OPEN FORUM: College identity

By: Professor Michael Jordan

Posted: 1/31/08

Last Thursday the Opinion page of the Collegian featured Clare Harter's editorial on "Diversity Disdained." She reports that once she arrived on campus, she was surprised to find how important religion was to her peers. She "had been told that Hillsdale was a non-denominational college, and [she] expected [she] would be able to concentrate on academics without having religion stuffed down [her] throat as it had been back home." Sadly, her Christian peers gave her the cold shoulder because she was not a Christian. Christians are enjoined to share their faith, to speak the truth in love, but that should not mean stuffing religion down someone's throat, or giving the unbeliever a cold shoulder, to use Miss Harter's metaphors. Whenever this happens, it is lamentable.

Miss Harter's letter raises important questions about the identity of the college, and the identity it proclaims in its attempts to distinguish itself from other institutions of higher learning. One of our Articles of Incorporation (as amended in 1907), is unequivocal about the identity of the college: "Religious culture in particular shall be conserved by the College, and by the selection of instructors and other practicable expedients, it shall be a conspicuous aim to teach by precept and example the essentials of the Christian faith and religion." From its inception, the college has accepted qualified students regardless of race, religion, sex, and national origin. And this is a good thing. But it should not alter the essential mission of the college or the essentially Christian culture of our students. While we are a non-denominational or non-sectarian college, I think it is fair to say that we are a "Mere Christianity" college (after the title of C. S. Lewis' famous work of Christian apologetics). I hope we will long be a place for Protestants of various stripes, for Eastern Orthodox, for Catholics, and, yes, for agnostics and others with non-Christian beliefs. In this day, an institution of higher learning that pays more than lip service to Christian beliefs and practices is rather unique, and it does provide a welcome diversity to the institutionalized secularism so abundant on other campuses.

I hope that Miss Harter's letter and my response to it will do two things: diminish the ostracizing and cliquish cold shoulder some Christian students display to non-Christian students, and clarify that the college does have a Christian identity.

- Michael M. Jordan
Chair and Professor of English