Old challenges, new opportunities for Erskine
By Joshua Grimm
Editor-in-Chief
The 20th century Roman Catholic essayist G.K. Chesterton once wrote that, "We have a new year not so much that we may have a new year, but that we may have a new soul." Indeed, with a new year comes new opportunities for growth, for renewal, and for change as we remember the past and move forward with our vision for the future restored.
The family atmosphere marking Erskine represents one of our greatest strengths; but we must pay careful attention to it or it may become one of our biggest weaknesses. Families may either lovingly deal with problems, or they can gloss over their problems and suppress them. Out of love for the family that makes up the Erskine community we need to honestly assess and confront the challenges facing us. I challenge us all to a conversation about what it means for us to be a community of administrators, scholars, and students.
Old Challenges
The conversation must begin with an open discussion concerning our educational philosophy and its ambiguous past. There exists within Erskine’s “institutional DNA” a certain ambiguity about what our educational philosophy really is. Until the 1960s, Erskine was largely a socially conservative church-related liberal arts college in the ARP tradition of pietistic Christianity. With the 1960s and new presidential administrations came a turn toward more liberal social policies on campus and an approach toward education that viewed faith and reason as inhabiting different “stories” of the world. The ARP Church began to respond to that trend with its 1977 ARP Philosophy of Christian Education, but Erskine’s Board of Trustees and its Administration neither had the vision nor the will to fully adopt that philosophy at Erskine. Thus began the entrenching of the dichotomy between “Christian commitment and excellence in learning.”
During the 1980s Erskine increased its academic standards and moving into the 1990s Erskine paid increased attention to the Sciences, an investment culminating in the building of the Daniel Moultrie Science Center. During the period of re-focusing on academic standards in the 1980s Erskine’s Christian commitment (in an apparent reaction by moderate to liberal administrations to the pietism of Erskine’s past) began to be de-emphasized. That changed in the 1990s, with the Strobel Administration. As Dr. Bright Lowry’s "Report for the Purpose Committee" for Erskine’s 2001 Self-Study notes, coming off of Erskine’s decline in enrollment in the early 1990s the College brought in the consulting firm Noel-Levitz to evaluate the institution and its retention levels.
In response to these self-studies, then, from 1997 to 2001 Erskine began to emphasize more its status as the only Carnegie BA-I school in the South to also be a member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. This coincides with the beginning of the Carson Administration in 1998, with Dr. Carson’s notable statement that a vision for Erskine as a Christian liberal arts college is
…not new - The Philosophy of Christian Higher Education and the Definition of an Evangelical were adopted 21 years ago by the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and the Board of Trustees of Erskine College and several years ago in its Mission. I do not intend to add anything new - not one new straw on the backs of faculty or staff or students; but I do intend to be consistent in making this vision a reality. Erskine College will be by God's grace what it has been called to be- a Christian Liberal Arts College open to all students.
(John Carson, Why A Christian Liberal Arts Education?, Erskine College, 1998)
Not until the Carson Administration do we see a movement to move Erskine beyond the polarities of its “institutional DNA”: vanilla ARP southern cultural pietism, on the one hand, and a kind of vanilla compartmentalist liberalism, on the other. Indeed, by the 2001 self-study, the Strategic Planning Committee’s Erskine College Strategic Plan 2001 made its goal “That the College be recognized as one of the finest Christian liberal arts colleges in the nation, advancing its academic reputation, with six hundred students by 2005” (cited in Dr. David Grier, "Section III: Institutional Effectiveness," 4 [2001]).
The problem with the Carson Administration consisted in that it did not bring about the consensus agreement to its Christian liberal arts vision needed to break the polarities of Erskine’s “institutional DNA.” The challenge that Erskine faced in 2001 may be best illustrated by the following focus group study results noted by Dr. Lowry’s report about the views of Erskine staff: “…those who agreed or agreed strongly dipped to fifty-three percent for, ‘unites faith and reason’ and fifty-five percent for, ‘makes students aware of their obligations to GOD’ (Lowry, II-6).
Present discussions about the new mission statement, and the wide range of disagreement and confusion among faculty and students (not to mention the virtual silence of administrators!), shows that the polarities of Erskine’s institutional DNA remain potent.
And the potency of those polarities powerfully affects the entire range of institutional, campus, communal, and spiritual life of Erskine College by frequently limiting what we can accomplish in those areas to the minimal. Those polarities lead to a fragmented and insufficiently vigorous vision for education and for community. But Erskine need not stay here.
New Opportunities
Like Chesterton’s proverbial new year, Erskine needs a new soul and a new vision. Our vision for what Erskine could be ought not to match the smallness of our campus. Instead, let us move forward by means of a vision of a renewed Erskine, an Erskine beyond the polarities of the past. It is a grand and glorious vision of an Erskine with robust academics seen as the quest of faith seeking understanding through the liberal arts, faculty passionate about educating both the hearts and the minds of their students, and community life led proactively led in its spiritual, intellectual, and recreational aspects by administrators and students.
As we finish this month of January and look toward the next eleven months and beyond, I ask you to dream big dreams with me. I ask you to be content no longer with mediocrity, with spiritual or intellectual shallowness, or with hypocrisy in Erskine as an institution and a community, in your friends, and in your own heart and mind. I ask you to consider that change and renewal are possible as we act on the basis of a Christian liberal arts vision.
I ask you to reconsider all that you have ever thought was impossible, in your own life and in the life of this community we call Erskine. I ask you to consider that in doing so, the stakes are high as the clouds. The stakes are whether or not Erskine will be, by the grace of God, an institution and a community that strives to glorify God in all that it does by producing well-rounded, Gospel-centered people lit on fire to serve and bring renewal to a fallen, confused, and hurting world in whatever they do. Will you and I be those kind of students? Will Erskine College be that kind of institution and that kind of community?
As we face this new year, the challenges of Erskine past remain to be tackled. But the time is now to meet those challenges head on, with all the energy, thought, and passion motivated by a breathtaking vision of the Christian liberal arts. The stakes are no more and no less, as Chesterton said, than the state of our souls.
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