What The Los Angeles Times Missed About Biola University

Biola University. Photo from Biolo Facebook page

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(OPINION) Perception has a way of shaping reality, even distorting it. I know because I’ve been part of a movement that flies under the radar of many scholars and most journalists. That movement, Christian higher education, is such an unknown that those attempting to understand it, to explain its ways, often stumble badly.

Most recently, it emerged in a Page 1 analytical feature in the Los Angeles Times about Biola University that suggested it was on a downward spiral, perhaps part of an impending implosion of similar schools nationally. Students and faculty, it argued, were jumping over the railings of the Titanic. And it pointed at me, without naming me, as the faculty adviser to a campus newspaper in which free thought — particularly about race — was not allowed.

I’d seen writing like this in the past, so I wasn’t surprised. But it disappointed, yet again.

Shortly before arriving at John Wayne Airport for the job interview that would land me a journalism faculty position at this Christian university in southeast Los Angeles, I read a feature piece in New York Times Magazine about the school. In “All God’s Children,” Samantha Shapiro had fixated on what most journalists can’t figure out — the disparity between what schools like Biola look like and what major universities across town look like.

The piece was reductive — written with sardonic humor and a sinister tone. It made Christian colleges and universities look naïve and backward at best; at worst, the piece suggested, schools like these were repressive and abusive to any student or faculty member willing to think deeply or buck the cultural tide.

It got caught in the weeds — unpacking externals, like rules about alcohol and sexual behavior, dorm policies, worship as part of the campus culture. The writer, like so many journalists, couldn’t seem to fathom how a university with any credibility could require Bible courses as part of the core curriculum. It missed entirely the point that some students — no, really, and smart ones — want to embed their cognitive and career development with a firm grasp of theology and an enriching of their souls.

It made me all the more eager to sign my contract. It drove me to polish up and recraft syllabi from 16 years of prior college-level journalism teaching. I’d left daily newspaper reporting in Illinois and Georgia shortly after covering the 1988 Democratic National Convention to invest in the next generation of journalists. I took that step at the invitation of a small Christian liberal arts college near Lexington, Kentucky. Advising of Asbury College’s campus student weekly, an unpaid gig, was part of that faculty position.

While there, I completed a doctorate at the University of Kentucky, where I explored the ways advances in media in the late 19th and early 20th centuries helped grow a movement of biblically centered colleges, universities and nonprofit organizations that have quietly shaped our nation and world. It was a movement, scholars Nathan Hatch and Timothy Smith have argued, that grew out of revivalism. Some have called those periods great awakenings. Regardless, they were years when widespread renewal of Christian faith so shook Americans that the outworking of that faith influenced the very contours of American social justice, our nation’s collective outworking of compassion and its patterns of democracy, commerce and even popular music.

Schools like Biola are part of a vast diversity of small but influential private four-year institutions. The most recent data from the National Center for Educational Statistics shows there are more than 1,900 private four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. and a little over 770 public four-year universities.

Well-respected histories of American higher education, such as those by Frederick Rudolph and Laurence Veysey, note how faith-based learning guided pursuit of scholarship and research in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But these and other historians point to the late 19th century as a time when many colleges and universities began downplaying the role of faith in their approach to teaching and scholarship. Rationalism and systematic skepticism took over.

It was at about this time that a new wave of Christian colleges and universities across the U.S. were founded — with the goal of counteracting the shift away from the faith-and-learning mix. Wheaton College, Gordon College, Taylor University, Asbury, Biola and many others grew quickly as places where the life of the mind could be intertwined with cultivation of biblical learning and deepened spiritual character. The Council of Christian Colleges and Universities, with about 180 members, today stands out in its commitment to biblical orthodoxy and integration of faith and learning.

Some of these schools, at their founding, required community service or local ministry work as part of the undergraduate curriculum, or the co-curriculum. That is, practical student learning mattered. If students didn’t get it — deep down, at sidewalk level — none of the essay exam grades or spiritual trappings really mattered. That’s always been true.

Rudolph and social historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz note the enormous power of the extra curriculum as that parallel universe on any campus where students have defined for themselves what their college learning will be — in class, out of class, on playing fields, in their college towns. Peer-to-peer learning, John Dewey argued, is as powerful as any lesson plan, any classroom regimen.

This is why, to me, campus media is one of the most important — and, oddly, one of the most underappreciated — elements of undergraduate development at any college or university. It’s in the rough-and-tumble mix of a newsroom where students grapple with right vs. wrong, fair vs. unfair, truth vs. half-truth or lies. College journalists, because the burden is on them to show they’re not uninformed, naïve or bent on media attack, have to earn their way into trust with audiences — from the administration on down to the freshman dorms.

College journalists at an explicitly Christian college or university see the seamy underbelly of institutions that claim moorings in biblical realities but fail to live them out. They see greed, lust, manipulation and even abuse. And they learn ways to tell these stories in a campus media context — or find out that the best way to tell them is to graduate and come at them as news professionals.

The writer for the L.A. Times found it difficult, I suspect, to get enough students to talk to him about the realities of Biola’s climates of race, gender, LGBTQ experience or doctrinal identification. But even without those interviews, he did put his finger on an overall sense of things not being right, of need for change at this university. Some of my students and grads spoke of this, of the need to talk about all of it better — and get somewhere with it. I agree.

The conversations won’t come easily. Schools in the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities share an overall sense of feeling under siege culturally and politically. Brett McCracken, in 2014, wrote of a wave of pressure against schools like Biola, which find themselves in the crosshairs of legal argument about the role of First Amendment free exercise of religious experience. There are two ways to approach that anxiety. One is culture war — a James Davison Hunter, Pat Buchanan taking up of media and policy armament. That mindset can shut down student dialogue, student media expression and even enrollment.

Another (I’ll limit my list to two) is what Biola President Barry Corey calls kindness — face-to-face, life-to-life dialogue and shared experience with those who disagree with us. It’s made Biola a place where student media expression is allowed, though peer-to-peer attacks are not unheard of — nobody said Christian colleges and universities have this all figured out.

What gives me hope is the phone call I got after the L.A. Times piece, from an editor on next year’s campus newspaper staff. She wanted to know how to take on tough issues, to get dialogue going. We talked; she’s ready.

Dr. Michael Longinow was born in Chicago and grew up reading the Chicago Daily News, The Sun-Times and The Tribune. He’s been a college-level educator for 33 yeras, after a prior career in daily newspaper reporting in Illinois and Georgia. He’s a professor of journalism and integrated media at Biola University and faculty adviser to The Chimes student news outlet. Longinow’s students have won many state and national awards for reporting, writing, photojournalism and overall excellence. You can find him on Twitter at @LonginowM.