How will religion fare as liberal arts education shrinks in the United States?
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(OPINION) Pity U.S. colleges coping with political feuds, “diversity,” declining applications and enrollments, student debt and tight budgets.
Add religious and moral issues, and things get even more complex.
Some religious colleges are on survival watch. On June 29, the 140-year-old Alliance University (formerly Nyack College) decided it must shut down, and a second New York City Christian school, The King’s College, will also close unless there’s a last-minute reprieve. Last month, Religion News Service reported:
The last remaining evangelical Christian college in New York City, The King’s College, announced Monday (July 17) in an email that the school, which has faced dire financial challenges, would not offer classes in the fall. In an earlier meeting with faculty and staff it was announced that many teaching contracts would not renew or were canceled.
“This decision comes after months of diligently exploring numerous avenues to enable the College to continue its mission,” read the email, which was addressed to “members of the King’s community” and signed by the Board of Trustees. “In connection with this decision,” it continued, “it is with regret we share that our faculty and staff positions will be reduced or eliminated.
The running tally by www.HigherEdDive.com lists 96 colleges that have gone out of business since 2016, and Christianity Today counts 18 Christian colleges that shut down since COVID, with more likely.
Amid all those newsworthy developments, let’s not neglect the content of higher education. There’s been considerable media coverage on conservatives’ complaints over neglect of “dead White men,” liberal faculty bias, oppressive secularization, imbalance on American history, “cancel culture” and “woke” pressures.
Yet with considerably less fanfare, a different 21st century trend is recasting the very definition of a well-educated citizen. College education as it existed in the West across the centuries was a huge invention and contribution of the Christian religion and, in turn, it enhanced value formation and spiritual depth. Any religion builds upon the past and nontechnological reflection on what’s “good, true, and beautiful,” as the old formula expressed it.
Especially since 2000 or so, there’s been considerable erosion of traditional “core curriculums” or “distribution requirements” that mandated broad education in the “liberal arts” or “humanities” such as literature, history, philosophy and the fine arts. This is not just true for majors in those fields but students of all interests and career goals.
Journalism should be examining the massive implications for religion, and for democracy as well, when job-training in business and the regnant STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) predominates over awareness of humanity’s past 3,000 years.
Last week, The Guy joined a New York City discussion on educational trends led by Grove City College’s Provost Peter Frank (724-458-2189 (FrankPM@gcc.edu). Frank, an economist, emphasized the related narrowing into specialization not just with the required curriculum but content within majors and within courses. He also worries about democracy’s dependence upon public virtue and shared community among people with differing ideas. Click here to check out his Christian-infused case for broad and universal humanities study.
An exception to media neglect is an 11-pager in the March 6 issue of New Yorker titled “The End of the English Major,” with a focus on a huge public campus, Arizona State University, and an elite private school, Harvard University. Telltale data came particularly from a key source for reporters, the Humanities Indicators project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
During the past decade, overall collegiate study of English and history has fallen by roughly one-third and humanities enrollment by 17%. Comparing 2012 with 2020, humanities majors fell by nearly half at such campuses as Bates, Boston University, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Tufts and Vassar, and by nearly three-fourths at SUNY Albany.
The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point briefly considered eliminating its English, history and philosophy majors — because so few students enlist any longer. Since 2002, Columbia University English majors dropped from 10% to 5% of undergrads.
At Harvard, (which reportedly spent $1 billion on its new science/engineering complex), over similar years freshmen who plan on humanities majors plummeted from 20% to 7% (compared with 30% in the 1970s). Half of 2020 grads planned on tech or business careers. One can now earn a Harvard English degree without taking a single course in poetry. Other campuses no longer even require majors to take a Shakespeare course.
Religious historian David Nirenberg, former Divinity school dean at the University of Chicago, put matters this way in a Wall Street Journal piece on atomic bomb co-creator J. Robert Oppenheimer, his predecessor as director of the hyper-elite Institute for Advanced Study and the subject of a new movie: “The technological challenges are growing, but the cultural abyss separating STEM from the arts, humanities and social sciences has only grown wider. More than ever, we need institutions capable of helping them think together.”
The New Yorker concludes that we may be producing “a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.” Also note this on “Why Religion and the Humanities Are in Decline” by Terence Sweeney of Villanova University.
Folks, that’s news.
Now, on a different topic:
With the buildup to the 2024 elections, journalists should resist the temptation to apply “Christian nationalism” as a slippery catch-all label and instead draw careful distinctions among the numerous varieties of conservative Christian activism and patriotism.
Here are a couple tips on this much-covered theme.
One of the more eccentric subcultural strands, the Seven Mountains or “7M” prophecy, is usefully explained here by an evangelical, writing for The Gospel Coalition website.
The controversial Moms for Liberty, which has gained media attention (click here for recent Terry Mattingly post on that topic) in high-stress moral disputes, is now joined by a newcomer to watch, Citizens Defending Freedom, depicted here at Religion News Service. It’s important to note that RNS coverage is being sponsored by a “freethought” foundation that fights what it judges to be “bias and dogma” in public policy.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and a former correspondent for TIME Magazine. He’s also worked in broadcast TV and radio journalism covering religion and received a lifetime achievement award from Religion News Association. This piece first appeared at GetReligion.org.