A college that blends science and God

Dale Lunsford is the president of LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas. LeTourneau’s founder, R.G. LeTourneau, was an industrialist and inventor. He founded the school as a technical college, whereas the majority of Christian colleges started as liberal-arts or Bible colleges. More than 70 percent of LeTourneau’s students are male, and more than 20 percent are African American. One-in-six of the school’s 3,000 undergraduates were homeschooled. Lunsford and I had this conversation at the National Religious Broadcasters Annual Conference in Nashville, held at the end of February.

LeTourneau was founded by the industrialist R.G. LeTourneau, whose expertise was science and engineering. Has that remained an expertise of the college? It’s in our DNA. We’re a Christian university founded by a Christian businessman. He was born 125 years ago and passed away in the late 1960s. He was an engineering genius. … In coming to Texas, he found an old Army hospital that was being decommissioned at the end of World War II and got the vision of creating a university. LeTourneau Technical Institute was founded, and the university evolved from that.

What is your current mission? Our current mission we describe as “every workplace, every nation.” Again, this goes back to our founder. In Stockton, Calif., in the 1920s, R.G. LeTourneau had started a business, and he was doing very well. His sister had become a missionary to China, and he was conflicted. He was a man of faith, very deep faith. … As the story goes, there was a revival there in Stockton, and the message he got from the pastor there that night was, “You know, Mr. LeTourneau, God needs business people, too, not just foreign missionaries, not just Bible translators.” That gave him the freedom to do what we now call business-as-missions. They didn’t have that term, but he was really one of the first men who understood, “I can use this business as my ministry field, as my mission.” That continues to be what we teach our students, that if you feel a call from God, it doesn’t necessarily end with you having a position on a church payroll somewhere. It might mean you’ve been wired to be an accountant, wired to be an engineer, wired to be a third-grade schoolteacher. We try to encourage the students to see that life’s work as their mission field.

Where are graduates from LeTourneau going? What are they doing? So many of our students are STEM students—science, technology, engineering, and math—and they’re off doing that work in the places you would expect. I was in Seattle recently. We have a lot of alumni working for Boeing, for example. They’ve been involved in the creation of the new Dreamliner and many other projects. They’re working in big manufacturing facilities. They’re also in inner-city schools in Houston, Texas, and doing that kind of work, as well.

What are you doing to train your students not only to be competent technologists, but also to grapple with the moral and ethical issues that might come up as a result of their scientific work? Faith and science have to coexist. We’ve made a bad choice in our society to separate those two and to choose one or the other or to pit one against the other. It doesn’t work. Scientific decisions have to be made from a faith perspective. There’s always a moral or a value piece of any scientific advance, any scientific choice that we make. You have to begin in higher education with bringing those two back together. It can be messy; it can be ambiguous. People of faith can have different opinions and different perspectives and, yes, those perspectives change and they mature as we know more about science, as the Holy Spirit reveals more about our faith.

Your college is a member of the Coalition of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). That means that you are intentional about your Christian distinctives. How do you integrate those distinctives into the education process? I notice as I travel and talk to various audiences, to describe yourself as a Christian university really is not helpful much at all now. It doesn’t mean much. It can relate to heritage. It can relate to contemporary structure or none of that, quite frankly. It could be a marketing campaign. I think you really need to identify it. Even within the CCCU, we’re a group of schools that share this common passion and intentionality, but we are very different in the way we approach things.

At LeTourneau, it begins with hiring. All of our faculty and staff are Jesus-followers. We’re non-denominational, so we don’t have a denominational shortcut in hiring. We have a statement of faith, and we look for an agreement with that and for an evidence of a growing believer, not somebody that has all the answers but someone that is seeking. It begins with that. It continues with a chapel program for our students. All of our students go to chapel; they go three times a week.

We make their spiritual growth as important as their intellectual growth. It’s not choosing one or the other; it’s absolutely both. Then it continues with a commitment to Bible education. All of our students, whether you’re majoring in civil engineering or biomedical engineering or you’re a theology major, you take at least 12 credits of Bible study while you’re at the university. Those are the ways in which we operationalize what it means to be a Christ-centered university.

Since you raise that issue of diversity, let me drill down into that a little bit. First of all, you’re in Texas; you’re in the South. You’re an evangelical university. That means that if you didn’t really work at it, you would be overwhelmingly white. You’re science and technology-oriented and focused, which means you’re probably drawing a larger male population. What specific steps are you taking to address that? I think something that’s really important in Texas and elsewhere in the country is opening the university to this pipeline of transfer students. When I went to college so many years ago, I never considered a community college. I was going to go to a university or I wasn’t going to go at all. That’s not our society now. The two-year community college route is an acceptable route, not just for students of last resort but for exceptional students. Often, it makes sense because they’re uncertain about what they’re going to do. Sometimes the community college route makes sense for economic reasons because it’s just a more cost-effective way of getting those first two years of college. Historically, I’d say Christian universities have not been open to junior college transfers.

Now when you do that, you bring in a more diverse group of students. For example, in Texas, the growing demographic is Hispanic students. That is the future of Texas and much of our country, quite frankly. You open smoother pathways for junior college students to come in and finish their program at a Christian university.

One of the things that we’re seeing a lot in our culture is the increasing encroachment of the federal government into colleges and universities. A few colleges such as Grove City College, Patrick Henry College, and Hillsdale College have completely opted out of receiving any federal funding so they don’t have to be engaged in these controversies. Where does LeTourneau fall on that continuum? The conclusion I’ve reached is, you really can’t opt out. That day has come and gone. There are perhaps different levels of entanglement or engagement, if you will, but you can’t opt out. I’ll give you an example that just recently crossed my desk. All universities and not-for-profits have to file a form now called the 990. The federal government requires it; the IRS requires it. It looks suspiciously like a tax form even for not-for-profit corporations. The 990 for LeTourneau University is 270 pages. It’s a massive document. We have to file it every year. It takes a staff of people to get that done. You can’t opt out of that. That’s law. It’s required to operate whether you receive federal funds or not or your students receive federal loans or so forth. That’s just one example.

I have the opportunity to serve on a board of a community bank and have done board work for hospitals, and I’ve noticed in those institutions, too, the same thing. There is a growing federal reach into all aspects of our lives. It is what it is. The politics are one thing. I don’t live in that world. I live on the receiving end of it, the regulation side of it. It’s very complex to run a university today. There are lots of constituents, and the federal government is a very important one, even for Christian institutions.

If you’re going to operate in our society, you’re going to have to live in that world. You just don’t get to opt out. We gear up. I have to explain to faculty all the time, we don’t understand why we need such a big accounting staff and why we have to have an attorney on retainer and why there has to be a vice president for this or a director for that. These regulatory requirements, they’re necessary in order to reach these students and do the good work we do in the classroom.

Do they drive up the cost of education? There’s no question they drive up the cost. There’s absolutely no question. I wish I could quantify that, and I think some people in my industry have begun to try to quantify that. It might be very informative if we could do that. It absolutely drives up the cost. It adds to the overhead that we all try to minimize. Again, if I could unlock the secret to opt out of that, I would, but I’ve reached the conclusion it’s just not possible.

Regarding colleges that opt out, your conclusion is that it sounds good, but they are really entangled, as well. They have to file the same 990s. The Sarbanes-Oxley accounting rules apply to them and the audits that they have to have and the accountants that they have to hire to do that. These are laws. They do have to meet those, in my understanding. There’s no question they’ve made some decisions to avoid entanglements in some other ways, and perhaps that does in some small way make their life a little bit easier, but I think most of this you just can’t avoid.

I’m assuming your students get Pell Grants and they have government-backed student loans. Do you worry that the government might place some ideological standards on those and you as a college will be so dependent upon that money you would face an existential question as to whether you stay in that system? There’s no question that the federal government’s role has gotten much bigger in that, and there’s potential there for all kinds of bad things to happen. I don’t worry about it. I think it’s a resource that should be available to our students. They’re taxpayers, too. Their parents are taxpayers, too, so they should benefit from this program, and they do. They do take advantage of it. It is something that we’re going to continue to watch and we’re going to continue to have to make our case for why the federal government should give us room to do what we do, to respect faith-based institutions even with their loan programs. The good news is, so far, they have respected that.

What is your faith, your personal faith tradition? I grew up in the Southern Baptist church. I find myself now on the road a lot and visiting lots of churches. LeTourneau is non-denominational, so … our students are in lots of different churches. I actually enjoy being in so many different faith settings every year.

At the end of your tenure here, what do you want people to have said about your time as president? That I kept the main thing the main thing. That the university did respond to our changing society, that we did align ourselves with a new world, new opportunities, but we didn’t lose our Christ-centered focus.

Listen to Warren Smith’s full interview with Dale Lunsford on Listening In.