Cultural cringe

What evangelical donors should remember about higher education | Roberta Green Ahmanson

November and December of their senior year in high school are crunch time for students thinking seriously about college applications. Those months are also crucial for college administrators thinking about donors. Rising costs—housing, faculty, services, buildings, not to mention insurance—mean colleges need money. Students represent money, but not enough. That's where donors come in.

But donors, to give wisely, need to understand the minefield that higher education has become. To teach in college, a person must earn a Ph.D. With few exceptions the only universities granting such degrees are large, secular institutions. Their basic worldview is naturalistic; questions of ultimate reality or God are at best interesting and at worst threatening to the hard-won intellectual freedom of the Academy.