Written by James M. Patterson |
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Prestige relates to money in that prestigious schools attract more grants and donations, because of their excellent students and also the eagerness of wealthy donors to have their children admitted. As a result, these institutions can spend money on fine arts programs, more faculty, better student services, and better facilities. Low-prestige universities often have to focus on budgets, which may mean opting for low-prestige signals like merging departments or relying on contingent faculty.

No doubt many conservatives, especially those in higher education, have been clinking glasses at the news that Claudine Gay has resigned after a short and undistinguished presidency at Harvard University. Gay was responsible for the mistreatment of conservative scholars at Harvard and rose through the ranks of higher education by trading on her identity while putting out plagiarized scholarship. There has been plenty of analysis of the specific instances of plagiarism and their relative severity. What is interesting, however, is that none of this seems to have anything to do with being a good president of a university.
What does a university president do? First, the president raises money. Second, the president is the face of the university. Whenever there is a problem, she is the one who appears on television, meets with faculty, and takes calls from donors and important alumni. Presidents are not the final authority on most things, and they almost never handle student or faculty controversies the way some conservative commentators seem to think they do. A university president is doing her job when she is raking in the cash and representing the university well. In the end, Gay was doing neither. While Harvard was never going to close, she had upset enough donors that she was, on balance, a problem rather than an asset for fundraising. She had put on a bad face for the university, starting with her December 5 appearance before the Committee on Education & the Workforce alongside Liz Magill, former president of the University of Pennsylvania.
Magill stepped down a mere six days after the appearance. Only a few months before, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford University after the discovery that he had misrepresented his research. All these resignations have two factors in common: money and prestige.
The Prestige Economy
Money and prestige are the two currencies of higher education. They are related but distinct. For a university, money is not just tuition revenue, but also grants, donations, and endowments. A university that relies entirely on tuition is poor and, in this climate, likely to close. Grants are discrete allocations of money for particular research or teaching roles, such as those given by the National Science Foundation or the Ford Foundation. Donations are usually from wealthy individuals with specific intentions attached to them, such as to pay for a new dormitory or fund a new music school. Endowments are collections of funds that the university invests that can be used for a rainy day or a major expansion.
Prestige is difficult to define, but it requires a good reputation combined with highly selective admissions. Universities can acquire good reputations by graduating excellent students, but they can also acquire them by attracting the sons and daughters of elites. The latter often wins one the title of a “finishing school,” but finishing schools still deal with elites in ways that less prestigious institutions simply do not. Contemporary elite universities do both—mixing incredibly talented students with scions of the upper crust.
Prestige relates to money in that prestigious schools attract more grants and donations, because of their excellent students and also the eagerness of wealthy donors to have their children admitted. As a result, these institutions can spend money on fine arts programs, more faculty, better student services, and better facilities. Low-prestige universities often have to focus on budgets, which may mean opting for low-prestige signals like merging departments or relying on contingent faculty.
Over the past few years, I have become increasingly baffled at how little of this conservative commentators understand. Conservatives often joke about the irrelevance of higher education by quoting Sayre’s law, “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Universities house scholars, whose work is both in research and the formation of students. If conservatives have no place in higher education, there will be no conservative scholarship and very few conservative students. Indeed, the falsehood of Sayre’s Law is evident in the intensity and coverage of the Magill and Gay fiascos. Conservatives understand that there is something at stake here, but they do not understand what it is. Let me explain.
Car Dealers vs. New Dealers
The source of this ignorance is what I call the “Car Dealer vs. New Dealer problem.” Most American conservatives are middle class or aspire to the middle class, and, as a result, share a “car dealer” view of the world. The car dealer is a successful business owner. He is usually one of the wealthier people in town, and he makes other people rich too—by advertising on local media, hiring employees, and investing in local enterprises. To ensure success, the car dealer must constantly manage finances by finding new investment opportunities and cutting losses. That means gathering market data, firing underperforming staff, and seeking out innovation for increasing sales. The car dealer provides for the common good of those around him because of self-interest, and he assumes that others do the same. This worldview could not be worse for succeeding in higher education. Why is that?
Car dealers cannot commit to anything in the long term. Short-term losses are signals to the car dealer that it is time to pull up stakes and minimize losses, and the costs imposed on those affected are simply part of how the world works. This mentality is what often prevails among American Christian higher education institutions. If we view higher education through the car dealer paradigm, education becomes a service for sale, while students are the consumers, administrators the management, and faculty the labor. Under this model, the primary source of income is tuition, so tuition dictates low-prestige education that diverts the college away from its mission. Meanwhile, faculty in prestige-generating majors are sidelined, encouraged to retire, or downsized.
Most conservative colleges are Christian liberal arts colleges, many of which are struggling to stay afloat. At these struggling American Christian colleges, the majors in greatest demand are primarily in education, business, and nursing—the fields that appear to have the readiest application to real-world employment. Hence, car dealer administrators will divert ever-dissipating resources toward these high-cost programs, often at the expense of the core liberal arts disciplines that are central to the stated mission of the college. Because leaders at Christian colleges do not coordinate decisions, they all make these same decisions at the same time, meaning that they are now fighting over the same students, which in turn means no one gains the enrollment bump they expected. Moreover, students in these majors often graduate into fields with solid employment possibilities and lower salaries. (A notable exception is nursing—although nursing is in greater demand outside of the areas where most Christian liberal arts colleges are.) I am regularly surprised by how little incoming students and their parents know about the demand for conservative graduates to work in prestigious, high-earning positions that would enable them to live religious lives.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, June 3, 2022
And so surely the Christian cause of this month should be opposing Pride Month and its flag in as public and strident a way as many have opposed racism and its symbols. Let us have many blog posts and tweets on the topic. And may we even have pointed op-eds and major articles slamming Pride by those Christians privileged enough to have access to the pages of The Atlantic and The New York Times. Social justice surely demands it. And I, for one, am looking forward to reading them all.

If anybody wants to understand what is happening to the public square in America—indeed, if anyone wants to know how America, or at least her ruling class, wishes to understand itself, they need look no further than Pride Month. If the arrival of the Pilgrims, the founding of the nation, and even the contribution of Martin Luther King Jr. receive no more than 24 hours on the national calendar, the LGBTQ+ alliance has an entire month to party in the streets. And this street party is enabled by the countless commercial ventures that post rainbow flags in their windows and on their websites.
For anyone not completely hoodwinked by the erotic obsessions of our day, taking pride in one’s sexual identity—indeed, even considering sexual desire to be an identity—would seem at best pitiful and at worst a deep perversion of what it means to be human. Yet, here we are. And we should not underestimate the power of what it signifies.
It is a basic fact of history that if you control time and space, you also control the culture. The early Christians of the fourth century knew that as they slowly but surely claimed space in pagan Roman culture for churches and marked the rhythm of time with the development of the liturgical calendar.
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Barked died about 4:10 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 27, his daughter, Peggy Barker Townes, confirmed to AL.com. He was 89 and would have turned 90 next month. “He was faithful to the last breath,” Townes said. “We have been as blessed as we can be.”

The Rev. Frank Barker, who founded Briarwood Presbyterian Church in a storefront in 1960 and led it to become one of Birmingham’s first megachurches, has died.
Barked died about 4:10 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 27, his daughter, Peggy Barker Townes, confirmed to AL.com. He was 89 and would have turned 90 next month.
“He was faithful to the last breath,” Townes said. “We have been as blessed as we can be.”
Barker retired from the 4,100-member church in 1999 after 39 years in the pulpit.
He founded Briarwood in a storefront in 1960 in Cahaba Heights. After several months, the church moved to a campus on U.S. 280. In December 1973, Briarwood Presbyterian Church hosted the first General Assembly of the new Presbyterian Church in America, a conservative break-off from the mainline Presbyterian Church (USA). Barker was a key figure in launching the PCA denomination.
Barker oversaw the construction of a $32 million new campus in 1988, overlooking Interstate 459 from a hilltop at the Acton Road exit. The church grew quickly and added a $5.5 million expansion in 1998.
Barker oversaw the creation of Briarwood Christian School, a ministry of Briarwood Presbyterian Church, which includes grades from kindergarten through high school. The high school has a Shelby County campus on Cahaba Valley Road.
Barker helped found the Birmingham Theological Seminary in 1972 with the Rev. Bill Hay at Edgewood Presbyterian Church in Homewood. It moved later to the Briarwood campus. Barker served as chancellor and chairman of the seminary, teaching classes in Old Testament and personal evangelism.
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