Shifting sand?

National | Calvin College offers a top-notch liberal arts education, but is it slipping its biblical moorings? First in an occasional series on Christian colleges | Lynn Vincent

ONE SNOWY EVENING IN FEBRUARY, four Calvin College students huddled round a table, piecing together supper. On the dining hall menu: steak sandwiches, fried fish planks, and an unnaturally orange, scalloped potato-and-ham affair that looked way better than it tasted. Mark Hutton, a brown-haired freshman from New Jersey who planned to hit the local snowboarding slopes after dinner, opted out of all three entrees. Instead, he crafted from available cold food a custom three-course meal: A milk-soaked bowl of Count Chocula breakfast cereal, followed by a bowl of Trix, washed down with a blob of raspberry Jello.

Some things never change: College students will always survive on food that would appall their mothers. But a lot else has changed at Calvin College as it has grown over the past century from a one-room schoolhouse for Christian Reformed Church (CRC) pastoral hopefuls to what is arguably the flagship of Christian liberal arts education. Calvin offers widely respected academic programs that attract Christian students from around the world, regularly places graduates into elite master's programs, and enjoys a good reputation even among secular institutions. But Calvin's commitment to traditional Reformed teaching seems to many to be fraying at the edges: On theology-rooted issues such as origins, feminist theology, and homosexuality, the school's policy and curricula have drifted away from Scripture.