The Middle Way is the High Road in Higher Education

At first, I planned to skip this topic, since my knowledge of Evangelical educational institutions is so distant and so slight. Wouldn’t readers be annoyed at me for having the gall to write anything? But the contrast between two sources of data I happen to have began to look so huge and so intriguing that I decided to check in after all.

While I was a visiting scholar at Yale Divinity School, Kevin Roose, then still a Brown undergraduate, came to speak about his new book. He had come up with the idea of enrolling at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University for a semester, as a sort of one-way cultural exchange, and The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University (Grand Central, 2009) records his adventures there.

Since the purpose of this Web site is respectful conversations, I feel I have to stipulate, as a sort of warning, that the first pages of the book don’t give much hope at all for Roose’s sincere engagement with Evangelical culture. He seems to have chosen Liberty on the strength of an impression, drawn from the popular media, that the Evangelical movement, by its nature, is bound up with secular right-wing politics—and this particular school, alas, was not going to disabuse him. For example, Liberty (after Roose’s sojourn) disowned its tiny chapter of the Young Democrats, and Roose decried that choice publicly. 

Furthermore, by taking Liberty’s whole prescribed religious curriculum at one swallow, instead of over four years in tandem with many ordinary courses, Roose got a skewed view of Evangelical intellectual life even at a school like Liberty, and moved less far than he would have otherwise from his initial judgment that, well, all these people are just ridiculous:

If I went to Liberty, it would be to learn with an open mind, not to mock Liberty students or the evangelical world in toto. For starters, that task is far too easy to be interesting. The satirist P. J. O’Rourke once compared making fun of born-again Christians to “hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle and scope.” That was a few years ago, before names like Ted Haggard and movies like Jesus Camp came on the scene. Now, it’s more like hunting the ground with your foot. 

The qualifications to the yokel stereotype that Roose did find himself obliged to make, even at Liberty, don’t all come out in the book, which (for instance) plays up classroom Creationist indoctrination. When I asked Roose at Yale how Liberty squared this with the demands of, say, medical school, to which many of the students must aspire, he replied that there was a full range of standard biology courses taught without interference. That’s in fact the case.

Now here’s a funny thing, in the face of Roose’s (at best) condescending evaluation. The following year, my third at Yale Divinity School, I knew a recent Liberty alumnus, who was finishing a YDS degree and about to go to Heidelberg to continue his studies in theology. I knew him because he was working for me part-time, keyboarding my oral translation of Latin from Apuleius and Caesar. I needed help catching up on these two book projects because, though I can read Latin well, I can’t type worth a hoot and was spending minutes entering into my computer a sentence that took only a few seconds to make sense in my head.

High-speed typing from dictation is a tough resource to find these days, and when you’d also like your typist to be able to comment on linguistic nuances when you get stuck, you can almost forget about finding help for less than $200 an hour. I did hire an undergraduate Latin major who could type about 60 words per minute, but I couldn’t count on him to show up on time; nor could I entice him to take any interest in the original texts.

Samuel the YDS student’s Latin and typing were both excellent, and he didn’t make any of those subtractions of attention and respect I had grown used to as a Classics teacher in the Ivy Leagues. This is Latin—I’m never going to use it, but the class is a convenient way to ditch my language requirement; I had three years of Latin in high school, so I’ll be able to pass a couple of Latin courses here without studying, meanwhile putting my energy into econ or organic chem or something else that matters. That teacher’s a dowdy woman, and nobody’s ever heard of her. She’s got no connections to offer me, even in her own field, which of course is nowhere. Worse, she’s demanding that I memorize paradigm after paradigm, week after week—does she have any idea how much my social life and sports take out of me? She’s asking me to give up time and trouble and sleep, just on her say-so?

Samuel, in contrast, reminded me of my all-time best student, Bryce, the graduate of an Evangelical high school who converted to Catholicism and went to study theology at Notre Dame after his Yale B.A. Critically, they could both deal with authority—which doesn’t mean that they believed or did whatever they were told; they were in fact less deferent than other students, not at all inclined to duck their heads and stare tactfully at a page when I made a mistake or said something flakey. They visibly didn’t like literary digressions, a weakness of mine. But nothing could have persuaded them that a scholar wasn’t a useful person who deserved thoughtful interaction.

I surmise that their upbringing had instilled—and their formal education confirmed—in them a good middle way in dealing with intellectual life. On the one hand, tradition and civilization are the means through which religion comes to us, and so deserve our regard. On the other hand, neither of these is God; neither partakes of the Ultimate except in a very limited way. Either of them (let alone whatever is going on outside them) is a fair target for criticism as long as this criticism itself is knowledgeable and synthetic—drawing on recognized logic or ethics, for example.

I think my own undergraduate experience, based in the University of Michigan’s East Quad with its radical residential college, is pretty sad in comparison. Let’s leave aside (I’m begging you, let’s not discuss it) the party scene that our fashionable intellectualism licensed, all the stuff we were allowed or actually encouraged to do to ourselves and each other. My main complaint is that we didn’t get, from that place, any core education, anything we could keep and adapt. A cause was important because “so-and-so’s here to talk about it, and there’s a film!” The slogan “Question authority” meant, “Question the authority that’s scheduled to be questioned tonight, and question it on cue according to the prescribed jargon.”

This is why I suspect that even the person who leaves an evangelical institution in disgust at its prescriptions, his faith shattered, takes away a better all-around education than I took from Michigan.