Published Sept. 20, 2024 by World
By Mike Pence and Paul J. McNulty ’80
As students return to college campuses, memories of last year’s demonstrations and anti-Semitic threats remain fresh in our minds. With a new academic year upon us, we may soon witness more of the same as Israel’s military campaign to free hostages and prevent future Hamas and Hezbollah atrocities continues. There will be no shortage of misguided students who are energized by the political season and ready to disrupt campus life—and, most disturbingly, threaten Jewish students.
The more basic question about this new academic year, however, concerns what will happen in the classroom and not on the campus grounds. What will students learn? Will those responsible for equipping young minds for fulfillment and flourishing teach contempt for the permanent ideas and values advanced by Western civilization? Rather than shaping people of high principle and purpose, will they cultivate intolerance, cynicism, and rejection of American values? In short, will our schools prepare the next generation to be wise and virtuous citizens?
Such questions are pertinent because the values in American society and especially our politics continue to shift in the wrong direction. On the left, a traditional liberal arts education anchored in the great ideas of Western civilization is increasingly cast aside and replaced with woke ideology. These forces of postmodernism seek to purge the academy of anything that bears a whiff of traditional values or respect for more moderate or conservative points of view. Conservative students are fearful of speaking up in class in these echo chamber colleges.
On the right, new questions are emerging about what it means to be a conservative. The policy agenda of President Ronald Reagan is giving way to a national conservatism, a more populist platform questioning the historic values of liberal democracy. It remains to be seen how this new conservatism will respond to concerns about protecting human life, economic freedom, and confronting evil in the world. Young Christian conservatives will be confronted with policy choices not seen since the rise of the religious right decades ago.
All of this brings us back to the college classroom. What should be the focus of the learning experience, especially at Christian institutions, to best prepare students to sort through the changing landscapes of culture and politics?
We need not accept the cynicism and intolerance that is so prevalent at colleges today, but we can instead seek to prepare our students to build a life grounded in virtue that leads the way for human flourishing.
We believe our Christian colleges must lead the way by recommitting to an education anchored in civic virtue. An education rooted in virtue will lead students to the highest goal of education: wisdom. Acquiring knowledge is good, but it is not the end goal. Our society needs a return to curiosity and intellectual humility and to be made up of citizens who are not afraid to ask questions, even of themselves and their own way of thinking, and this must start in the classroom.
Nowhere has the phrase “teach students how to think, not what to think” been more important than today. At Christian liberal arts colleges, students are taught not to blindly fall into the modern regimented way of thinking but to be anchored in time-honored principles, understanding that there is universal truth and there are universal moral goods that benefit humanity.
Too often, colleges today, even those with religious heritage, view their purpose to lead students to employment, provide job training, or yield future political activists in society without teaching discernment or virtue. Without a strong foundation, these students will struggle with the messiness of human history and the complexities of the world and will look for purpose and community in places that will not fulfill them. But an education grounded in faith and timeless truth offers so much more. As the book of Proverbs instructs, “Train up a child in the way he should go … he will not depart from it.”
A Christian education teaches students that universal truth exists and will not change. Such truth is a basis on which to build a life, a society, and a country, recognizing that freedom cannot flourish in the absence of truth. Students will be sent out into the world, not as activists but as a winsome witness of goodness, beauty, and truth to the world.
As C.S. Lewis once wrote, “If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next.” At Grove City College we’re redoubling our effort to train up future Christian leaders and we encourage colleges and universities across the country to do the same, for that is how history is made and America will be renewed.
Mike Pence was the 48th vice president of the United States and is the founder of Advancing American Freedom. He serves as the distinguished visiting fellow for Faith & Public Life at Grove City College in Grove City, Pa.
Paul J. McNulty ’80 is the president of Grove City College in Grove City, Pa., which recently launched the Center for Faith & Public Life to promote awareness of the historic connection between religion and American public life and to strengthen opportunities for Christian engagement in public service. He was also a former U.S. deputy attorney general.