Reviewing the College Scene

A friend asked what I thought of Grove City College, in western Pennsylvania.

Short answer - I think the school is pretty solid.

I have two sons who each attended for one year very recently, and they also agree, Grove is especially strong in liberal arts and Western canon of literature, art, etc.  One son took several psychology classes but was disappointed with the lack of rigor.  But this may be driven by two things: he's a quick thinker and gets impatient if things are moving too slow.  And some profs were hammering it into them that they cannot legally bring their Christian faith into their counseling and therapy sessions, to keep their state license.  There might be some legal basis for this, but it was often coming from a liberal prof who is faculty advisor for the (small) LGBT group on campus.  He is retired now, though.  I've heard their math and science dept is strong.  Their political dept is good, and conservative.  Prof Kengor has written good books on Reagan and Marxism, and also had a balanced article on MLK recently.  He got Newt Gingrich to come speak last year.

They have a presbyterian background, but try to appeal to more mainstream Protestants, not cranky or ultra-conservatives.  One of my boys got to hear and meet Alistair Begg at a chapel event - very good.

Your typical conservative Christian freshman would fit in well.  Probably the school culture is similar to the private high school your kids are at, but faculty and admin are more conservative - I think.

The year one son attended they had a pretty big scandal: trying to respond to wokeness after 2020, they flubbed it a bit.

 - they had Jamar Tisby, I think, speak at chapel.  In between inviting him pre-covid and the event itself a couple years later, he moved far left and said some atrocious things.

 - a resident director put on a book study throughout campus of an anti-racism book touting it - I saw the flyers up when moving my son in and was disturbed.

 - a pilot education class used only woke texts, and advocated it as part of the curriculum and their ed degree.

Parents were outraged by this.  Many conservatives thought the admin was too tepid in their response, but it seemed to me they got back on course without giving in too much to a counter-cancel-culture impulse.  They brought in Kevin DeYoung and Begg to speak at chapel in response to it all, reaffirmed their biblical worldview policy, and stopped the anti-racism advocacy, as far as I can tell.

The gem of the school in my book is Carl Trueman - one of my boys had him for a class and much enjoyed him, but they speak highly of several other profs, too.

Zooming out from Grove City, Christian colleges are highly susceptible to going liberal.  It seems all the profs and admin staff who come seeking employment are trained in leftist institutions.  Getting an education degree usually requires being immersed in woke curriculum for years, and the hiring school feels they need to hire from these places to maintain a good academic reputation on the outside.  Getting teachers or profs from Hope or Calvin College without closely vetting them is a really bad idea, in my book.  Christian colleges hiring PhDs from Princeton as profs is usually worse.  Though I have seen exceptions in the Ivy League (Robert George at Princeton, Joshua Mitchell at Georgetown, historian Allen Guelzo, etc).  

I know this dynamic personally.  When I was at seminary, profs would drop hints that the left-leaning things they were teaching us wouldn't be accepted by the average (closed-minded, read biblical) church that we aspiring pastors would want to serve.  So, it was hinted or said aloud, you might need to downplay or avoid those issues in the interview process.  If the hiring team at the church or school doesn't know the questions to ask, the church/school can quickly have a faculty supermajority that is opposed to a biblical worldview, which the admin thought everyone was FOR.  Al Mohler likes to say that he asks prospective profs at Boyce College or his seminary, not only if they adhere to their confessional statements, but if they will enthusiastically endorse and teach them.  Thus, a Christian college's PR material looks and reads great, but the real story in the classroom is often quite different.

There are very few colleges firmly holding the line, here: Boyce I think (Mohler), Hillsdale, Grove, New St. Andrews in Idaho (Doug Wilson).  Patrick Henry College in VA, probably.  Cedarville in OH, maybe.  Taylor U. in IN, maybe.  There are probably a few more I'm not aware of, but I hear in the news almost every week of another Christian college that caved to student or faculty protests to remove a biblical policy on some cultural issue.

But then again, in the college classroom, you don't WANT anti-woke indoctrination, any more than you want leftist indoctrination.  You need a thorough consideration of the views, and then hold it up to a biblical worldview.  Work to understand the other position, and be able to articulate it, even if you vehemently disagree with it.  That's education.  Gotta trust the student at that age to read primary sources, and trust the prof to give proper and sufficient guidance.  In our polarizing times people don't want to hear that.  They want to fire the chaplain or prof who tried to critically engage with woke leftism!  Fire the woke advocate who won't present and argue the other side, fine.  I think Grove navigated that decently.