Is a Christian College a Community?

Can one speak of the college, the collegium or the universitas, as a covenant community?

Yes and no. A covenant is unconditional, while a contract is full of preplanned exceptions. A contract is about protecting yourself. In a covenant, you are utterly vulnerable. In a covenant, a relationship is established first, a personal connection that defines who we are and carries with it certain costs if we to succeed and certain consequences if we fail to live in this new relationship. The Christian college, I would contend, has elements of both a covenant and a contract.

Colleges, by their intellectual history, are gatherings that take on a life beyond any one individual; they are incorporations. Once they are brought into being, they can outlive their originators. The Roman collegium or universitas (a legal association of many types) could, in theory, be reduced to a single individual. The medieval creation of collegia of learning arose from canon law’s appropriation of this Roman tradition, and it carried with it certain assumptions of due process and due assembly. From their beginnings, colleges of learning intertwined forms of self-governance with pedagogical communities. Gathering for study and debating how to go about it are old, old assumptions about university education.

The University of Paris, for example, organized itself around "nations" (nationes), guilds headed by teachers, each with their own internal governance, while the University of Bologna was organized around student-run nations. Medieval universities fought for and were eventually granted the right of cessation, to be able to relocate if a town was overcharging for rent, food, and student lodging, as well as the right of suspendium clericorum, to be able to boycott as a corporation to force similar changes. To enter a center of study, a stadium, was ideally to make a commitment to a shared goal, the ends of truth, salvation, and public service. Such a commitment, admittedly often noted more in the breaking, carries with it elements of covenant--the academic relationship is entered with a measure of vulnerability and consequence, yet the tight, rule-bound nature of political relations of the association also carry with it overtones of contractual protection.

The rise of humanist academies and houses of legal study in the Renaissance observed similar patterns, and if I had room, one could trace the give-and-take of this through the classical education of the Enlightenment, its Lockean and dissenter counterpoints, the rise of the German research model, and the debate between the liberal progressivism of John Dewey and the Great Books approach of Mortimer Adler.

While it is important to recognize the Christian college and the local congregation as differing entities, they do share the mission of God as their reason for being. Christian education is more than a tool of the Church; it is an expression of her communal personhood. So while the college or university is not the same exact polity as that of the Church, it does help to fulfill elements of its polis, or as Reinhard Hütter suggests, its "public." A public, following Hannah Arendt, has "a particular telos, circumscribed by constitutive practice, and underwritten by normative convictions" (Human Condition 31). The modern world defines itself on the distinction between the public and private spheres. The problem has been that Christian faith reduced to religion as a free association in the private sphere effectively has removed it from having a public claim to our allegiance in any ultimate way.

I will contend that the project of the Christian college should refuse by its very construction to being reduced to a privatized model that isolates its confessional understanding and practices to a few religion courses at best. One aspect, in particular, we should keep in mind is that of the academic culture of research and disputation. Again, speaking in ideal terms, a practice of disputation--be it professional disagreement in journals, researched evaluation, journalistic response, or oral, public debate--to name but a few of the ways--need not lose sight of the Christian telos of love, benevolence, and charity. Failure at peace-making does not remove the command to seek it.

Educators, such as Parker Palmer, have offered that neither a "therapeutic community" of absolutely unprotected intimacy, nor a "civic community" of tolerant strangers is the best kind of community for learning. Instead, Parker argues for a pedagogical community based on troth, on loving mutual commitment to an encounter with truth that draws out of us spiritual formation (30-32). The role of formal antagonism, whether it be in the practice of addressing counterarguments or in the awareness that some measure of proof must be offered for our intuitions and claims, is pedagogical beneficial. But to be so, from a Christian understanding, a covenant of learning must provide for a shared commitment both to the authority of God's truth and to the debate as to its content.