Julie Ooms

Introduction

Julie Ooms

This past, pandemic-complicated semester, one of my Honors students called Socrates a “soulful Greek philosopher” in a paper about the purpose of argument and thinking. I love this endearingly awkward little phrase; I know exactly what she means. Socrates, as a philosopher and interlocutor, was deeply concerned with the soul—both his own and others’—and whether it was allied to virtue or ensnared in vice. In the Gorgias, Socrates argues that no human work can be truly an art, can truly advance truth and justice, unless it first considers how and whether it affects the shape and welfare of the human soul. Thus, the makeup artist, whose work only enhances the surface appearance, merely performs a knack; the gymnastics instructor, whose work actually strengthens the body and renders it more beautiful, practices an art. The rhetorician, who seeks to persuade others for reasons of political expediency rather than truth, performs a knack, and twists the soul; the philosopher, whose first concern is the truth, practices an art, and perfects the soul by training it in the pursuit and practice of virtue (27). Teaching, rightly viewed, is not a knack but an art. Instructors at Christian institutions of higher education must be, at root, concerned with the shaping and welfare of our students’ souls. We are committed not only to training them in skills but to shaping them in their pursuit of virtue toward “deeper moral reflection and self-examination,” as Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung writes in Glittering Vices (10). But our commitments are often at odds with the spirit of our age, a spirit that emphasizes what is expedient over what is true and encourages students to pursue successful lives as if they are the same as good ones. This phenomenon is hardly new, or even phenomenal (Socrates’ dialogue partners, in the Gorgias and elsewhere in Plato’s work, articulate similar views). What should give us pause (at the very least) is how often Christians— particularly Christian institutions of higher education—lose sight of the pursuit of virtue in order to pursue success. Last year, a month or two before the reality of the COVID-19 set in for Americans (and American higher education), I interviewed David Kinnaman, the president of Barna, about current trends in Christian higher education for an article on “The Promise and Paradox of Christian Higher Education” for Christianity Today. His research has shown that Christian students and parents do not differ much from nonreligious students when it comes to the reasons they choose to come to college and where they choose to attend. Rather than being drawn to Christian higher education because it will help them strengthen their faith, seek truth, or take classes in a variety of subjects from professors committed to the integration of faith and learning, they are instead eminently, understandably, and mercilessly practical. Higher education is, for them, motivated primarily by earning potential and leadership opportunities; their imagined future is that of the successful wage-earner. And while there is nothing

wrong with wanting to find meaningful work that will afford one the ability to provide for oneself and one’s family (as well as pay back one’s student loans), the limits of this imagined future are far narrower than those many instructors in Christian higher education want their students to envision. It is easy, and may even seem necessary, however, to allow economic expediency to sideline the pursuit of virtue, particularly as Christian higher education institutions face extreme pressure to somehow grow enrollment or else close their doors. The COVID-19 pandemic has increased this pressure. In an article last updated on August 10, 2020, Liam Adams reported for Christianity Today that “evangelical colleges and universities have eliminated more than 230 faculty and staff positions,” most citing the pandemic in addition to other “ongoing financial concerns.” One of these eliminated positions belonged to a graduate school classmate of mine, Jeffrey Bilbro, who was fired after teaching for eight years (and earning tenure) at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. Eric Miller writes at Mere Orthodoxy that, if Bilbro’s firing was somehow the sad result of financial necessity, it is also emblematic of a dangerous, scandalous, worldly, even vicious (as opposed to virtuous) kind of thinking:

Whatever goods those [capitalist] arrangements have delivered, they do not include the cultivation of minds that reach toward the triune God, that know themselves only in relation to God, and that see all in light of an ancient garden, a coming Jerusalem, and a towering cross. Such coordinates are gone, replaced by algorithms and stock shares and plastic cards and sleek screens: touchstones of what we might call the market mind—in a decidedly jejune use of the term. The market mind is not the Christian mind. And it’s the market mind that students come to college to gain (whether they want to or not), and for one obvious reason: They believe they need it. That is why “The market made me do it” has become the excuse that covers every sin, whether it’s voting for a candidate or tearing up the earth or terminating the tenure of an unusually talented, devoted, accomplished professor.

Failure to consider economic realities, and failure to steward the financial resources Christian colleges and universities are given, is a failure of wisdom, and a failure to exercise virtues like temperance and prudence. But giving oneself— and the institution one serves—over to what Miller calls “the market mind” is to allow one to be shaped by forces often antithetical to the overarching purpose of the Christian higher education institution—in other words, to act viciously, not virtuously. At the same time that Christian higher education is going through both an identity and an economic crisis, the way many Christian educators consider the integration of faith and learning has shifted quite emphatically toward the very kinds of character-shaping, virtue-cultivating practices that a “market mind” toward higher education cannot hope to encourage. Bilbro himself, a product,

like me, of Christian higher education from undergrad through graduate school, responded to his own firing with a spirit of hope, contrasting this implicitly with a market mind:

Even those of us who have—or who had—the privilege of earning a paycheck for learning and teaching have always done our real work for love, not money. In being dispossessed of external rewards, I have been reminded that, as [Zena] Hitz demonstrates, “contemplation in the form of learning” is a human good open to all, not just professional professors.

Bilbro’s argument is evidence not just of his own thoughtfulness but of the learning communities that shaped him: communities, like those I have been blessed to have been a part of and hope to provide for my students, that regard learning not merely (or even primarily) as an accumulation of marketable skills but as a practice that forms our character and guides us in the cultivation of virtue. This practice is one of love, “an appetite for learning,” as Paul Griffiths notes, characterized by “closer cognitive intimacy with creatures understood exactly as creatures, which is to say as gifts from the Lord, knowable and lovable exactly as such” (109). And so, it seems, we stand at a sort of intellectual crossroads. That, or we find ourselves in a position of having to make oil and water mix if Christian institutions of higher education are to continue to speak, and cultivate students who will speak, into whatever cultural zeitgeist we find ourselves within. In one vessel is oil: not only the dangers of the “market mentality” (and its prevalence among our students and their parents) but the very real financial, enrollment, pandemic-related, and other difficulties that make such a mentality seem so inevitable. In the other is water, what many of our institutions agree is the larger purpose of Christian higher education: the moral formation of students’ souls toward virtue and the service of the Lord. Such formation, we hope, will undergird, not be undermined by, each student’s approach to the marketable skills he or she must necessarily develop. I cannot produce a successful emulsion in these brief pages. Neither, I should note, can any of the four authors whose articles follow this introduction. Together, however, our individual explorations of how virtue can be cultivated in Christian higher education can help develop new—and remind us of old—recipes. At the very least, they can help us articulate again and again the formative nature of education, the art (not knack) of teaching, and the “soulful” nature of our interactions with our students, our colleagues, and our own disciplines. Kyle A. Schenkewitz’s article opens this issue. In it, he discusses the importance of intellectual humility as a guiding virtue for the academic community, specifically for teachers and students in Christian higher education. His exploration of intellectual humility begins with its history and ends with an emphasis on how it fosters interdependence between students and teachers, both of whom foster and model intellectual humility for each other in the classroom and in the broader world.

D. Glenn Butner provides another explicitly pedagogical argument in his study of grading curves. Butner argues that retroactive curves, which allow students to improve their scores over time, help students cultivate virtue because they foster habits that not only give students better study skills but can cultivate a deeper love of learning. Butner’s framing of retroactive curves as aids in the formation of virtuous habits (rather than the development of pragmatic skills alone) can help instructors in all disciplines reframe their own grading practices. Moreover, they can equip instructors to help their students reframe their study habits in ways that align more explicitly with the greater, deeper purposes of Christian higher education. Zachary Beck’s article discusses the pitfalls, as well as the significance for Christians, of reading—not just of reading, or of choosing what to read, but of learning how to read. Borrowing both from Church fathers and from ReaderResponse theory, Beck argues that Christian readers must be trained in virtue by the interpretive communities in which they live, communities grounded in the Church (and in their churches) as well as the classroom, before they engage in interpretation of texts. How we read, Beck argues, is as important, if not more important, than what we read; the texts we read can help us cultivate virtue within ourselves only if we approach those texts as readers already steeped in communities that have shaped and continue to shape us in virtue. Steven Petersheim’s article returns readers to the overarching concerns of what the identity of the Christian institution of higher education has been and will be. Will we reduce our institutions to credentialing programs, he asks, or will we keep to the essential task of offering something both deeply Christian and unique in the broader landscape of higher education? Petersheim ultimately argues that Christian colleges and universities are uniquely suited to help students engage questions of life purpose and meaning. Such institutions, he proposes, should offer first-year seminars that provide students with a holistic vision for their education and, in doing so, give them a framework for not only developing but valuing intellectual virtues in the context of Christian community. We live and teach in challenging times. Truly, calls to refocus the gaze of Christian higher education on the cultivation of virtue, first, and on the development of marketable skills as only one outgrowth of virtuous habits of mind and body, are difficult to justify when the continued existence of many of our institutions is under threat. But it is essential to recognize that these very circumstances make such a refocus more, not less, important, and not only for those tempted by the “market mindset.” Those of us who might be tempted to think primarily in esoteric terms rather than pragmatic ones, as well, can be brought back down to earth through the cultivation of virtue in our classrooms and ourselves. Our habits of mind and of body, cultivated both inside and outside of the classroom, help us and our students to be more “soulful,” and to act virtuously in all of life, for our own spiritual growth and the welfare of our neighbors.

Works Cited

Adams, Liam. “Hundreds of Positions Eliminated at Evangelical Colleges and Universities.” Christianity Today, 10 August 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/august/christian-collegecuts-bethel-harding-john-brown-cccu.html, accessed 19 October 2020. Bilbro, Jeffrey. “Going Dark.” Breaking Ground, 29 September 2020, https://breakingground.us/goingdark/?fbclid=IwAR1rk9Uti5nWnaaFzNZLOJ0iPIXCqeae-UqpthifcCbZlNTtwZ1vVmk9gc, accessed 19 October 2020. Griffiths, Paul J. “From Curiosity to Studiousness: Catechizing the Appetite for Learning.” Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith & Learning, edited by David I. Smith and James K. A. Smith, Eerdmans, 2011, 102-122. Konyndyk DeYoung, Rebecca. Glittering Vices. Brazos, 2009. Miller, Eric. “The Market Made Me Do It: The Scandal of the Evangelical College.” Mere Orthodoxy, 23 September 2020, https://mereorthodoxy.com/market-made-scandal-evangelicalcollege/?fbclid=IwAR3VXNS0ABXTHl35fXUOM71YDWdYOq24QC_HXxQI2t2woPRzVpDU1cJAA, accessed 19 October 2020. Ooms, Julie. “The Promise and Paradox of Christian Higher Education.” CT Creative Studio, 20 April 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/partners/higher-education/promiseand-paradox-of-christian-higher-education.html, Christianity Today, accessed 19 October 2020. Plato. Gorgias. Translated by W. C. Hembold, Prentice-Hall, 1997.