Adapted from Homecoming Chapel At the rededication of Blanchard Hall at Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL
Alumni coming back for the rededication of Blanchard Hall hope that the new Blanchard will continue some of the old traditions. We are concerned that Wheaton College not lose the vision for developing students. The trend in many famous liberal arts colleges is to downplay interactions between teachers and students. Recently Harvard was judged to be the best liberal arts college in the country. Harvard was chosen because of its world-class faculty, cutting-edge research and stringent admission standards. None of these criteria “of excellence” include the need for caring teacher/student relationships or a vision for the Kingdom of God. Most faculty at Harvard and other liberal arts colleges have a single-minded obsession with research. Students pay the price with large classes, inaccessible professors, and a heavy use of teaching assistants. Students are sacrificed on the altar of academic excellence. We pray that Wheaton College will never try to be a miniature Harvard or University of Chicago. The standards of excellence for these schools provide dangerous models.
Blanchard Hall as a Factory
• Last night I had a bad dream, a nightmare. I dreamed that there had been a mix-up of architectural plans and that Blanchard Hall had been remodeled by mistake into a factory. But nobody seemed to notice the difference.
The primary interests of a factory are efficiency, predictability and measurability. Numbers are the best indicators of success. In my dream, students were recruited primarily by their SAT or ACT scores. Depending on their SAT and CLEP scores, students were placed on a conveyor belt at the lower east end of Blanchard, and came out from the top west end four years later. Students entered as passive raw material and left as passive finished products. (Remember this was only a dream.)
• The mission of this new Blanchard Hall was to fill empty minds of students with important bodies of knowledge in the most effective, cost-effective way.
• In my dream faculty members sat in offices on the first or second floor with huge funnels on their desks. Each funnel was connected to hoses going into the ears of each student in the class. When the bell rang, professors would pour pearls of wisdom into the funnel. From time to time they would peer into the head of each student and count how many pearls actually got inside. It was the “tell-um-and-test-um” method of education.
• Since the motto was “Excellence Through Efficiency,” students were treated as children by faculty and staff. The staff had to get mean with students because they never filled out forms properly or on time. (Factories would collapse without lots of forms.) Teachers complained that students were always asking dumb questions. Since teachers knew it was inefficient to get sidetracked by trivial questions they learned they could pour in more pearls if they didn’t waste time by asking students what they thought.
• I dreamed that all the staff followed procedures of management by objectives. Staff from student accounts, the work order department, student development, financial aid, the counseling center, and the health center, could save time and money by being impersonal with students. Quality was defined solely by the numbers. Secretaries received wage increases if they consistently answered the phone before two rings. After all, the most efficient way for trustees, administrators, staff, and faculty to run a school is to treat students and each other as impersonal objects.
• In my dream, the conveyor belt propelled students past remedial funnels and divided into two directions. The scholarly students took the conveyor belt up to the second floor where they studied great books, great music, great art, and great ideas from the past. Anything as long as it was old. The less scholarly students stayed on the ground floor and studied the more professional subjects like education, business, computers, and social work.
• The debate in many faculty meetings was over the “canon” of knowledge to be injected into passive students. The second-floor faculty argued for a canon of the classics, the Great Books of the Western World. The first-floor faculty accused the “Great Books Cult” of being racist, bigoted, and sexist. They objected to limiting the curriculum to the writings of dead, European, white, upper-class, males. The first-floor faculty poured practical pearls through field trips and internship funnels.
• The “canonites” on the second floor accused the “vocationalists” of being relativists, positivists, and post-structuralists.
• In this factory there was very little dialogue. Second-floor faculty accused the first-floor faculty of being unscholarly and not true to the factory’s historic liberal arts position. The first-floor faculty accused the second-floor faculty of being like artificial intelligence computers -- highly rational but lacking a passion for the needs of people.
• Occasionally speakers would come to the factory challenging people to evaluate their ultimate purpose. One speaker said we had two tasks. The first task was evangelism, and all the bottom-floor faculty said “amen” (bottom-floor faculty talk like that). Then he said the second task was to redeem the academic disciplines, and the second-floor faculty nodded their heads in wise, condescending agreement. But the speaker didn’t stimulate much dialogue. A second speaker argued that factories have two kinds of purposes. Some are oriented toward service and others toward scholarship. He said our factory should emphasize scholarship and Bible Colleges should emphasize service. The second-floor faculty loved the lecture. Faculty in my dream would argue and talk behind backs, but seldom listen to each other.
• Chapel speakers called the factory students the “cream of the crop” and challenged them to excel. “Be a success! Be rich and famous! Anything done with excellence is Christian!” In the back corner of the chapel a few rebellious students could be heard mumbling, “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.” And then something about “another brick in the wall.”
• The thing that woke me up was a factory meeting where teachers, students and administrators were shouting at each other over questions about general education requirements about the pledge. (Or maybe I just had to go to the bathroom.)
Blanchard Hall as Interpreter’s House
The nightmare wore me out so much that I got back to sleep right away. In my sleep this time I dreamed that the revitalized Blanchard Hall was Interpreter’s House from Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress.
• All the people, from the president, to the most senior professor, to the most junior janitor, were pilgrims. The pilgrims treated each other with love as wounded but maturing people, not as cogs in a machine. They came to a safe retreat at Wheaton College for a short while to reflect on where they had been, where they were going, and move on better equipped to face the next leg of the journey.
What would Wheaton College look like if my second dream were true?
• The admissions criteria would still consider the SAT, but the primary criteria for admissions would not be test scores but leadership potential in helping other pilgrims.
• The schizophrenic dilemma of the two conveyor belts would be solved. The course titles would not be much different from those of the factory model. But the teaching methods would be radically different. Instead of students getting writer’s cramp in every class, the teacher would present a few important ideas and students would be compelled to wrestle with these ideas. Real knowledge is never poured into the heads of students. The kind of knowledge that leads to wisdom must be “owned” and accepted by active, thinking, students who are struggling for themselves. Teachers in this school would know that real learning only takes place when students are changed on the inside. Test scores have very little to do with measuring real learning.
• Pilgrims in Interpreter’s House would catch a vision for being scholars of the Map -- the Map of God’s truth. But they would also realize that knowledge of the Map is a means and never an end. They would know that there is nothing as practical as a deep understanding of God’s truth. Ideas without action make an idol out of scholarship. But action without scholarship often leads to faddish heresy. Practical skills would never be taught without philosophical and biblical foundations. Theoretical ideas would never be presented without challenging students to wrestle with implications for the problems of the present and future. Students would be more serious about scholarship. In the factory, learning was a game of trivial pursuit. At Interpreter’s House pilgrims would have a passion to understand God’s truth because they love God and are anxious to know and serve him. Pilgrims would be motivated to study because they know they all will face the Slough of Despond and the Hill of Difficulty. Pilgrims would not be ridiculed while struggling in Doubting Castle.
• In a community of pilgrim scholars people would be anxious to help each other. Cooperation rather than competition for grades would be the mode. (They wouldn’t hide key books in the library on order to “excel” over other students.) Pilgrim scholars would help each other with assignments, be more relaxed, more joyful, more hopeful.
• The purpose of Interpreter’s House would be to equip students for full-time Pilgrim service. Pilgrim missionaries, evangelists, pastors. Pilgrim lawyers, teachers, business persons, parents and professors. But also pilgrim truck drivers, pilgrim factory workers and pilgrim carpenters. However pilgrims make a living, their orientation is to be full-time pilgrims.
• In my factory dream, professors argued about integrating faith and learning. At Interpreter’s House, faculty and students think and weep with each other about how to integrate faith and living.
• The community of pilgrim scholars looks forward eagerly to the return of the King. Pilgrims know they are marching through Immanuel’s land, but they also know that this world is not their real home. They know they have a responsibility as servants to influence political and social structures. They fight for justice and care for the poor. They have a passion for the 3 billion people who live in the City of Destruction and have never heard the Good News. But they also realize that the only hope for utopia is the return of the King.
• As the class of 1965, we come back home as weary pilgrims needing to be reminded of our roots. Few of us match the mythical “Wheaton image” of success. Many of us have struggled in the prison of Doubting Castle. We are pilgrims in progress. We need to come back to our Interpreter’s House and compare notes about the journey and renew friendships. Pilgrims desperately need other pilgrims. But we also come back to remember good times and good friends. Even though the road the last 25 years has been rough, and the road ahead is unpredictable, we continue on with deeper joy and stronger hope because of our time at Wheaton College.
• As pilgrim alumni we are concerned that the remodeled Blanchard not become a factory. We plead for a renewed sense of direction guided by eternal values -- a vision that will permeate our attitudes toward people, programs and our ultimate purpose. May God build the new Blanchard Hall into a loving community of scholars who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.
