The College Fix

Responding to a hilariously ironic Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed by the University of Pennsylvania’s Peter Conn that says religious colleges shouldn’t be accredited because they are hostile to “skeptical and unfettered inquiry” (where Penn excels), Baylor University humanities professor Alan Jacobs writes in The New Atlantis:

Could anyone affirm with a straight face that English studies in America has for the past quarter-century or more been governed by “the primacy of reason”? I seriously doubt that Conn even knows what he means by “reason.” …

I taught at Wheaton [College] for twenty-nine years, and when people asked me why I stayed there for so long my answer was always the same: I was there for the academic freedom. My interests were in the intersection of theology, religious practice, and literature — a very rich field, but one that in most secular universities I would have been strongly discouraged from pursuing except in a corrosively skeptical way. …

Some of Wheaton’s most famous alumni have strayed pretty far from its theological commitments, though I think Wes Craven has done a pretty good job of illustrating the consequences of original sin. But even those who have turned aside from evangelicalism, or Christianity altogether, often pay tribute to Wheaton for providing them the intellectual tools they have used to forge their own path — see, for instance, Bart Ehrman in the early pages of Misquoting Jesus. The likelihood of producing such graduates is a chance Wheaton is willing to take. Why? Because it believes in liberal education, as opposed to indoctrination. 

Read the whole article here. See our previous articles on the academic freedom College Fix contributors experienced at Grove City College and Seattle Pacific University, both Christian schools.

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