In A Faith and Culture Devotional Dr. J.P. Moreland describes how Harvard professor Julie Reuben (The Making of the Modern University) has chronicled the drift in teaching knowledge and values in our Universities: “From 1880-1910, colleges took themselves to have two mandates: the impartation of wisdom and knowledge and the tools needed to discover them, and the development of spiritually, morally and politically virtuous graduates who could serve God, the state, and the church well….”

But the abandonment of Christianity has ultimately resulted in a loss of confidence that a unified curriculum could be based on knowledge of God or even shared moral values. The moral and spiritual wisdom of Plato, Aristotle, Moses, Solomon, and Jesus has, for the most part been excluded from the curriculum.

Some concerned faculty and citizens have led initiatives to restore teaching the foundations of democracy and the moral and spiritual wisdom of the ages into the curriculum. Their efforts have resulted in a number of beachheads such as The Program on Constitutionalism and Democracy at the University of Virginia, The Center for the Foundations of Free Societies at Cornell and Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. But World magazine reports that a similar program has been shut down at the University of Texas. The fledgling Center for Western Civilization and American Institutions was to have readings that included Plato and Aristotle but also selections from the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin; Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography but also Whittaker Chambers’ Witness, which tells of his move from faith in Marx to faith in Christ.

Although it was funded by outside sources the program met intense faculty opposition and has been renamed, restaffed and redirected. The dismissed founder of the program who still teaches his philosophy classes, professor Rob Koons, has finally broken his silence to explain what happened to the program in a post on the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy website:

“Our program was rightly perceived as a threat to the monopoly of what I call the Uncurriculum, which prevails at UT and at most universities today. It is the absence of required courses and of any structure or order to liberal studies. The Uncurriculum dictates that students accumulate courses that meet a ‘distribution’ standard–a smattering of courses scattered among many categories. Even within majors, the trend has been to eliminate required sequences. . . .

“The Uncurriculum free-for-all gives undergraduates only the illusion of choice. In reality, the Uncurriculum model is entwined with the interests of the professoriate. If there are no courses students are required to take, there are no courses that professors are required to teach.

“Professors at research universities focus on the accumulation of prestige through publication, the indispensable means for acquiring tenure and increasing one’s salary (through the leverage of outside offers). By allowing students to pick what they want to study, the Uncurriculum model eliminates a potentially great distraction from the quest for publications: the burden of teaching a required curriculum, unrelated to one’s ow narrow research agenda. . . .

“Rather than admit this self-interest, liberal arts professors at UT use postmodern and multicultural ideas to defend the Uncurriculum. These fashionable ideas form an ‘ideology’ in Marx’s sense: a system of ideas designed to cloak, rationalize, and defend an unjust set of relationships, namely, the exploitation of undergraduates and their underwriters (parents, taxpayers, and donors). . . .

“Our program was a sound alternative to the Uncurriculum. It was privately funded and offered students a coherent way of satisfying many of their general education requirements. Unfortunately, the faculty saw our program as foreign and threatening, and therefore attacked it, much as the human body automatically attacks transplanted organs. We need to prevent that from happening in the future.

“One idea, which state legislators could implement, is the creation of charter colleges’ within existing state universities. The state could authorize groups of three or more professors, together with a private foundation or even a for-profit sponsor, to propose charters for innovative programs like ours. If its charter were approved by an outside board, a charter college would be authorized to offer specific courses to satisfy designated components of the state’s core, as well as certificates, minors, and majors. Faculty in the rest of the university would not control the decisions of the charter college.

“The experience of the Western Civilization and American Institutions program underscores a sad truth about higher education in America- it is mostly run by and for the faculty. What it likes and dislikes trumps what would be best for students. Our system will never fully achieve its promise as long as that remains true.”

by Kelly Monroe Kullberg

(Congratulations to our book winner! Michelle Elford)

Today is the happy 6-year anniversary of my marriage to David — a “youngish” widower raising five great kids. Today is also the 1-year anniversary of my mother’s near-death, and gradual recovery to something like a stable condition in assisted living.

When I was engaged, a friend suggested that I reconsider the wisdom of marrying because the demands on the “sandwich generation” (those caring both for children and parents) would distract me from my larger cultural calling (the Veritas Forum, in particular). To credit my friend’s foresight, I really didn’t quite grasp what I was signing up for, either in marriage or in parenting. (I’m sure David didn’t, either). Nor did I request a crash course this year in geriatric endocrinology, cardiology and nephrology that help keep my mom closer to me on this side of heaven, while I was working, and while two of the children were finishing high school, one entering college, one marrying, and another giving birth. Nor, for that matter, do I remember ever signing up for any course, or life, of adulthood in any real form at all.

The truth is that I’m not much of a Giving Tree …

…but somehow I’m all caught up, entangled, entwined, and fed by the One Who is just that. Along the way I laid a few axes to the root, but thankfully the True Vine will be tenacious enough to eventually bear life in and through me.

The granularity of the Given Life not only takes our breath away (like off-road-wheelchairing today with my unwitting mom, as we rolled through a field and around the pond by our church), the Given Life also often feeds my “larger cultural calling.” When David and I moved Michelle into her freshman dorm last week, we were reminded of hundreds of thousands of students so loved by parents and by God. When, yesterday, my mom and I comforted a nurse’s aid — a lovely Indian woman who had lost her mother the day before — we were reminded of the pain of orphans, and the deep kindness of those like this woman who care for the elderly. When today we shared God’s love with Ruth — a partially-blind 96-year old who was upset with herself “for feeling uncheerful today” — we felt something of the love of God for a widow, and the dignity of this woman living so long, so bravely.

As we hold our grandsons, Nathaniel and Isaac, whether in a diaper meltdown or in a moment of bliss, we know more of God’s unconditional love for us, as well. His Fatherhood allows us to be children, still. He offers us His strength, his grace under pressure, his resourcefulness. My job is to learn to abide, and to first receive before presuming to give. (God is not the only one who prefers a cheerful giver.)

Eight years ago, I lived alone, in a pine cabin in the woods north of Boston, seven hundred miles from my Ohio home. Had I remained there, apart from some form of real community, I’m guessing my work would have become increasingly unhinged from the framework, and inspiration, of the real questions and longings of the heart … the joys and pains of love found and lost, and found again, forever, in Christ. So I offer thanks today, on this anniversary, for the Given Life. And to the Giver.