I received an email from an old friend this week. I had lost track of him 15 years ago.
He is a Christian. He teaches college-level economics. For years, he has taught his introductory course on economics by using David Chilton's book, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators. You can download a PDF here.
When I knew him, he taught at a moderately well-known Midwestern Christian college. It has a conservative reputation. He taught his students not to teach in a tax-funded school. This is a matter of principle, he said. The head of the college's education department complained to the administration. The program trains young women to teach in public schools. He quit.
I would not have quit. I would have taught students majoring in education to set up Christian day cares, make $100,000 a year, and retire in 25 years owning half a dozen day cares that generate at least $250,000 a year. But I digress.
Here is what he reported about his subsequent career.
I spent 12 years at [Boondocks College], but when the supporting denomination sanctioned the ordination of homosexuals I decided it was time to find another job. However, it took the old, white, male 4 years to find one but that didn't last long. I took a job at [No-Reputation Baptist University], but the dean of the school of business that hired got demoted before classes started and the young woman they put in his place wanted me to drastically change the way I teach my courses. She wanted almost all inter-active class exercises and very few, if any, lectures. She actually said at my end-of-semester review in December: "We have a new generation of students that we know are not reading the textbooks, so we have to find other ways of delivering the material." I went to the provost but I could tell he wouldn't admit he made a mistake so I resigned effective at the end of the school year (first time I quit a job without having another one in hand). But I did find one. [Obscurity University] hired me. But I found that they are schizophrenic. They joined the CCCU over 10 years ago, but as the year unfolded, I discovered 3 (could be more) faculty were living with people that weren't their spouses, the new softball coach was a lesbian, etc. So, when I was notified on March 25 that my contract would not be renewed because I was too "rigorous" I was not too dismayed. In fact, several of the newer staff people, who were frustrated with the college, told me I was terminated because I was "too" Christian in my integration (come to think of it, it is probably your fault because I used Productive Christians there).
He finally got a job at a Canadian college. I had never heard of it before. But his work visa is about to run out, and he will probably have to go back into the job market again.
I recommended that he contact a friend of mine who teaches at a somewhat conservative Christian college, but I am not certain that the school will have a position available at the end of the next academic year. My guess is that it will not. Once somebody gets a job in one of these schools, he usually stays there forever. He has no other employment opportunities in academia.
There are Christian parents who send their children to the schools that he left. They spend anywhere from $35,000 a year to $40,000 a year so that their children can earn degrees at these obscure colleges. The schools have nothing remotely resembling an integrated Christian curriculum. They don't always enforce basic morality among the faculty.
I will admit that one of the schools did have a purge several years ago of faculty members who would not sign a lifestyle pledge, but the school's academic reputation is so poor that hardly anybody has ever heard of it. I have visited the campus bookstore. I would regard the textbooks assigned for lower division as nothing above the typical public high school textbook in my day. There was not one book that presented an explicitly Christian presentation. They were just low-level secular college textbooks. The operative phrase is dumbed-down.
These are schools designed to provide academic degrees for students who would not qualify academically at a second-tier state university. The students probably have SAT scores around 1000. The students were undistinguished in high school, and their parents send them to undistinguished but expensive colleges where they will graduate with degrees in sociology. They will be employable in entry-level positions that would have been filled by high school graduates 30 years ago.
If the parents had common sense, they would let their children remain at home for four years for free room and board, and have them earn degrees at the local community college and local state university. The content of the education would be higher. The schools would be no more secular than the Christian schools. The textbooks would be the same, or slightly better.
Even better, the students should work part time in a local business, and earn their B.A. degrees by distance learning for under $15,000. They could pay for their own educations. They would graduate debt-free. The parents would not have to dip into their retirement funds to pay for their children's educations.
But you cannot convince the parents of this. Their children want to get away from their parents' control. They want to go out on their own, but at their parents' expense. In other words, they want four more years of adolescence.
Keep these words in mind: "We have a new generation of students that we know are not reading the textbooks, so we have to find other ways of delivering the material."
Boola, boola. Moola, moola.
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