delight—to engage the college board for several hours at one of its meetings. Those of us who cared about the college’s religious heritage looked forward to a pivotal conversation at its 175th birthday.
Lo and behold, nothing happened. The whole event was canceled, though one faculty member did arrange observations of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. But no college-wide discussion of our identity and mission as a church-related college. Indeed, the president shelved the many copies of my book he had ordered on an obscure bookshelf. My engagement with the board was cancelled. Instead, I was given five minutes in the midst of the board dinner to say my piece.
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After some positive comments about the St. Olaf of the 90s, he mysteriously pronounced that: “Other indicia suggest the Midwest college is entering a divestiture of its Lutheran identity that, though much longer in coming, could be swifter in its eventual accomplishment.” Other schools—Azuza Pacific and Calvin—were assessed quite positively, but Burtchaell had little confidence in their futures as Christian schools.

During my sabbatical year of 1985–86 at St. Edmunds College of Cambridge University, I had the good fortune of having many conversations about Christian higher education with James Burtchaell, who also had a year-long sabbatical there. He had recently moved from the provost’s office of Notre Dame to its theology department.
I had moved in 1982 from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago to Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia, recruited by President Norman Fintel in order to build a strong religion department and to help strengthen the connection of the college to its Lutheran heritage, including the founding and shaping of a Center for Religion and Society.
Burtchaell was fearful that Notre Dame was loosening its connection with the Catholic tradition, as so many other Catholic schools had done. He was very interested in criticizing and preventing such a move.
I was still in mild shock about the Roanoke College that I found when I arrived there in 1982. Half the department chairs were hostile to the college’s connection with any sort of religious tradition. The other half were apathetic about that connection, not seeing any relevant connection between the college’s Lutheran heritage and liberal arts education. Only two of us department chairs thought it important to hire Lutheran Christians if the college was to have any continuing relation to its original founding. The Dean and the President both farmed out the hiring of new faculty to the departments.
The shock came from the contrast to what  I experienced when attending a Lutheran college in the Midwest in the late 50s that was unabashedly Lutheran in its identity and mission. Though I had lectured at many Lutheran colleges while I was a seminary professor for nearly twenty years, I had not looked closely at their overall religious substance. After my jolt in arriving at Roanoke, I now had to take a closer look. What had happened in those twenty years?
A great aid in taking that closer look came from my friend Burtchaell, who had followed up his interest in the secularization of Christian schools. In the April and May 1991 issues of First Things Burtchaell wrote two connected articles entitled “The Decline and Fall of a Christian College.” The articles presented a very long and highly erudite historical account of how Vanderbilt moved from being what Methodists hoped would be their flagship Christian university to a thoroughly secular institution in which Christianity offered no public relevance. In the articles he points to nine fateful moves that were crucial in that secularization.
Though there were some earlier studies of secularization in higher education, this one was a game-changer because of its clarity and passion. In hopes of understanding the process of secularization, I had already organized a faculty/administration discussion group on the subject of Christian higher education. When Burtchaell’s articles came out, we were given tools to understand what had happened. We could almost put our college’s name in every reference to Vanderbilt that Burtchaell made. His work was enormously helpful to understand what had happened and gave us clues about how we might take measures to mitigate the secularization process and perhaps rebuild a viable Christian college.
However, those articles were but a foreshadowing of what was to come in his The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches, a tome of 868 pages, published by Eerdmans in 1998.1
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