TEARING DOWN THE IVORY TOWERS:

The new school spirit (Jay Tolson, 2/14/05, US News)

If the past two decades have been an era of religious revival in America--what some observers have called the fourth Great Awakening in the nation's history--the predominantly secular world of U.S. higher education seems at first glance to have been remarkably untouched by the spirit of the times. Large majorities of undergraduates, for instance, say they seek meaning and purpose in their lives, yet just 8 percent report hearing professors discuss spiritual or religious issues in or out of the classroom, according to a major study of campus religious life by University of California-Los Angeles researchers. "There is a poor fit today between students' interest in spiritual matters and the universities' general lack of interest in those concerns," says Alexander Astin, founder of UCLA' s Higher Education Research Institute.

But sometimes a picture of the forest may miss a vigorous new species of tree. That, in any case, was the hunch that put journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley on the trail to writing her new book, God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America. After spending three years visiting colleges with strong religious identies, from five-year-old Patrick Henry College in rural Purcellville, Va., to Indiana's venerable University of Notre Dame, Riley found that these schools are providing intellectual heft to a generation of spiritual seekers that is already influencing American society, business, and government.

Booming. One of Riley's central discoveries is the sheer popularity of colleges with an explicitly religious mission. True, total enrollment in colleges with some kind of sectarian affiliation hasn't grown as a percentage of total college enrollment during the past 20 years. But at schools with an intensively religious focus, she notes, student numbers have surged. The 100-plus members of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (all of which are committed to teaching Christian doctrine and creating a Christian atmosphere beyond the classroom) have seen total enrollment rise some 60 percent between 1990 and 2002. Similarly, Notre Dame received a record number of applications last year, even as high attendance at Brigham Young University, the flagship school of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has led the administration to open a new Idaho campus in addition to the older ones in Utah and Hawaii.

Nor is this solely a Christian academic boom, Riley reports. The orthodox Jewish Yeshiva University is bursting at the seams, while there's a similar explosion of interest in Soka University of America, a recently established Buddhist college in Southern California.

One reason for the popularity of these religious schools--as others before Riley have noted--is straightforward: From Illinois's Wheaton College (often called the "Harvard of evangelical colleges") to Michigan's Ave Maria School of Law (funded by Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan), they offer what is often a superb, rigorous education and can boast a wide range of impressive alumni. But Riley goes beyond generalizations to offer readers a reporter's-eye view of just what makes the schools she profiles tick.

And when, in the not-too-distant future religious schools supplant the Ivies and others as the nation's best, then what does the Left have left?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 13, 2005 6:52 AM