Picking up on my own comment to yesterday’s “Agenda of some professor’s” post. . . .
Let us set aside the way some university professors deliberately and maliciously try to destroy their students’ faith, at a time when those students are eager to have their faith destroyed so that they can participate in the rank debauchery that characterizes most university campuses.
What kind of EDUCATION can students get where their professors teach them that Western civilization is worthless, that reason is invalid, that knowledge is unnecessary, that students can construct their own reality, and that there is no such thing as truth?
I guarantee that the level of discourse, the intellectual sophistication, and the mental development students receive at my Patrick Henry College–with its great books, courses in logic and rhetoric, and substantive programs–is far better than that students will receive at the postmodernist universities.
Yes, students who study engineering or some of the other technical fields can learn them at the big elite universities. And it is possible for grounded, self-disciplined, eager-to-learn students to pick good courses and professors from the vast smorgasbord or to educate themselves in the academic atmosphere. And other students may not learn anything, but they can learn how to do things, which may be all that is required in many professions today. But it is possible for students in some programs to come out worse educated than they came in, with the knowledge they came in with destroyed.
Doesn’t it concern parents, alumni, and taxpayers that it is the universities, ironically, that have become the centers of anti-intellectualism, opposition to knowledge, and narcissistic ignorance?
What is the educational value of institutions like that?
I suspect that most parents, not to mention their children, care nothing about the content or quality of the education they are receiving. Elite universities carry prestige, and that is all they care about. Ordinary universities can give tickets to a job, so that is all that matters. Many parents and students do not care about anything else, including the harm these places can do to young people’s faith and morals.
I think we need Christian institutions of higher education not just to protect young people but to keep learning alive. The church and specifically the monasteries kept learning alive through the barbarian vandalism of the Dark Ages, and I fear that we are back in that state. We need Christian universities, not to just colleges, to teach also the engineers, scientists, and technical fields, since those too, I think, are in danger in our relativistic intellectual climate. That’s why I wish the best for Baylor and other such ventures. But, in the meantime, support alternatives such as Patrick Henry College.
OK, maybe I am overstating the case. But don’t I have a point?
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I relate this to the point of the previous post. Not everybody needs to go to college, most especially in our day, when colleges are primarily brainwashing and risk-taking centers. It’s an honorable thing to be a skilled craftsman or an honest tradesman, and you don’t have to learn to deconstruct literature to become those things.
“What kind of EDUCATION can students get where their professors teach them that Western civilization is worthless, that reason is invalid, that knowledge is unnecessary, that students can construct their own reality, and that there is no such thing as truth?”
I can guarantee parents with children in engineering schools that their children will not graduate from any university with these beliefs. Even if they encounter a prof or two in their liberal arts classes who teach this, it is so clearly at odds with everything they learn in their major that it is unlikely to be taken seriously.
My thesis is that an engineering education is inherently, even if not explicitly, supportive of the Christian (and particularly Lutheran) world-view. If I had an opportunity to pursue another PhD, I’d love to develop that thesis beyond my incompletely formed views on this point. However, I believe that an engineering education achieves many of the same goals of the Christian liberal arts education often described on this blog (I’m a long time lurker, so I’m familiar with the tone of discussions here).
Even though I see nothing inherently wrong with pursuing a major because of the job prospects it provides upon graduation, I consistently bristle at suggestions from many corners inside and outside academia that engineering schools are glorified vo-tech programs that churn out mile-deep but inch wide technicians uninterested in and ignorant of anything outside their labs. Those who believe that don’t understand the educational process in engineering nor its goals.
Actually, engineers are getting sucked into the relativistic morass more often these days, and I’m seeing the evidence from formerly coherent writers in my technical journals. People who formerly used the classical arts of presenting evidence logically are delving more and more into “establishing truth via politics,” sad to say.
The more I see, the more I realize I need to get that classical education for myself, in order to pass it on to my kids, to establish clear thinking.
After going to Patrick Henry and then coming home away from everybody else who went to Patrick Henry, I found out how much I actually learned from Patrick Henry. I always thought I was on some level plane of learning, thinking about things the way everybody else thought about them, but then I learned that I was on a mesa of learning, about the same as everybody around me, but far above the desert wasteland below.
This was typified by a conversation I had with an old friend who had just taken a History of the Church course. He said it was good to take it from an unbiased perspective, since the proffessor wasn’t a Christian. So I assumed that it was more of a Historical type of approach to Church History instead of Theological, so I asked him about some of the major events in the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. But they never talked about the Schism between the Italian and French popes, or some other Historical church milestones. So it seemed this wasn’t a historically based class. And that’s when I wondered, “How was this an objective class? What does he know about the Church?” If you don’t know Church Theology, you don’t know Church History. You won’t know the reason for any schism, the motivation for any movement, or the foundation of the institution you are studying. And another thing, what does “objective” mean? Does it mean “the truth” or does it mean “from somebody else’s perspective”? I happen to think your perspective is bunk. Where does that leave us? Relativism, that’s where it leaves us.
You’re right, it is possible for some people to get a good education by sticking to the right classes, and not straying from their beliefs. I’d call that my highschool education, where at my public high school, I actually had quality teachers who not only gave me the mechanics of the class (The boring grammar in English, the names and dates in History) but also gave the stuff behind it all (The themes of literature, the lessons and moral unequivalence of History). Strange, I know, but it happened.
This brigns me to my final point, which is that a “bad” education or an anti-education can be countered by a firm indoctrination of truth from the Church. But as we’ve already mentioned in this blog, Doctrine is fading, and feeling based factors are growing in importance. On the battlefield of logic, Christianity does amazingly well. On the battlefield of relativism and emotion, not so good. Where is the Church in this war?
Dr. Veith, you are not overstating your point. In earlier posts some seemed to suggest that providing a protective environment, especially past high school, might be adverse to engaging culture (i.e., evangelism). It was also suggested that well-grounded, logical Christians would do well in secular institutions where they could be the salt of the earth . Perhaps. However, the Christian directive — to both the individual and Church at large — to proclaim AND preserve the Gospel in its truth applies throughout one’s life and no Christian, no matter how well trained and intelligent he may be, is beyond temptation. Universities and colleges, Christian or not, are places of ideas; some good, some neutral, and some from the evil one. At the confessional Lutheran college where I taught many of the students transferred after the first two years to the local state university. Many of them struggled because of the ideas (usually post modern relativism and Darwinism) that were taught to them. Some abandoned true Christianity. You can’t get enough of a good thing. Ideas are like leaven.
After spending the last few years at one of these liberal public universities, I think that some of the points here are overemphasized while many of the dangers aren’t mentioned.
In-class-room dangers are legitimately secular. In psychology you hear that actions and actions that result from disorders result from chemical balances or imbalances in the brain and not sin. So what? I assume the same thing would be taught at a Christian university (although it would be understood that the two aren’t mutually exclusive). A discipline like psychology - and this would hold true for all the sciences - has never been about having God explain the world to us. It is about what the best efforts of humanity are able to teach us about the world.
I never thought that any of my teachers were ready to go off on a tangent and exclaim that secularization was the only reasonable state of mind and religion was a curse on the world. My biology professor - a brilliant guy - started off his developmental biology class with a few quotes. One of these was King David’s exclamation that “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Of course using scripture like this does not mean that this professor was necessarily a Christian. However, I am quite certain that it was not one of his goals in life to brainwash students into a secular way of thinking.
The dangers that haven’t been sufficiently stated are those that take place away from the classroom. While the university I went to is in a state that overwhelmingly condemned the same sex marriage vote, the county the university is in was the lone county to vote for the implementation of same sex marriage - and it did so in pretty lopsided numbers.
Many of the same students that are so liberal in deciding who has the right to be married, are also angry against the concept of organized religion. In philosophy class - after discussing the relative merits and problems of Descartes’ view - a student made that statement “I hate organized religion.” The simple fact that the student didn’t feel stupid making such an emotionally based non-logical statement in class did indicate that most students in the class were somewhat secular. Also, however, I think that the statement was utterly foolish and the Christians who may have wanted to speak out - like myself - realized that the statement was in no way a logical argument and therefore did not need to be refuted. It stood as a dumb statement with or without an argument against it.
My point is that for a student to stay strong in his faith in such a culture prevalent in secular universities, he or she needs to take the initiative. The high school I went to had daily mandatory chapel services. Whether all the students felt it was important or not was a non- issue - all students were going to hear the word of God each and every day. But eventually every person - as they move to adulthood - will have to take this step. They, all by themselves, have to put themselves in the best position to learn and study about God. Whether this takes place in college or afterwards their will be a time when parents can no longer protect their children from seeing and living in a world that is to a large degree secular.
For me, living as a Christian at this university did take effort, but it was an effort I was willing to make. I helped teach Sunday school at the local Lutheran church. I spent this past spring break down in Las Vegas passing out flyers for a church’s Easter service - it was successful by the way. This was important for me - others that had went to the same high school could have decided otherwise and harmed their faith. By the time college starts however, parents don’t really have the ability to make these decisions for their children anymore.
My last point is that the one on campus group that was widely visible and did make a huge effort at outreach was The Campus Crusade for Christ group. I was quite impressed with their willingness to canvas whenever and wherever on the campus. Even as a lifelong Lutheran their message was enticing. They offered excitement, trips to canvas the message of Christ during scenic summer trips, the chance to make close Christian friends and they offered a lot of fun in a Christian atmosphere. While I stayed at the small and “boring” Lutheran church, some of the other lifelong Lutherans I had known from high school that were attending the university were enthralled by the Campus Crusade organization and the friends they made there. Sure the gospel emphasis that they knew from being a Lutheran was not there to the same degree, but they had more fun and they could make some amazing Christian friends. To an extent, I even envied them.
The secularization of American campuses is a difficult problem we are facing in this day in age. A Christian with a weak faith will surely have to deal with all the confused ideals that the university’s culture will throw at him or her. The faith of a Christian whose knowledge of the gospel knowledge is vast and strong may not be phased so much by the contrary message of secular society, but they might latch on to the strongest most vocal form of Christianity they see at such universities. So even if your son or daughter arrives home still a Christian, their knowledge of the gospel message might be in a form that is barely recognizable.
Due to the nature of academic politics, faculty who do not toe the Statist-fascist line will not receive tenure, or will otherwise be forced out. Do not think that your denominational colleges and universities are exempt. They are very good at creating Potemkin villages for visiting parents and boards of trustees. Baylor is lost, and shows that normally a university cannot be saved just by creating a new institute and installing an orthodox president. Faculty are entrenched by reason of tenure. In many cases the only option may be to shut the school down, sell the property, and start over on cheaper land. I’m not exaggerating.
The dangers in our colleges are in a way a great deal more serious, because the faculty teach with the name and authority of the church and “what we believe.”
Need I mention Portland on Darwin? Need I mention other names? The fact is, multiculturalism and diversity are taught as dogma at LCMS schools (I hope not all of them - I have seen professorial eyes rolled at the mention of Mequon), That our future teachers are taught that teens in our schools *will* be having sex, and that we need to teach them how to do so ’safely’. That we must believe as dogma that gender is socially determined.
This then, is what our children are and will be taught in our Lutheran schools. Let alone the children that are sent to the government schools.
And parents still send their children to ELCA colleges, because after all “they are Lutheran, aren’t they?”
I saw the word “indoctrinate” regarding what we should do to our children. May I strongly differ on that. We need to teach them -why- the doctrines are true, not merely insist that they parrot them back to us. If they don’t know *why*, we will have only taught them to accept whatever an authority tells them to believe - and it isn’t going to be Christian in the future!
I wholeheartedly agree with Prof. Veith’s statement that “we need Christian institutions of higher education not just to protect young people but to keep learning alive”. However, Christian colleges have to take this task seriously. Far too many Christian higher ed institutions in this country have lax academic standards, treat “pre-ministry” programs with preference over basic academic subjects, and sink millions of dollars into adult degree-completion programs and the like while their libraries and science labs are using facilities and equipment from 10-20 years ago.
At the Christian college where I formerly taught, I had grades changed from fail to pass by administrators without my knowledge. Academic programming was summarily canceled in my department and the money redistributed to ministry major programs. New niche majors in ministry were started up and stocked with faculty while science and math faculty were stuck with 4 preps a semester and 20-30 students per class. I even had student leaders telling me with a straight face that they didn’t come to college for an education but rather for an “experience”. And I know from personal experience that many other Christian colleges operate this way. Thankfully there are a few CCCU institutions who actually think of themselves as colleges and not church camp or the seminary minor leagues.
Until Christian colleges catch this appropriately high academic vision themselves and start retooling the ways they do business, that vision is still a long way off.
I would like to be clear that I don’t think engineers are unaffected by larger educational trends such as those Dr. Veith has described (actually more the opposite - engineers are and should be engaged with the culture). It’s more that relativism is inherently incompatible with engineering so there is something of a firewall that allows relativism to push only so far into the discipline. And engineering faculty by nature are skeptical of progressive educational trends and strongly believe that core principles of the discipline are unchanging and that students need to learn the same things that engineers have always needed to learn (or at least what they had to learn when they were students).
I would also like to state that Matt’s experiences seem quite similar to mine as an undergrad nearly 30 years ago and comparable to what I perceive among my current students and from what I’ve heard from students attending my church. A strong partnership between the local church and students at the university is essential. I too credit Campus Crusade for having caused me to think more deeply about my faith. But it was at the University Lutheran Chapel in Minneapolis while in grad school where my faith matured.
But there is no substitute for the Holy Spirit in maintaining and nurturing one’s faith, regardless of major or institution.
As someone who attended one of those big name secular institutions, I can say that it is not as bleak as all that. Not a single professor that I had taught that “that Western civilization is worthless, that reason is invalid, that knowledge is unnecessary, that students can construct their own reality, and that there is no such thing as truth?” None of them tried to undermine my faith either.
Where I saw relativism the most was coming from the Deans of the Office of Religious Life. Happily, I found a strongly confessional Lutheran Church within days of coming to campus. While I obviously have nothing against Christian universities or colleges, I think we also need to make sure that students at secular institutions have support nearby. Pastors and parents need to contact the churches near the schools that their high school seniors will be attending.
It’s also a bit insulting to say that students at big name colleges care only about the prestige rather than about the content and quality of the education. That was not my experience at all. One of the best parts of college is that my fellow classmates did not ask if something would be on the final before grudgingly committing something to memory, they were just happy to learn.
Although I disagree with Rorty’s denial of ahistorical universals, I think you’ve misunderstood his meaning in the quote in the previous post. If you continue to read, you’ll see that the quote is using hyperbole. He writes how he as a liberal dominates conservative students, then in the next paragraph advocates “domination-free communication” . He asks how he as a liberal indoctrinator described in the previous paragraph is any better than a Nazi teacher who indoctrinates his students. His point is that liberals and conservatives have persistently different moral intuition. He sees this as insurmountable, and says we should give up on philosophical debate in favor of pragmatism. Of course, pragmatism is itself a philosophical position, but that’s a different question.
I’ve found that we evangelical Christians often respond to persistent debates in the same way — giving up on reasoned debate in favor of a more pragmatic approach. You criticize secular educational institutions for their anti-intellectualism. It’s true that Christians have a better grounding for the reliability of the intellect in discovering transcendent truth. But do you really think Christians are any better at responding to differences of opinion with careful, reasoned debate in order to find truth? Are we any less likely to either give up or resort to ad hominem?
How can anyone with an IQ over 50 not spot the fallacy contained in “There is no truth?”
Steve:
The characteristics of an engineering education that you have brought up were major factors in my choosing to major in engineering in my youth. Unfortunately, I had no aptitude for engineering.
I ended up studying history and then going to law school, which is probably the most relativistic discipline there is.
Robert, the libraries only have books going back 10-20 years? How horrible? They should have -much- older books than -that-!
As to the question of education in a relativistic university, I would say that they get job training (and thought training) but not education.
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