Professing in the Postmodern Academy: Faculty and the Future of Church-Related Colleges

A Review of Research on Church-Related Higher Education

A Review of Research 1 A Review of Research on Church-Related Higher Education STEPHEN R. HAYNES In 1944, Albea Godbold began a study of “church colleges in the old South” with a note of deep concern. “Many are asking ,” he wrote, “can the church college survive? Does it have a place in the American system of higher education? Can it, or dare it, be Christian?”1 In 1953, Winthrop Hudson lamented that denominational colleges had long since lost any significant religious heritage.2 In 1969, Charles S. McCoy wondered “what roles and functions are appropriate to [church colleges] in this age of the public college and federal-grant university? Do they have a future? Should the relation between church and college be severed?”3 More recently, in 1991, James Tunstead Burtchaell asked: “In what form can these colleges survive,” and “What role will they play in American higher education in the future?” The consistency in these expressions of concern indicates that certain critical questions—can churchrelated colleges and universities survive, and can they remain relevant and distinctive—have been with us for at least half a century. In the chapters that follow, junior teacher-scholars at church-related colleges and universities who are participants in The Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College address these very questions. As an introduction to their work, this chapter offers a brief history of American 2 STEPHEN R. HAYNES church-related higher education and a review of twentiethcentury scholarship dealing with the phenomenon. A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW THROUGH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The first American colleges were founded to serve the welfare of their communities. Though it is sometimes claimed that these colleges existed for the sole purpose of educating clergy, in fact they prepared graduates for all the professions. These colleges dominated the American scene during the colonial and early national periods. In fact, Robert Pace notes, “from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, higher education was mainly private and mainly Protestant.”4 The years between 1820 and 1870 saw an explosion of denominational schools and colleges, an eruption accompanied by a high mortality rate. The surviving schools were more sectarian than their colonial predecessors and less committed to serving the public good. Among the conditions that encouraged the emergence of the denominational college in the nineteenth century were westward expansion, flexible academic standards, and Protestantism’s disposition to fragmentation. Another factor was the “Dartmouth” Supreme Court case of 1819, which assured that private institutions could remain free from state interference. Yet because college founding was “undertaken in the same spirit as canal-building, cotton-ginning, farming and gold-mining,”5 many institutions were exceedingly fragile: Often when a college had a building, it had no students. If it had students, frequently it had no building. If it had either, then perhaps it had no money, perhaps no professors; if professors, then no president, if a president, then no professors. Perhaps as many as seven hundred colleges tried and failed before the Civil War.6 The rapid appearance and extinction of denominational colleges in the nineteenth century contributed to a chaotic educational environment and, ironically, fueled suspicion regarding experiments in public higher education. In fact, by late in the century the “diversity of sects, religious conservatism, and the American insistence upon radical separation of church and A Review of Research 3 state created a suspicion of tax-supported higher education and an active opposition to it.”7 After the Morrill Act of 1862, however , the American public began to embrace the notion of public higher education. This embrace was aided in the twentieth century by the ideological shift from elite to democratic notions of education, a shift that gradually moved from the secondary to post-secondary level. Meanwhile, the emerging state universities were often as religious as the denominational colleges with which they were in competition. In the last third of the nineteenth century, American higher education was further diversified by a new kind of private university initiated and financed by wealthy industrialists such as Johns Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and John D. Rockefeller. Newly established state universities shared with these private institutions a “vision of mind as being in the service of society.”8 The influx of new money into American higher education from public and private sources brought significant changes: its center of gravity shifted westward from New England, the number of students attending college...