Faced with a multiplicity of horrors — such as returning to American mass culture, losing my legal drinking age status, and bidding farewell to my legion of suitors who no doubt found my citizenship the most attractive thing about me — I did the only sensible thing I could think of. I became hysterical. I accused my parents of callously evicting their firstborn into the stifling conformist world of Christian higher education at the expense of my freedom and independence. To that, my somewhat abashed yet still agreeable parents replied, "Fine. Get a job." Faced with that even greater horror, I reconsidered. After 24 hours of sullen silence, I came to my senses and, however reluctantly, accepted my admission to L-R. Even that miserable fate was preferable to work.

All summer I dreaded the impending doom of Christian college. I worked myself into a frenzy, complete with weekly nightmares. I started making plans to transfer somewhere bigger, more interesting and more prestigious. I convinced myself that the only salient adjectives to describe my alma-mater-to-be were small, boring and Christian. Really, I thought. A religious college with a mere 1600 students (including evening and graduate) in a place named, of all things, Hickory?! This Eurotrash knew for sure that the state of North Carolina was far below her own exacting standards.

Well, I had a lot to learn. It's a cliche that hindsight is 20/20, but even though I know now that L-R was one of the best things that ever happened to me, certain other individuals have remained somewhat skeptical. So for the record I'd like to take my own derogatory words — small, boring and Christian — and turn them around to reveal the assets of any school fitting that description.

Small
America is the land of "the bigger, the better" concerning everything from automobiles to anatomy, so small usually qualifies as an automatic liability. It used to be that small colleges had better faculty-to-student ratios which gave them the personal edge, but now with the glut of state money going into public schools and the glut of college professors on the market, state schools are doing nearly as well. Add to the mix more sophisticated technology (though I still don't see how undergrads need particle accelerators) and impressive athletic facilities along with a beautifully diverse student body, and one starts to wonder what small schools have that big ones don't.

The answer isn't too hard to figure, actually: community. Community used to be one of those things that the whole world took for granted. By now, America has gone from community to commuting, and the former is prized, cultivated and studied to death. From what my state-school-attending friends have said of their campuses, students at those big universities have to search long for community and work hard to keep it. Frequently and quite ironically, those communities-within-communities are even smaller and more stifling than at small colleges. Students find their secure niche but then they're often stuck in it, because striking out in search of new friends and ideas is a lonely business. Impersonal public personae serve as survival techniques, unfamiliar faces are the norm and neither is conducive to warm group solidarity.

At small schools, by contrast, community arises naturally. Students are never far from their comrades, yet it's never difficult to find new people. Even the smallest schools have a few hundred people, and a few hundred friends is enough for anybody. The stability coupled with freedom of movement is a pretty healthy social arrangement all around. Conflicts tend to be expressed for resolution rather than suppressed by fear of exile from the protective group. New people and ways of thinking blend into existing groups with ease. Failed romances have a cushion and successful ones have regulation. Older students take younger ones under their wings and pass on what could almost be called a tradition. Small schools come to resemble extended families, or a network of dynasties, a process which is often defined by the Greek system. Like all families, they have their crazy old aunts and internal feuds. But with very rare exceptions, the family is preferable to social solitude or strategic advancement.

Boring
This is a deliberately provocative choice of word, but I use it tongue-in-cheek. As any philosophy major will tell you, it all depends on how you define the term. In some extremely broad sense, small Christian colleges are pretty boring. The latest academic fad is not going to gain a constituency in such an environment, nor is a nationwide student protest against unjust war going to be sparked off, nor is a Division I NCAA championship likely to fall to East Boondock Christian University, population 400.

But as any small-college grad can tell you, often the campus is positively overflowing with activity, and not only are things happening, but everybody knows about them. By the end of my junior year, social interactions had reached such a fever pitch that I was compelled to move off campus just to get some peace. This isn't just a social matter, of course. In small communities, competition is less intense, so there is room for students of one discipline to get involved in another. I was a theology major but spent most of my extracurricular time in theater; my English-major friends went to the art building to paint; biology majors got involved in the sports-medicine program. An evening of poetry reading and chamber music in a student art gallery attracted business majors and administrative personnel as well as the more naturally artsy types. Homecoming attracted even the decidedly non-athletic. Greeks didn't mind the presence of non-Greeks at most of their events and certainly valued their pennies during charity fundraisers. Our school was too small to be rigidly cliquey. The only way anyone's interests got financial and staff support was by proving their value to the rest of the school. Diversity, the ultimate higher education catchword, strengthened the community precisely because it was for the community. There was almost no splintering into market-savvy niches.

For all this, a small school still has a kind of boredom that is practically salvific. Racial incidents were nearly unheard of at my school (I can't think of any in my time offhand) and the extremely rare sexual assaults usually involved non-students infiltrating the campus. There was little political strife (even among the faculty, if you can believe that!) and rather impressive religious harmony among the various facets represented.

Christian
"Christian" is the real bugaboo of the mix here. It can describe anything from the religious composition of the student body to the official mission statement of the college to the attitude of the faculty to the content of the curriculum. I would guess that a lot of people hear "Christian college" and think of artificial restrictions on the realm of human knowledge, litmus tests, wholesale damnations or a lack of a critical and analytical edge towards Christian claims. This is, of course, a gross caricature. There can be caricatures at the other end too. Christian colleges can be perceived as warm wet wombs, places where innocent and pious young people are bundled up in the cozy blanket of faith and are protected from the big bad world. That might be Christian — of a fearful kind — but it certainly isn't college.

A Christian college has two tasks which are in tension. The Christian part is, of course, to form Christians, to teach people raised in the Christian faith how to be Christian adults. That is a very involved task, more like weaving than painting, and I doubt I could have learned it so well at a secular school. In fact I often think that, above all else, my alma mater taught me how to be a sister in Christ, a citizen and a morally responsible grown-up during those tempestuous in-between years. Learning can, and should, happen at any phase of life, but the formation of Christian character happens best during this short and critical time period, and it needs the full support of a community life, regular worship, and mentors. For instance, my understanding of my church tradition was enriched and expanded by knowing southern Lutherans; until college I knew mostly the northeastern kind. My departmental professors didn't only teach me theology, but also fed me a lot of good meals. My campus pastor was a brilliant confidante and beautiful liturgist, but his pastoral care also extended to walking his dog down fraternity row on Friday and Saturday nights, which, I suspect, helped to civilize the party scene. The Christian presence on campus wasn't stifling, but it was certainly ever-present and permeated all things.

Naturally, the formation of Christian character has a deep impact on education, and that is the other task of any college. Christian adults learn to see how present faith and past tradition form the world and critique the conclusions that the disciplines come to. At the same time, though, the disciplines need the freedom to come to their conclusions. The connection with Christian faith means that the disciplines are always anchored in honesty. It is implicitly understood that there is such a thing as truth, that all honest scholarly engagement should eventually lead to truth, and that all truth is unified in God. That doesn't mean simplistic answers; if anything, a world which is the product of a free, creative, trinitarian God is bound to be infinitely more interesting, complex and multifaceted than a world resulting from a few basic physical laws that blindly churn out results. Such an approach of faith respecting and informing academic pursuits applies across the board. Science in all its empirical methodology can become an exploration of the mind of God every bit as fascinating and reverential as theology. I know a chemistry professor at another Christian college who is rigorous and respected in his field, yet fascinated by how the Christian faith informs it. The two, for him, are anything but antithetical.

It is only logical, then, that the confidence in truth will show up most apparently and importantly in the faculty of a Christian college. People who believe in something higher and better tend to be better people and (surprise!) better scholars. Nothing will bring a scholar and teacher's life work into focus like the conviction that it means something and makes a difference in the world. An English teacher will take a text of literature and see not an indecipherable string of code but a layered package of wisdom and insight. A professor of art history will intuit and pass on the profound reverence of medieval architecture. A math prof will detect the transcendence in the numerical patterning of the universe. Nowadays especially, truth claims are far more than statements of the obvious. They are expressions of the theological virtue of hope. The theological virtue of hope is not optimism or perkiness. More often, I suspect, it is accompanied by practical pessimism. This kind of hope places its trust in God, leaves the final resolution of earthly ambiguities in His hands, and boldly proceeds with God's work on earth.

The hopeful outlook of Christian higher education has a profound effect not only on religious formation but on academic development as well. The joining of the two produce people who are not pawns in the market or slaves of the state, but wise and knowledgeable servants of God who enter the world with charity and zeal. Our sin-struck world needs more people like that.