The Future of the Christian University

Thesis 

My goal here is to argue that, as we look to the next two to three decades of American conservatism, the category of the Christian college or university offers us a significant decisive point in the cultural battle.

Decisive Point Defined

In order to make this argument, let me first begin with a definition of what I mean by the term decisive point. It is a military concept that can be identified by the intersection of what is strategic and what is feasible. An action is strategic when it produces large results. For instance, what if your organization’s goal were to become the most popular cellular provider for New York City (population 8 million) versus the same goal for Boville, Idaho, (a lovely logging community, not far from where I live, with a booming population of 202). As lovely as Boville might be, New York City would be a far more strategic target than Boville, Idaho, because of its massive size. That is what it means to be strategic. But an action is feasible when it is realistically possible. So, between New York City and Boville, Idaho, the Big Apple might be far more strategic, but Boville far more feasible, because capturing the market in Boville would be so much easier. 

Such is normally the case. The most strategic actions are also usually the least feasible and vice versa. A good tactician searches endlessly for  possibilities that offer the greatest potential intersection between what is strategic and what is feasible. The rare moment when a possible action is both strategic and feasible—a point as easy to take as Boville and as impactful as New York— is the decisive point. It’s the time to push all the chips to the center of the table and declare, “I’m all in.”

Now, having given my definition of a decisive point, allow me to repeat my opening thesis. As we look to the future of American conservatism, the category of Christian colleges and universities offers to us a significant decisive point in the cultural battle; a target that is both strategic and feasible. In the fight to recover and reestablish a substantive conservative presence in America, the private Christian college offers a focal point for our energy that ought to be preferred before other options— in essence, the decisive point.

Feasible 

Christian colleges, by virtue of their explicit faith commitment, are established on a statement of religious faith, which allows them to give the clearest articulation of the true foundation of America’s conservatism— the Christian faith. While conservative secular colleges can only argue for a tolerant libertarianism and gesture vaguely towards a transcendent power, Christian colleges can point unashamedly to the triune God of the Bible, who is the Creator of the universe and the one who gave us transcendent, objective standards. Such standards do not give a rip about who feels triggered by them. This foundational clarity allows Christian colleges to provide the most complete and coherent articulation of the conservative vision. 

Second, by virtue of being private colleges, rather than state universities, the governance structure is far more straightforward, and therefore offers a much more direct path to total institutional control than any other form of higher education. When considering the governance structure of larger, secular institutions,  it becomes apparent that, due to all of the different layers of governmental oversight (the governor, the state legislature, the state department of education, the federal department of education apparatus, and the individual college’s board, president, and deep state within each particular university’s own administration), these institutions are the inhabitants of an elusive bureaucratic swamp. To isolate the actual levers of power in order to enact real change in such a complicated system proves either impossible or produces such a meagre yield that, as they say, the juice is not worth the squeeze.

I remember attending a lecture on the Holy Roman Empire at the University of Oxford. The professor explained that part of the Holy Roman Empire’s brilliance was the complicated nature of its power structure. Due to the layers of intricacy, no one could locate the actual source of power. He argued that this complex structure made the empire difficult to topple. When the power coordinates remain unclear, the power source is secure. Such is quite literally the case with most of our institutions of higher education—the power inherent in them is diffused throughout an impossible-to-diagram bureaucratic structure. Thus, we need to identify and focus on institutions of higher ed whose power structures can be identified and completely owned. 

I think that conservatives are far too naïve on this point. We celebrate when we hear of the mere appointment of a prominent conservative lecturer or the creation of a conservative honors program at this or that secular university. But we do not understand the malignant academic deep state, lurking in the shadows, waiting to undermine and subvert any conservative presence. Within three to five years, these conservative projects are regularly, completely subverted. However, the governance structures of smaller, private colleges offer potential paths to total institutional control, which, while still admittedly difficult to achieve, remain more clear and more possible to capture and  defend than most other educational institutional structures. 

The levers of power are much more readily identifiable and easily isolated in smaller private Christian colleges. Institutional control can be achieved with a board and a president who are united around a clear, common mission and committed to aggressive action to achieve that mission. That is where the true decision-making power actually resides, assuming that they have the courage and conviction to use it. There are always other contenders for institutional control, but they compete with the board and the president only to the extent that the board and president capitulate and abdicate their authority. 

The bar must be set high when it comes to determining what constitutes a unified governance. And this is where a Christian college with a robust statement of faith offers a clear, objective standard for establishing deep alignment. This strategic unity of vision between the board and the president is by no means an easy thing to achieve. But it is relatively feasible. I would add that establishing paths of aligned funding is fairly critical as well, though still secondary to that first objective of unity of governance.

Strategic

So, say that what I am suggesting actually proved to be feasible. Say, we either built or captured one to two dozen first-rate Christian colleges. That is all well and good, but the one quality that most feasible targets share is that they are unstrategic, that is, they lack larger cultural relevance. With these hypothetical Christian colleges, we are likely talking about 20,000-30,000 college students out of a total of just under twenty million students nationwide. Have we merely captured the University of Boville, twenty times over? And, if so, what good does that do us? In order to qualify as a decisive point, the Christian college must be the rare target that combines feasibility with strategy. How could these Christian colleges be strategic?

First, I would argue that as we return to a merit-based economy, a private Christian college which is unshackled to DEI or other toxic institutional ideologies and committed to the idea of a transcendent objective standard of truth, can become academically competitive more swiftly than most other institutions. While the Ivies have begun making signals of repentance in order to have their federal funding restored, it would be incredibly naïve to think that the intellectual formation that they offer their students has or will change in any substantive way in the very near future. But I know from my current experience at New Saint Andrews College that a robust Christian liberal arts education creates a finished product that may have at one time been ordinary, but that in our present age is consistently extraordinary. And to the extent that we can find a level playing field, we want to compete.

On the one hand, 20,000-30,000 students is a drop in the bucket. On the other hand, consider for a moment the impact to the conservative cause a consistent drip of graduates from colleges like what I am proposing could have. A steady stream of tens of thousands of graduates who have a basic mastery of the intellectual skills inculcated by the liberal arts, along with a faithful moral formation, a commitment to building Christendom, and a track record for showing up to work sober with no plans to either embezzle or file a lawsuit against the boss. It is a sad fact that this description sounds like a fantasy to most employers. They would give anything to have this sort of personnel pipeline. It is a description of the America once was and could be again, if we build it. 

I concede that this would still be a small percentage of the nation’s college students. But the point is not to try to take over a majority of American colleges. The point is simply to establish a dominant model that will drive emulation. Take the story of classical Christian education as a good example of this kind of force. Classical Christian education took off in the early 1990s with the publishing of the book Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, by Douglas Wilson, and with the formation of the Association of Classical Christian Schools. From the 1990s through the first decade of 2000, these schools began popping up all over America and gained notoriety as the premier Christian educational option. 

But around the year 2010, something very interesting started to happen. The term classical became a brand that everyone to want to copy. American colleges all over started all trying to claim to be the true centers of classical education. They created honors programs to recruit graduates of classical schools. K-12 charter schools began launching across the US, all claiming the “classical” brand. 

Basically, one small cluster of schools, the original classical Christian school movement, by demonstrating a new standard of excellence, established a nationwide movement that is still reshaping our K-12 schools. A dominant model drove emulation across the market. And I am arguing that a small number of Christian colleges could do the same for America. A handful of Christian colleges, executing their mission with excellence, would stand out so drastically against the current backdrop of American higher education that they would very quickly become a competitive force that must either be bested or copied. And either way, conservative American higher education would catapult forward. 

In order for my proposal to come to fruition, evangelical Christians would need to lose their allergic reaction to institution-building and institutional leadership. For several reasons that are beyond the scope of this talk, American evangelicalism has viewed institutions with great suspicion and has virtually assumed that the future of every Christian institution is apostasy. Because of this mindset, the strategy that I am proposing will be inimical to the evangelical world unless they are able to reject this self-fulfilling prophecy that all institutions inevitably spiral down into apostasy.

Conclusion

My argument is not that other strategies could not produce results. There are plenty of one-off situations that don’t fit my description but are nevertheless worthy ventures into conservative higher education. But the decisive-point argument takes a step back, looks at the broad field of higher education, and asks: where could we get the most bang for our buck as we invest time and money into this field? I believe that for establishing a clear, conservative vision in the world of higher education, our Christian colleges offer the fulcrum with the greatest possible leverage for cultural change. 

Learn more about the education New Saint Andrews College can provide.
Visit our Undergraduate page.