Post-mortem for a Christian college

Another Christian college has closed. This one was my alma mater—Eastern Nazarene College. Whether or not it was still Christian at the end is debatable, but when I was a student there 40 years ago and when I taught there on an adjunct basis about 20 years ago, it certainly was. I owe that school a great deal. Even so, I received the news of its closure with more sadness than I had expected to feel.

The college in Quincy, Mass., had trouble keeping its doors open recently, so when the announcement was posted on the school website a number of us who had watched its decline said, “At last.” At the end, the place was unrecognizable to many classmates of mine. The announcement from the trustees listed the standard boilerplate: a shrinking pool of prospective students, rising costs, debt, COVID-19, you know how it goes. True enough, those things threaten the survival of small colleges across America. But in the case of Eastern Nazarene College, anyone with a little inside knowledge knows there’s more to the story.

I’m currently on the board of a Christian college that is growing rapidly. I’ve also served on the board of The Academy of Philosophy and Letters. This gives me a little insight into things that are hurting Christian colleges across the country.

While it is a challenging time for small Christian schools, the ones that are growing are doing so because people are making costly sacrifices to help them succeed. And they’re willing to make those sacrifices because they believe in those schools.

The problem with ENC is that it lost the support of its constituency—the people who could have made the needed sacrifices to keep the school afloat. The constituency I’m thinking of is its alumni and especially the churches that supported it for 100 years. Take as an example a couple of alumni I know pretty well—otherwise known as my wife and I. We met at the school in 1982, graduated in 1985, and were married shortly after that. Her parents went to the school, too. And her grandfather was the chairman of the religion department—twice. Yet, when it was time for our children to go to college, ENC didn’t make the cut. And even if our children had expressed interest in going there, we would have discouraged them. The reason is straightforward. We believed sending them there might undermine their faith in many truths we taught them to believe at home.

That’s a painful thing to say. But we were not alone. Conversations with old classmates confirmed that.

The things we noticed going on at the school are probably familiar to you. You might even say, “Yep, my alma matter, too.” Today, we call it “wokeism,” but it’s had other names over the years. It began somewhat innocuously, with addressing the educational needs of underserved minorities. But predictably, the number of minorities grew, until finally something called “sexual minorities” became a thing. And all these minorities needed “allies” if they were going to succeed. And guess who was blamed for keeping them from succeeding in the past? Unsurprisingly, the people who make up the constituency of the school. Terms like “structural racism,” then “the patriarchy,” and finally “heteronormativity” displaced older words such as “holiness,” “purity,” and even “truth.”

Perhaps it can be boiled down to this: Many academics care more about their standing with secular colleagues and professional associations than they do about the people they sit next to in the pews. This is assuming they actually worship and have fellowship with people outside the bohemian bubbles that often surround campuses. There is a progressive standard of righteousness and a secular eschatology that many of them subscribe to that is increasingly difficult to harmonize with Biblical sexual ethics or even commonsense notions of right and wrong.

The crisis is even larger than what we see in Christian colleges. The progressive agenda is undermining educational standards everywhere. The university may be the premier institution of Western civilization, but since the legitimacy of our civilization is in question with progressives, even that institution is in crisis.

Of course, the calls for justice and equity are often incoherent and even self-refuting, but things are so bad this doesn’t seem to matter, even at places like Harvard. My prayer is that the antibodies that have saved us from sophistry and relativism in the past will save us again. And one would hope that Christian colleges, the institutions that traditionally defended the transcendental source of those standards and cultivated those antibodies, would be the healthiest colleges of all. Sadly, if the demise of Eastern Nazarene College is an indication, it isn’t necessarily so.