Hillsdale College, a Christian college in Hillsdale, Michigan, known for its conservative political identity, saw an enrollment surge of 16% in fall 2021 and reported an endowment topping $900 million that same year. The school advertises on Fox News, and in 2020 Donald Trump appointed the school’s president to chair a committee created to help curb “anti-American” scholarship.
According to Hillsdale’s website, the college rejects “the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called ‘social justice’ and ‘multicultural diversity,’ which judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups in divisive power struggles.”
Other politically conservative Christian colleges have also found success in terms of numbers. Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, whose then-President Jerry Falwell Jr. championed Donald Trump’s White House run in 2016, boasted its highest enrollment in both online and residential programs in fall 2022. Trump also held a campaign rally at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where enrollment nearly doubled between 2010 and 2020, thanks in part to new online degree offerings.
“In a general sense, at conservative colleges, I’ve seen them become more explicitly partisan,” Matthew Warner, a critical cultural scholar who previously taught at Hillsdale and Liberty, told Religion News Service. He said that political identity is increasingly reflected in their student bodies.
“I think that as institutions have become more politically vocal and more partisan in how they market themselves — when Hillsdale College started advertising with Rush Limbaugh, for example — what you end up getting is a larger portion of the student body that’s coming for specific reasons … year on year on year, more of the freshman class was already politically aligned with the public reputation of the college.”
Leadership at other Christian colleges could be following suit. In October 2021, faculty at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, voted no confidence in their new president, Gerson Moreno-Riaño, the day before his inauguration, citing a culture of “fear and suspicion” and his alleged opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Moreno-Riaño, who previously served in executive leadership at Regent University, wrote an article in 2020 calling today’s college classrooms “myopically fixated on the perspectives of the oppressed.”
Hawk believes Palm Beach Atlantic’s leadership is also on the path to partisanship. Before she graduated in 2017, she told RNS, it was “obvious” that it “leaned conservative,” but it “wasn’t necessarily a hostile environment” to non-conservatives. That changed, she said, in 2020 when the university honored Melania Trump as that year’s “Woman of Distinction.”
Conservative politics isn’t the only thing uniting these schools. Several, including Liberty, Grove City and Palm Beach Atlantic, don’t offer tenure (except at Liberty’s law school, where it’s required for accreditation). And Regent, Liberty and Cornerstone have all seen layoffs that allegedly targeted faculty and staff who didn’t align with leadership’s politically driven mission.
Many Christian colleges are trying to be defined by their faith, not politics, and to offer an education rooted in theology and open to people of all political viewpoints. But in today’s political climate, argues Andrea Turpin, a Christian historian of religion in American higher education and professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, simply having a “political spread” can get an institution accused of losing its identity.
“That’s what I see happening here at Palm Beach, that’s what happened at Grove City,” said Turpin. “There were individual people or classes that were exploring the connection of the faith with issues that have gotten coded as politically left in the contemporary American context.”
When donors, parents and other stakeholders apply labels like “CRT” indiscriminately, even broad lectures on racial justice are flagged as indoctrination. This is especially the case in Christian higher education, argues psychologist and educator Christina Edmondson, where there’s a risk of “this conversation being funneled through this cheat-sheet of labeling things quickly as either right or wrong, biblical or unbiblical.”
Edmondson acknowledged that many Christian colleges are financially dependent on churches and other outside funders to keep the lights on. But, she said, it’s in the vulnerable times that Christian colleges discover what they really stand for.
“That’s when you can demonstrate what I believe to be the best of the institutions, this Christian courageous tradition of not being controlled by dollars, but seeing oneself as standing for justice and righteousness, come what may,” she said.
This article originally appeared here.
