Dan Hummel:

Hello and welcome to With Faith in Mind. I'm Dan Hummel, today's host and the director of university engagement at Upper House. This episode is part of our series on Christian education at the crossroads and we're welcoming Dr. Andrea Turpin to the show. Hi, Andrea.

Andra Turpin

in.

Dan Hummel:

So today we're gonna explore the history, the long history of higher education, and particularly the role of religion in that history. I don't think we could have a better guest to help us navigate this pretty broad terrain and for many of us unfamiliar terrain. So a little about Andrea. Andrea is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University, where I guess you've taught for 10 years now, Andrea, is that right?

Andra Turpin

Yes, I started in fall 2011.

Dan Hummel:

Awesome, so over 10 years, yeah. Andrew is the author of many articles. She's the author of an award-winning book, A New Moral Vision, Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, which came out with Cornell a few years ago. And also, and this was really helpful to me, this is an article, Andrew, that you wrote a couple years ago for the handbook on higher education. And it's The History of Religion in American Higher Education. It's a 60-page tour de force. I don't even know how many, books are referenced in the bibliography

Andra Turpin

They

Dan Hummel:

of that

Andra Turpin

asked

Dan Hummel:

thing.

Andra Turpin

for that length, yes.

Dan Hummel:

It was very helpful, very informative. And she's the author of many other articles as well that span from the more academic to the more accessible. Andrea also blogs for Pathios and other things. And currently she's on a sabbatical grant for researchers from the Louisville Institute for the 2023 year to do research on another project. I think many people would want to know, Andrea. like being on sabbatical for a year? Is it, I'm sure some people might imagine you're dining in coffee houses and taking in movies in the early afternoon. Is that what it's like?

Andra Turpin

My sabbatical started January 1st because I actually have a calendar year sabbatical, which is unusual. And on January 1st, I was on a transatlantic flight and I caught COVID, so I'll let you know. What? What?

Dan Hummel:

Okay. We'll spend one more minute on the sabbatical. So of course, the sabbatical is meant to give you a break from your teaching and other duties at Baylor so you can focus on research. What's the

Andra Turpin

is

Dan Hummel:

title

Andra Turpin

correct.

Dan Hummel:

of the project you're doing

Andra Turpin

So the working

Dan Hummel:

for the

Andra Turpin

title

Dan Hummel:

year?

Andra Turpin

is a debate of their own, Women in the Fundamentalist Modernist Controversy. And the book project explores how Protestant women, and particularly Protestant women's organizations, navigated that theological and political and social controversy of the early 20th century. It's generally talked about as a tale of men yelling at each other, right? Like pastors, editors of religious journals, but. During this time, every single Protestant denomination, at least every major one, had a major women's organization dedicated to missions. That was women's ministry at the time. It was women who got together to pray for, raise money for, and learn about missions, particularly missions by women. And so they had a sort of a separate culture, and so they had unique takes on those issues. And the book explores those takes and what the effect was when people listened to them and when they did not.

Dan Hummel:

Excellent. Very interesting. I will resist from going down that rabbit hole because that's a topic

Andra Turpin

Different roads,

Dan Hummel:

I

Andra Turpin

yeah.

Dan Hummel:

find a lot of interest in. However, I do think the question of gender in higher education will come up later. So that is a tie through with your current project as well. Okay, so there's an introduction. I want to start off with one just personal question or question about how you came to this topic. So what made you interested in studying higher education as a not just to be, you know, to sort of exist in institution of higher education, but actually study it as a subject of inquiry.

Andra Turpin

So I am part of that famous joke that all historians are really writing autobiography. I was at seminary, at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, getting a master's degree in church history. And I knew that I wanted to go on and get a PhD, and I was thinking through how to do my work as a historian, as a Christian. And I was taking a course with Garth Rossell. He's a scholar of American evangelicalism. And he had assigned one of his own pieces. This is why you should always assign your own pieces in a course, I do. He'd assigned a piece that he did on Charles Finney, the great revivalist of the 19th century that is less well known for also being the president of Oberlin College and one of the pioneers of the seminar discussion method, at least in theological education. And so he wrote this piece on how Vinnie was using seminar discussion method in theological education. And for the first time, I realized you can study, studying, right? So, and he... And I was like, I wanna do this, it's so meta. And so then he recommended that I use Mount Holyoke College because it's in Massachusetts like Gordon Conwell. And so Easy Access to the Sources was founded by an evangelical woman interested in missions. And so then I read many of her letters and she did this wonderful thinking through how you could use beliefs about gender difference to advance God's kingdom if you used it to convince people that women should be educated and could do this special role. And so I was like, oh, this is fascinating. I could study myself. I can study Christian women in higher education. So maybe it was just really narcissistic, but it was this entry point into realizing, my life has this deep history. And that's how I got into it.

Dan Hummel:

That's great. And I identify with the same. I call it naval gazing. I guess autobiography is a little more elevated of

Andra Turpin

Ha

Dan Hummel:

a practice.

Andra Turpin

ha!

Dan Hummel:

But yeah, I think that's maybe that's I wouldn't say it's particularly true. There are a lot of religious historians in particular who end up studying something about the religious tradition that they grew up in. Okay, well, thanks for sharing that. We'll jump into the topic here of you've done this, teach a course that would basically be around this topic. Where would you start and what would be sort of the things you'd emphasize as just as an orientation to thinking about this big, what is now a massive industry of higher education, it's a key institution in our society, and religion, which is also a key institution in our society, but many people today might see those as separate, in some cases entirely separate, and they should But of course, if you go back historically, that's not the case. So where do you try to orient people when you try to introduce the intersection of these two major topics?

Andra Turpin

First of all, I should say that I've never taught an entire course on the history of higher education, believe it or not, but I have taught units on it that I incorporate into all my other courses. I tell my students that because this is a specialty of mine and it's unusual for a historian in some ways, I can tell them why they're there. And so

Dan Hummel:

Mmm.

Andra Turpin

I'm very interested

Dan Hummel:

Hehehe.

Andra Turpin

in this question. Why do you do what you, why are you in this chair? What made you do that? And so I think one of the important... things simply to realize for people today is that college hasn't always played the role in our society that it does now. So originally, and by originally, we're gonna go back to the colonial era. College as a concept inherited from Europe and, but very, very big priority, right? The first American college, Harvard, founded by the Puritan settlers within six years of getting here because they cared so much about an educated ministry. And at the time you went to college for one of four purposes. You wanted to be a minister, you wanted to be a doctor, you wanted to be a lawyer, or you wanted to be a quote unquote educated gentleman, part of the international community of letters that would talk through ideas and have this common set of readings. And I say a common set of readings because colleges had a set curriculum. It was largely Greek and Latin. You had to speak both to gain entrance into college. So you read a lot of the classical literature. It was believed to form your brain by doing hard things, but it was also that the text of the New Testament is in Greek, the text of medical texts were in Latin, inherited from the Middle Ages, and likewise, legal texts. And then if you ever wondered why all of the founders of the United States reference the same kinds of random Roman stories, it's because they had the same education and they all read that stuff there. about 1% of the population went to college, all men. So it was not a normal thing to do. So ministers were often honestly not as wealthy as other people, but more educated than other people in this context, in the colonial context. And in the American context, where we didn't have an established church that was the same in all the colonies, you ended up with denominational colleges functionally. So your congregationalists and... in Massachusetts, in Presbyterians in New Jersey. I myself am a Princeton graduate that was founded by Presbyterians, right? Anglicans in William and Mary in Virginia. So, but that said, all colleges were understood to serve both the church and the state. And this is an important dynamic that was present all the way through into the 20th century. So it's meant to... to do good for God, but also to do good for the people at large. And this is sort of attention. I can go on and on and on.

Dan Hummel:

Yeah.

Andra Turpin

So you might want to ask an additional clarifying question at this point about where you want me to take the story.

Dan Hummel:

Well, there's a number of threads there. And I wonder if one of them is, I'm trying to anticipate sort of, I don't know if they're necessarily myths of higher education, but just sort of assumptions about what higher education has been because of what it is now, that people might project back. And so I think one thing you just mentioned was that for at least for the 17th, 18th, maybe all the way through the 19th century, most colleges or universities were understood to be serving both, the public or the state and the church. And I wonder. I'm sitting here at UW-Madison, a public university that has a complicated history with that, but would definitely today define itself as serving the public good, would never sort of reference itself as serving any type of religious entity. Where does that, where do you see historically that development start to happen? Like, when do you start seeing different institutions charting out different missions that don't hold these things together in the same way that they did going all the way back to Harvard?

Andra Turpin

Well, in some ways, the University of Virginia, right, founded by Thomas Jefferson, and he wanted it to be more secular, but there were still, even state universities, other state universities like Wisconsin, Michigan, University of California, they had chapel. So

Dan Hummel:

Yeah.

Andra Turpin

even when it was a public university that was not associated with a particular religious denomination, While in the 19th century Protestantism was very dominant culturally in the United States, parents didn't want to send their children to an education that they would consider godless. And so state universities, they marketed themselves as being sort of broadly Christian. They were, quote, non-sectarian, not narrow, but not atheist or infidel. So it's like, your kids will go to a t-shirt. It's a chapel. They will be taught by people of good, upstanding Christian character, most of whom are, in fact, actually Christians. And so it had to do with not being affiliated with a particular denomination or church, not to having a total absence of religion as part of the experience. And there are pros and cons to that. It could be difficult for Catholic students or Jewish students. But it was a very dominant liberal broadly evangelicals shifting to liberal Protestant space, even at state universities, when they first arose in the 19th century.

Dan Hummel:

And I think there's an interesting book by a University of Virginia professor, Harry Gamble, that came out a couple of years ago called God on the Ground. And it was a history of religion at UVA.

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

And even there, so the mythos and, in fact, the reality of the sort of secular vision that Jefferson had lasts basically until Jefferson dies, more or less, which is very early in the history of the university.

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

And even at UVA, by the end of the 19th century, there's a major, the YMCA, the official student center on campus. They have

Andra Turpin

it

Dan Hummel:

a chaplain.

Andra Turpin

was almost everywhere. Like that's

Dan Hummel:

Right,

Andra Turpin

that's

Dan Hummel:

right.

Andra Turpin

what the Y did. Yes.

Dan Hummel:

Right, and they have a chapel at UVA in the late 19th century. All these things that would make you never know that there was this sort of secular vision, this sort of real secular vision in a sense of a separation that maybe Jefferson had, maybe a few other people had, but the sort of population of Virginia did not have. And I'll just say, at Wisconsin, it was a similar thing where the chapel was official until the 1870s. And they got rid of it, or they moved it to voluntary, then they got rid of it. And the people who got rid of it were doing it because they were secular. The person who actually got rid of it was a guy named John Bascom who was a minister himself, but had started developing a different way of thinking about spirituality, I guess you could say, which is something you talk about a bit in your book as well,

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

this shift from vertical to horizontal spirituality

Andra Turpin

Thank you.

Dan Hummel:

in a lot of these schools. Could you just get into that sense of, I think we're

Andra Turpin

Sir.

Dan Hummel:

tracking here, sort of what's the shift from into a more 20th century vision of education and what role does religion play? playing in that.

Andra Turpin

Sure. So there's a whole, historians love the time period between the Civil War and World War I, and I am among those historians, but particularly as it relates to the change in American higher education. So there's a ton of things that are going on after the Civil War, like the US looks up and was like, oh, lots of things. So Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859, but we were a little busy in 1859, so we noticed after the Civil War. And this raised questions about the interpretation of Genesis. And to be honest, a lot of Protestant scholars actually were fine with it and just sort of meshed it. But it raised these issues of what is the relationship between science and religion. Also, you have the rise of the research university for the first time, which Wisconsin is. Other state universities like Michigan, but also changeovers like Johns Hopkins, new upstarts, and Harvard and Princeton moving in those directions. So. This is the rise of the ideal that you don't just transmit inherited knowledge, but you learn new stuff. And in order to do that, you do it sort of dispassionately without presuppositions, what we might call the scientific method. That raises questions about how religion integrates with that. You also see the rise of disciplines. This is something we totally take for granted in college now,

Dan Hummel:

Mm.

Andra Turpin

that you have a major. The idea that you spend the first two years of your college education taking all these different courses in sort of a breadth and then you zero in, for two years in a major is a compromised position we reached in the early 20th century between two poles of the inherited system of having a set curriculum versus what Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard tried where you do nothing required. Like they're adults, they can figure it out. So then you end up with this sort of middle space of like, well, why don't we require some breadth and then allow people to specialize? because there's an explosion of knowledge that comes with the research ideal, not just in the sciences, but in history, in sociology, in politics, you have every academic discipline. So like you and I are members of the American Historical Association, right? It dates to the late 1800s. They're all founded then, because it's the rise of discipline. And one of the things that that does is there used to be this capstone course in college that tied together everything you learned from a Christian lens. But when everybody's learning something different and you're all doing it in your own way, knowledge gets much more fragmented and that's sort of a question about, well, how do you bring religion into the academic experience then as well? So there's just a lot of change in the nature of higher education and people start to think, well, what role does religion have here? And there are a lot of different answers that are offered. What you were asking me to actually answer. was that simultaneously with all of this, there was also a theological shift going on among leading Protestant scholars. From roughly speaking, evangelicalism, which would later become in the 1920s, an offshoot of that known as fundamentalism, to roughly speaking, what we call modernism, which is a particular type of, more broadly, Protestant liberalism. And the way that I explained that shift for my readers that I think is relevant to the way that leading educators approached the role of religion in higher education is as a shift from what I call vertical spirituality to what I call horizontal spirituality. So both Christians in general, particularly Protestants, believed that there is something broken in our relationship with God and in our relationship with other people. And vertical versus horizontal spirituality go about repairing it by focusing on the opposite piece. So evangelicals in the 19th century and those who continue in this belief system into the 20th century believe that the primary break is with God. So you repair that break through faith in Christ's death and resurrection on our behalf that grants us forgiveness and our break is repaired with God and then we get a new heart that overflows and love towards other people. The modernist or more liberal approach is to say what grieves God is our break in relationship with one another. So if we think carefully through how to treat one another, if we grow in love towards one another, if we think about how to create more just social relations, then we repair our breach with one another and that automatically repairs our breach with God. And so these are different approaches to how you would integrate religion into the college experience, depending on how you think you need to go about repairing that breach, about repairing the world. And I should say here, it's not that evangelicals were not concerned with social action or social justice, they actually were. They just thought that you needed to get people fixed in their hearts first in order to do that effectively. It's in the 20th century that you see that, what I consider a tragic separation between conversion and activism.

Dan Hummel:

And do you see a, is it as simple as saying that Christian higher education, what we call Christian higher education today, is the branch of that story that goes into the vertical mode and sort of prioritizes that and that the rest of higher education prioritizes the horizontal or is it more complicated than that?

Andra Turpin

I think that's broadly fair. The more complication piece is, of course, that certain types of institutions of higher education that would be considered, quote, secular now, but were state or public then, or even denominational but broad, were big spaces. So there are people in those spaces who take a variety of approaches. And the big piece here that's relevant is campus voluntary religious life. You referenced the YMCA earlier. And so even at these other institutions, I mean, there are places like upper house, right? And that's a different phenomenon that has its own history. But what students do outside of class may not be what's the philosophy of the university in general. So there are these spaces for more evangelical religion at many colleges, whether the whole college is oriented in that direction or not.

Dan Hummel:

Right, yeah, I guess I was asking, yeah, you're right. That's a good correction. So thinking from like this sort of top-down institution, there might be one story. Another one, if you emphasize sort of student life or

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

the spiritual life, and I think of just using UW as another example, geographically or architecturally, there are churches that ring this university. And some of them have quite prominent buildings.

Andra Turpin

Yes.

Dan Hummel:

And you wouldn't even, to the outsider, and I'm sure many people do confuse or sort of look up quizzically, these churches look like they're on campus because there's no clear demarcation

Andra Turpin

Yep.

Dan Hummel:

where

Andra Turpin

Yep.

Dan Hummel:

the campus ends and where the church begins. That's a product of these churches coming and serving students who... come into UW and leave as devoutly religious people, even if what they're learning at UW might challenge some of those beliefs, there's a different story happening at the ground level. And

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

that can be overlooked if you're just looking at the top-down, sort of institutional or administrative, or even what the faculty are talking about. There's often two different stories there.

Andra Turpin

I guess I would say yes. But when you're talking about the top down, which is the question you were asking,

Dan Hummel:

Mm.

Andra Turpin

if you are... One of the things I point out is if you believe that you need to repair the breach with God first, you have to have some kind of doctrinal specificity because you need to know, like, who is God and how would I repair that breach? You need less doctrinal specificity to repair breaches with other people. You need an elaborated ethical system. And so institutions that... go towards a more horizontal spirituality, often go in that direction by conviction, but also because it can be a bigger tent for students from a variety of same monotheistic religions to be welcomed in, or who disagree on different aspects of Christian doctrine, even if they're all Christians, and say, okay, well, we have this sort of ethical commitment. Our education is for the public good. You think about how what you're studying connects with that. You go to chapel, but the talks are much more broad. So religion pervades it, but it is sort of what you might see from the outside as a more gentle way, though it's not necessarily experienced with gentle if you're Jewish, right? So I mean, it's messy, but that's sort of the horizontal approach, whereas the vertical approach would probably, say, require a chapel, which might be more optional at a horizontal institution. It would likely have a course in Christian doctrine, which universities used to have, even state universities, but it was more like Christian evidences, like here's how nature points to God. But you might have more specific doctrine passed on as part of the college experience explicitly in those types of institutions.

Dan Hummel:

Yeah, and I think of at UW, the, by the way, UW used the term nonsectarian as its founding. That was its way of distinguishing itself, but it was actually competing with denominational schools. That was basically

Andra Turpin

Yep.

Dan Hummel:

what was in

Andra Turpin

Yep.

Dan Hummel:

Wisconsin in 1848. And, but this was one of the defining sort of, you could even think of it in marketing terms. Like if you want the vertical, if you want the Presbyterian take or the Methodist take, you go to Lawrence College Carroll College, if you want the sort of the non-sectarian or sort of broader approach, you come to UW. And it's an interesting way where those framings, not to just reduce it to marketing, but sort of how you'd appeal to students to come, would really shape the curriculum as well and how you talk about religion on those campuses.

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

Okay, I want to think about Christian higher education if that's a if that's sort of a framing that's Emerging in the 1920s or about that time And maybe maybe that's not the right timing, but within Christian. There's a lot of diversity and I think about Catholic and protestant

Andra Turpin

Yep.

Dan Hummel:

being quite

Andra Turpin

Yep.

Dan Hummel:

different

Andra Turpin

Yep.

Dan Hummel:

African American

Andra Turpin

Yep.

Dan Hummel:

education has its own story. How do you think about those? In relation to each other or should they not be thought of in relationship? Are we sort of much when we say Christian higher education.

Andra Turpin

So there's two answers to that question. One is what people think of when you say Christian higher education, and one is, what is Christian higher education? So

Dan Hummel:

Mm.

Andra Turpin

my personal conviction is that Christian higher education is a big tent full of experiments by people of Christian faith who are trying to think about how to do higher education as faithful believers. So it's a. It includes women's colleges in the 19th century that were founded, that's been part of my own research, for Christian purposes. It includes African-American colleges that were founded for Christian purposes. It includes Catholic colleges that were founded for Christian purposes, and it includes evangelical colleges that are founded for Christian purposes and includes denominational colleges that are founded for Christian purposes that may not identify as evangelical. So I think Christian higher education is all of that, but we think of it... as the slice of sort of evangelical colleges, I think, in a common parlance of today.

Dan Hummel:

Why do you think that is? Is it just because, well, I'll put myself, is it just because I come out of that world and so I use this general term for a more specific thing I'm referring to? Or is there a reason why those particular schools, places like Wheaton and Baylor,

Andra Turpin

Okay.

Dan Hummel:

where you're at are sort of what come to mind with Christian College? Yeah, is that accidental or is there a reason for that?

Andra Turpin

there's an organizational reason, which is the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, which I think you guys are interviewing representatives from there as well, that in the, I think, the 70s, started to get together a lot of these groups of people to have an identity together and to talk with one another and to think through issues together. So there really is an affinity. So there's an organizational reason. There is probably a political reason in the way Christianity is perceived in the public sphere, sometimes as equivalent to evangelicalism of a particular type. And so I think there's probably just a public mindset equivalency there. And possibly there is the fact that this is not true across the board. So some Catholic universities do this as well. So there are certain types of universities just... spend more time thinking about their Christian identity and theorizing it and trying to work it out and talking about that in public. And so I'd say certainly leading Catholic universities do that and certainly leading evangelical universities do that. And a lot of denominational colleges, either they're just not on the public radar, they're doing it much more privately, or they're trying to keep everybody happy and it's like, and they're just not theorizing it as actually.

Dan Hummel:

Yeah, that's interesting. I think about how we use that term sort of instinctually now. I'm gonna use it right now again, and maybe I'm rethinking that, but I did wanna ask you, just historically speaking, you can bring that up to the present. You can even talk about your

Andra Turpin

Uh huh.

Dan Hummel:

situation at Baylor. What is

Andra Turpin

Sure.

Dan Hummel:

distinct about Christian higher education? Like what would you say are the defining marks that set it apart from other types of higher education offerings? both historically and I guess up to now, what is the distinct perspective and contribution in a general sense that Christian higher education offers?

Andra Turpin

So to take it historically briefly, I will reiterate what we've talked about, that almost all colleges were Christian colleges in the United States until the late 1800s. So historically, Christian higher education is all of it, but being done in different ways. in my judgment, and here I tell my students, right, I have a seminary degree from Gordon Conwell in church history that is about half of an MDiv and additional church history coursework. And then I have a PhD from Notre Dame in American history. So I will sometimes in class because I teach at Baylor, which is a Christian university. And so I'm able to speak as a Christian as appropriate, but our students are of many faiths and none. And so I'll like physically like take off a hat and put on a different hat, put on my theologian hat. And so this is a little bit of a theologian answer rather than a historian answer. So what makes a Christian college? A Christian college is a college that is attempting to integrate the formation of its students in a holistic manner in keeping with the Christian faith. There are a lot of ways to go about that. You can, for example, and I'm a big believer in institutional pluralism. I believe that Christians ought to be salt and light in a variety of different types of institutions and that we ought to have a variety of different types of Christian institutions. So I'll talk about the advantages of different types and the approaches that they take. And this is more of a contemporary statement. So you have a very well-defined, typically small, highly elaborated statement of faith denominational style college. Think maybe Christendom. within a Catholic colleges or dort within a reformed Protestant.

Dan Hummel:

close by

Andra Turpin

And

Dan Hummel:

here by the way

Andra Turpin

what?

Dan Hummel:

only a few hours away from Madison Dord College. Or Dord University,

Andra Turpin

There

Dan Hummel:

I think that might have shifted to the University now.

Andra Turpin

you go. Or even a place like Calvin, which gave birth to an entire intellectual movement in the field of philosophy because everybody started out with certain beliefs in common. So if the student body has a certain set of beliefs in common, if the faculty has a certain set of beliefs in common, and they're a pretty well-defined set of beliefs, then you're The advantage is that you can take a lot for granted and go deep. But what you don't do is get the input from Christians or people who are not Christians who see things from other perspectives. So you have advantages and you have disadvantages to that model. And then say you have a different model that's say broadly evangelical, like a Wheaton or a Whitworth. or a messiah or an Eastern, right? So the big, broadly, big, quote unquote, broadly evangelical colleges. And then at these places, you have a statement of faith for students and for faculty, but it's less detailed. It's more essentialist. Like we're all Christians, maybe we're all Protestant Christians, depending on the institution. And so there are things you absolutely take in common and you go deeper, but you get more voices from different perspectives and they're having a conversation higher up on the spectrum, I guess. So you can't, in one sense, get as deep with as many people because you don't have the same sets of things in common, but you're likely to be more wide-ranging. And then you can go all the way to someplace like Notre Dame, which retains its Catholic identity in a variety of ways, partly having to do with the fact that the Catholic Church is an established international organization with a hierarchy.

Dan Hummel:

Mm.

Andra Turpin

So it's easier to keep a Catholic identity in some ways than a Protestant identity that doesn't have that. And they have 51% of their faculty be members of the Catholic Church. And that's how they do it. And then they offer all of this stuff on campus for the Catholic life. So every dorm has a mass. I was at Notre Dame for six years, so I experienced this myself. And so they have a certain type of conversation that's possible, like the church and the world, because the world is there and the church is there. And the other 49% are not Christians, right? Many of them are Protestants, but nevertheless, it's a different type of conversation. Baylor is, in my judgment, the only way a Protestant university can be a research university, which is here's its, and still be robustly Christian and be a research university, here's its policy. All faculty and staff are members of a Christian church or Jewish synagogue of their choice. So that means they are invested in the Christian tradition. bodily, like they show up in local worship. And that means that they can have a variety of theological and political positions. In fact, it's in some ways more politically diverse than you might get in certain secular settings, but it has the whole spectrum. And students don't have that statement of faith. So many students select in and are Christians. A third are Catholic. It's Texas.

Dan Hummel:

interesting.

Andra Turpin

And that's a fun fact for a Baptist university. But a chapel is run by Anglicans, also a fun fact. I'm Anglican, so I shout

Dan Hummel:

Thanks for watching!

Andra Turpin

this out. But students come from a variety of perspectives. And so you get a mix in the classroom of people speaking from their faith or from not their faith. It creates a different kind of position. So I guess I want to sum up, there's different aspects of being a Christian institution. One is, are your faculty Christians? And I'd say having at least some of them is essential. because minimally you want students to have resources as they are learning their intellectual fields, learning about the world, to discuss those things with someone who has a mature faith or have options on campus to do that. Another

Dan Hummel:

writing

Andra Turpin

would

Dan Hummel:

it

Andra Turpin

be

Dan Hummel:

one.

Andra Turpin

some kind of formal religious instruction. Sorry, go ahead, yeah, I'm talking too

Dan Hummel:

Yeah,

Andra Turpin

long.

Dan Hummel:

just thinking about your definition of a Christian higher education as institutions that are trying to form students within the Christian tradition, it makes sense that some of the faculty doing that forming would be bought into that

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

tradition, right? That there would be a buy-in.

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

You mentioned Baylor and its role as a research university and as a site of teaching and

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

all that other stuff. If you look at most of the schools that we call Christian colleges and universities, they tend to be pretty teaching heavy. Many of the faculty do publish

Andra Turpin

Yes.

Dan Hummel:

research, but that's usually not the primary

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

thing.

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

Is there a historical explanation? Is it as simple as it's resource intensive and so these schools just don't have the resources to dedicate to original research? Or is there a deeper explanation for why most, particularly Protestant, but I'm sure most Catholic colleges also tend to be very teaching heavy and not as research heavy as say, the Ivy League schools or major public universities.

Andra Turpin

Interesting question. When I was researching my book, my first book, I remember sitting in a bed and breakfast in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Wellesley, the women's college, is the first set of sources that I used and was in their archives. And processing some aspect of this, I remember concluding in August 2008 that the only way, to have a research university. would be to basically do what Baylor was doing. And this is a numbers game, I think straight up. So again, the more specific you make your statement of faith, the fewer people you can get to sign that in good conscience. And God does not call all of them to work at your institution, right? So some of them are going to be called to work at the University of Wisconsin or at Wheaton or not in a professional position. And it, you have to get a, to get a number of people, you actually have to broaden and broaden and broaden. And so what Baylor is doing is honestly pretty impressive because it's a 20,000 person institution where everyone goes to church in the faculty and staff. And so I think there is some lack of realism in some quarters about what you can do. given a certain size.

Dan Hummel:

interesting and it reminds me of do you know the story of Crusader U? Have you heard the story

Andra Turpin

Yes,

Dan Hummel:

of

Andra Turpin

yes I do, yeah, a

Dan Hummel:

that?

Andra Turpin

little

Dan Hummel:

So

Andra Turpin

bit.

Dan Hummel:

that's the potential university that the Billy Graham and people around him wanted to create I think in the 50s or 60s and this was going to be a top-tier research university on the I don't know who they they're probably comparing themselves to Harvard or something at the time but it was going to be very confessionally evangelical be probably even more specific in doctrine than Baylor is. And as I know the story, they basically couldn't even get this thing off the ground, in part because they couldn't agree on student life ethics. What could students do? Could they drink?

Andra Turpin

for the drink.

Dan Hummel:

Could they not?

Andra Turpin

Yeah.

Dan Hummel:

What would they wear? And it's just indicative of, man, if you can't even, it's such a narrow, it's a numbers game in that sense, which is you can't even get it off the ground because no one can agree on some very basic things. that reveal sort of the maybe the narrowness of the traditions that they were trying to tap into for that but I think of that because that's you don't hear many stories like that where there are sort of evangelicals trying to get together to build an art one a research university and maybe there's a good reason why you don't hear many of those stories because they all sort of end like that before they even get started I'm not sure

Andra Turpin

I want to reiterate that I don't think every institution should be an R1 institution. Like I said, I believe in institutional pluralism. I believe we should have small,

Dan Hummel:

Yeah.

Andra Turpin

robust denominational colleges alongside that.

Dan Hummel:

Yeah. Well, I want to ask just a few more questions. One of them is returning to our original setting of like, we've been talking as if hopefully it's a new student or someone not familiar with this history of higher education can sort of follow along with the conversation. What is, I assume you answer this question a lot, what is the use of knowing a history like this? As we're sitting here in 2023 thinking about, higher education along this series that we're doing, what's the use of knowing sort of this deeper history of where higher education has come from in the US and where in particular Christian higher education has come from?

Andra Turpin

I became an American historian at all because of this conviction, that it's so easy for all of us, and college students in particular, to assume that the way things are is the way they've always been and the way they should be. And when you look back at American history, you can say, oh, wait a minute, the way things are is because people made a series of decisions in response to certain circumstances, and we ended up with this. And we need to know that so that we can fight to keep the good and fight to change the bad. The good's not just gonna sit there and keep there if you don't fight for it. And the bad will just keep on going if you don't change it. So having that kind of perspective helps you understand, it expands your mind. Wait, things don't have to be like this. They weren't always like this. They could be some other way. Which is not to say we should go back to some golden era. think anything was perfect in the past either. But it gives us fodder for creative thinking, for, okay, what, oftentimes people have had these conversations before, like, what should higher education be about? How does Christianity relate to it? Is it better done in a public setting as one of many options in a pluralistic sort of way? Is it better done in a private setting? Again, my thought is both, right? But that's my take. So that perspective allows us to think creatively about the present. And one of the big issues of the present is that is the cutting of the humanities. In many institutions, the utilitarianism direction to higher education, which is stated more sympathetically has to do with how expensive it's gotten. and the desire for an ROI, a return on investment on a very expensive degree, you wanna be able to turn that into some kind of money unless you came from money.

Dan Hummel:

Hehehe

Andra Turpin

And that's fair, it's part of the justice of higher education is wanting it to serve people from a variety of backgrounds, and I'm a big believer in that. So, the removal, this is... In his new sort of redone version of Soul of the American University, George Morrison puts this issue forward, and I think he does it in a good way, that the conversation, right, when religion was removed as the unifying factor, because people didn't agree on it broadly enough in culture anymore, in higher education, we were left with this gap of like, okay, like, what is the moral purpose? Like, what are we training people to do in a good way? And so the people that I talk about in the late 1800s, early 1900s, very much oriented like your education is for the public good and they were channeling men and doing this kind of public good and women are doing that kind of public good. And I talk about the details of that, but late at least they were channeling people into doing the public good, right? Later people, they gave up on that in some ways. And there's a value of pluralism now in a good way in higher education in learning to respect. people from a variety of different backgrounds and granting equal advancement. But beyond that, we don't have an articulated common vision. And I think realizing that people tried for that in the past, that it's something higher education has been about, it is something that Christian institutions of higher education or Christian groups within institutions of higher education can offer, perhaps in a non-combative way, a vision of how holistically forming young adults and of how advancing knowledge can contribute to the public good in some kind of a way that is more purposeful than, well, y'all just go find a job.

Dan Hummel:

You know, when that music to my ears, that's how we often frame what we're doing at Upper House.

Andra Turpin

Good.

Dan Hummel:

Though I will say there's a there's a humility to that too when you go when you when you understand the history that there have been people basically I don't want to reduce the change over time, but there are people who basically come up with ideas, critiques of the university and ideas about how to fix it, every generation. And so that's one thing

Andra Turpin

Yes.

Dan Hummel:

I've noticed

Andra Turpin

Yes.

Dan Hummel:

is

Andra Turpin

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Dan Hummel:

we are nothing new, what we're doing here in the 21st century, where often the debate lines are a little different or the topics are a little different. But some of these issues have been perennial or at least deeply embedded in higher education for a very long time. Which can both

Andra Turpin

Mm-hmm.

Dan Hummel:

make you feel humble and in some ways, I don't know that like we're not at some new ultimate crisis point. It's just

Andra Turpin

Every generation

Dan Hummel:

sort of a new iteration

Andra Turpin

thinks there's a crisis in higher education. Absolutely, yes.

Dan Hummel:

Right, right, right. And that's not to dismiss that there are real problems right now, but it is to say, keep it in context. Okay, I'll end with this question. You talked a bit about some of the sort of concerns you have about where higher education is now. Is there one bright spot, and maybe you can either go broad higher education or just Christian higher education. One trend that you find very encouraging since your time teaching or as a historian, one thing that you would, you know, sort of encourage the higher education space in general to continue doing the way it's doing. Is there anything that comes to mind?

Andra Turpin

will talk about Christian higher education specifically in that answer. And there is a, there's a lot of contentiousness politically among Protestant Christians about diversity. But one of the real strengths that I have seen, I'd say even in the last 10 years, I mean, again, this is in my setting at Baylor, but also across different institutions of Christian higher education, is that Christian higher education can at its best serve as a location where Christian scholars from a variety of different backgrounds, racial backgrounds, men and women together, people from different countries, people from different Christian traditions can get together in the same department, in the same institution, and talk together, and think together. And that is a locus for the vision that we see in Revelation of people from every tribe and nation and tongue coming together to praise God and each bringing, and all the nations bringing their wisdom into the heavenly city, each bringing a different perspective on their experience with God and their understanding of God's world and talking together. And the church is stronger for diversity. This is the Paul, the... the argument that Paul makes when he describes the body of Christ in each of us is different parts. And churches can get ghettoized and Christian higher education can be an opportunity for people from a variety of churches to come together. And I would say that I have seen that taking place increasingly over the last decade.

Dan Hummel:

Thank you, Andrew. That's a good note to end on. We endorse that here at Upper House as well. So thank you for your time. Thank you for the work you do and for giving us a helpful perspective on the history of higher education in this series.

Andra Turpin

My pleasure.