burtchaell

AMERICAN COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES:

HOW THEIR CHURCH RELATIONSHIPS WITHERED AWAY

Burtchaell, James Tunstead, C.S.C. THE DYING OF THE LIGHT: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities From Their Christian Churches. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998. Ursinus College Library: 371.071/B951.

James Tunstead Burtchaell's hefty book (868 pages) documents the withering of relationships between American colleges and universities and the Christian churches to which they owed their origins.

He looks at 17 instances from a spectrum of church groups--Congregationalists (Dartmouth and Beloit); Presbyterians (Lafayette and Davidson); Methodists (Millsaps and Ohio Wesleyan); Baptists (Wake Forest, Virginia Union, Linfield); Lutherans (Gettysburg, St. Olaf, Concordia); Catholics (Boston, New Rochelle, St. Mary's College of California); Evangelicals (Azusa Pacific, Dordt).

Burtchaell gives these detailed case studies in a voice uniformly regretful and often censorious. He wishes colleges and churches had nurtured their relationships otherwise. Instead, he has to report that the relationships, never unqualifiedly strong, even at their start, have withered away at all the institutions studied.

The original weakness, he divines, was that the colleges looked to the churches primarily for students and money. Even at the beginning, few looked to the churches for "truth," especially that which came in the form of sectarian doctrine. As soon as fledgling colleges saw that they could generate students and money on their own, the vital links with churches began to wither. The social revolution of the 1960s emerges as a major moment when lingering church relationships received their final blow.

Burtchaell reports on lingering affirmations of historical relationship at some of the institutions studied. Nowhere, however, can he find a lively critical engagement between an institutionalized religious conviction and academic professional research and teaching.

Interestingly, Burtchaell does not blame the colleges exclusively for "the dying of the light" on their campuses. He also blames the churches--for failing to "raise up a more prophetic and learned criticism of their centrifugal colleges and their leaders." (848)

Burtchaell gives an account of past influences that abetted the parting of colleges from their church founders. Among the most powerful was anti-sectarianism and the corresponding appeal of pietism. Pietism sought to go around the particularities of sectarian doctrine to the one universal religious truth apprehensible to the good of heart. This made it easy to transfer credence to surrogates for religious belief, as Burtchaell sees it: "civilization, rational inquiry, communism, science, fatherland." (833) It also eliminated the chance for an intellectual critique, from a religious perspective, of professionally constructed knowledge.

Burtchaell bitterly ends by knocking the churches for continuing to claim the colleges as theirs. He excoriates both for jointly creating a "degraded rhetoric" (849). It pretends to suggest a continued thread between churches and the academy where none exists.

As a Catholic, Burtchaell is particularly vitriolic when he describes what happened to Catholic colleges since they secularized in the 1960s. Jesuit Boston College, for example, holds "that BC serves a pluralist society, not by being a distinctive institution with its own conviction and commitments, but by being a characterless amalgam of diversity: 'a pluralist society requires institutions which are effectively pluralist in outlook.'" Burtchaell's acerbic comment on this catalog rhetoric is that "BC will thus offer its students, not the beat of a different drummer, but the dissonance of a band without a score." (849)

He blasts the "secular bafflegab" of colleges and churches that makes meaningless reference to "values," "openness," "sensitivity to human dignity," "quest for the meaning of life." (850)

The tension between professionalism and church-derived parochialism gives structure to my essay on Ursinus College 1970-1976. Burtchaell's account usefully provides examples from other colleges with which to compare the Ursinus story. It seems, further, to validate my brief historical accounts of the rise of professionalism and the withdrawal of parochial objectives in appendices to that essay:

Appendix I, The Pillars of Parochial Purpose: Piety, The Collegiate Way, and the Moral Curriculum.

Appendix II, Themes From the History of American Colleges.

Burtchaell is less charitable than I would be toward the withdrawal of vital relationships between colleges and their churches. He yearns to hear an intellectually critical voice from the church that no church--finally, not even the Catholic Church--could raise. (He may be particularly exercised because of the late-breaking story of the Catholic institutions. They did not separate until the 1960s, long after many Protestant colleges effectively ended a meaningful church connection.)

The pious "bafflegab" that he condemns is amusing to read (I've written my share of it). Yet, it is evidence that the traditional concerns of churches, at some deep level, still resonate within the academic world. What is our only comfort? Why are we here? What is good? The "academic culture" reflects a body of beliefs as well as a methodology of rationality when it confronts the issue of human values. That body of beliefs largely came to displace the church beliefs that pervaded campuses at their founding.

Burtchaell would doubtless label them idolatries or ideologies, unworthy of a church perspective. But I think it distorts matters too much to cast the academic culture as an antithesis to a religious culture. Something of the old moral curriculum and the old religious environment lingers in the core curricula of colleges today, free though they are from churches. Faculty members talk about communicating their "passion" for their world of knowledge, which in truth is the world they occupy as human beings, not just as scholars. At the same time, it is certainly true that students at historically related colleges can go easily through an entire four years without being scathed by any consciously religious discourse.

Colleges and churches did not abandon their relationship in bad faith with one another. They were evolving along with Western thought as a whole. The language of moral commitment moved into a secular, professional domain. It diverged from the language of the church. But it is a mistake, in my view, to think of this divergence as a rejection of the concerns of the church.

I confess that I liked Burtchaell's feisty account. I liked his vigorous claim to an intellectually critical dialectic within the church. I enjoyed the spirit of his broadside charge that the secular academy "has only crude and tendentious intimations" of this. (851)

He torments himself and us unduly, however, when he wishes for a return of colleges to their Christian churches and vice versa. There is no going back. The grand concerns of human destiny have to play out without the benefit of the church alliances that so characterized the beginnings of our old colleges and universities. To the extent that they can, let churches and colleges be allies without prescriptive claims on one another.