God on the Quad
By Naomi Riley
On February 1988, author Tom Wolfe gave a Class Day address at Harvard in which he described ours as the era of the "fifth freedom"--freedom from religion. Religion, he commented with his satirist's smile, is "the last hobble" on the emancipation of students from "ordinary rules."
It's undeniable that college faculties, dominated as they now are by Sixties kids, continue their generation's endeavor to "liberate" others from the strictures of orthodox religion and traditional morality. Students who manage to arrive on campus with some traditional religious identity quickly find themselves a beleaguered minority. In the classroom, their beliefs are derided as contrary to tolerance and "diversity." And in their extracurricular lives, their sensibilities will be consistently offended by amoral behavior among many of their peers, with the tacit approval of college officials.
On today's college campuses, religious students generally confront what modern terminology would call "a hostile environment." A Harvard student running for president of the undergraduate council a few years ago was vilified by the campus newspaper for his religious beliefs. He never mentioned them on the campaign trail, but a young woman on the election commission, unbeknownst to him, had e-mailed some friends asking them to pray for the candidate. That led the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson to warn that the candidate's "ties to religious groups have raised concerns among many students."
In an earlier, more widely publicized case, a group of Orthodox Jewish students at Yale sought to live off campus because the co-ed dormitories forced them to encounter half-naked members of the opposite sex in the hallways. The students were denounced for being "judgmental" and told that if they left campus, they would still have to pay the $7,000 dorm fee. As a university spokesman explained, co-ed dorms are just one "aspect of the Yale educational experience."
Among the relatively few students who are involved in faith groups on campus, many describe themselves as "spiritual, not religious." A recent book titled Religion on Campus offers a clear picture of what this means. At a weekly meeting of a Methodist group on a large western university's campus, leaders asked, "How can we keep the spark of God burning inside us this week?" The responses included, "I'm a vegetarian, and that's religious to me," "Smile," and "Take time to be quiet and alone." Another student who is active in the Catholic Newman Center calls herself a "spiritual junkie," citing as an example her experience of turning out the room lights and listening to the Indigo Girls with a male friend.
Feel-good spirituality turns out to be a sorry substitute for the real thing. Academic insiders and outsiders alike have often described a certain malaise among today's college students. A 2002 New York Times story profiled Jeffrey Lorch, a sophomore at Columbia, whom the reporter found typical of the more than 2,600 students who had sought help at the university's counseling center the previous year. Jeffrey apparently has no real problems, but it takes him three quadruple espressos and an unknown quantity of Prozac to get through the day. Looking at his college experience, Jeffrey notes, "There have been times when I've felt like every conversation [I've had at school] was a sham."
"Souls without longing." That's what Robert Bartlett, a professor of political science at Emory University, calls the dozens, if not hundreds, of Jeffreys he has encountered in the classroom. In a striking essay in the Public Interest, Bartlett argues that this malaise is evident in the "narrowness of students' frame of reference or field of vision; in the pettiness of their daily concerns; in the tepid character of their admiration and contempt, their likes and dislikes; in the mediocrity of their ambitions.... The world could be their oyster, but they tend to stare back at it, pearls and all--and yawn."
But to say these students are "without longing" is to miss the point. Obviously they long for something. Otherwise, why all the caffeine, alcohol, and psychotropic medications? Indeed, a recent UCLA survey on spirituality in higher education found 75 percent of undergraduates were "searching for meaning or purpose in life," while 78 percent discuss religion and spirituality with their friends.
The Counter-Revolution
Call them the "missionary generation." The 1.3 million graduates of the nation's more than 700 religious colleges are quite distinctive from their secular counterparts. And the stronger the religious affiliation of the school, the more distinctive they are. The young men and women attending the 20 religious colleges I visited in 2001 and 2002 are Red through and through. (Though the schools are sometimes located in Blue states, the majority of students hail from Red states and view faith accordingly.) They reject the spiritually empty education of secular schools. They refuse to accept the sophisticated ennui of their contemporaries. They snub the "spiritual but not religious" attitude. They rebuff the intellectual relativism of professors and the moral relativism of their peers. They refuse to accept their "fifth freedom."
In practical terms, these students challenge what has become the typical model of college behavior. They don't spend their college years experimenting with sex or drugs. They marry early and plan ahead for family life. They oppose sex outside of marriage, as well as homosexual relationships. Most dress modestly and don't drink, use drugs, or smoke. They study hard, leaving little time for sitting in or walking out. Most vote, and a good number join the Army. They are also becoming lawyers, doctors, politicians, college professors, businessmen, psychologists, accountants, and philanthropists in the cultural and political centers of the country. While they would disagree among themselves about what it means to be a religious person, they all assume that trying to live by a set of rules, generally laid down in Scripture, is the prerequisite for a healthy, productive, and moral life.
Administrators and faculty of many religious colleges of all denominations believe they can produce young professionals who will transform the broader secular culture from within. If they're right, the implications are enormous. Advocates of religious higher education argue that: CEOs won't need to send their employees to business ethics classes when they can hire college graduates who already know them; the Armed Forces will find it easier to recruit from the educated classes; faith in our elected leaders may override the cynical attitudes that have characterized American politics for the last half century; instead of appointing special committees, hospitals may be able to hire entire staffs of doctors with backgrounds in bioethics; and secular universities may be overrun by professors studying the interaction of religion with philosophy, science, mathematics, or literature. Is this vision of the future realistic? Can these young men and women become pioneers, bringing an ethical perspective back into their professions, their schools, their communities, and their government institutions?
A Growing Hunger
The initial signs of this cultural shift are everywhere. A Brigham Young graduate was recently elected governor of Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the Union. Indeed, the number of BYU grads living in New England went from 100 to 3,000 over the last ten years. The evangelical Wheaton College ranks eleventh in the nation in the percentage of graduates who go on to receive Ph.D.s. It was two women who had attended the Baptist Baylor University who were captured by the Taliban while they were doing missionary work in Afghanistan. Yeshiva University, ranked by U.S. News & World Report as one of the top 50 research universities in America, recently graduated its first Rhodes Scholar. The Ave Maria School of Law just had a higher percentage of its graduates pass the bar than any school in Michigan. Although Ave Maria, a conservative Catholic school, is too new to have received full accreditation from the American Bar Association, its students (whose average LSATs would make it the twenty-fifth ranked law school in the country) are being sought after by leading law firms, Justice Department offices, prosecutors, and federal judges. More students at Bob Jones University dropped out to join the Army after September 11 than did Harvard students.
Religious higher education is indeed on the rise. Enrollment at the over one hundred member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (four-year liberal arts colleges committed to teaching Christian doctrine, hiring only professors who share the faith, and providing a Christian atmosphere outside the classroom) jumped a remarkable 60 percent between 1990 and 2002, while the number of students at public and private schools barely fluctuated. As a percentage of total enrollment in institutions of higher education, the number of students at colleges with religious affiliations has not changed much over the last 20 years (8.34 percent in 1984 and 8.07 percent today), but schools with the strongest religious identities have been gaining steadily.
While evangelical schools like the members of the CCCU are at the heart of this new strength in religious higher education, they are hardly alone. Schools affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been expanding, in part because of the fast-growing Mormon population. BYU has added an Idaho campus to its ones in Utah and Hawaii, and a new college was recently established in Virginia to serve the Mormon community. It has grown to a student body of 500 in six years and is already looking to expand its campus. Populations at Catholic colleges and universities have seen a dramatic rise as well. Applications to Notre Dame have risen steadily in the last decade--a rise of 23 percent last year broke the 1994 record of a 20 percent rise. And numerous smaller Catholic schools have opened across the country to cater to a more strictly religious population. In California, Thomas Aquinas College, a small Catholic "great books" school at the forefront of this movement, is operating at capacity, and its administrators are considering opening another branch on the East Coast. Yeshiva University, the country's flagship Orthodox Jewish college, has many more qualified applicants than it can take, and the more recently established Touro College has stepped in to cater to more traditionally Orthodox students. The religious trend extends from the fundamentalist Bob Jones University to the newly established Buddhist college, Soka University.
These developments did not occur in a vacuum. Homeschooling has experienced a dramatic rise in popularity, growing annually at a rate of 15 to 20 percent, to approximately 1.5 million families today. A nationwide survey by the National Center for Education Statistics reports that 38 percent of homeschooling parents cite religion as the main reason for their decision.
During the 1990s, the churches that grew the fastest were the ones that demanded the highest commitment from their members, including regular attendance at worship services, strict behavioral codes, tithing, and public confessions of faith. While mainline Protestant churches continued to lose members, the Mormon Church grew by 19 percent, and the evangelical Church of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church recorded increases of 19 and 16 percent respectively. Much of the energy driving the current "great awakening" in organized religion is coming from the most traditional corners, and young people are often the ones demanding stricter rules and more tradition.
Sex, Drugs, and Different Behavior
Promiscuity, or at least "sexual awareness," has become part of a college education promoted by the administration at secular schools. While a student at Williams College, Wendy Shalit wrote an article for Commentary describing the meeting in which the residents of her dormitory voted to make the bathrooms co-ed. When Shalit objected to the idea, one of the girls came to her aid: "'Don't worry, I was just like you once,' one of them [began] condescendingly, smiling with the smug authority of the victorious. 'And then...I became comfortable with my body.'" "The resident advisers," notes Shalit, "take this opportunity to announce that if anyone has problems with the co-ed bathroom, please do come and talk with them--there are any number of good campus counselors at 'Psych Services.'"
And if you're crazy not to want to share a bathroom with a member of the opposite sex, why not a bedroom? Several schools, like Haverford College, have added co-ed dorm rooms as a way of accommodating homosexual students who don't feel comfortable living with someone to whom they might be sexually attracted. Life on most college campuses remains defined by the 1960s mantra that college is the time for students to get out from under the thumb of their parents and "experiment."
Religious students generally seem to avoid the kind of trouble that puts secular campuses in the headlines. There are exceptions, of course, but on the whole, religious campuses are devoid of the alcohol, drugs, sex, and violence that plague many secular universities.
How do they do it? First, religious college kids want to be in this environment. Only a small minority of the students I spoke to claimed their parents made them attend a religious college. Carri Jenkins, in charge of public relations at Brigham Young, tells me over lunch with a few other administrators and faculty: "Many of these students have been in a high school where they were the only one who is religious, and they are tired of having to constantly defend who they are. They want to have fun without getting drunk. This is freedom for them. They come here and they can be who they want to be."
Second, religious college leaders have no problem acting in loco parentis. In fact, the parents themselves often become involved. At Calvin College, there is a parental notification policy for any alcohol use on campus or any other disciplinary infraction. "We've found that to be very effective," says administrator Shirley Hoogstra. "We think that a parent is a partner in the process in terms of discipline."
Administrators at religious colleges, not surprisingly, take a religious approach to discipline. Professor Scott Moore notes that if a Baylor student violates a rule, "any action taken would be redemptive." Most of the adults on these campuses agree that human beings are sinners, prone to make mistakes, and, within limits, it's the job of the college to help set them on the right course, rather than simply kick them out. Administrators believe the key to successful discipline is creating an environment in which students will come for help before they are caught violating some rule.
On some issues, students' faith may provide clear guidelines for behavior. Mormons are not allowed to smoke under any circumstances. In other cases, the gray area is more extended. Are young evangelicals allowed to kiss? To what extent can Catholic students drink? How are people with homosexual impulses to be treated? It is the job of religious colleges to help their graduates make these decisions.
Rules and Expectations
Administrators and faculty at religious colleges agree that the place to start addressing these issues is in the dormitories. Most have stuck with the tradition of single-sex dorms. Lauren Whitnah, a sophomore at Gordon College, was skeptical of the dorm rules, but says she is now grateful for them. "If my roommate was coming in drunk or with her boyfriend, I have recourse to say, 'That's not okay with me and not okay with the school.' I feel like there would really be someone that would back me up."
Few leaders of religious colleges are of the opinion that they can prevent all sexual activity among the students. Instead, most use dorm life as a means of student "formation." What is meant by that, of course, varies from school to school. At Baylor, it involves a willingness on the part of the administration to mandate behavioral standards, but no one is checking the beds each night.
At Thomas Aquinas, students are prohibited from engaging in any public displays of affection. At Brigham Young, such displays are ubiquitous. Even during the "fireside" talks given by church leaders on Sunday evenings in the sports arena, couples hold hands and men have their arms around their girlfriends' shoulders. There is a strange slow movement everywhere as students stroke each other's hair, arms, and faces.
But BYU students do take seriously the rule against premarital sex. Since most of the students live off-campus, the rule is enforced primarily through peer pressure. Minji Cho, who only recently converted to Mormonism and experimented with sex in high school, tells me, "I realized that if I went to a public university there would be a lot of...temptation for me. I didn't want to necessarily be around Mormons; anyone with clean morals would have been fine." Knowing she is struggling, Minji's roommates keep a motherly eye on her.
Like Minji, most religious college students seem thankful they will not have to confront the sorts of sexual pressures they would at secular schools. Rachel Stahl, a sophomore at Gordon, tells me she looks forward to going out with guys there. "I have dated people who aren't Christian and sex is all they want."
At most of the colleges, there is a contingent of students who are not living by the code of sexual conduct. But sexual activity is not flaunted, thanks to peer pressure and administrations that are clear about their standards.
Drinking does not seem to be a significant problem at the evangelical colleges, many of which have relaxed their drinking restrictions, but some of the Catholic schools, having long allowed alcohol on campus, have more experience with the problem. As Notre Dame anthropology professor Rev. Patrick Gaffney explains, there is plenty of drinking on campus. More than one professor reports students regularly coming into their Friday classes hung over from Thursday night's parties. There are more serious effects as well, according to a transfer student from George Washington University, who points to "ambulances coming to dorms on a more routine basis than they should be." There have been a few incidents of violence and sexual abuse at Notre Dame resulting from alcohol.
At Thomas Aquinas College, students are not allowed to drink on campus except at official college functions (where a little wine might be served), but it does happen at campfires in the woods nearby on Friday nights, or Saturday nights during Lent. The school's president, Thomas Dillon, makes clear that anyone who returns to campus drunk will be subject to disciplinary action. But he adds, "I can easily make a distinction between someone who goes down to have a beer and talk to someone and someone who is drunk. The second thing is out of character with our high noble aspirations."
Finding the Balance
In order to set the rules, those who run religious colleges must act as filters of the general culture. They want to produce students who know what the tenets of their faith demand of personal behavior, who have been given enough freedom to make some decisions on their own, and who are strong enough to go against the grain, if necessary, when they graduate. But making judgments about secular American culture involves much more than simply knowing when to have sex and whether to drink.
In October 2002, Calvin College hosted the Indigo Girls--an outspoken lesbian folk-rock duo who support such extreme leftwing causes as the Zapatista rebels and Leonard Peltier. Surprised? As Calvin's student activities director Ken Heffner explained in the campus paper, "Cultural discernment" (as the administration likes to refer to the policy) means that "Calvin College finds a way for Christians to engage with [secular] culture without becoming of it.... It's a way out of the trap of liberalism...and it's also a way out of the trap of fundamentalism, which leads to separatism."
Navigating the waters between fundamentalism and liberalism is probably the single biggest challenge facing religious colleges today. There are so many ways for the values of secular culture to seep into a religious college, it's hard for these communities not to become overprotective. At SVU, a faculty member was forced to write the word "whore" out of a student production of "Man of La Mancha," even though, as one professor points out, the word appears in the Bible. And while one might be inclined to wonder about Magdalen College's banning popular magazines or novels, it's true that publications like Cosmopolitan or Maxim and even some chick-lit novels read like explicit sex manuals.
The extent of the influence of secular culture cannot be understood completely until you think about what it takes to filter it out. Even something as simple as sports, a staple of university life, has to be rethought. What does it mean to play in the same league as the University of Colorado and Florida State, which offered not only luxury accommodations for their recruits but also promises of sex from young women on campus?
At Notre Dame, of course, the school's athletic programs are an integral part of its identity, with thousands of alumni attending mass together after each home game. But the administrations there as well as at Baylor and BYU must somehow shield the players from the kind of financial, sexual, and drug-related scandals that have come to plague high-level athletics in America. Cultural discernment, that is, teaching students the best of what secular culture has to offer and providing them with the tools for examining it, requires constant vigilance and much forethought from religious college leaders, but the rewards for success are tremendous. Striking the right balance means producing graduates who are unafraid of the world, can participate in some aspects of it, change other parts of it, and all the while maintain their religious grounding.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a TAE contributing writer. This is adapted from her new book God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America.
