Grape Twizzle

Eric Hoffer once noted the trajectory of institutions — first a movement, then a business, and finally a racket. As it happens, higher education in North America is deep into the racket phase. They have perfected the process of extracting money from the great American sap, whose resources appear to be limitless. The extractors have it down to racket science.

Like many rackets, this is made possible by deep religious commitments, of which they take full advantage. From Tetzel’s indulgences to the teleshysters waving their Bibles on the tube, the unscrupulous have long known that unquestioned religious faith in the necessity of xyz provides a fine opportunity for marketing their versions of xyz. In this case, the deep religious commitment is in the power of higher education to fix all kinds of social and cultural problems. This religious faith in our culture is called secular, but it occupies the same sacred place in the gut — and is able to make large numbers of people buy things that are manifestly not worth it.

In the midst of this villainous pandemonium, we have a handful of small Christian colleges who want to do it right. They want to break with the immediate past, and return to a time when people knew what knowledge is for. They don’t want to be part of the current circus, but by legal necessity they have to set up their tent on the same fairgrounds with everyone else. Okay, what could go wrong?

In order to guard against mission drift — the pressures of which are intense — it is crucial that the institution begin with a right understanding of the true nature of the mission. Now a good college education can do what a good college education can do — which is not everything — but it is quite a bit. College education is no savior, but it can have quite a cultural impact, which is why debates about it are so important.

For example, at New St. Andrews, we want to educate our students in such a way that they are equipped to provide cultural leadership under the lordship of Jesus Christ. But one thing more is actually included in this. We want them actually to do it, and our success as a college is bound up in it.

This means that students are fundamentally disciples, not fundamentally consumers. A consumer can resolve to start jogging, and go out and buy some sneakers for it, take them home, put them in the closet, and never think about it again. This is not a problem with the store where he bought the sneakers because their relationship with him was that of merchant/consumer. But education is not simply consumption of information. A college should be more like a personal trainer, and less like a seller of equipment. As one writer put it, the point is formation, not information.

If you had a boxing academy, do you want graduates who “could have been a contender?” If nobody ever is a contender, but all of them could have been, had the breaks only gone their way, then at some point you are not graduating boxers but rather makers of excuses. At some point, you are just taking people’s money.

Take a thousand alums, for example. We don’t have that many yet, but suppose we did. If all of them were equipped to exercise cultural leadership under the lordship of Christ, but none of them actually did so, would this be a failure on the part of our college? I would argue yes.

An essential part of the college’s mission has to be actually making a difference in the lives of the graduates. If you do not make that difference, then what is the point of the college’s existence? When that question is raised at a board meeting, and the answer comes back in some form of “we need to continue to exist because we have existed in the past,” then the institution is teetering on the border of business and racket.

Now I recognize that colleges are not widget factories, and you can’t deliver your graduates to the culture at large on specially designed widget trucks. Because your “product” is people, you will have high levels of variation and diversity because of personality, gifts, calling, and so on. So colleges are not, and cannot be, leadership factories, with the serial numbers stamped on the bottom. At the same time, if there is no correlation between what you are attempting and what you are accomplishing, then at some point the question why bother? should be raised at a board meeting.

If you declare mission accomplished because all of them were equipped to do great things, although none of them ever did, you are trying to secure for yourself the enviable position of being able to make promotional claims that can never be falsified. Suppose you had a journalism school that had a mission statement that said they wanted graduates that were equipped to win the Pulitzer Prize. This is a reasonable goal if you are reasoning backward from actual Pulitzers. But if you running it frontwards, at some point you are running a con. Actual results are the enemy of all the cozy comforts of entrenched educrats.

But there is an error in the other direction as well. The demand for actual results can turn education into something alien to true wisdom. There is no machinery of knowledge, with the acquisition of truth rattling and smoking as it goes. Factories have everything standardized, and we must recognize that graduates of a college are not like that. But vineyards have a system also, and as a metaphor is much closer to what a college is seeking to do. And when you start laying bottles down, you should know what to expect when you take them up again two decades later. If, two decades later, you find yourself with a cellar full of Grape Twizzle, then you should be willing to find fault with the vineyard.

Think of it another way. Whatever prospective parents and students are asked to believe on the promotional materials should be the very same thing that the board is actively evaluating in their alums ten and twenty years out. Every educator should be concerned that we not be promising something other than what we can deliver. And if we are doing that, then the secular schools should throw us a party, and say “welcome to the racket.”

If our attitude toward the twenty year alums is “who knows why that happened?” then our promotional materials and prospective student weekends should have a similar theme. “Send your kid here. It might turn out okay!”

One last thing. This concern for results is not the demand of a false perfectionism. Jesus had twelve disciples, and one of them fell from his position. When that kind of thing happens, no one blames the instructor.

But if I give an exam, and a couple of students flunk it, then I have a couple student problem. If I give an exam, and 25 students flunk it, then I have a one teacher problem. If out of our one thousand alums, ten of them wind up going over to the dark side, this is very sad, but it is not a failure rate that calls the mission of the institution into question. But if 900 of them turn coat, and their Facebook posts show that they don’t know how to think and live like a Christian at all, then the institution that dedicated four years to teaching them how to think and live like a Christian should go back to the drawing board. Either that, or learn to acquire a taste for Grape Twizzle.