By the standards that please accountants, administrators, and the people who do the numbers, times have never been better for Christian higher education, or so it seems. After all, over the last ten years, total enrollment at Christian colleges has increased by more than 45 percent, nearly three times the rate of growth at the 1,600 private colleges and universities in the United States, and ten times the growth of enrollments in state schools. Total undergraduate enrollment at member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities now stands at over 135,000, with probably another 40,000 enrolled in ancillary and graduate programs. Endowments of Christian colleges have begun to creep up into the fabled top 500 of college and university endowments. Wheaton, the richest of all the Christian colleges, ranked 145th in the nation in terms of endowment in 1993, and ran a budget of $45.3 million; in 2002, its budget was $63 million, and its endowment stood at $159 million. The same good things were happening in other places, too. Messiah College, for instance, was sitting on an endowment of over $65 million in 1994 (ranking it 202nd in the nation) and $94 million in 2002; Gordon College saw its budget soar from $29 million in 1998 to $39 million in 2001.1
The high times even trickled down to the faculty. A full professor at Eastern College took home $44,000 in 1994; at Messiah, $48,000; and at Westmont, $48,900. In 2003, the full professor at Westmont was earning $68,700; at Messiah, $65,100; and at Eastern, $68,500.
Nor does any of this seem to be a fluke. “Christian elementary and secondary schools, home schooling, and youth ministries are all thriving,” reported The Chronicle of Higher Education in a feature story in 1999, and they have provided a potent market for Christian higher education recruiting. Christian higher education has also developed more sophisticated marketing tools, and it has benefited from the increasing perception that secular and state schools offer little more than non-stop parties and binge drinking. And probably most surprising, Christian higher education has rocketed upwards in terms of academic and intellectual respectability. “Of all America’s religious traditions, evangelical Protestantism … ranks dead last in intellectual stature,” wrote Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe in 2000. But when Wolfe visited Wheaton College, he discovered that the students “are as outstanding as any in America,” while its faculty “are writing the books, publishing the journals, teaching the students, and sustaining the networks necessary to establish a presence in American academic life.” No longer, warned Wolfe, can Americans “write off conservative Christians as hopelessly out of touch with modern American values.”2
If news like this made for happiness, then we should be happy indeed. The problem is that it lacks context. The enrollment surge represents a great accomplishment, but its greatness is somewhat diminished by the fact that the total undergraduate enrollment of Christian colleges still amounts to only 1 percent of the 15 million or so students enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States. Institutional membership in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities stands at an all-time high of 130, but that amounts to less than 4 percent of the 3,600 colleges and universities in the United States—and at a time when self-identified evangelical Protestants number over 20 million Americans and comprise 7 percent of the population.3 In other words, only one in seven evangelical Christians is likely to attend a Christian college, although these institutions could—and statistically should—correspondingly carry three times as many as they do. Places like Indiana Wesleyan report enrollments of over 10,000 students; but 70 percent of Indiana Wesleyan’s students are part of its off-campus College of Adult and Professional Studies. Fully a quarter of the CCCU colleges and universities enroll fewer than a thousand students; fully a third enroll less than a thousand full-time undergraduates.
It’s not merely that the pool of students is disappointingly small. Christian higher education also has to compete with secular campuses where various Christian ministries have carved out “safe” spaces for Christian students. The success of Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and church-related college-age organizations around the country on secular campuses has undermined a major rationale for attending a Christian college or university. So long as Harvard, Dartmouth, or Penn State could be portrayed as quicksands of secularism, Christian colleges had an important trade-off to offer student recruits: the Ivies may offer a more prestigious education, but they’ll smother your spiritual life, and what will it profit a bright kid if he gains a Harvard MBA but loses his soul? Yet today at Harvard, “there are probably more evangelicals than at any time since the 17th century,” says Peter J. Gomes, the minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church, and certainly no part of an evangelical himself. As Harvard expanded enrollments in the 1970s and 1980s, that “meant that a lot of Midwestern white-bread Protestant Christian evangelicals at whom Harvard would never have looked in the past, and who would have never looked at Harvard, suddenly became members of the university.” Evangelical students venturing into deepest, darkest Cambridge will still find more than enough hostility to Christianity to challenge their faith; but they’ll also find the Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, the Asian-American Christian Fellowship, RealLife Boston, or Park Street Church’s Friday evening prayer fellowship in Emerson Hall. Campus Crusade alone has 27,000 staffers on 1,000 American college and university campuses. And as they grow, such ministries reduce the sense of threat and exposure evangelical students have to feel on secular campuses—and reduce, also, one of the major incentives for coming instead to a Christian college.4
Size, of course, is not a moral quality, so maybe I’m putting our attention on the wrong category. But acceptance rates may be moral qualities, since acceptance rates are generally understood as a good measure of how picky a college can afford to be, which in turn is supposed to indicate how stable (and tuition-proof) its financial position is. By that standard, not many of the Christian colleges enjoy much fiscal stability. For instance: according to the 2002 Peterson’s Christian Colleges and Universities, Huntington College accepted 650 new students in 2001—but this was almost 95 percent of those who applied, and only a third of the 219 who actually enrolled had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school graduating class. This suggests that Christian colleges are enormously eager to take whatever students sign up—which suggests, in turn, that they do so because, like the airlines, they cannot afford too many empty seats: Christian higher education is so dangerously tuition-dependent that it can’t be too picky about the caliber of student it enrolls. We apologize for this by reasoning that our educational philosophy is one of ministry, and ministry doesn’t turn people away. On the other hand, that type of student tends to be much more expensive to educate (for reasons I’ll come to in a minute); so even when increases in enrollment improve revenues, they also increase costs. As Melissa Morris-Olson wrote in 1997, “increased enrollments in colleges and universities have not necessarily resulted in improved financial conditions.”5 And the reason is that we are filling those seats with high-maintenance students.
Sadly, it is precisely Christian colleges and universities which are in the weakest financial position for dealing with such students. Whatever the high-number financials are for a Wheaton or a Messiah, the truth is that they are depressingly lower for most of the rest of Christian higher education. In 2002, while little-known Carnegie “Master’s Colleges and Universities” like Rider University enjoyed revenues of $111 million (or Suffolk University, which had $127 million, or my old neighbor, Villanova University, which had $285 million), Christian colleges in the same Carnegie category went a-begging. Eastern had revenues of $47 million, Geneva had $33 million, Malone had $32 million, and enrollment powerhouse Indiana Wesleyan reported only $55 million. That pales beside the revenues enjoyed by the top-flight Carnegie ‘Baccalaureate’ colleges that places like Gordon, Wheaton, and Eastern think of as their real counterparts. The wish, in that case, is only father to the thought, since none of the CCCU schools—not even Wheaton—could match the $110 million in annual revenues enjoyed by Amherst (or Amherst’s $877 million endowment), the $128 million reported by Grinnell (or Grinnell’s $1.111 billion endowment), or the $129 million enjoyed by Oberlin (with its comparatively modest portfolio of $537 million).
The wild ’90s were good for nearly every college or university endowment, and almost all Christian colleges experienced endowment growth. But compared broadly, that growth was amazingly meager. Wheaton’s place in the endowment ranking actually slipped to 159th in 2002, and 166th in 2003; Messiah fell 100 places to 302nd by 2002, and skidded to 320th in 2003, losing 6.4 percent of its endowment value in the bust year of 2002. Seattle Pacific, which was lodged at 398th in 1994, was mired at 575th in 2003.6 Over the same decade that Harvard and Princeton tripled their endowments, the rate of endowment growth at Wheaton was a third less, while Messiah’s grew by only 60 percent. Either because development officers at Christian colleges are unusually modest in what they ask for, or (what is more likely) donors are concluding that their dollars buy them more prestige at Harvard than Messiah, the financial base of Christian higher education seems actually to be shrinking, rather than growing. And the closure of William Tyndale College, despite a takeover by Regent University and a influx of $1 million in cash, may well be only an indication of what the lengthening financial shadows of Christian higher education are pointing toward.
As the costs of private higher education across the board soar ever upwards, and as the purposes of college education turn ever more vocational, only the most élite of private liberal arts colleges are likely to survive in their current configurations. And especially for Christian liberal-arts colleges, which are disproportionately grouped in the upper Midwest, the question will eventually be asked: Why do we need 13 Christian colleges in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois? Why, for that matter, do we need three in Pennsylvania? Even the schools which do not finally succumb to the pressures of finance and under-enrollment will still be asked whether merger and consolidation offer a better deployment of resources that are clearly strained to the limit. Inevitably, we will have to wonder whether we are better served by 130 financially edgy colleges, or fifteen combined and (hopefully) stable ones. And inevitably, too, there will be an unholy amount of jockeying among certain Christian colleges whose idea of consolidation will amount to little more than a Darwinian absorption of their lesser-endowed fellows.
What grinds this comparison in deeper is that places like Amherst, Grinnell, and Oberlin were all themselves once Christian colleges—all of them, in fact, founded in the 19th century by righteous Congregationalists who were convinced that Harvard, Yale, and the other old foundations of American higher education had gone rubbery. They are, in effect, enjoying the fat incomes that were originally designed for Christian tables.
Or perhaps (and this is more unsettling) their trajectory reveals the direction Christian higher education in America eventually goes when even modest success comes knocking at the door. I suspect that many of Christian higher education’s schools suffer most, not from lack of money or lack of management, but from a dismaying level of confusion over their exact purpose, a confusion which often begins in the sorry tale of finance that I have just recited, and ends in the loss or crippling of Christian mission. James T. Burtchaell’s sobering 1998 study, The Dying of the Light, chronicles with relentless dismay how the press of finance led to the crumbling of mission in precisely the places Oberlin, Grinnell, and Amherst once were. Until the Civil War, higher education in America was almost entirely private and Christian—not Christian in the sense of an explicit commitment to faith-learning integration, mandatory chapel and Bible courses, or any of the attributes CCCU schools today use to identify themselves as self-consciously Christian, but Christian in the sense that they had been founded by churches, were staffed by clergy and overseen by boards of clergy, and assumed that their students already possessed a Christian identity from their churches which required only a moralized liberal arts curriculum to polish up. Of the 109 undergraduate colleges in the United States in 1848, not more than ten could be classified as secular. But during the Civil War, in an effort to promote “scientific” modes of agriculture, the federal government undertook a massive legislative intervention in the form of the Land Grant College Act to finance (from the sale of federal lands) the establishment of state-owned vocational schools. In time, these vocational colleges expanded their focus to include teacher-training, engineering, and a number of other “mechanical arts.” Between 1862 and 1910, state-financed higher education posed a serious challenge to the reign of the private, church-related colleges, and the colleges responded in three ways:
(a) they turned to new sources of financial support, such as trustees, alumni, foundations, and industry, many of which required a toning-down of particular religious viewpoints if the colleges were to appeal successfully for the donations of wealthy individuals not of their particular persuasion (a Baptist college, for instance, was not likely to get much money from a Presbyterian financier if it unwisely flaunted its Baptist distinctives);
(b) they turned to new forms of governance, recruiting academics-cum-administrators rather than clergymen as presidents, and deep-pocket philanthropists as their trustees; and
(c) they turned to new forms of professionalism, as they looked to recruit ever-more prestigious faculty—faculty, unhappily, whose first allegiance was to their professional guilds or disciplines, rather than to the church that stood behind the college.7
And so, by a long process (sometimes very long: Princeton still maintained mandatory chapel for undergraduates as late as the mid-1960s), the Christian identity of places like Grinnell, Oberlin, and Amherst was steadily effaced, to the point where one can hardly recollect that they ever had any religious connections at all.
I am not sure that the same developments promise to be any less lethal to Christian higher education today. Lacking endowments sufficient to ensure fiscal stability, and finding the tuition revenue generated by increased enrollments mysteriously proving inadequate to their expenses, Christian colleges turn first to their boards of trustees or directors. Since more than three-quarters of the CCCU schools were organized under the umbrella of evangelical denominations, their boards were originally expected to contain a substantial representation of their sponsoring denominations (in at least two cases I have had direct contact with, even faculty and administration were expected to be members of that denomination). But these were exactly the trustees who were least likely to prove equal to the task of supplying budget shortfalls, and that has meant that the boards of evangelical colleges have recruited some unlikely converts to their governing agencies—individuals who are either well-endowed themselves but of meager religious profile, or else religiously sympathetic but not so well-schooled in evangelical theology as to know what part of the foot goes into the shoe first. This, then, casts board members into roles in the life of Christian colleges for which they may not be well-prepared. And that only speaks to the well-intentioned. In too many instances, board candidates are recruited without any explanation of what a board is supposed to do, recruited sometimes for the prestige they get from being a trustee, or recruited without commitment to putting time or effort into dealing with “problems.”
Boards, in order to stay on top of this managerial explosion (and also because this is the only way their business-world backgrounds have conditioned them to see matters), have increasingly turned to non-academics as their presidents—people, in other words, who have either never lived inside academe, or who have ever only held administrative or development posts in higher education, and who tend to see a college’s imperatives in business-driven, rather than mission-driven, terms. As late as the 1980s, the majority of presidents of Christian colleges were academics with terminal doctorates in some recognized discipline, while the presidents of Bible colleges were usually holders of undergraduate theology degrees and graduate education degrees. By the end of the 1990s, however, barely more than half of the Christian college presidents had a Ph.D. Only 8 percent of those were in the humanities and only 11 percent in theology or biblical studies; more than half had been career administrators. These are not prophets or the sons of prophets; they are managers.8
The same imperative that pushes Christian colleges in pursuit of managerial leadership also pushes them in pursuit of prestige faculty, who, presumably, can act as enrollment magnets (and, incidentally, as hiring trophies for administrators). We want, naturally, the best faculty talent we can get, and we want to get it from the best schools. But the “best” schools frequently turn out to be also the most secularized ones, which means that we are likely to find ourselves recruiting people who are already deeply enculturated in the value systems of élite universities, and who cannot be easily persuaded to abandon them for the missions of Christian colleges. Or else, we recruit faculty whose professional expectations have been shaped by the research university, and who experience disgruntlement and communicate disaffection when they discover the teaching loads and salaries on offer in the cash-strapped Christian colleges.
Even when we are able to recruit new Ph.D.s who can pass doctrinal muster, the passing grade is often not a high one. Lacking much theological training beyond Sunday school, faculty are often unwilling or unable to fully embrace and explain the mission of a particular Christian college. Pascal once remarked that “pious scholars” were rare, and this would not be a bad thing for search committees to commit to memory. In some cases, I have seen Christian college faculty positively pride themselves on being only “amateur” or “lay” theologians, on the grounds that they are much too committed to their disciplines or their students to acquire deep theological learning. (I have found this to be especially true in those evangelical traditions, like the Anabaptists, which have long histories of anti-intellectualism.) Unhappily, theological amateurism often becomes a vacuum into which secularism fears not to tread. In 1996, a Bethel College student, Andrea Sisam, went to the extraordinary length of suing Bethel for forcing her to view in class selections from the film The Tin Drum, which included scenes of simulated oral sex; and I remember being recruited for a senior administrative post at another Christian college, and being asked how I would respond to parents who were upset when a faculty member in the arts assigned Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs to his students.9 All of this is certainly first-rate academics; whether it is still Christian is a good question, and one which I expect was once asked at Oberlin, Grinnell, and Amherst, too, before the tide washed the questioners away.
Can Christian institutions choke on their own success? Quite possibly, and especially on the success we have most prided ourselves upon, which is student enrollments. We concentrate on the increased enrollments without also asking what it is we are increasing our enrollments of. And that may be a much more troublesome proposition than the numbers themselves. As Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton noted in 1998, “students are coming to college overwhelmed and more damaged than in the past.” More than half of the campuses Levine and Cureton surveyed reported difficulties with student eating disorders; 44 percent reported campus disruptions, 42 percent drug abuse, 35 percent alcohol abuse, 25 percent gambling, and 23 percent suicide attempts. Nearly one-third of all freshmen grew up in single-parent households; and they are driven to college, not by a passion for learning, much less truth, but by terror that without a college degree they have nothing to look forward to but lives on minimum wage. There have always been problem students; but the numbers who bring problems with them to college have grown, as have the intractability of the problems (histories of sexual abuse as children, single-parent and dysfunctional homes, chronic psychological traumas and illnesses). The less selective a college can afford to be, the more likely it will see mounting numbers of the damaged among its student population.10
On the other hand, those students who come mercifully free of such problems pose problems of their own. Today’s college student arrives on campus with expectations very different than those of a generation ago, largely because advances in information-related technology have raised those expectations to the level of “normal.” Computer systems and internet access are no longer luxuries, both for on-campus communications networks and for personal convenience; but they still cost as though they were. Ubiquitous as the internet seems to be, it is also very much an infant technological tool; connections, systems, and usage can be surprisingly fragile—and maintenance, highly expensive. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently installed software for intercepting viruses that carried a $400,000 price-tag. Just as with administrative costs, the greater the drive to enroll more students, the more expectations are laid on technology, and servicing those expectations may turn out to cost more than the gains made by enhanced enrollments.11
But more than mere problems among students, there is the cultural dilemma of what Peter Sacks savagely lampooned as The Attitude, a postmodern sensibility of “utter disengagement” which expects entertainment, is puzzled by demands for work, and which regards the reading of books or the application of reason as being nearly as foreign as the other side of the moon. Postmodernism has given us a generation steeped in “consumerism, entertainment, and entitlement,” complained Sacks, and in an institutional environment governed by managerial administration and cost-focused boards, woe to the faculty who sit lightly by these demands.12
Surely, you argue, Christian institutions should simply rebuff these ungodly attitudes as firmly as they rebuffed the ungodlinesses of earlier decades. Except that my own experience of Christian education is that rebuffs are expensive, and culture is powerful. I have seen played out before my own eyes the tendency of evangelical Christians to deplore certain behaviors, find that the deploring has only gotten them strange looks and marginalization by the dominant culture, and then discover ways of rationalizing those behaviors. A female faculty member at a Christian college in California confessed her horror to me, more than a decade ago, at how easily abortions could be procured there—and how readily parents, who liked to talk pro-life politics in public, paid for their daughters’ abortions in private. Litigation-shy administrators have turned to an evangelical version of don’t-ask-don’t-tell to deal with gay and lesbian faculty. Binge drinking is ignored by residence life directors and student-life vice-presidents who know that trustees and parents will vent their wrath on them, not the drinkers.
Even when trustees finally do attempt to intervene in a principled fashion, they are not likely to be thanked for it. When Huntington College dismissed “open theism” advocate John Sanders last fall for theological cause, the college president criticized the decision” because it “could be a blow to academic freedom.” I suppose it could. But why, in a Christian college, do we now declare that secular academic virtues are more important than questions of Christian doctrine?
“Christian colleges … profess Christian doctrine and practice as our defining feature and our primary driving force,” laments Eric Miller of Geneva College, “but a stroll through the campus bookstore, or a visit by an accrediting agency …. remind me of the extent to which we at Christian colleges, despite our clear differences of belief and behavior with our secular equivalents, swim in the same polluted waters.”13 After so much effort at creating and supporting Christian higher education, it is almost the worst judgment we could hear, and yet it springs at once to mind: why bother?
It’s the unaffected willingness of evangelicals to accommodate themselves to the spirit of the age that so deeply troubles me. I do not say this merely because I am besotted with the old wineskins. I have spent a quarter-century in Christian higher education, and with only a few sunspots of grief. It is the city of my first love, and God forbid that anyone should hear this as anything but the faithful wounds of a friend. I also am describing systemic, not personal, dilemmas, and those dilemmas are actually not all that far removed from the pressures secular liberal-arts colleges experience. But for Christian colleges, the dilemmas are complicated by the issue of faithfulness, which we gloss over to our peril, but which also has no easy solution once we trade in conviction for professionalism. At the end of the day, I would prefer conviction, even if the conviction is a little oddball, to professionalism which dies the death of a hundred moral updates.
It would be horrific to think that evangelicalism cannot keep its colleges, that what happened to Grinnell or Amherst or Oberlin—or Yale or Harvard or Dartmouth—is indicative of a deep-seated weakness in the evangelical mind that insists on playing itself out in an endless spool of accommodation and conformity. We hear the call of our Savior to be in the world, but not of it; we hear the demand of the prophets to serve God and not Baal; but we also hear the call of our cultural Sirens, and we discover that we do not believe what we hoped and thought we believed. What we believe in is management, financial survival, increased enrollments, and growing endowments, all the while crying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord is here. My friend Mark Noll made quite a sensation in 1994 when he published The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a jeremiad against evangelical anti-intellectualism; and right as he was in what he said, he may not have been right enough. What we may suffer from even more seriously, more than just a scandal of the evangelical mind, is a scandal of the evangelical heart—or, as Ron Sider has it, a scandal of the evangelical conscience, a shrinking back from the costs and penalties which a testimony against the culture of American higher education will require, a leaving of our first love. Today, our calling as evangelical Christians in higher education may be, as T.S. Eliot said, to “make perfect our wills.” Doing so may be the only hope we have of saving our minds.
Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. His book Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster) was cowinner of the Lincoln Prize, the second time he has won this annual award for the most outstanding work of scholarship on Lincoln.
1. The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s annual surveys of pay and benefits of leaders at private and public colleges and universities also include data on expenditures and revenues. See the surveys for May 5, 1993 (pp. A17-A24) and October 23, 1998 (pp. A-39-A58) for the data referred to here. This data, and the data on endowments which I have drawn from The Chronicle’s annual endowment rankings, can also be accessed through The Chronicle‘s website at www.che.edu.
2. CCCU Directory and Resource Guide for Christian Higher Education (CCCU, 2000), pp. 13-14; Peterson’s Christian Colleges and Universities (Thomson/Peterson’s, 2002), p. 1; Leo Reisberg, “Enrollments Surge at Christian Colleges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5, 1999, pp. A42-A44; Alan Wolfe, “The Opening of the Evangelical Mind,” The Atlantic Monthly (October 2000), pp. 56, 58.
3. D.G. Hart, That Old-Time Religion in Modern America: Evangelical Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (Ivan R. Dee, 2002), pp. 4-5. There are many ways to count “evangelicals,” and other sources arrive at much higher figures.
4. Neil Swidey, “God on the Quad,” Boston Globe, November 30, 2003.
5. See the statistics on these institutions in the CCCU Directory and Resource Guide for Christian Higher Education and Peterson’s Christian Colleges and Universities (2002); Melissa Morriss-Olson, Survival Strategies for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU, 1997), p. 4.
6. Justin Ball, Justin Bell et al. “The Highest-Paid Leaders and Employees at Private Institutions,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2003, pp. S14-S35; “College and University Endowments,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2004, pp. A30-32.
7. James Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches (Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 819-851.
8. James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, “The Market-Model University: Humanities in the Age of Money,” Harvard Magazine (October 1998), p. 6; John G. Plotts et al., “Career Paths of Presidents of Institutions Belonging to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities,” Research on Christian Higher Education, Vol. 6 (1999), pp. 137-146; Martin Finkelstein, “The Morphing of the American Academic Profession,” Liberal Education, Vol. 89 (Fall 2003), pp. 1-11.
9. Charlotte Allen, “Is Deconstruction the Last Best Hope of Evangelical Christians?”, Lingua Franca (December/January 2000), pp. 47-59.
10. Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton, “Collegiate Life: An Obituary,” Change (May/June 1998), pp. 14-17; Levine, “How the Academic Profession is Changing,” Daedalus, Vol. 126 (Fall 1997), pp. 6-10.
11. As it is, colleges and universities actually find it easier to raise money to construct new buildings than for the maintenance of them, and since it’s easier to defer maintenance on a dormitory than on a computer network, we are witnessing the rise of an attitude which proposes to dismiss building maintenance altogether. Build it, patch it, tear it down and replace it with another building, because it will, in the long run, be cheaper to replace it than maintain it. The cost to the quality of institutional life, however, is the creation of an atmosphere of impermanence and improvisation on a campus. “Financial Pressures Squeeze Colleges,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 19, 2003, pp. A8-13.
12. Peter Sacks, Generation X Goes to College: An Eye-Opening Account of Teaching in Postmodern America (Open Court, 1995), pp. 9, 121.
13. Eric Miller, “Alone in the Academy,” First Things (February 2004), pp. 30-34.
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