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advertisement But sometimes a picture of the forest may miss a vigorous new species of tree. That, in any case, was the hunch that put journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley on the trail to writing her new book, God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America. After spending three years visiting colleges with strong religious identies, from five-year-old Patrick Henry College in rural Purcellville, Va., to Indiana's venerable University of Notre Dame, Riley found that these schools are providing intellectual heft to a generation of spiritual seekers that is already influencing American society, business, and government. Booming. One of Riley's central discoveries is the sheer popularity of colleges with an explicitly religious mission. True, total enrollment in colleges with some kind of sectarian affiliation hasn't grown as a percentage of total college enrollment during the past 20 years. But at schools with an intensively religious focus, she notes, student numbers have surged. The 100-plus members of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (all of which are committed to teaching Christian doctrine and creating a Christian atmosphere beyond the classroom) have seen total enrollment rise some 60 percent between 1990 and 2002. Similarly, Notre Dame received a record number of applications last year, even as high attendance at Brigham Young University, the flagship school of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has led the administration to open a new Idaho campus in addition to the older ones in Utah and Hawaii. Nor is this solely a Christian academic boom, Riley reports. The orthodox Jewish Yeshiva University is bursting at the seams, while there's a similar explosion of interest in Soka University of America, a recently established Buddhist college in Southern California. One reason for the popularity of these religious schools--as others before Riley have noted--is straightforward: From Illinois's Wheaton College (often called the "Harvard of evangelical colleges") to Michigan's Ave Maria School of Law (funded by Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan), they offer what is often a superb, rigorous education and can boast a wide range of impressive alumni. But Riley goes beyond generalizations to offer readers a reporter's-eye view of just what makes the schools she profiles tick. Students at California's Thomas Aquinas College, for instance, really do take their theologically informed discussions of the Great Books out of the classroom--and bring them back. "Teachers who don't arrive for class 15 minutes early may find the students have begun without them," Riley writes. A different kind of seriousness can be found at Brigham Young, where many undergrads have already been on two-year church missions, often abroad, bringing more to the classroom than the average freshman does. Above all, Riley finds that faith gives real impetus and orientation to academic pursuits. Juls Trinh, a Vietnamese-American premed at Baylor University, a Baptist institution in Waco, Texas, tells Riley that she believes her medical humanities courses make her better prepared than her counterparts in more secular schools. Because "faith definitely enters into those classes," Trinh says, she sees her intended profession as "human beings treating human beings instead of a doctor treating a diseased organ." Wariness. Not surprisingly, Riley finds significant differences among religious schools, particularly in their attitudes toward secular subjects. Many at Bob Jones and Yeshiva U., for example, share a wariness toward the secular fields; they are seen as necessary evils, helpful to one's eventual career, perhaps, but to be viewed with suspicion (at Bob Jones) or with a kind of cynical indifference (at Yeshiva). Yet at Notre Dame and a number of evangelical institutions, the ongoing effort to revive Christian humanism--with faith informing knowledge, and vice versa--flourishes. While most of the students at the schools Riley profiles are from "red" America, she notes that many--contrary to stereotype--express uneasiness about combining politics with faith. "Compared with people in the Christian Coalition," says Riley, "these kids see things in a much more nuanced way." Undergraduates at religious schools, she adds, find that their faith is challenged--and even complicated--by their learning, not simply reinforced. "It's not just evangelical fervor you find on these campuses," Riley says. "It's not just an emotional spirituality. It's much more intellectual." As successful as these schools have been in strengthening the "missionary generation," is there any chance their popularity will bring about a sea change in the wider academic world? Riley thinks not, and UCLA's Astin concurs, pointing out that the largely baby boom-generation professoriate tends either to be ideologically committed to secularism or, in some cases, to feel constrained by campus mores from exploring faith in an academic setting. "We seem to have a hidden or implicit rule that we don't discuss these sorts of things in the classroom," says Astin. Boston College political scientist Alan Wolfe points to another group that resists strengthening the religious identity of schools like his own Jesuit-founded institution: parents. In his view, the majority of parents at "mainstream" institutions see a too overtly religious orientation as inconsistent with what the larger society deems to be a good university. "Sociology rules," Wolfe says. Perhaps. But, says Notre Dame historian George Marsden, the academy's postmodern certainties about relativism and diversity are no longer going to get as easy a pass in a society increasingly populated with religious college grads. All early-American institutions of higher learning started as religious, he explains, but they never had to justify or argue for their generally Protestant Christian assumptions. Today's religious schools, by contrast, must do just that, making "a deliberate effort to relate religious traditions to what is being studied in secular courses," Marsden says. In doing so, they exemplify a form of profound intellectual diversity that is, paradoxically, often threatening to the self-described champions of that ideal on the majority of the nation's campuses. "There is still pressure," Marsden says, "to uphold the view that diversity trumps everything else, including the view that there may be absolutes." Yet it's precisely that devotion to absolutes that seems to account for the appeal of God on the Quad's quietly thriving colleges. |
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