GOD AND (WO)MAN ON CAMPUS: Ohio Wesley an University:
Murchland, Bernard
Bernard Murchland OHIO WESLEYAN I CAME directly to Ohio Wesleyan from a large state university. My first reaction was one of immediate relief to be free of the fierce competition and impersonality...
...Unrealistic as it may sound, I believe the survival of schools like Ohio Wesleyan lies in some creative reaffirmation of the religious and ethical values that made them great in the past...
...The two Methodist bishops of Ohio are ex-officio members of the board of trustees and one-third of the total board is nominated by the Church...
...but it seeks also to educate for the dimension of depth in human experience, and this is the quite distinctive and unapologetic role of the church-related college...
...One shudders to think that education will become the sole prerogative of the multi-university...
...How well do they get translated into reality...
...There is, for instance, a special regard for the elders on the faculty...
...It seeks to expose students by various means to the epic ways in which men have struggled to find answers to these issues...
...What is the connection between Ohio Wesleyan's religious tradition and the kind of education it offers...
...The attitudes and values I speak of have to do with the vital piety part of the formula-a slippery term to be sure but one that embodies concrete if often unspoken realities...
...One week later Jacob Neusner of Brown University delivered three lectures on the history of Judaism to a similar audience...
...It is a time of great insecurity for the independent liberal arts colleges and no one can predict how we will emerge from our present dilemmas...
...Statistics on the student body are more unreliable but the chaplain's office estimates that about 85 percent of the students come from families that are at least nominally affiliated with some church, about 10 percent are Roman Catholic, another 10 percent are Jewish and the rest from the mainline Protestant sects...
...Without the church affiliation the same kind of faculty would be offering the same courses in the same way to the same kind of students...
...Looking through the course offerings for the current term, I was somewhat surprised to note that there are no less than seven courses in as many departments dealing with some aspect of medieval religious thought...
...At the same time the ways in which a religious tradition influences an educational philosophy grow increasingly faint...
...Administrators and faculty committees are sensitive to the personal difficulties of individuals and they weigh moral factors into decisions about retention and promotion...
...My own opinion (and I can scarcely offer these remarks as anything else) is that the religious character does make a difference, and that in three ways...
...It is becoming more and more difficult to maintain this distinctiveness...
...The students find his language alien and his arguments less than compelling...
...Here, I thought, one could do effective teaching and research without paying a high price in alienation...
...Students who leave here with the experience of having been treated as whole persons have something very real to cherish...
...Among its conclusions it stated that a church-related college: -should be a place where the Christian faith may be considered a live option by intelligent persons...
...This would be regrettable not only because such institutions have made enormous contributions to society in the past but also by reason of the contributions they could yet make in a society that is becoming more mythically impoverished with each passing day...
...Not only does the faculty (the majority of them anyway) pride themselves on knowing their students well and taking a personal interest in them but in addition, on the side of the administration, there are literally platoons of deans, deanlings, deanlets, counselors and advisors of all kinds to attend to student needs...
...This reflects a quasi-religious sense of personhood as well as education (in the sense in which Whitehead said all education is religious) and while it necessarily casts the university in the role of in loco parentis (which is unavoidable anyway in educating the young), it also does much to diminish the effects of anomie that prevail in the society at large...
...But others like Emory, Duke and Southern Methodist remain officially related to the Church...
...should improve society by educating students to be sensitive to standards of individuality and quality over quantity and the mass values of society...
...At its best vital piety goes hand in hand with a robust humanism...
...In 1844, two years after the school was founded, the Methodist church split into two factions over abolition, with the Ohio Wesleyan faculty in the vanguard of those favoring emancipation...
...It does deliberately encourage conscious concern over religious and ethical issues...
...A number of my colleagues think a long shadow falls between the rhetoric and what actually goes on in the day-to-day educational process...
...In founding his own school, John Wesley stated: "Let us unite what has so long been separated- education and vital piety...
...One also notices here, and this is my second point, a special sensitivity to ethical and political issues...
...Fellowship, community, service are some of the terms used to point to them...
...increasingly faint...
...A science major, for example, might graduate without ever having taken a course in ethics...
...Many of them have severed (or are in the process of severing) their formal ties with the church...
...and, conversely, one might be retained or promoted with less than average academic ability provided, say, his service to the university community was outstanding or he exemplified the ideals of the school in a particularly effective way...
...So much for the ideals...
...But the exercise never fails to generate lively discussion...
...One can always detect traces of its presence...
...The proposal takes a stand against "value neutrality" in a liberal arts college and asserts that a church-related institution has a special responsibility to remedy a painful lacuna in the educational fabric...
...For example, in 1962, the university sponsored a conference on The Nature of the Church-related College...
...should communicate an informed faith...
...Most majors are in a similar predicament...
...Few would care to give an apodictic answer to such a question...
...Among the other features of the school that indicate its religious tradition are an office of Religious Affairs under the direction of a full-time chaplain, a five-man religion department, sponsorship of a number of lecture series, including the prestigious Merrick lectures which have attracted the best theological minds in the country since 1886, and several religious organizations among the students...
...Ohio Wesleyan was small (about 2500 students and 165 faculty members), firmly in the liberal arts tradition, and enjoyed an enviable reputation among its peer institutions (notably the 12-school consortium that forms the Great Lakes Colleges Association...
...There are over 120 Methodist institutions of higher learning in the country...
...So, too, does Ohio Wesleyan...
...I think it fair to say that one could not advance here on intellectual ability alone (effective teaching, publishing, etc...
...It is possible that few if any of them will survive...
...The balance is difficult to maintain...
...Still, they are willing to grant that he is raising an important question of origins, even though they would prefer to discuss it in a different idiom and from a more congenial perspective than medieval logic...
...A third difference has to do with a concept of person-hood, particularly with respect to the students...
...at its worst it veers off into sentimentality and mindless-ness...
...Later, as Vergil might say, it will help them greatly to remember it...
...should be a place where teachers give witness of their convictions and their experience in such a way as to help students adopt similar convictions and desire similar experiences...
...Ohio Wesleyan is very much in the Social Gospel tradition and faculty political involvement goes all the way back to the abolition movement...
...Age confers a prestige that is nothing short of tribal...
...I find the distinctive mark of the church-related liberal arts college precisely in this sense of personhood: in its refusal to look upon the student as a mere academic consumer and in the importance it attaches to the affective domain of feeling, desire, emotion...
...It seeks to educate for intellectual excellence and technical competence, yes...
...There we read that "the Christian religion has always been at the heart of Ohio Wesleyan's educational principles . . . [the school] is not narrowly sectarian, but neither is it religiously or ethically neutral...
...Perhaps it would not be too far from the mark to say that the relationship between education and religion here is that their relationship is frequently discussed...
...These and similar ideals are frequently voiced around the campus and are reflected in the University Catalog's statement of aims...
...In the twenties a prominent member of the science faculty wrote in the Atlantic Monthly defending the theory of evolution as the Scopes trial was going on...
...There is, in a word, a real interest in the whole person...
...Compulsory chapel was abolished in the early sixties (although not without a fight) but faculty meetings, graduation ceremonies and other official functions still open with an invocation...
...Ten years later a member of the religion department told a long-range planning committee of the university that: "A church-related college can charge the atmosphere with ultimate questions...
...Examples would be Northwestern, University of Southern California, Syracuse, Connecticut Wesleyan and Boston University...
...My first reaction was one of immediate relief to be free of the fierce competition and impersonality I had experienced at the larger institution...
...The tradition is there, granted...
...As it stands, God and man have more than a nodding acquaintance here...
...In a recent lecture Yale's Roland Bainton spoke to a full house on Erasmus and Luther...
...Wesleyan, like all such schools, is suffering from the triple threat of a shrinking student pool, the incursions of secularism and a galloping career-ism that would measure all educational programs by how effectively they enhance job opportunities...
...It was as well a church-related school...
...When the plan is implemented all graduating seniors will have participated in one or another of the Symposia...
...One history professor told me" that Wesleyan is a religious place only in limited ways of no real consequence...
...Each term I go through Descartes' proofs for the existence of God in my introductory philosophy courses...
...More recently, a five-man faculty team wrote a proposal for Senior Symposia on Ethics and Careers that has attracted grant moneys...
...One is aware here, too, of a cluster of attitudes and values- that are difficult to explicate but which nonetheless have an appreciable influence on the school's ethos...
...The proposal is based on the premise that students graduating today from institutions of higher learning rarely have the opportunity to consider the ethical dimensions either of their discipline or their future careers...
...But what real difference does it make...
...There are atheists on the faculty but a majority are church members...
...So far as I know this is the only school to have undertaken this kind of initiative...
...In the first place it favors a climate of openness in which religious questions can be raised and discussed...
...One feels free in the classroom as well as outside of it to discuss a wide range of such questions, to profess one's belief without fear of the subtle reprisals secular universities so often reserve for such avowals, and in general to urge the position that religion is a necessary dimension of human experience...
...and, more importantly, it presses the student, if even by rebellion against its traditional commitment, to fashion the tools by which he will ply his own moral craftmanship in the secular world...
Vol. 102 • March 1975 • No. 1
