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This article is found at http://www.logoscrc.ca/fourseasons
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This article was originally published in
Christian Courier, December 18, 2006. Reprinted with permission. Any other
reprinting of this article must have prior permission from
editor@christiancourier.ca .
Four Seasons of the University
By Peter Schuurman
Educational Mission Leader, Christian Reformed Home Missions
Christian Reformed Church in North America
“The contemporary university is hollow at
its core. Not only does it lack a spiritual center, but it is also without any
real alternative.”
So says George Marsden in The Outrageous
Idea of Christian Scholarship (Oxford, 1997). While that may aptly describe
the core of the public university today, I believe four grand stories (which are
also seasons in history) currently vie to occupy it. Jumping off from Marsden,
the four seasons I’ve distinguished are: Christian establishment, established
non-belief, default commercialism, and dialogic pluralism.
I. Christian Establishment
It is no secret that all universities that
were started over a century ago or more were motivated by deep Christian
conviction. Most, in fact, began as seminaries for clergy training, and had
clergymen as their first presidents. Chapels were mandatory, sometimes even
twice a day. The mottos on these universities’ crests reveal a deep purpose,
set in the context of transcendence:
“In Christ all things hold
together,” from Colossians, McMaster U.
“Teach me wisdom, discipline,
and knowledge,” from the Psalms, U of Windsor.
“Wisdom and knowledge shall the
stability of thy times” (Isaiah 33:6) Queens U.
“Under God’s power she
flourishes,” Princeton U.
“Truth for Christ and for the
church” Harvard U.
These were the days of the Christian
establishment. But the monopoly could not hold. If these were truly to be the
nation’s public universities, they needed to change as the nation did. Canada
became increasingly diverse, and a secular spirit was on the rise. Consensus
was to be determined by what is “rational”. Rational consensus determined who
can speak, and rational consensus is the goal of all speaking.
II. Established Non-Belief
Harvey Cox bestseller Secular City
captured this spirit in 1965 which declared on its opening page: “the rise of
urban civilization and the collapse of traditional religion are the two main
hallmarks of our era…” (p. 1). Even the Beatles sang: “Imagine there’s no
heaven, its easy if you try…” Schools for medicine, law, and liberal arts soon
eclipsed the original theological schools. Chapels disappeared, and the
clergyman professor faded into the background. The notion of human progress
through science replaced the former trust in Providence. Governments took
ownership of educational institutions.
The mottos of the universities
that were founded in this era reveal the replacement of theological themes with
secular humanist themes. The horizon of expectation lowered as York
University’s crest says rather mundanely, “The Way Must be Tried,” Simon Fraser
University’s says, “We are ready” and Brock University chose “Surgite!”-- the
last words of the dying General Brock at Queenston Heights in the battle of
1812.
This was the 60’s--a season of
established non-belief. If it was hard to be anything but a Christian in the
first era of the university, the tables completely turned in this second
season. Marsden explains how the dominant academic culture of today has become
“defined in a way that [faith-related] viewpoints, including their counterparts
in other Christian or religious heritages, have been largely excluded.” (7)
Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, and a dogmatic scientism become gatekeepers to the
academic table.
III. Default Commercialism
Marsden’s book was written in 1994. I
believe we are beginning to see another season now, a season that is much less
homogeneous, with an amnesia for the university’s classical and Christian
origins. Secular reason has been debunked by postmodern thinkers, as they say
it only hides Western white male perspective, power and privilege. There are
only a multiplicity of individual perspectives, each relative to one’s
ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and generation. What is left to pursue
and share and hold the university together, except a power play of perspectives?
You might just call this
“disestablishment of everything” season, but that gives a false impression.
There are no cultural vacuums, there is never neutral ground. From what I can
see, we live in a season of what you might call default commercialism. Recent
books like The Corporate Campus, University, Inc., Universities in the
Marketplace, and Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing
of Higher Education all basically say the same thing: commercial interests
are the highest value on campus today. “Credentialing, not educating, has
become the primary business of North American universities,” prophesies Jane
Jacob in last book Dark Age Ahead (2004). The campus has become
subservient to the market.
Again, I turn to the mottos, or
in this case, slogans intended to market the university’s product. Brock
University’s recent slogan was “Your Career Begins Here.” Windsor’s slogan:
“The Degree that Works.” Queens: “Knowledge is Power.” University of Western
Ontario even had a small promotion event entitled: “Major in Yourself.” The
trend is the same: universities are selling themselves to the student consumer
as a degree granter that is the ticket to privilege, a secure career. Its not
just that God, truth and service have disappeared from the aims of university,
but so have the humanistic slogans of the sixties. All they can promise now is
a place in the market. And the names of corporations on the campus buildings
make it clear. The soul of the university is for sale.
IV. Dialogic Pluralism
We have shifted from church to government to
market-run higher education. In some ways, all three of these previous
“seasons” still exist and play off each other, although the influence of the
church has been almost completely wiped off the campus map.
Is there an alternative? A
small, Protestant theological tradition may offer a way forward that promises
hegemony to none of the three above. The “Reformed” tradition – tracing itself
through Holland to John Calvin’s Geneva--has been labeled “the Protestant
Jesuits” because of their dedication to education. They have spoken for over a
hundred years already of a “principled pluralism” that can respect and
facilitate a diversity of voices on the campus and beyond.
More recently, this pluralism
has been referred to by philosopher Nicolas Wolterstorff as a critical
dialogic pluralism. This concept recovers the ideals of truth and
spirituality, but invites everyone to the academic table, whether First Nations
alternative health specialist, secular feminist philosopher, or market-driven
economist. It is understood that everyone comes to their research and teaching
with a perspective or worldview. We bring all of who we are to university, and
we need to promise to engage and challenge each other in making a just and
peaceful society. Otherwise other interests will rule the day.
Harvey Cox changed his mind
about secularization. Apparently its hard to imagine there’s no heaven. In
his later book Fire from Heaven (Da Capo, 1995) he declares that “today,
it is secularity, not spirituality, that may be headed for extinction… the
predictions themselves had been wrong… a religious renaissance of sorts is under
way all over the globe.” Markets and governments need to give space to
faith-based perspectives, for they will not be shut out.
A critical dialogic pluralism is
the only way forward. As Wolterstorff explains:
Instead of
assuming one can, and insisting that one should, strip off all one’s
particularities of perspective and engage in academic learning as a generic
human being, moving from rational consensus in basis to rational consensus in
results, I propose that we acknowledge that we have no option but to enter as
who we are, human beings with shared faculties but ineradicably particularist
perspectives. We enter as feminists, as Christians, as Jews, as
African-Americans, as gays, as agnostics, as atheists, or whatever. And we then
engage each other as much as possible with the goal of arriving at consensus on
the truth of the matter under consideration, recognizing, what is in any case
obvious, that whereas sometimes we succeed in achieving consensus, often we
fail. (Anastasis, Winter, 2003).
The secular hegemony of the present will not
hold. The Muslims pressure administrations for prayer space, the Jewish
students request kosher food in the dorms, and global politics force religion
back into the curriculum. The inconvenient truth is that our planet is dying,
and markets must be directed and limited by larger concerns than self-interest
and competition. The invisible hand has left dirty finger prints all over the
globe, and it needs a head and heart to make it work for the flourishing of
all. That is what public education must be about: nurturing people for global
citizenship.
New mottos for our universities
are wanting. Not just mottos, of course, but a new vision for what public
education can be in these postmodern, post-Christian times. We desperately need
a vision for education in our country that speaks to a wider horizon of meaning
than consumption and markets. The wisdom of our great religious traditions,
alongside other rigorous, academic perspectives, will bring the full richness of
our cultural mix to the table of teaching and learning.
Copyright © Peter Schuurman 2006
This article was originally published in Christian Courier, December 18, 2006.
Reprinted with permission. Any other reprinting of this article must have prior
permission from
editor@christiancourier.ca .
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