Gary M. Ross
Academic Vice President
It is with pleasure and
expectancy that I welcome you to one of the most exciting cerebral experiences
you will ever have.
Few misconceptions
entertained by students are as great as the belief that the Adventist element
of an Adventist education is peripheral in the classroom.
This belief is pervasive and
persuasive: it truly has its reasons.
From one thing, an abundant and seemingly sufficient amount of religious activity occurs mainly outside the classrooms, yet still within the campus, of an Adventist institution. You interact with Christian teachers and attend numerous religious services and even take prescribed religion courses. In doing so, one easily concludes, you imbibe the Adventist part of your tertiary experience. Then you enter the secular classroom for the meat of it–the classroom alleged to be empirical and value-free.
Add to this the fact that students
are jealous for the integrity of their classes. Granted, religion is a very good thing, the rightful basis of a
desirable environment or climate of learning.
But introduce it cart blanche to the curriculum and you dilute and
distort the subject matter and undermine its hoped for equivalency with public
schooling. (In this regard students are
appropriately wary: they
have seen well-meaning professors bring religion into the classroom at the
expense of everything else.)
Third, it seems endemic to
our lifestyle, perhaps the Western lifestyle, to bifurcate the sacred from the
profane. Our own church encourages it
without intending to by voicing a separation that sounds like the purging of
religion to public issues.
So peripheralism shouts out:
religion is everywhere; protect our classes; be Western and therefore
bifurcate!
However justified
peripheralism seems, integration makes the stronger case. For its advocates, the Adventism of an
Adventist college is fundamentally a classroom phenomenon because for them
knowledge is acquired or learning takes place within a faith perspective. No one intends this to minimize the general
environment, but simply to maximize the cognitive element of campus life.
We could digress here to the
pitfalls of integration–such as the belief that there is only one way to do it
in a given discipline, or the belief that one eventually gets it right (in
contrast to the lifelong striving that it really entails), but I only
acknowledge these in passing because I wish rather to describe why it is that
the effort to integrate is so worthwhile, the assumption being that knowing the
value of integration will compel us to try it.
So what is its value or what
are its values?
First, the exercise called
integration models what we wish our young people to become and be in the real
world–whole people driven by, conditioned by, or at least contextualized by
religion in all that they perceive or do, rather than compartmentalized people
for whom the
facets of life are not
connected enough to be meaningful or even manageable. We know that we are role models in the areas of character, but it
turns out that we are equally such in matters of the mind.
Second, the exercise of
integration answers those who bemoan the high cost of college education (and
who isn't bemoaning this). To
consumer-oriented students and parents the persuasive demonstration of
uniqueness is indispensable in justifying the cost of something, and
integration locates that uniqueness at the most fundamental point of academic
life, the classroom.
Third, the exercise of integration closes the gap between what we have been doing in our colleges and what we have been saying about our colleges in the public arena and especially t he courts-wherein we have argued for decades that our schools must be shielded from public money and the possible violation of church/state separation because they are pervasively religious. I contend they will be such only when integration happens across the board; only then will our oft-repeated public claims be credible.
Fourth, the exercise of
integration aligns our disciplines with a great deal of respectable scholarship
today, and that is both remarkable and satisfying. In the disciplines of history and political science with which I
am most familiar, one thinks of the now conventional wisdom that value-free
commentary is not possible, that explicit bias and self-discourses, not feigned
objectivity, bring us as close to what actually happened as we will get. Or one thinks of the long reign of realism
as a measure of international or diplomatic behavior (Metternich to Kissinger)
and of the widely acknowledged rootage of that theory in the Christian view of
man.
Fifth, the exercise of
integration is simply exciting–it becomes your project for life–like a very
long book that you can't put aside but also cannot finish. And if teaching becomes your project in this
sense, your teaching will not die as it is want to do (we call it burn-our) but
rather it will grow in vibrancy and at the same time deepen with a sense of
wholeness and completeness. Even as
these sentiments of vibrancy and depth prolong your academic life, they will
arrest the attention of your students and captivate them so that learning is in
the best sense of the word their project too, a book that can neither be put
aside nor finished.
For these five reasons, and
no doubt others, let's determine, no later than today, to move beyond
peripheralism and experience the rewards of integration.
Here, too, critics will
lurk. Peculiarly, the loudest may be
our religion teacher who bemoan one of the corollaries of integration, namely
the diminished need for religion as such in core curricula that include
integrated classes. To them you have an
enticing rebuttal: ultimacy has reached the classroom–spiritual points of view
that add to and never subtract from the legitimate work of students,
tantalizing insights that direct the finite mind of man to the infinite mind of
God. Who could want less?