The Story of NSA: Grit, Grace, and a Dash of Sass

The other morning, I was driving home from downtown, and it seemed that almost every other road in Moscow was shut down for road construction. (This appears to be our city’s way of welcoming all the students back to town since it happens every August like clockwork.) So, I found myself wandering through a few random side streets, picking my way through road closures and actually quite enjoying my winding and circuitous route home in the slanting morning sun. As I was driving up 8th Street and nearing the intersection with Jefferson, I had a sudden realization and turned to drive down that way. This happened to be the very first Monday morning of the New Saint Andrews school year 2024. And it had just hit me that thirty years ago, on the very first Monday morning of the New Saint Andrews school year 1994, my 17-year-old self had walked into my very first college class in a house on Jefferson Street. I pulled over and took a picture of that little gray house for no particular reason other than nostalgia. It looked exactly the same.

That first Monday morning, there had been four of us, myself and three guys, sitting around the dining room table of Dr. Atwood’s house. I attended three lectures around the table that day (Lordship, Rhetoric, and Greek, the first term of which was a Linguistics class), walking the few blocks back to our house in between. By the end of that Monday, I had the assignment of reading three books by Friday, and there were no other classes until then. So, from Tuesday through Thursday, I sat alone on our porch under the apple trees in the hazy, late summer sun, working my way through How to Read a Book by Adler, How to Read Slowly by Sire, and Augustine’s City of God. Needless to say, titles 2 and 3 felt a bit in tension with each other under the circumstances.

Thus began my college career, and thus began New Saint Andrews College. The entire marketing and recruitment for that first class had come down to a one-page ad in Credenda Agenda magazine that ran in April, advertising for a brand-new college that would be commencing in August. A second ad ran in June. If you ever find yourself in the Sword and Shovel bookstore, head into the back room and find those two ads framed on the wall. Give them a glance and marvel at the improbable existence of the institution you’re standing in. I distinctly remember the convocation which had taken place the previous Friday evening. We all sat in one of the Logos School classrooms (then the library, later the kindergarten room), and my dad gave a talk featuring the verse, “Do not despise the day of small beginnings.” And what a prescient word that was. I wonder if he still has that talk in a file on his computer somewhere because it sure would hit differently now.

Everything was scrappy, everything was intense, and there was no fading into the crowd in those days.

After a month or so, we moved out of the Jefferson house and got our very own space, which basically made us all feel much more professional. This space happened to be an apartment over a detached garage out behind a residential house that, for some reason, sits in the middle of Greek Row on the University of Idaho campus. We would park out in the gravel behind the garage, traipse up the stairs, and have all our classes, recitations, disputatios, and finals on the living room side of that one main room, sort of ignoring the kitchenette on the back wall. One day that winter I climbed those stairs into Greek class only to be confronted by someone I didn’t recognize who was shrugging his way out of a leather jacket. I realized this must be the new guy from U of I who was jumping in with us mid-year just for Greek. My first thought was, “Thank goodness he seems normal,” and my second thought was that this explained the quite cool motorcycle parked out behind the garage. And that’s how I met Ben Merkle. He graduated from U of I a year later and left Moscow - so other than translating Titus together, nothing else of interest happened there until my junior year. But that’s another story.

Meanwhile, NSA grew. The second year, there was a bumper crop of freshmen, including three girls, which was quite a welcome update in my life. The college was downright bustling, with a student body now of upwards of a dozen. Disputatios certainly lived up to the name in those days. The whole faculty and student body sat in a circle of folding chairs while one person stood and presented a paper, followed by a general shout-up. One guy in particular was prone to throwing himself on his knees in the circle, arms outstretched, passionately shouting about anything really. I remember fights about anarchy, fights about theology and fights about whether women should be in college. (Those fights, in particular, shaped much of my future interest.) We all had to present at disputatio many times in those days and then hold our own in the ensuing rumble.

Finals were held in that same room, but this time you would show up all alone and sit down across the table from all of your instructors at once, police interrogation style. They would take turns asking questions, sometimes jumping in on one another’s questions and pressing to see if you really knew what you were talking about. You might have to go up to the whiteboard and translate something from Greek or Latin, or work through a logic proof, then come back to the table to answer questions about the tactics of the Persian triremes at the Battle of Salamis. Everything was scrappy, everything was intense, and there was no fading into the crowd in those days.

The summer before my junior year, the Christ Church office and Canon Press moved into a new location (now State Farm Insurance near Rosauers). This new building contained a couple of church and Canon offices, but it also featured a kinda-biggish back shipping room full of gorilla shelves that held Canon’s inventory. Clearly this could double as a classroom, and given that there was one more actual room, this meant that New Saint Andrews could also squeeze right on in there alongside the church and Canon. It was our first multi-classroom facility, quite a necessity given that there were now three classes of students, and the student body must have been at least in the twenties by then. Junior year was the philosophy year, and I distinctly remember sitting in that very gray, chilly, concrete space in the back room, being supremely underwhelmed by Kant, staunchly refusing to believe that Heidegger was doing anything original whatsoever, and giving the stink eye to the instructor who kept wanting me to be excited about Nominalism, all while Canon employees answered phones and packed orders in the background. As I think about it, it’s quite possible that my enduring disdain for every philosopher after Plato might have been shaped less by their arguments and more by the horrible light in that room. Upon rereading the above sentence, I find there are whole levels of profundity opening up before me that were not in view when I typed it just now. Affinity with trying to get out of badly lit caves might have been an unrecognized undercurrent.

Incidentally, Ben Merkle was back in town by then and had come on staff with the newly formed CRF (Collegiate Reformed Fellowship, which was a ministry of the church). And so that meant that although he wasn’t involved in the college he did pop into the office from time to time. And given that he was involved in the college ministry it was important for him to get to know the college students. Obviously.

My senior year was spent in that same space - but by then, I was married to Ben. By the end of Jerusalem term, I was also pregnant and significantly morning sick. Senior year was the literature year, and I still can’t even think about Don Quixote without getting queasy. The student body was too big to fit all together anywhere in that building, so Disputatios had to be moved up to Logos into one of the classrooms so that we could fit thirty people. I was writing my thesis that year, and I wrote it on the relationship between a culture’s theology and its treatment of women (an actually fascinating topic that was the outgrowth of some of those early fights and which also formed the basis for what later turned into Eve in Exile). I had to publicly defend my thesis at disputatio in front of the whole school, nine months pregnant. And if I remember correctly, Toby Sumpter was a prospective student who was visiting that day; sporting a very definite hairdo that defies description, a pair of enormously baggy plaid pants that were also too long for him, and a long dangly chain swinging from his belt.

I graduated the Spring of ’98, timing my contractions throughout the entire ceremony and feeling like standing up front for the wine rite in my pronouncedly pregnant state might be a bad look, but oh well. From the original four, only two of us graduated that night. He was black, and I was female, and for that brief shining moment, our DEI stats were impressive.

Even back then, Moscow already had a national voice and reputation for strong, solid, reformed theology, combined with evangelical, practical, how-should-we-then-live Christian teaching and a good dose of that distinctive sass that has, of late, been christened the Moscow Mood.

A year after I graduated, Ben began as a TA for my dad’s Lordship class, and the following year, he took the class over completely. So other than that one year in ’98 and then a three-year hiatus in Oxford, while Ben completed his DPhil, New Saint Andrews, has been at the very center of our lives from the literal first day we met. We have seen it grow from that little gray house on Jefferson to its current, very prominent, very controversial position on Main Street. And through all of that time and all of that growth, we have had a front-row seat to watch the sheer abundance of God’s grace on a college that never should have worked. If there were a book out there titled “How to Start a College,” it would definitely not outline the approach I have just described. You would need millions in capital, a significant donor base, a campus, a massive marketing strategy, and probably sports teams in order to lure some students actually to come; certainly not a one-page, black-and-white, text-heavy ad in a free magazine four months before opening and a dining room table.

But on the other hand, New Saint Andrews always had something that made it viable from the get-go despite lacking all the more obvious amenities like, you know, classrooms. First of all, even back then, Moscow already had a national voice and reputation for strong, solid, reformed theology, combined with evangelical, practical, how-should-we-then-live Christian teaching and a good dose of that distinctive sass that has, of late, been christened the Moscow Mood. That’s why you could run a black-and-white, text-heavy ad in a free magazine and have students actually show up. For those of you not old enough to remember the old Credenda Agenda magazine, the first half of it was dedicated to theology (“Credenda” - things to be believed) and the second half to practical Christian living (“Agenda” - things to be done). Then the very last page was called The Cave of Adullum and was essentially the Babylon Bee, decades before the Babylon Bee. It was definitely the page everyone flipped to first once it showed up in the mailbox and what prompted lots of stern, “I don’t believe I like your tone, sir” rebukes. And if you find yourself in the back room of the Sword and Shovel bookstore, after you’ve found and read the framed first advertisements for the college, start reading the lampshades. Every lampshade is different, and they all contain selections from the old Cave of Adullums from the mid to late 90s. But I digress.

Looking back over the last thirty years of college, I absolutely love how much it has grown, changed, and improved on the periphery and how much it has stayed the same in all the essentials. I have sometimes heard alumni shake their heads over some change or other, lamenting how much NSA had lost the beating heart of the curriculum by losing this teacher or that class. And it always makes me chuckle because that is like me saying these current students aren’t getting the REAL NSA because they’re not in an apartment above a garage or they’re not wearing homemade robes. Realistically, the class they bemoan is a class that hundreds of NSA students, both before and after them, never experienced. But the things that are truly at the heart of the NSA education are alive and well, despite lots of pressure at various times to eradicate them.

Those things are a strong sense of Credenda and a strong sense of Agenda—with a little Cave of Adullum thrown in. That is the winning combination that makes seemingly impossible marketing strategies work and that yields a shockingly impressive result when woven into a rigorous four-year academic program.

And it’s still early days yet. There is still so much to be done. The freshmen who showed up this year aren’t rolling into a dining room on Jefferson Street or an apartment above a garage on another school’s campus. But they are still quite clearly experiencing a school that is in its adolescent growth spurt. They joined a college that is delivering an excellent education as its day job while trying to also build itself as a side hustle in the off moments. And I love that. That’s the old, familiar feel of NSA. I love that it still feels like we’re pioneering, still settling the land. I love that that excitement is still there, and I love that the faithful heart of the education remains the same today as it was in the 90s. Here’s to many more.