Bear of a battle

Education | As students return to campuses across the country, professors debate Baylor University's ambitious plans to be 'the Protestant Notre Dame,' and the ambitious president driving charge | Gene Edward Veith

Hundreds of Christian colleges, most of them small liberal arts institutions, salt the United States. Few have graduate schools, much less comprehensive Ph.D. programs. Few Christian colleges have the resources to sponsor research that would allow Christian scholars to have a greater voice in the marketplace of ideas.

Christian colleges that want their professors to hold the union card—a Ph.D.—recruit their faculty from secular Ph.D.-granting universities. This ensures that Christian faculty members are tested on intellectual battlegrounds, but it can also mean that they are educated only in secular modes of analysis and socialized to pursue conventional academic glory.

What if there could be a distinctly Christian university, one known for academic excellence but unapologetic about its reason for being? Professors would educate students and also build on biblical insights that illuminate their disciplines, contributing to the growth of knowledge as Christians used to while creating intellectually rigorous alternatives to secularist scholarship.