Grove City College loves the marching band’s trumpet line. As the faculty process into the college chapel for the opening convocation, the trumpet line heralds the beginning of the academic year with Ralph Herman’s Trumpet Fanfares. As faculty and students process into graduation, the trumpet line announces the end of the academic year with the same melody. What actually happens inside the classrooms of a Christian liberal arts college like Grove City merits an even greater celebration.
A brief review of what Grove City means when it claims to be a Christian liberal arts college may help clarify some of the recent confusion about the purpose of the college. Grove City is not a trumpet line with everyone playing the same note. In fact, the college Bulletin explicitly rejects such a perspective as contrary to the stated purposes of a genuine Christian liberal arts education: “Rather than political, ideological, or philosophical agendas, objective truth continues as the goal of liberal learning.”
The Vision, Mission, and Key Values of a Christian Liberal Arts Education
The recently revised vision statement clearly states that the college is committed to being a Christian institution: “Grove City strives to be a highly distinctive and comprehensive Christian liberal arts college of extraordinary value. Grounded in permanent ideas and traditional values and committed to the foundations of free society, we develop leaders of the highest proficiency, purpose, and principles ready to advance the common good.”[1] The college’s other official statements—its mission statement and five values—outline how the college aspires to fulfill this vision. Grove City, the mission statement reads, “equips students to pursue their unique callings through a Christ-centered, academically excellent, and affordable learning and living experience.” The college’s key values are faithfulness, excellence, community, stewardship, and independence. Faithfulness is particularly relevant to what happens inside the college’s classrooms: “By God’s grace, we remain committed to the same Christian faith embraced by the College’s founders and to seek, teach, and apply biblical truth in all that we do. While we continuously adapt our efforts in relation to the realities and challenges of this world, we serve a God who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”[2]
Context is Crucial
Christian liberal arts colleges like Grove City enjoy a unique place in American higher education today. Some people, often well-meaning, project assumptions onto Grove City about what they think a Christian college should be. Sometimes these expectations are not grounded in historical fact or a firm understanding of how the college defines the purposes of a Christian liberal arts education. Consequently, a brief review of the historical background and contemporary context for Christian higher education can help us appreciate Grove City’s distinctive mission.
Grove City College, like most other colleges founded in the 19th century, has modest origins. In 1876, local residents established Pine Grove Normal Academy to train public school teachers and to prepare its graduates for a regular four-year college. They recruited Isaac Ketler to serve as its principal. In 1884, Ketler turned the preparatory school into Grove City College with the generous support of local residents.[3]
When the college opened in 1884, the trustees defined it as “a Christian but undenominational institution of learning.”[4] When they revised the college’s charter 10 years later the trustees declared that Grove City is “an undenominational but evangelical Christian school.” By using the term “undenominational,” the trustees were explaining that the college was not under the direct authority of the local presbytery, the regional synod, or general assembly of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. Although Ketler was a Presbyterian minister, the charter stipulated that no more than 10 of the 30 trustees could be clerics. The charter also stated that it would admit students “without regard to creed or religious belief” and hire faculty “without regard to creed or religious belief.”[5] Given the fact that Protestants dominated the region as well as much of late 19th-century higher education, the trustees could assume that almost all those interested in teaching at or attending the college would be Protestants.
While nominally non-denominational, Grove City College was in effect a de facto mainline Presbyterian college in its early years. In 1909, for instance, Ketler wrote the wealthy Presbyterian and philanthropist L. H. Severance to ask him to donate to the college. While describing the college as “undenominational,” he hastened to add that “the institution was founded and is maintained by Presbyterians largely, and we have always been in the most sympathetic relations with the Presbyterian Church, and we have also sent a great many men into the ministry of other churches.”[6]
During the 20th century, the secularization of American higher education weakened Christianity’s influence on the leadership, intellectual life, and curriculum of many colleges and universities. Many church-related and private colleges emulated elite major research universities in the process of secularization. Christianity did not disappear, but it was typically restricted to the extracurricular life of students. Some schools maintained certain formalities, such as mandatory chapel or Bible classes, well into the 1960s. But eventually, even the symbolic vestiges of a bygone day when Christianity—be it Protestant or Catholic—dominated higher education were eventually dropped. Princeton University, for example, required freshmen to attend Sunday morning worship services as late as 1964. Until J. Howard Pew, the president of Grove City College’s Board of Trustees, hired Charles McKenzie as president in 1971 with a plan for reviving the place of Christianity in the life of the college, Grove City was well on its way of becoming just another high-quality liberal arts college with a Christian heritage that had little bearing upon the intellectual life of the campus.
As “an undenominational but evangelical Christian school,” Grove City stood in the mainstream of American higher education in the late nineteenth century. Today, self-identifying Christian schools occupy a rather small space in that landscape. The single most important way that Christian institutions advance their mission is by hiring Christian scholars who meaningfully integrate faith and learning in their scholarship and teaching. Some institutions still have denominational affiliations, and those denominations participate in the selection of the Board of Trustees and thus the administration of the college. Some Christian institutions also mandate that faculty subscribe to their denomination’s confessional standards. Covenant College, for instance, requires faculty to affirm the Westminster Confession of Faith. Other evangelical institutions, such as Wheaton College and Taylor University, are non-denominational. But they have their own distinctly evangelical theological statements that faculty are required to affirm.
Today, Grove City College remains non-denominational. The college’s vision and mission statements and its five core values function as a de facto faith statement. As the Bulletin explains, the “College’s mission necessitates the selection of a faculty who are professing Christians, experts in their chosen fields of learning, and thoroughly loyal to the purposes of the College.” Today, the faculty is comprised of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and evangelical Protestant believers. In short, the college hires for mission.
Christian Character and Integration of Faith and Learning
The college’s goals and objectives—as expressed in the Bulletin—detail how the college aspires to fulfill its vision, mission, and key values. Examining these official statements helps to flesh out how the college strives to conduct its work as a Christian liberal arts college. Moreover, the faculty works hard to fulfill the college’s vision, mission, and key values.
The college has three goals:
- To provide an excellent education in a college which seeks to be thoroughly Christian and evangelical in character.
- To seek a Christian perspective of life which integrates all fields of learning by communicating the significance of the Word of God for all of life in all disciplines.
- To keep the door of educational opportunity open to all by maintaining low charges, thus minimizing financial burdens on families.
In pursuit of its mission, the college seeks to achieve six objectives:
- Promote academic development
- Promote spiritual and moral development
- Promote social and emotional development
- Promote physical development
- Promote a sense of responsibility to larger community and society
- Model responsible administration
Although these involve both the curricular and co-curricular life of the college, the first two goals and first objective are most directly relevant to what happens inside the classroom. To provide students with “a thoroughly Christian and evangelical” education entails more than just requiring a course in the Bible and creating a positive classroom learning atmosphere where each student is valued as someone as made imago Dei. It also involves, as the Bulletin describes it, “rejecting relativism and secularism” and fostering “intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social development consistent with a commitment to Christian truth, morals, and freedom.”
The second goal, the integration of the Christian faith with learning, is crucial to achieving the first. The integration of faith and learning means that faculty attempt to help students develop a basic understanding of historic Christianity. Yet integration necessitates more than the transmission of information about the Christian faith, as important as that is. It offers a way of framing God’s vision for human flourishing in both word and deed. Faculty in every academic discipline seek to base their courses on a robust biblical epistemology and metaphysic. This occurs differently in the various fields of study offered by the college. A biblical view of humanity as imago Dei is probably more directly relevant, for instance, to the field of psychology than it is in mathematics, where a biblical understanding of the orderliness and creativity of God may be more pertinent. In my American religious history course, students discuss an essay by the eminent historian George Marsden on a Christian perspective on history. Students also read a thoughtful critique of Marsden by another highly respected historian who is a self-identifying agnostic. The faculty work very hard to examine different ways to more effectively cultivate a Christian perspective in their disciplines. Because the college takes the integration of faith and learning seriously, we hold workshops throughout the year on the subject as well as a two-day retreat to discuss this enterprise before the beginning of each academic year.
Engagement from a Christian Perspective
A thoroughly Christian liberal arts education that integrates faith and learning explores different perspectives on the relevant issues in various fields and asks how the Gospel impacts each field. Grove City College wants faculty and students to grapple with the hard issues of our day rather than to dodge or dismiss them. To be sure, the curriculum is not tethered to current fads. The college affirms that intellectual “inquiry remains open to the questions religion raises and affirms the answers Christianity offers.” Consequently, “many points of view are examined.” This means that faculty assign authors who are at odds with the Christian faith as well with as vision, mission, and values of the college. Constructively engaging a wide range of perspectives is a constitutive part of Grove City College’s mission. However, as the Bulletin states, “the College unapologetically advocates [the] preservation of America’s religious, political, and economic heritage of individual freedom and responsibility.”
The early history of Grove City College presents a compelling example of the kind of constructive engagement the college valued in the past and still values today. To introduce students to different theological perspectives as well as to elevate the work of local ministers, Isaac Ketler held an annual 10-day Bible conference at the end of the spring semester. Ketler brought to campus a veritable who’s who of prominent Protestant Bible scholars, theologians, and philosophers. A. C. Dixon, the popular Baptist preacher and later editor of The Fundamentals, spoke at the conference. So did Francis Landey Patton, a conservative theologian from Princeton Seminary. Ketler also invited the liberal Protestant theologians Charles C. Hall and Hugh Black from the citadel of Protestant modernism, Union Theological Seminary in New York, to lecture and preach on campus.
Not Indoctrination
A robust Christian liberal arts education cultivates critical thinking, whereas indoctrination suppresses it. The notion that education can be “value-free” is naive and demonstrably false. In contrast to indoctrination, a thorough Christian liberal arts education, “grounded in Christian principles,” as the college’s first objective describes it, equips students to assess the assumptions informing the college’s educational mission. The Christian philosopher Arthur Holmes explains the difference between integration and indoctrination:
Sometimes even interaction [between faith and learning] has been repressed in favor of indoctrination, as if prepackaged answers can satisfy inquiring minds. Students need rather to gain a realistic look at life and to discover for themselves the questions that confront us. They need to work their way painfully through the maze of alternative ideas and arguments while finding out how the Christian faith speaks to such matters. They need a teacher as a catalyst and guide, one who has struggled and is struggling with similar questions and knows some of the pertinent materials and procedures. They need to be exposed to the frontiers of learning where problems are still not fully formulated and knowledge is exploding, and where by [sic] the very nature of things, indoctrination is impossible.[7]
Indoctrination suppresses critical thinking. A robust Christian liberal arts education by contrast cultivates it. According to the Bulletin, the college wants students to “think creatively and critically about ultimate issues in the light of the Word of God.” Indoctrination promotes reductionistic binary thinking; an authentic Christian liberal arts education does not. Instead, it provides a curriculum that explores a wide range of influential authors and ideas. It is also why the college offers students, as the Bulletin describes it, a core curriculum that “consists of books, thinkers, and ideas proven across the ages to be of value in the quest for knowledge.” Indoctrination denigrates God’s common grace and general revelation, whereas a true Christian liberal arts education is built upon this robust biblical epistemology. As a colleague in the chemistry department likes to say, he does not teach a different “Christian” periodic table. Because all truth is God’s truth, the college wants faculty and students to draw upon the best scholarship—past and present—in their pursuit of truth.
The Ongoing Search for Truth
The conviction that all truth is God’s truth animates what happens inside the classroom. Achieving “the College ideals depends upon,” as the Bulletin explicitly states, “[s]earching courageously, persistently, and reverently for truth.” It is an ongoing, living, and dynamic process. It also involves overcoming fear. The pursuit of truth also entails humility and, ultimately, deference to the triune God, as revealed in Scripture. This is why the college describes its mission as “Christ-centered.” In the world of social media, where some have learned to monetize their outrage and others confuse the absence of obnoxiousness with a desire to curry the favor of secular elites, these values are rather countercultural.
An Ongoing Process
Because the search for truth undergirds a genuine Christian liberal arts education, the faculty continually review the curriculum to improve it further. As the Bulletin states, the college carefully reviews and revises the curriculum and avoids “educational philosophies that deny the possibility of truth or meaning, assert the relativity of values, or emphasize contemporary perspectives to the neglect of what has proven across the ages to be of value for human life.” This is why the college is reviewing its core curriculum today. Likewise, departments examine their course offerings every five or so years to confirm that they are providing students with the knowledge and skills that will best prepare them for the workforce or graduate school. Moreover, new classes are typically first offered as “studies courses” to enable faculty to explore new subject matter, to test-drive textbooks, and to think creatively about pedagogical matters. Department chairs and deans work hand-in-hand with the faculty to ensure that students in studies courses, just like every other course in the curriculum, receive an education that constructively interacts with contemporary scholarship in a way that advances the college’s mission. Because the search for truth is an ongoing process, we continue to strive to ensure that all courses accord with the college’s values. As dean of the Calderwood School of Arts and Letters, I am grateful and impressed by how hard the Calderwood School faculty work at achieving this goal. This is an ongoing process that we take very seriously.
Again, the history of Grove City College is instructive. Isaac Ketler required students to read Richard T. Ely’s economics textbook, Introduction to Political Economy. Ely, a Christian Socialist, was a leading proponent of the historical and institutional school of economics in the United States. Required science classes included geology textbooks by James Dwight Dana and Joseph LeConte, both noted advocates of theistic evolution.[8] Clearly, the founders of Grove City College wanted students to engage the latest scholarship of the day, and it is difficult to imagine that Ketler or the trustees considered reading such works contrary to the college’s Christian mission.
Training Young Adults for the Real World
The college is convinced that students are not children to be protected but young adults preparing, as the Bulletin explicitly states, “for life in an increasingly diverse and interrelated global community.” Of course, some students might argue that the college takes its in loco parentis responsibilities a little too seriously. It would be naive to think that students are oblivious to the outside world or disinterested in it even in a bucolic setting like Grove City. Instead, most are (typically) eager to engage their world. A thoroughly Christian liberal arts education prepares them well to live, to think, to speak, and to act as Christians for the common good.
Conclusion
The faculty and curriculum are like the college’s orchestra playing a symphony rather than a trumpet line. Just as an orchestra consists of various string, woodwind, brass, and percussion instruments playing different parts of the composition, the faculty and curriculum teach a wide range of subject matter that resonate deeply with the college’s vision, mission, and values. If people listen to only the cellos and snare drums practicing in the same studio, they might walk away with the misperception that the musicians are at odds because of the apparent lack of harmony between their instruments. But when the entire orchestra assembles after hours of hard practice, the various instruments, playing different parts of the score, come together to make great and harmonious music. In the same way, it takes persistent and patient practice to get a lecture, a course, a major, indeed an entire curriculum, to address the pressing needs of the day. Anything less would likely result in an illiberal education. And Grove City College would no longer be Freedom’s College.
Editor’s note: The views expressed in this essay are the views of the author and are not official Grove City College policy.
[1] The recently revised vision statement, mission statement, and five values are from a document shared by the president’s office. These will be available as part of the strategic plan.
[2] All quotes are drawn from the most recent college Bulletin, which is available at https://www.gcc.edu/Home/Academics/Majors-Departments/College-Catalog.
[3] Grove City College Bulletin, 1884-85 (Mercer, PA: The Dispatch and Job Printing Office, 1884), p. 5.
[4] The Annual Catalogue of the Officers, Professors and Students of the Grove City College, Grove City, Mercer County, PA., for the College Year 1884-85, and Calendar for 1885-86-87 (Greenville, PA: The Advance Argus Job Printing Office, 1885), p. 5.
[5] Grove City College, A Historical Sketch, with Charter and By-Laws (n.p., [1884]), pp. 11, 12.
[6] Isaac C. Ketler to L. H. Severance, 2 December 1909, Box: Ketler Correspondence Collection, Folder: Correspondence: Board of Education, Presbyterian Church USA, Grove City College Archive.
[7] Arthur F. Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College, Revised Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1987), p. 46.
[8] Grove City College, The Nineteenth Annual Catalogue of Grove City College, Grove City, PA. Course of Study and Calendar for 1895-96-97 (Mercer, PA: Press of Dispatch and Republican, [1895], pp. 12, 13.
