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Seeing our collegiate selves

Often the successes and shortcomings of our practice of faith can be seen most clearly through outsiders’ eyes. Like the eyes of Marjorie Hass.

I didn’t cheer when one of our PC(USA)-related colleges called this Jewish scholar to be its president. Amid the flood of post-Christian influences pressing upon schools, I grumbled, “Can’t we at least expect the person at the top of those schools to share our Presbyterian or, at least, Christian faith?” Hass’ election to lead Austin College in Sherman, Texas, looked like yet another brick added to the wall of separation between church and higher education.

I was wrong.

While talking with her at presidents’ conferences of the Association of Presbyterian Colleges and Universities, and at a recent gathering of institutional executives hosted by the Texas Presbyterian Foundation, I could tell that her appreciation and promotion of our convictions matched or even exceeded those of most of the others in the room. Moreover, her unintended critique of us was searing.

So, at my request, she agreed to a conversation with me (see p. 14).

Her academic training focused on the philosophy of language and logic. Though her three academic degrees were all earned at a state university — Illinois at Urbana-Champaign —  she soon found herself on the faculty of the Lutheran church-related Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pa. She fell in love with the liberal arts model, even as it pressed her to search for points of contact between her studies and the minds of her students. She branched into the use of colloquial language — finding lots of fodder in the text generation’s propensity to invent new words.

She also served as director of Muhlenberg’s Center for Ethics — fertile field for reflecting on the practice of faith — and later as provost. In the process, she came to see how church-related liberal arts colleges “change lives. … We’re not simply about career preparation; we are certainly not about rote learning. We see the college experience as an integrated, residential, whole-person, life-changing experience.” Of course students graduate equipped to take on that first job or go to grad school, but they also come out “prepared to be problem solvers, to see holistically, creatively and critically. They come out with a sense of responsibility. They come out not only with their lives changed but prepared to change the lives of everything and everyone they touch.”

Throughout her four years at Austin College, her philosopher’s mind has run in high gear, helping her not only to exhibit the values of generations of Presbyterian heritage but even to master presbyspeak — that mix of high-powered theological concepts, polity eccentricities, mother-country carryovers (like “wee kirk”) and contemporary colloquialisms (like “energizers”). The one course she’s taught at the college, a religion class, she led in partnership with the campus chaplain, a PC(USA) teaching elder.

She’s quick to brag on the chapel program, listing the weekly Bible studies, events, service projects, youth group leading, discussion forums — many particular to the Reformed tradition, others geared to students from other denominations and religions.

But when she’s asked about lessons for us to learn from the Jewish approaches to ministry with teens and young adults, her response, while enthusiastic, presses Presbyterians to the wall. “The Jewish community takes campus ministry seriously, extremely seriously.”  Jews have invested in the education, tradition cultivation and spiritual formation of their students as if they are an endangered species. Few perceptions will mobilize to action more than the fear of extinction — that is, if one values the community identity that could be lost.

Hass reported how the Hillel organization for college students tried tying its future to local congregations — expecting the jacksynagogues to do most of the work. The effort flopped. The students’  activity calendars and life-stage issues simply didn’t mesh with the congregations’. So they redoubled efforts, rebuilt vital on-campus programs, and poured in funding from every synagogue in the country.

Dare I suggest that we Presbyterians, the self-described “people of the book(s),” might be coming up short? …  That maybe we’re letting down our next generation? … That maybe we might learn a thing or two from Marjorie Hass?

 —JHH

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