Doubly Marginalized, Part 1: How the university is marginalized

Christians in the university very often feel like outsiders in both their churches and their institutions. In this series, I take a look at the different aspects of this situation of being doubly marginalized.

It might not seem like the university is marginalized in America. There are certainly a lot of higher education institutions all around. Doing a Google search of "College Jacksonville, FL" turns up least 17 different institutions in my immediate area alone.

But I think this plethora actually speaks to the marginalization of the university. There are many institutions available because it's relatively easy to make money off of a higher education institution, and the more career/business-oriented those institutions are, the more profitable they are.

For example, if you search for physics departments or humanities departments or music departments in Jacksonville, you'll find much fewer results. And why should all of these smaller career-oriented colleges offer physics or humanities or music? There's a lot more money to be made in training physicians' assistants and computer technicians and court stenographers---because we need more of these people than we need physicists or humanities professors or trombone players. (Note I didn't say that we need PAs and techies and stenographers more than we need physicists and humanities professors and trombone players, just that we need more of them.)

But in this process of training people to fill roles with greater demand, the more traditional idea of the university has gotten lost in the conversation, and physicists and humanities professors and trombone players get put to the side and treated like they're not necessary for society. Hence the marginalization of the university.

John Sommerville (no, I won't mention him in every blog post) says it much better in his The Decline of the Secular University. I highly recommend reading it.

What do you think? How do you see the university as marginalized in America? In your city? In your church (now there's a thought that deserves a series of blog posts all its own)?

About Me

“Abraham believed God, traveled to Egypt, rescued Lot, and was the father of Isaac. Now, was that before or after he became the sixteenth President, fought the Civil War and freed the slaves?” –Me, Age 8

I was often very confused as a child. I knew for certain there were two things I needed to succeed at: school and church. And these were both very similar: We read at both school and church, we learned history at both school and church, we were asked questions at both school and church, we moved from one grade to another at both school and church. They were so similar that I thought that they surely must be related.

That’s where the confusion came in, leading to questions like the one I quoted earlier. School seemed to get more serious (requiring more reading and more homework, playing fewer games and getting fewer breaks) while church (particularly Sunday school) didn’t seem to change all that much (never requiring homework, playing games even when we seemed too old for them, and spending as much time in chit-chat as we did opening the Bible). There was also a growing difference in content. In school, we learned more details year after year, had to memorize the years that events happened, had to learn how everything (science, math, American history, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, technology, etc.) fit together. In church, though, no one ever seemed to say in what year the events in the Bible occurred, nor did we really learn how everything fit together; I had the vague feeling that Jesus came after everybody in the front of the Bible, but not much else.

Little did my middle-school-self know, my questions about how the things I learned at school and church related to each other told the story of conflict and estrangement between the church and the academy.

I remember in ninth grade when one of my classmates in Biology who also attended my church asked our Youth Pastor to pray for us, since we were studying evolution. “We’re not studying evolution,” I responded. “We’re just studying taxonomy. Evolution’s not until the next chapter.” It was as if getting even close to evolutionary theory was like looking into the sun for this student, and I didn’t understand why.

I remember in tenth grade in World History, we spent a chapter studying the Reformation. “Luther,” I read in my textbook, “made the radical claim that salvation was based on faith in God, and not on works.” “But,” I responded, in shock, “that’s what I believe!” I then had two questions that have haunted me ever since: 1. What did people believe before that? 2. Why did no one in church tell me about this history? The first question has been more or less settled in my mind. The second question, I have come to realize, is a form of the tension between Christian faith and academic study that has developed over the years.

Experiences like those in Biology and World History have largely shaped me today, leading me to ask questions about how my faith as a Christian relates to my study and teaching as a professor. I’ve received abundant help from other Christian scholars in venues such as the Christian Study Center of Gainesville and in books such as The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Habits of the Mind, and The Decline of the Secular University. It’s my hope that this blog will serve as a sounding board for those questions and provide help to others as they wrestle with similar issues. Thank you for joining me.