What is Wrong with Olivet Nazarene University ...
Well, there's a reason for that. ONU is a pimple on the hog of American higher education. We generally try to focus on the shank, the shoulder, the butt, and the ribs. As a Southerner, I'm even used to examining the parts that are often shunned: the snout, the feet, the ears, the tail. Oh yes, many of us Southerners eat such things. Pickled pigs feet. You bet. Ever hear of chitterlings or souse? Ears sort of gross me out, but some of my fellow Southerners love ‘em. But pimples you generally ignore or you put a cream on ‘em and hope they go away. Anyway, just to satisfy the demand, here's what's wrong with Olivet Nazarene University. Once I've told them that, for the right offer of money and authority, I'll be glad to accept its invitation to come up to Bourbonnais and straighten the place out.
First of all, Olivet shouldn't be calling itself a"university." It's an institution with about 2500 undergraduates and 1800 students in eight master's degree programs. Most of its graduate and professional students are probably part-time and six of the eight master's degree programs are in education or religion. Ordinarily, a university would be composed of a number of colleges, in which the college of liberal arts would only be one. Elite colleges like Oberlin, Swarthmore, and Williams continue to call themselves colleges. A lot of colleges compensate for not being elite by hefting master's degree programs on an undergraduate curriculum and calling themselves a"university." I'd say it's lipstick on a pig, but my friends over at Horizon tell me that's a cliche.
But we're talking pimples here and we still haven't lanced them, because it's that"Nazarene" part of its name that gets closer to the point. A place like ONU is the academic pride and expression of its mother denomination. The Church of the Nazarene emerged out of the 19th century holiness movement in America's Wesleyan tradition. It's a heart-oriented tradition, not a head-oriented tradition. If you want head-oriented evangelical education, go to Michigan's Calvin College, not to ONU. Being heart-oriented means that ONU was never deeply grounded intellectually and, because it was never deeply grounded intellectually, it's subject to evangelical fashions. And one of the fashions is the church growth movement and a fairly superficial piety.
A place like ONU has a denominational constituency to serve. That has very real implications for the way it organizes itself. Fruitful as their discussions have been, it makes most of Tim Burke's talk about"the perfectly baked pie" or KC Johnson's lamentations over the declining numbers of slots for American constitutional, diplomatic, military, and political historians in American universities almost irrelevant to Olivet.
Unfortunately, Olivet isn't even a good liberal arts college on which a few graduate programs are piggybacked. Just take a look at the numbers. It is a place that has 13 faculty members in Education, 3 faculty members in History and Political Science, and 12 faculty members in Religion. Burke's probably right to suggest that there's no infallible guide to the perfectly baked pie and KC's probably right to say that traditional approaches to history need more attention than they've been getting, but this way of distributing faculty resources is an abomination. It may serve Olivet's felt needs and the accrediting agencies will not call it on the carpet for it, because they only examine how well an institution does what it claims to be doing. But beware of education with a capital E. It's an oxymoron. Eight of 13 faculty members in Religion had a substantial part of their formal higher education in Nazarene seminaries and colleges. Nazarene seminaries and colleges are not noted for excellence.
But it is the three faculty members in History and Political Science that is really the most disturbing. THREE ... Three ... three ... 3 ... full-time faculty members to cover History and Political Science. So, you have a political scientist and he's a specialist in Dooyeweerd and Voeglin. He's safely conservative; no risk that he's a behaviorist or a Marxist, but at least he's conversant in ideas. Then there's room for one person to do American history and one person to do non-American history. Don't worry about KC's constitutional, diplomatic, military, and political history slots, Nazarene Olivet University hired a specialist in sports history to teach its American history. And the poor lad who chairs the program gets to do everything else that gets done.
This is just way below pitiful. I've taught in a history department of this size, but we had a student body of 600, not 4,000 students. No need to talk about Tim's perfectly baked pie. This is more like a mud pie. It looks like nobody at the helm is really trying to make sure that students at Olivet Nazarene University have a serious opportunity to get a good education. All those smiling faces; all those vapid minds. It's a tribute to Adam Kotsko, Anthony Smith, and the others at The Weblog that they shook the dust from their feet, turned their backs on the place, created something so imaginative as the University Without Condition, and are doing some serious work.