Halfway through a very complex and highly spirited classroom discussion that I was leading on the interplay between fallen human nature and divine grace, a discussion in which students were vigorously debating the contrasting views of Augustine and Pelagius, the Vice President for Development of the college where I then was teaching walked into my classroom unannounced and uninvited, along with two prospective Donors. The three dark-suited men paused for a moment, looked around, and then selected adjoining seats in the front row. As they did so, all attention naturally turned away from the intricate theological battle that had consumed Christian thinkers for many centuries and instead focused on the three interlopers. All discussion and all thought stopped. While fund raising continued apace, education was momentarily suspended.

Because a significant portion of my teaching is conducted in Socratic dialogue, I did the only thing I could do to set the situation right — I turned slightly to my left to face him, and I called on the Vice President: “What do you think, Mr. X? Are we sinners because we sin, or do we sin because we are sinners?”

Clearly questions of that sort had never before darkened the door of Mr. X’s mind, much less enlightened its deepest recesses. For a few seemingly interminable moments, he searched for something — anything — to say. While the students and donors waited expectantly and uncomfortably for his answer, he sat red-faced, silent, baffled and embarrassed, trying to extricate himself from the pit into which he had so unexpectedly walked, using every tool available to him except thought.

He was caught in this humiliation partly because he failed to realize that education is not properly a spectator sport by which we entertain or impress people from whom we want money. It never occurred to him that nothing he does as a college administrator, including fund raising, ought ever to injure teaching and learning, the very things his errors brought to a screeching halt. He was thinking of the bottom line.

He apparently never contemplated the effect his untimely intrusion might have on teaching and learning. He thought instead about what effect watching an interesting class might have on fund raising, on the bottom line. To him, education was a means to a fund raising end. The faculty and students were there to serve his endowment purposes. His actions declared his real beliefs, no matter what his mouth might have professed. His actions declared that faculty and students are support staff for the administration, rather than the other way round. After all, he never would have consented to my bringing a group of prospective students into his work space to sit and watch halfway through his pitch to a donor, even though he himself did that very thing to others.

It was a view he learned from his president, which leads to my main point: Unless you know what you ought to be doing, you probably won’t be doing it well, if you are doing it at all.

Put bluntly, some Christian college presidents do not know what they ought to be doing. If decorum and charity did not prohibit my doing so, I could give you names, dates and places. Despite their good intentions to the contrary, the college presidents to whom I am referring serve a purpose inimical to Christian higher education. Instead of focusing their attention resolutely and unflaggingly on promoting teaching and learning in light of the lordship of Christ, they serve the function of Mickail Gorbachev: They preside over the dissolution of their empires and they don’t even know it.

Education crumbles unnoticed around such college presidents precisely because they themselves are not educators. By training, by choice, and by experience, they are businessmen and fundraisers, not teachers. Nor were they hired to be. They were hired to be the college’s chief development officer, not its chief academic officer. The classroom is foreign to them; the boardroom is not. They are committed to the idea that a college is a business and that fund raising trumps all. To their minds, the bottom line is not education; the bottom line is the bottom line. Even when their words do not tell you this about them, their actions do.

You can always tell when a college is under the control of a president or a board of trustees who overvalues money and who undervalues almost everything else, including teaching and learning: The raising of funds covers a multitude of sins. No matter how poor the president might be as an academic or as an administrator; no matter how pedestrian the president’s powers of intellection, conception or articulation; no matter how many good persons (or ideas) get trampled underfoot on the college’s way to the bank; this president does not have to pay for his errors because when the endowment grows, the college is thought to flourish and he is thought to succeed. His errors and shortcomings are written off, euphemized, as merely the idiosyncratic foibles of an otherwise effective and honorable leader. Were the dollar count not so impressive, however, his shortcomings would end his career, rather than the careers or ideas of others.

I am not saying anything so foolish as that college presidents need not concern themselves with money or with fund raising. Of course they must. But they must raise money by conceiving, articulating and embodying, both in themselves and in their institutions, a vivid and compelling vision of Christian higher education. That compelling vision itself will generate income, if those presidents articulate it the right way to the right persons. But that compelling vision rarely arises in the minds of those who themselves lack the beauty, truth and goodness afforded only by a liberal arts education pursued under the lordship of Christ.

College presidents must never alter that powerful vision just to suit potential donors. If you alter the vision to suit the donors, the keen and attentive Christians among those donors will soon discover that the president’s pitch changes with the situation. They will figure out that the investment they made (or might make) in this particular college is in serious jeopardy because this college and this president are for sale to the highest bidder. The next donor on the president’s visitation agenda, a donor who might give an even greater amount of money, will then shape the way the college functions — determining which programs get funded, which teachers get hired, which courses get taught, which buildings get built, and which scholarships get given.

If the college and its president are for sale to the highest bidder, no donor can consider his or her investment safe, or can confidently assume that the purpose for which that gift was given is secure. The next donor in line can undermine the very purpose for which some previous donor sacrificed so selflessly. That sobering prospect shuts down good will and the generosity that flows from it. This consequent donor unease, in time, results in less money for the college, not more, which is the very outcome this all-too-pliable-president was trying desperately to avoid. If the intellectual life and practice of a college are determined by donors and not by lofty principle, education is threatened.

Put differently, wherever and whenever the endowment of a college swells while authentic education withers, that college does not have an endowment, the endowment has the college. Such cases are legion. Money becomes an end in itself rather than a servant of teaching and learning. Consequently, decisions are made based too much on fund raising considerations and too little on what makes teaching and learning thrive.

That is a shame. Teaching and learning, after all, are why colleges exist.

Questions or comments about this article? E-mail Dr. Bauman at michael.bauman@hillsdale.edu. Unless otherwise specified, e-mail will be considered for publication.

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