Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/07/22/god_and_man_at_dartmouth.php
Friday, July 22, 2005
At one point in William F. Buckley's eclectic "autobiography of faith," Nearer My God, he discusses the evolution of religious life at the Millbrook School in Connecticut. Mandatory religious services on Sundays during Buckley's tenure in the 1940's have given way to the absence of any services at all in the present day. Moreover, where once Buckley had to obtain special permission to attend Catholic Mass rather than the school-sponsored Protestant service, a modern "Candlelight Service" is so diverse and dissolute as to be meaningless—the Lord's Prayer, while present, is disguised in Aramaic.
Buckley found, unsurprisingly, that the nation's other most elite preparatory schools had abandoned their Christian mission. And so it is at Dartmouth, where Eleazar Wheelock's original goal of witnessing to Indians is far more often scorned than embraced—it is continually surprising and not just a little embarrassing how many of my fellow students purport to despise everything that transpired at the College before 1972. At the same time, though, anyone who claims that Dartmouth is an affirmatively anti-Christian (or, for that matter, anti-religious) institution is living in an equally delusional world.
The skeptic might counter by noting the vitriol directed at proselytizing evangelicals from the left wings of campus discourse following this spring's New York Times Magazine cover story on evangelicals in the Ivy League. The cynic might crack that there's no need for Dartmouth to be anti-religious—Millbrook and other prep schools have rooted out any "viruses of the mind," to adopt the language of zoologist and ardent atheist Richard Dawkins, before students arrive on the Hanover Plain.
The truth, however, is that many fervently religious students arrive at Dartmouth, only to have to their faith obliterated, wither away, or lapse into dormancy thanks to the prevailing, and mostly benign, neglect of things spiritual by the campus mainstream. Such a marginalization is institutional; I remember a campus fellowship leader noting, with some amusement, that the Tucker Foundation—Dartmouth's umbrella organization for spiritual and religious life—donated $50 to a spring break mission trip that cost tens of thousands to run. Tucker, of course, fully funds numerous non-religious service fellowships to locations around the world each year. This is just one example of how, while proclaiming official neutrality, Dartmouth discourages religion by omission.
Some would argue, as they often do, that things are better today than they were in olden days, now that the Ivy League is thoroughly secular and its original task of training young men for the ministry is long forgotten. In Nearer My God, Buckley paraphrases the thesis of George Marsden's The Soul of the American University, writing that, in the early twentieth century, "the administrators of higher education…turned education over to their faculties…in the serene conviction that the fusion of academic inquiry and religious inclination would vitalize evangelical Christianity even beyond where it then was on the typical campus."
The fact that it did not, and rather that Christianity was largely abandoned, could thus be interpreted as a defeat for religion on the merits.
But was it? Atheism, or at least militant secularism, has certainly carried the day in the academic arena, but what has it won for the hearts and minds of Dartmouth students? It is hard for this enlightened knowledge to stick when the academic accomplishments of the day are washed away in the night by a meaningless sea of alcohol and one-time assignations. That's not to whitewash the past and ignore the fact that young adults of college age have been behaving badly for time immemorial, even when attending daily services.
But that is precisely the point. At least in the past, institutions of secondary and higher learning felt an institutional responsibility to counter the intemperate impulses of youth with religious training. Returning to Nearer My God, Buckley quotes a story from a book by Sir Arnold Lunn (who, among other things, invented downhill slalom skiing) about a young fornicator who refused to miss Sunday morning Mass. Prohibitions against sex, notes the narrator, are "infernally difficult to keep. On the other hand the obligation to attend Mass is easy to observe." Failing to do so "is like cutting an important parade. It's bad manners, and as good manners are easier to acquire than good morals, bad manners are in some ways more inexcusable." Or, to rephrase in the parlance of our times: there's nothing wrong with copious amounts of beer pong, but it's a shame that long Saturday nights are no longer routinely followed by somber (and sober) Sunday mornings.
Such social coercion to enforce commonly accepted values is the College's job as an authority figure in students' lives. Radical 1960's educational reformers campaigned to strip universities of any such in loco parentis authority, but, in practice, the old orthodoxy has been usurped by a new one that is just as stringent, where, among other things, a thorough-going nihilism has replaced long-standing religious traditions.
So what, then, is to be done? As Buckley noted in his first book, God and Man at Yale, over a half century ago, this transformation of academia has been spearheaded by faculty members and administrators against the will (and often the knowledge) of the university's true masters—the alumni. Here at Dartmouth meanwhile, the alumni speak through elected Trustees, and, as we experienced this spring, their collective voice can speak loudly and authoritatively about the direction of the College.
In Yale's official refutation of God and Man, a distinguished committee wrote that "there is today, more than ever, widespread realization that religion alone can give meaning and purpose to modern life." The same would not be said by Dartmouth's administrators today, but, as Trustees and administrators alike re-evaluate the College's priorities in the wake of the watershed election of Peter Robinson and Todd Zywicki, they should consider their approach to the life of the spirit as well as to the life of the mind.