Fundamentalist U
Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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Publisher Description
Colleges, universities, and seminaries do more than just transfer knowledge to students. They sell themselves as "experiences" that transform young people in unique ways. The conservative evangelical Protestant network of higher education has been no different. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, a proper American, all within the bounds of Biblical revelation. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty.
In Fundamentalist U, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America's culture wars. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education. Students at these schools have been expected to learn what it means to be an educated evangelical in a secularizing society. This book asks new questions about that formative process. How have conservative evangelicals hoped to use higher education to instill a uniquely evangelical identity? How has this identity supported the continuing influence of a dissenting body of knowledge? In what ways has it been tied to cultural notions of proper race relations and proper relations between the sexes? And perhaps most important, how have students responded to schools' attempts to cultivate these vital notions about their selves?
In order to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to appreciate the role of this influential network of dissenting institutions. Only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America's continuing culture wars.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this fastidiously researched but biased study, Laats, professor of history at Binghamton University, describes the development of fundamentalist higher education since the 1920s as an attempt to modernize evangelical training schools in response to secular education. Laats links this new brand of higher education to the shared goal throughout fundamentalist communities of providing a competitive education in an environment with strict standards for student conduct and an academic curriculum that wouldn't contradict beliefs in biblical inerrancy. He explores the governing philosophies at various schools (particularly the racist policies at Bob Jones University, where black students weren't admitted until 1970 and interracial dating was prohibited until 2000) before turning the discussion to the cults of personality that have developed around school founders and leaders. The book concentrates mainly on Bob Jones (and his heirs) and Clifton Fowler at the Denver Bible Institute, both of whom conducted staff purges and placed personal loyalty above educational excellence. Laats's other large concern is the schism between mainstream evangelicals and the fundamentalists who objected to their "big tent" policies. Although Laats concedes that much of fundamentalist orthodoxy is irreconcilable with academic standards of research, he minimizes the importance of the teaching of evolutionary science as a driving force behind the rise of fundamentalist institutions, and glosses over disputes about geologic time alternatives. Delving into these issues may not be necessary for specialists, but general readers will be frustrated by the lack of broader context in an otherwise enlightening book.
