My plane touched down just before midnight at Entebbe airport, by the shores of Lake Victoria, on a warm humid evening in May 2013. My host grabbed my suitcase and walked me through a drab, tired-looking airport terminal and out to our waiting vehicle in a dimly lit parking lot. I had arrived in Kampala, Uganda for a four-day visit to Uganda Christian University.
Higher Education in Development: Lessons from Sub Saharan Africa
Information Age Publishing
300 pages
$45.55
The year before, I had taken a very different trip. Exploring the epicenter of the “digital tsunami” forecasted to revolutionize higher education, I had journeyed to Silicon Valley and toured the gleaming, gun-metal gray halls of Apple’s world headquarters in Cupertino, California. At the time, talk of the digital revolution was everywhere. Experts predicted the end of the traditional university as the work of the teacher is absorbed by online “facilitators,” students cobble together their own customized education like they assemble playlists on their iPod, and universities survive as digital dispensers of education rather than residential learning communities.
That rhetoric hasn’t disappeared, but it does seem a bit more muted. Online education continues to expand, and moocs grab the headlines, but the rate of growth in online degrees has slowed. Moreover, recent events at Amherst, Duke, and Harvard indicate that professors are increasingly willing to challenge the growth of online educational consortia. While professors generally are open to adopting digital methods, the notion of moocs replacing traditional education anytime soon seems a bit overblown.
What many students and their parents are looking for in a college is not simply a degree but a fully-orbed college experience that shapes them as intellectual, emotional, and spiritual persons. Just as the publishing industry seems to be reaching a balance between electronic and paper books, I suspect that higher education in the U.S. may be arriving at a blend between digital learning and the old-fashioned sort. There are many varieties of higher education, and the “full-service” model that private Christian colleges offer will, I believe, adapt to and survive the digital revolution.
But there is another revolution currently afoot: the explosive growth of higher education around the world. In 1900, there were about half a million people enrolled in colleges and universities. In 2000, there were 100 million. As the economies of the developing world ramp up, they have created a nearly insatiable demand for higher education, especially in the Global South. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the number of university students has risen from 800,000 in 1985 to three million in 2002. Moreover, as governments fail to keep up with demand, the number of private universities has climbed rapidly. In Africa, over thirty percent of the student population is enrolled in private institutions.
A footnote to this growth has been the rapid increase of Christian higher education in the developing world. As Christianity continues to expand in the Global South, Christian universities are growing accordingly. Of the 595 Christian universities outside the U.S. and Canada, thirty percent of them were started since 1980. 138 new Christian universities have been started since 1990, and 46 of them are in Africa.
As our Christian universities in the U.S. cope with the Great Recession, one may wonder whether we are destined to become a backwater of a global Christian college movement centered in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. If these demographic trends mean anything, what happens at places such as Uganda Christian University may be more important to the future of Christian higher education than the next gadget devised by techies in Cupertino.
So when my friend Steve Beers, vice president of student development at John Brown University in Arkansas, invited me a year ago to join a team of educators visiting Uganda Christian University, I eagerly enlisted.
I needed some background reading, and Higher Education in Development: Lessons from Sub-Saharan Africa seemed a logical place to begin. The authors, Kate Ashcroft and Philip Rayner, have spent years working in African higher education. They seek to use their experience to help those wanting to develop higher education in this region to be more aware of the dilemmas Africans face and more sensitive to, as they put it, the “complexity of the development worker’s task.”
They begin by chronicling the dramatic growth of higher education globally but most dramatically in Africa—a process called “massification” in higher education parlance. They give more attention, however, to the particular challenges that universities in Africa face in light of their rapid expansion in nations beset by poverty, inefficiency, and government corruption.
The challenges are cultural as well as financial. Because of the dominance of the English language in African higher education, many qualified students from tribal backgrounds who are not fluent in English struggle to succeed academically. Also, the affluence of the West creates a “brain drain” as African universities struggle to retain highly qualified PhDs on their faculties. Moreover, while the authors point out that Africa urgently needs workers with critical and creative thinking skills, university pedagogy typically consists of lectures and rote memorization of facts.
The book is filled with data, case studies, and recommendations, the implications of which are generally commonsensical but not illuminating. The authors do better when they delve into issues of cultural translation. They advocate “reflective practice” for Western educators in Africa, who should base their actions on deep enquiry into the cultural context. They caution educators to keep a sense of open-mindedness and to be aware of the long-term responses to their interventions. “You can never be the ‘expert’ from whom others should expect to learn the truth,” they caution, “but only an evermore expert facilitator of development, working with people who have as much to contribute as you do.” Good advice for a newbie heading to East Africa for the first time, as I was last May.
A book just published by Eerdmans, Christian Higher Education: A Global Reconnaissance, is a must for anyone interested in this ongoing “revolution.” Edited by Joel Carpenter, director of the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity at Calvin College, along with Perry Glanzer and Nicholas Lantinga, this book is a collaborative project by scholars in cooperation with the International Association for the Promotion of Christian Higher Education (iapche), which was initiated in 2009 in response to the rapid growth of Christian universities around the world. It offers eleven case studies of Catholic and Protestant institutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as an analysis of the state of Christian higher education in its older centers in the U.S., Canada, and Europe; introductory and concluding essays bookend the case studies.
In his introduction, Carpenter discusses the educational challenge of Christian universities that adopt the traits of the private, career-driven universities that are expanding across Africa and India today, including a reliance on part-time faculty, narrowly focused majors, and hierarchical structures more appropriate to corporations than universities. He concludes, “So we see the values of higher education shifting from public good to private gain, from formation to information, from perspective and judgment to skills and techniques.”
In their concluding essay, Glanzer and Carpenter point out the threat that governments pose for emerging Christian universities. Some African governments are implementing non-discrimination policies that require Christian universities to accept Muslim students, and Christian universities in India are threatened with persecution for violating “anti-conversion” laws. Moreover, Christian universities in developing countries often face pressures to secularize as governments become increasingly aware of their potential for providing quality training for an educated workforce. As relatively young institutions in rapidly-changing nations, these universities will struggle to balance the call for what Glanzer calls “redemptive engagement” in their society while retaining their distinctive Christian identity over and against that society.
If one seeks a microcosm in which to witness the globalization of Christian higher education firsthand, it would be hard to do better than Uganda Christian University. The university, governed by the Anglican Church, emerged out of the William Tucker Theological College, which had been established in 1913. Despite only offering accredited non-theological degree programs since 1997, it now enrolls over 12,000 students across five campuses, including 6,000 students on its main campus in Mukono, outside of Kampala.
The university’s vice chancellor (essentially equivalent to the president of an American university), Dr. John Senyonyi, is a visionary leader who came into contact with members of the U.S.-based Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) several years ago. Concerned about the potential for secularization as the university expanded into nursing, engineering, and other programs, Senyonyi believed that the best antidote was to employ a Christian worldview approach to education that is common in the CCCU, one which attempts to integrate faith and learning in every academic discipline.
Accordingly, Uganda Christian University joined the CCCU as an international affiliate member and has implemented a “Christian foundations” curriculum that includes required courses in Bible, Christian Ethics, and Christian Worldview. Recently, Senyonyi created a committee on the Integration of Faith, Learning, and Service to embed integration in the university culture. To launch this new committee, he invited a team of U.S. educators led by Steve Beers to conduct faculty and staff workshops on the topic.
Thus, I found myself in Uganda in last spring (which means little on the equator), eager to do my part to fulfill Dr. Senyonyi’s vision, but also to see how our American educational models and cultural forms transfer to African soil. I disappointed my hosts immediately upon arrival: It seems that in Uganda, the title “provost” refers to a high official in the Anglican Church. My hosts were expecting a venerable personage in clerical robes, and instead they got a middle-aged guy in khakis and Adidas Sambas. Having failed to live up to my billing as a crony of the Archbishop of Canterbury, I then set about offending as much of the university campus as possible: On our first free afternoon I decided to go for a run. Dr. Beers had assured me that despite strict cultural mores against wearing shorts, doing so on the campus running track is acceptable. Of course, getting to the track is another matter. Unaware that the accepted practice is to wear sweat pants to the track first, I jogged from our guest house to the athletic field, my pasty white Michigan legs attracting everyone’s attention. I was obviously a far cry from any “provost” that my Ugandan hosts had encountered before.
Fortunately, things went better once we settled in to our main task of discussing Christian higher education. In good culturally sensitive fashion as recommended by Ashcroft and Raynor, we crafted our visit in terms of mutual dialogue, listening, and collaboration. That, however, wasn’t what our hosts expected. At the Sunday morning church service, Vice Chancellor Senyonyi introduced us as a team that had come over to “train” faculty and staff in Christian worldview integration. And despite the fact that the members of the Faith, Learning, and Service Committee have academic credentials just as strong as our own, that seemed to be their expectation as well. Mark Twain’s definition of an expert as an ordinary fellow from another town seemed particularly appropriate here.
In our ensuing discussions, we discovered that the challenges facing Uganda Christian University are, by and large, the same ones that we face in our own Christian colleges, just on a larger scale. Having grown so quickly, UCU relies heavily on part-time professors, most of whom have had little exposure to how their Christian faith might affect their discipline. Moreover, salaries for full-time professors are alarmingly low (an issue that is occasionally mentioned by my faculty as well). Many students come to UCU for the excellent nursing and business programs and have little interest in Christian education. The differences are sharpest in classroom technology: while we in the U.S. complain when our servers are not lightning-fast, the classrooms at UCU are equipped with chalkboards and a wooden lectern.
The workshop began promptly at 8:30 a.m., even though only about a quarter of the event’s 200 participants had arrived by that time. We opened with singing and prayer, and the room gradually filled up. As the first presenter from our team, my task was to provide an introductory overview on Christian worldview and integration. My friend Steve, supportive as always, encouraged me to “just get on base.” I sought to keep the session practical, with illustrations drawn from college athletics as well as academic disciplines. The audience seemed engaged and receptive, although my PowerPoint slide depicting the optical illusion of an old lady and young woman so intrigued them that I was in danger of losing momentum halfway through my lecture.
In the following sessions, our team members presented on topics such as student spiritual formation, faculty/staff hiring and development, and fostering student engagement in the classroom. Judging by the vigorous informal discussions that took place during breaks, it seems that the workshop accomplished its intended purpose.
On my late-night flight out of Entebbe, I reflected on why, even aside from the friendly hosts and fresh avocado at every meal, my visit to UCU was so invigorating. Leading a workshop at an African university, where the concepts of Christian worldview and integration are fresh and eagerly welcomed, is a heady and reinvigorating experience. At places such as UCU, there is a sense of energy and idealism about the future, despite the daunting challenges. As Carpenter remarks in his introduction to the Global Reconnaissance essays, “At Christian universities in the United States, we often worry about spreading ourselves too thin, so we tend to put some of our more ambitious dreams on hold. Yet I look at my African and Asian colleagues and marvel at their vision, risk-taking, and creative energy.” Such creative energy, and a sense that the Jell-O is still in a liquid state, holds a deep attraction to Western educators accustomed to launching bold initiatives that languish in committees.
At the same time, heeding Ashcroft and Rayner’s words of caution, I wonder about the extent to which the “partnership” between U.S. and African Christian universities is a one-way street. Are we simply exporting Western models of higher education rooted in the ideas of some Dutch Calvinists from the late 19th century? Ironically, a week after my visit to Uganda Christian University, the annual conference of iapche took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan. At a session on challenges and opportunities in Africa, participants raised some trenchant questions: What is truly distinctive about African Christian higher education? Given the social challenges facing the continent, would greater emphasis on problem-based learning, as advocated by Nicholas Wolsterstorff and others, be a more effective way to integrate faith and learning? Perhaps African universities could mentor their American counterparts on how best to integrate not just faith and learning, but faith, learning, and service.
I also wonder whether our influence and actions in places such as Uganda, well-intentioned as they may be, might actually hamper the ability of African educators to develop such a distinctive brand of education. At one of the iapche sessions, one of my hosts from Uganda Christian University, who traveled to Grand Rapids for the conference, explained UCU’s “foundations” curriculum. During the subsequent discussion, a scholar from the Catholic University in Nairobi, Kenya, observed that their curriculum was quite similar and suggested that the two universities have further discussions and dialogue. Ironically, UCU’s interactions with Christian universities in the U.S. may have led it away from potential partnerships with fellow Christian universities on its own continent.
Such questions are beyond the expertise of an American provost who has neither clerical vestments nor much experience in African culture, but I look forward to exploring them in the years ahead. While the “digital revolution” discussion can sometimes lead to dry conversations about Moodle and faculty-student ratios, it’s hard not to get excited about the explosion of global higher education and the restless ferment of new ideas being generated. Hopefully the future of Christian higher education will resemble not only a high-tech conference room in Cupertino but also a hot, bustling classroom in Kampala.
Rick Ostrander is provost at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His most recent book is Reconsidering College: Christian Higher Education for Working Adults (ACU Press).
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