Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
An Open Letter to Anyone with $75 Million to Give to Christian Colleges

An Open Letter to Anyone with $75 Million to Give to Christian Colleges

Last updated on: January 23, 2018 at 5:04 am by Chris Gehrz

An Open Letter to Anyone with $75 Million to Give to Christian Colleges 2018-01-22T16:08:56-04:00 Chris Gehrz

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Dear madam or sir,

I write in hope that you exist. Honestly, it’s hard for me to imagine that there are individuals in this or any society who have the ability to donate $75 million to their favorite good cause. (Subtract a few zeroes and I’d still need to battle my budget a bit.) But as you may have heard, Johns Hopkins University just announced a pledge in that amount from investor Bill Miller.

Embed from Getty Images

Now, I work in a very different sector of higher education from the one occupied by Johns Hopkins, a venerable research university that is private, but unaffiliated with any religious tradition or group. But even here in the world of private religious higher ed, I don’t need to look very far to find such generosity. Just last year, two of Bethel’s church-related peers on the Minnesota Private College Council announced eight-figure gifts: St. Thomas, a diocesan Catholic university, received $50 million to endow scholarships for business students; and Gustavus Adolphus, a college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, got $40 million for scholarships, general endowment, and expanding and renovating a sciences building.

So I write in hope that you are out there: someone whose means far, far exceed my own, yet shares my deep commitment to the mission of Christian higher education.

These are challenging times for that sector. In part because we don’t have the endowment of a St. Thomas or a Gustavus, let alone a Johns Hopkins, Bethel and most of its peers remain almost entirely dependent on the ability of students and their families to pay tuition plus room and board. But while we’ve made significant efforts to reduce our costs, at the end of the day it’s clear to me that there is no way to fulfill our mission (at least at the traditional undergraduate level) apart from a high-touch, high-cost model that depends on highly skilled, highly trained professionals whose time is divided between teaching relatively small numbers of students and engaging in research on the cutting edges of their fields. (Then add in the expenses required for all the co-curricular programs and amenities that families expect of a residential version of this model of education.)

So we have little choice but to adapt to the changing desires and needs of two markets: first, the prospective and continuing students we’re tempted to treat as nothing more than consumers; second, the for-profit, non-profit, and public employers who will hire our students after graduation.

And at some level, we should respond to such markets, changeable as they are. And not just for pragmatic reasons. A university that centers itself on Jesus Christ must fulfill his mission, which means that we must ever always be in the turbulent world that God so loved to the point of sending it his Son.

But equally, we must not be fully or chiefly of that world.

If we are a Christian liberal arts university, we must be primarily concerned with asking timeless questions whose answers — however hard to see — ultimately lead back to the One who was, is, and will always be “the way, and the truth, and the life.”

Ultimately, we are seeking after the permanent things of God, and only penultimately after the impermanent things of the market.

So if you are compelled by that project, see how fragile it is in our present economy, and have the capacity to make a transformative gift in support of it, let me be so bold as to make two suggestions for how you designate your donation or pledge:

1. Give preference to the arts, humanities, and sciences

Our university, like most others of its kind, has long since decided that it needs to offer professional programs. I’ll trust that those programs arise from the intersection of our mission and the needs of the world. But they are not at the core of our identity as a Christian liberal arts university. If the needs they serve disappear (or can be met as effectively in other ways), then those programs can disappear and we will still be able to form whole and holy persons who serve out of love of God and neighbor.

Conversely, because such programs are supposed to meet the felt needs of the private, public, or other sectors, they should have a far easier time recruiting tuition-payers and attracting other revenue streams. (Admittedly, this is far less true of programs like social work, education, and perhaps health professions, which clearly align with our mission but whose value as a public good is not always recognized in our society.)

So let me suggest that you instead turn your attention to the disciplines that constitute the core of any liberal arts institution: the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Of course, this is precisely the focus that made Miller’s gift to Johns Hopkins so noteworthy. Though he accumulated his wealth as an investor, he didn’t pledge $75 million of it towards a business program. Nor health sciences (what might first come to mind with that school). Instead, he designated that amount for the philosophy department, telling reporters that “I attribute much of my business success to the analytical training and habits of mind that were developed when I was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins” studying philosophy. (He stopped short of finishing his dissertation.)

Embed from Getty Images

Likewise, I’d strongly encourage you to start with philosophy, the other humanities, the arts, and the social sciences, precisely because the gap between how they’re valued by the market and how central they are to our mission has never been greater. Everyone with any intellectual honesty will tell you that our institutions can’t possibly do what they’re supposed to do without teachers and students engaged in disciplines like philosophy, history, literature and languages, rhetoric, theology and biblical studies, art, music, theater, political science, sociology and anthropology, geography, and economics.

(And also mathematics and the natural and behavioral sciences. They’re essential, and I wish them to thrive, which isn’t always easy to accomplish in religious settings. But in general, those shifting market currents I mentioned above currently favor those disciplines, if only because they wrap up technology and engineering in the bundle we call STEM. So I certainly wouldn’t be dismayed to learn of a donor like yourself making possible, say, a new building for our chemists, physicists, and biologists. But if you’re going to make that gift, please attach a string that ensures that the money truly serves the sciences themselves, and not just whatever applications of those sciences are temporarily prized by a fickle market.)

However “Christian” you make it sound, there is no ultimate meaning to an education whose primary aim is to send out people equipped for a market… yet utterly unequipped to question the values and practices of that market, to adapt to its changes, to value the people and things that it neglects, or to see purpose in their work and everything they do beyond it.

Once upon a time, I held out hope that the church itself could help us close the gap between our missional core and what’s valued by the market. But it’s clear that most denominations and congregations are not going to prioritize Christian higher ed as they struggle with their own scarcities.

So I appeal to you as an individual member of that Body: if you believe in our mission and have the ability to make a gift, look beyond the fields of study privileged at this time and invest in the fields of study that are meaningful at all times.

2. Give preference to people, not buildings

Our university, like every other that has been around for any decent length of time, needs to improve and perhaps expand its facilities. Or so we’re told.

I’ll admit: it’s harder for me, a history professor, to see the benefit of engaging in the infrastructural equivalent of an arms race. I’ve taught in our best and worst classrooms, in every building on campus, and even (every other year) in the town squares and open fields of Europe. Give me committed, passionate students, and I think I can teach history wherever you put me.

That said, I know that things are different for my colleagues whose disciplines simply require certain spaces and equipment that quickly wear out or grow obsolete. So it’s no doubt important that Christian colleges and universities join their peers in seeking funds (from individual donors like you, but also from corporations, foundations, and governments) to meet the needs of sciences, engineering, medical fields, media production, finance, and other specialized programs.

Benson Great Hall at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN – CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Chris Gehrz)

But again: if our mission is about permanent things, we ought not to care too much about impermanent things like buildings and devices. If our mission is in service of the eternal, we ought to invest more heavily in those creatures who are made in the image of the divine and whose immortal souls are being crafted through the transformational education that we claim makes them into “whole and holy persons.”

So consider endowing scholarships. Make it possible for at least a few students to come to their school of choice and pursue the studies that most closely align with their gifts, passions, and calling. Free them of the lifelong burden of feeling like they need to deny their vocation in order to maximize their salary and minimize their debt.

Or endow faculty chairs. Make it possible for at least a few professors to do their work — as teachers and scholars — without living in perpetual anxiety about how many students are taking their classes or how hard it is to demonstrate the practical value of their research. Make it possible for universities to keep their core disciplines somewhat insulated from the market pressures that tempt us away from our mission.

Miller’s gift to Johns Hopkins’ philosophy department, for example, will endow nine chairs, allow for the near-doubling of the philosophy faculty, and help graduate students and postdoctoral fellows continue their work.

If you’re in a position to do something at all similar to that… I’m not asking for a $75 million gift to the Bethel University Department of History. (Though I wouldn’t turn it away. Our development folks can be found here. Or email me to schedule a time to talk — believe it or not, I can say much more than what I’ve written here!)

Pick five such schools, or fifteen, and make smaller, still-transformative gifts that will allow them to fulfill their mission long into the 21st century. You will change the lives of students, and through them the world.

Thank you for reading. May God bless you with grace and peace, with wisdom and discernment.

Chris Gehrz

Professor of History

Bethel University

St. Paul, Minnesota

Reposted from The Pietist Schoolman

Johns Hopkins University

liberal arts

philanthropy

Previous Post

January 22, 2018

The Square and the Tower

Next Post

January 24, 2018 Could Medieval Women Preach? Stop Using Paul Against Women Pt 3

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe Guest Post guest post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

True or False: Ezekiel saw a vision of a valley of dry bones that came to life.

Select your answer to see how you score.

FALSE TRUE