Their Idea of a University
America's religious colleges are growing in popularity and quality.
BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN
Thursday, January 6, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
It's not news in academia, although it may come as a surprise to the rest of us: America's 700-plus religiously affiliated colleges and universities are enjoying an unprecedented surge of growth and a revival of interest.
New institutions have opened their doors in recent years, including the evangelical Patrick Henry College in Virginia; Ave Maria, a conservative Catholic law school in Michigan; and the Buddhist-run Soka University in California. Long-established schools such as the Mormon flagship, Brigham Young University, have launched satellite campuses.
And enrollments are soaring. As Naomi Schaefer Riley reports in "God on the Quad" (St. Martin's, 274 pages, $24.95), the number of students attending the 100 schools of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities--an organization of four-year liberal-arts schools dedicated to promoting the Christian faith--rose 60% between 1990 and 2002. In those same years the attendance at nonreligious public and private schools stayed essentially flat. The number of applications to the University of Notre Dame, the nation's premier Catholic college, has risen steadily over the past decade, with a 23% jump last year alone.
But numbers don't tell the whole story. Many religious schools, traditionally regarded as second-tier or worse, have improved the quality of their students and of their academic offerings, sometimes dramatically.
The evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois and the Reformed-affiliated Calvin College in Michigan now rank among the nation's leading liberal-arts institutions. Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, Texas, has embarked on an ambitious program to boost itself into the nation's first rank by hiring 220 new full-time faculty members. The percentage of Ave Maria's law graduates who passed the Michigan bar examination last year was higher than that of the University of Michigan's graduates. Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva University is on U.S. News & World Report's list of the nation's top 50 research universities, while Wheaton ranks 11th in percentage of graduates who go on to receive Ph.D.s.
Surely Ms. Riley, a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal's "Houses of Worship" column, has picked an exciting topic, and her book attempts to explore what life is like at religious colleges and why so many young people these days scramble to attend them. To this end, she visited 20 strongly confessional campuses across the country, mostly Protestant, and a group of small, relatively new conservative Catholic campuses, such as Thomas Aquinas in California and Magdalen in New Hampshire. Also on her itinerary were Notre Dame, Soka and two Jewish schools. She devoted most of her interviews to the students themselves, although she also visited classrooms, where professors, unlike most of their secular-school counterparts, actually encourage the discussion of religious matters.
Ms. Riley's aim, as she explains, was to focus primarily not on how the schools maintain their religious identity, if they do, but on how they foster a student culture that rejects the intellectual and moral relativism of most college campuses. The students at these schools, instead of experimenting with sex and drugs, generally oppose sex outside marriage and choose to marry early and start a family.
"Most dress modestly and don't drink, use drugs, or smoke," writes Ms. Riley. "They study hard, leaving little time for sitting in or walking out. Most vote, and a good number join the army. They are also becoming lawyers, doctors, politicians, college professors, businessmen, psychologists, accountants, and philanthropists in the cultural and political centers of the country." Ms. Riley calls the 1.3 million graduates of such schools a "missionary generation" that aims to change today's spiritually empty culture.
The colleges themselves have widely varying strategies for producing such a result. Baylor offers sports teams, fraternities and sororities, and many of the majors that one would find on a secular campus. Several of the small Catholic colleges, by contrast, have strict dress codes and a required liberal-arts curriculum. Nearly all the schools forbid or discourage premarital sex, but at Thomas Aquinas public displays of affection are also off-limits. At Brigham Young, amorous couples at least hold hands (most claim not to go much further). Magdalen College bans not only televisions in students' rooms but also dating, hanging pictures on dorm-room walls, and sitting with one's friends during meals.
In her book's most interesting chapter, Ms. Riley examines the high level of tension at Yeshiva, whose ultra-Orthodox faculty members and rabbinical students resent the school's required secular courses and sometimes aggressively secular professors. She is less successful in her look at Notre Dame, where similar tensions exist but in diffused form: Many professors, hired for their scholarly excellence, and students, admitted for their academic potential, either have no interest in their university's religious identity or actively disdain it.
Ms. Riley suggests that the "missionary generation" of religious-college graduates is changing America. To be sure, their moral seriousness and their alma maters' new intellectual rigor benefit society, and it is true that Brigham Young graduate Mitt Romney is governor of Massachusetts and that Wheaton graduate Dennis Hastert is speaker of the House. But more evidence is needed for such a broad claim. Ms. Riley has, however, more than proved her case that "the widely held notion that the members of strongly religious communities in America are somehow intellectually backward is a myth."
|