Please notice that the board members and college presidents who advocate these misguided (and therefore destructive) paradigms are frequently persons of unusual distinction and achievement outside the academy. They might be CEOs in enormous multi-national corporations; they might be retired generals or admirals from the armed forces; they might be ambassadors, inventors, surgeons, poets or pastors. They might be persons of impressive wealth, high intelligence, formidable achievement, or inspiring piety. But that does not mean they know higher education. Indeed they sometimes are so ignorant of higher education that they do not know that they do not know. Nevertheless, these are the very persons in charge of the life of the mind at nearly every institution of higher learning in the nation. I do not exaggerate: The roster of most college and university boards is made up almost entirely of non-academics. If you do not believe me, then check it out for yourself. Truthfully, I do not know of single institution of higher learning where this is not precisely the case — not one.

That their prevailing paradigms (corporate, military, ecclesiastical or familial) are foolish and counter-productive becomes readily evident, even to the board members themselves, when you get their minds off campus and back into the non-academic worlds from which they came and in which they succeeded so admirably. On their home turf, none of them insists that their corporation ought to run more like a college; none demands that their platoons run more like a university, and none insists that their churches or their families function more like a grad school. They know full well and without doubt that if you ran your corporation as if it were a college, you’d go out of business; that if you ran your platoon like a university, your soldiers would die; and that if you ran your church or your family as if it were a grad school, you’d stumble over a truckload of new meanings for the word “dysfunctional.” Yet, these same persons insist on running their colleges as if they were corporations, platoons, churches and families, all with predictably bad results for teaching and learning.

But that obvious point is apparently forgotten when these same good folks come to campus. Probably because of their philosophical, pedagogical, and theological inadequacies, as well as the narrowness of their educational experience, they are naturally intent upon forcing the academy into a foreign and distortive paradigm largely because that paradigm is the one with which they are most intimately familiar. Their own habits of mind enslave them and therefore their universities. But they do not know it. They assume that the paradigm of success is the same for the college as for the battlefield, the marketplace, the church or the home, when it is not. God help the schools over which they preside because the prevailing paradigms by which they work would kill tenure if they succeed. Not much worse could happen to a Christian college.

If the persons in charge of higher education insist on adopting a non-academic paradigm for the operation of their schools (and I am by no means certain that they should), then at least let those persons understand that the closest parallel to the academy is the courtroom and that the closest parallel to the professor is the judge.

Because both the judge and the professor are, or ought to be, engaged in the pursuit of truth, the closest parallel to academic life is service on the bench, not service in the corporation, in the armed forces, in the pulpit, or in the living room. Because both the academic and the judicial enterprise require unhindered and undeflected adherence to evidence, the scholar and the judge need to be free from the pressures of the powers that be, whether educational, political, financial, ecclesiastical or familial.

If, for example, the evidence in a judicial case leads a judge to conclude against the powers that be, even the powers that nominated, appointed or confirmed that judge, then that judge needs to be free from pressure and recrimination, free from fear of dismissal and destitution both for the judge and for the judge’s family. In other words, judges require judicial tenure and the freedom it entails because the nature of the task set before them requires them to be honest and meticulous evaluators, never fearing for their livelihood, their reputation, or their security should they reach an unpopular conclusion. Their adherence to the Constitution and their pursuit of truth are essential to their proper function as judges. Justice is compromised, or at least seriously and foolishly endangered, when the administration in power can reward judges for reaching decisions favorable to the regime. Disqualification from the bench ought to be predicated upon judicial incompetence, dereliction of duty, or moral turpitude, not upon decisions unfavorable to the administration. When something outside the courtroom controls the courtroom, that is the death of justice.

As we all recognize, the figure of justice is traditionally represented as blindfolded, symbolic of her impartiality. Justice weighs the evidence, not the reputation, wealth or administrative power of the litigants. Justice does not peek; she does not say “Tell me who you are and what money or power you have, then I will tell you my decision.” Justice does not put her thumb on the scales of evidence in order to alter truth so as to further her own political or financial advantage. Justice seeks rather to promote or produce as objective an evaluation of the evidence as possible. She seeks an impartial application of the law, without which the court’s truth-finding function is virtually set at naught.

Because academic life, like judicial life, is (or should be) characterized by the pursuit of truth, the professor also requires insulation from administrative pressure designed to force the professor to reach institutionally acceptable conclusions, pressure designed to force the professor’s utterances, whether written or spoken, into channels that the evidence itself might not permit. Professors who consent to such knowledge-destroying abuse are much easier to control — and easily controlled professors don’t complicate fund raising by advocating unpopular or unsettling ideas.

To borrow an apt illustration from Allan Bloom: Whenever political regimes changed in the old Soviet Union, Soviet historians had to re-write their history books in order to put in a new and acceptable set both of good guys and bad guys. Their Western counterparts rightly chastised them for doing so because those Western historians understood that as long as something outside the academy controls the academy, that is the death of learning, whether that something is the church, the state, the culture, or even donors. As long as the academy is shackled by fund raising (or by anything else but truth), it shall not be and cannot be what it ought to be. Sad to say, college presidents themselves are frequently the guiding force behind that institutional distortion and the suppression of knowledge and discovery it inevitably entails. They raise money for their colleges by making their colleges something less than or other than an institution of higher education. Colleges are supposed to be knowledge-friendly before they are donor-friendly or even administration-friendly.

While college presidents whose paradigms of operation exclude tenure might be doing their fund raising efforts a favor, they do their colleges a singular disservice. They deny those colleges the benefits that come only from untrammeled research, only from careful and extended self-scrutiny. For example, by continually putting the institution’s understanding of itself and of truth to the test, and by doing so without fear of reprisal, tenured academics offer their schools one of the surest and safest protections from self-deception and error. That self-deception and error characterize the sorry state to which our fallenness and hubris repeatedly predispose us. Both our respect for the institution’s high calling, on the one hand, and our penchant for hubris and self-justification, on the other, demand such a safeguard — even when it makes donor recruitment and personnel control more difficult.

Hubris is the bane not only of presidents and trustees whose greatest (and perhaps unspoken and unacknowledged) desire is to make their jobs easier and to keep their views of the world intact, it also infects professors. Hubris is a human failing, not a merely administrative one. Thus, the work of free professors, while necessary to the health and continued good service of a Christian college, itself requires a check, a rein, or a harness. Just as the free academic is a corrective power for wayward thinking administrations, so also is the work and tenacity of other free academics a protection from the hubris of the free academic. Put differently, the proposed justification or refutation of the institution’s self-understanding and of its mission and worldview are subject to confirmation or refutation by the work of the free academic, and the confirmation or refutation of the work of the free academic is subject in turn to confirmation or refutation by the work of other free academics.

One ought carefully to consider the powerful inducement to intellectual fraud and to self-deception in a school whose president, board, or donors insist upon academic conformity, whether that proposed standard of conformity is written or unwritten, and whether it is in force institution-wide or is merely the private and personal predilections of the president, the dean, or the department chairs. Presidents who do not protect teaching and learning (by protecting tenure and the truth-seeking and self-corrective function of research that accompanies it) injure the very thing they think they serve, namely Christian education itself.

I sometimes think, but cannot prove, that the reluctance of some administrators and institutions to submit their beliefs to scrutiny by academic friend and foe alike springs not from a love for preserving truth, and not from a love for teaching and learning, but from fear and from cowardice, from a failure of nerve. They are afraid (1) that they will not be able to convince donors to give generously to their schools should certain of their pet ideas fail to pass academic muster, and (2) that their own ideas about the universe and the God who made it will be undermined, which is something we all find deeply unsettling when it happens to us.

But if, as a college administrator, you fear that you cannot sell to a prospective donor the college’s courageous commitment to truth (and therefore to the God of Truth), then perhaps you are not very good at your job and ought to find a different one. Perhaps you are in the wrong business, in the wrong office. And if your pet ideas cannot stand up to careful and sustained scrutiny, perhaps you ought to get some that can. The God of all facthood is never undermined by the facts themselves, though your mistaken ideas about him might be. Schools and professors who pursue truth with perseverance and dedication do their Lord and his followers valuable and indispensable service — especially in cases where some institutionally favored but false idea is overthrown. Colleges and presidents who are for sale, who let donors control the intellectual climate or agenda, cannot render that service. If you are for sale, we know what you are, regardless of what title you hold. If you are for sale, the only thing left to haggle over is price.

When, because of their faulty paradigms, college presidents and the boards with which they serve do not permit opposing viewpoints to be heard, they demonstrate that they do not yet know the difference between education and indoctrination. They wish to tell students what to think rather than teaching them how to think. Such presidents and boards seem not to understand that if you know how to think, you will know what to think. Not to permit academic freedom for professors or for students simply because it complicates fund raising or because it threatens institutionally favored ideas is to banish fact-finding and the acquisition of new and greater wisdom from the college, from the very institution that ought to be the best friend of such high and important endeavors. Presidents who do such things seem not to realize that they value mental cloning over authentic teaching. In an atmosphere of mental cloning, if a college’s worldview or its self-understanding are distorted, neither that college nor the students it claims to teach could ever be undeceived because those who deeply and passionately share its error permit no airing of alternatives. Colleges and their presidents all need the help that only potential intellectual dissent can provide. But that help, in most cases, is banished, even censored, by the very persons and institutions that need it most. That failure has been repeated on more college and university campuses than I can count.

Failure to do as we ought with our abilities, our freedoms, and our obligations stifles the pursuit of truth; it makes correction of current errors and the discovery of fresh insight exceedingly more difficult. It shuts down debate; it cripples discovery, teaching and learning. Those failures are not mitigated in the slightest simply because they make the president’s job easier. No Christian college president ought to be party to such education-destroying chicanery.

If, as a Christian college president, you tell me that the college’s constituency won’t like it if you do the right thing, then I say that your college has the wrong constituency (and perhaps the wrong president). I will tell you that your college has spent too many years and too much money and effort cultivating the good will of persons whose gifts undercut the college’s very reason for existence. As a college president, you must never be a slave to your donors, whether current or future. If you are a slave at all, then be a slave to the God of truth and of fact, and to no one else. If your constituency won’t permit such a commitment, you must either get a new constituency or get out of the business of education. Indeed, until you do get such a new constituency, you already are out of the business of education.

You just don’t know it.

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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