Hope for higher ed

The future of higher education looks bleak.

According to a Gallup survey, 32% of Americans have little or no confidence in higher education—that number was only 10% in 2015. We’ve seen a decade-long decline in undergraduate enrollment across the country while costs regularly outstrip inflation.

In such a context, a book about hope in higher education feels particularly audacious. The editors of Habits of Hope (IVP Academic, 160 pp.), however, suggest that Christian hope in “the world to come” can address many of higher education’s challenges and can set Christian colleges and universities apart from secular institutions. The chapters present hope as an essential anchor “that can give light and life to the classroom, the laboratory, and the institutional mission.” Numerous Christian professors and administrators contribute. Some chapters are more practical, while others, like Hans Boersma’s study of Maximus the Confessor’s pedagogy, are more academic.

Habits of Hope

The book suggests a vision of hope is essential to the Christian classroom. As Kevin Grove argues, education is a primary “mode of inducting others into the life of hope, a movement of darkness to light.” The hope-filled education goes beyond “content coverage” and knowledge transmission, transforming students and inspiring them to live their created desire to understand reality.

Habits of Hope tackles how this kind of education can be realized, from the integration of faith and learning to reading, conversation, and writing. The authors avoid being too abstract. They situate their chapters alongside real-world challenges, like the toxic environment of social media, the rising rates of anxiety, and the dehumanizing influence of artificial intelligence. David Smith’s chapter on teaching as a hopeful practice is particularly salient in this regard. Smith says that hopeful education must go beyond lectures, assignments, and exams. Hopeful teaching must model virtues like “hospitality, humility, learning together, self-reflection, gratitude, silence, and rest.”

It’s too bad Habits of Hope has little, if anything, to say about what happens outside the classroom or laboratory. Contributor and Wheaton College President Phil Ryken points out that hopeful education must be “intentional about the mind of Christ informing every aspect of Christian higher education,” but something seems to be missing from this ­otherwise valuable book.

There’s no discussion of how hope-filled Christian colleges should be governed and managed differently than secular ones. How should enrollment goals be set? How should violence on campus be dealt with? How should tuition rates be determined? How should an institution address student debt? How much money should be spent on athletics? How should the institution’s facilities be used to benefit (rather than profit from) the community? How should pay be determined for adjunct instructors, full-time faculty, and administrators?

The book should have addressed these difficult questions that explore the darker corners of higher education: things like rising student debt, administrative bloat, dwindling budgets for instruction, and fraudulent practices at some of the largest institutions.

The reality is, with some exceptions, Christian colleges and universities for the most part adopt the models and methods of secular institutions when it comes to management and administration, deferring to industry standards. An institution that aspires to be led by the mind of Christ should approach these questions differently than one that is not, and it should arrive at different answers to these difficult questions.

Habits of Hope’s exhortation to a more hopeful pedagogy and curriculum is welcome and needed. But if Christian colleges and universities want to shine through the bleakness of higher education, the dark corners must be addressed and entire institutions must be recast in the mind of Christ.

—David J. Davis is a professor of history at Houston Christian University