oppressive, and that we each should define our own morality along the Left’s approved racial, sexual, or class categories. That’s the direction higher education is taking our culture—and even at Christian colleges few seem to want to stop it. Good Ideas Produce Good Teaching I received an early Christmas present in 2010. It came in the form of a headline run by CBS Money Watch and The Huffington Post: “Okla- homa Wesleyan University ranked first with the best university professors in the entire nation.” A conservative Christian college gets cited by the mainstream media as having the “best faculty in the nation”! Not Harvard. Not Dartmouth. But Oklahoma Wesleyan University. We have stayed at or near the top of that list ever since. How did this happen? Good teaching presup- poses good ideas, and we offer both. None of our students graduate with a degree in “whatever”; our students earn degrees in real academic disciplines where they are challenged and held to the highest standards. Above all, our goal, as the psalmist says, is, “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth” (Psalm 86:11). That is what higher education lacks above all else—and that is what is corrupting our culture—a refusal to pursue truth. Without that, we are a nation truly lost. The above institutions are just a few of hundreds that explicitly cite a Judeo-Christian ethic, or even specific biblical passages, as their guiding ethos and their very reason for existence. America’s higher educational inheritance is, indeed, rich with the assumption that the highest goal of the academy should be to teach and model personal integrity within the context of God’s objective truths: truths such as respect for law; a desire for virtue; a heart for sacrifice; and the value of sobriety, religion, morality, and biblical wisdom. Leaving Home I n the latter half of the 19th century, however, higher education started its departure from these founding principles. Millions of dollars from wealthy benefactors, and the burgeoning in- volvement of the federal government, helped estab- lish many new universities and expand others. This infusion of capital brought with it a different focus and intent. “The German model, which emphasized self-directed, specialized…scholarship…where there would be total intellectual freedom from… doctrinal directives,” was viewed as superior to the traditional British model, which was based on the classics and focused on personal morality, philo- sophical consistency, theological depth, civic duty, and individual integrity. Johns Hopkins University, founded in 1876, was one of the first to be based on the German model. Its focus was on science and re- search, expanding graduate programs, and offering professional studies in medicine and engineering, rather than focusing on religion and morality or logic and rhetoric. American education as a whole, through the course of the latter part of the 19th century and the entire 20th century, became much more utilitarian than religious, much Ī WWW.AGRM.ORG MAY/JUNE 2018 47 America’s higher educational inheritance is, indeed, rich with the assumption that the highest goal of the academy should be to teach and model personal integrity within the context of God’s objective truths.