Soulforce came through Wheaton while I was a student up there. I thought the college’s response then was quite constructive and effective, and did not give the protestors the ammunition they seemed to desire.

Here’s another issue that Christian Higher Education Institutions have to deal with:

“A group of alumni from Wheaton College have formed OneWheaton, an organization to provide support for the gay community on the conservative Christian campus and to promote the view that homosexual practice is compatible with the Christian faith.

“If you are a student and this is part of your story, your sexual identity is not a tragic sign of the sinful nature of the world,” a letter to Wheaton students posted on the group’s website reads. “You are not tragic. Your desire for companionship, intimacy and love is not shameful. It is to be affirmed and celebrated just as you are to be affirmed and celebrated.”

The letter, worded as a response to “a recent chapel message on Sexuality and Wholeness,” is followed with a list of several hundred alumni signatories—all of whom are either homosexual or support the campaign—with their graduation years and cities. The group’s organizers also reached out to students by distributing informational fliers outside a chapel service, prompting an internal email from college president Leland Ryken, affirming “the full humanity and dignity of every human being, regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity” but restating the school’s biblical position on homosexual practice.

OneWheaton’s campaign is the most recent incident in a string of challenges to Christian colleges’ policies on sexuality. The pro-gay advocacy group Soulforce organizes events to put pressure on Christian colleges and churches to embrace homosexuality.”

Opening excerpt from

Gay Activists Target Christian Colleges.

No longer, then, can it be said that American higher education is in the business of education. In fact, it is in the business of conferring and recruiting prestige.

But Christian higher education, if it has any raison d’etre at all, is in the business of handing on a tradition, not of piling up research or conferring credentials—in other words, its real “core business” is education. If Christianity is a revealed religion, then the content of that revelation is both fixed and authoritative; it does not bend, wilt, or evolve gradually into something else. It will not be improved by research into religious phenomena. Thus, the Christian college may recover, re-emphasize, and reform, but it will not re-design.

Or, alternately, it may fall further into forgetfulness of its “core business.” It will attempt to keep up the research-and-credentialing game, only to discover that it does not possess sufficient credentialing prestige and lacks the resources to acquire it. The college will then attempt to make up for the low value of its credential by expanding access (either by lowering the admissions bar or by exfoliating degree-granting programs), but this will only deflate the value of the credential even more.

Christian universities do need to understand that they are truly supposed to be doing something different than “secular” universities. If they try to copy “secular” universities, they will fail in either funding or their teaching because of the elephant in the room.

The elephant in the room is the connection between funding, economics and mission. Christian universities will not be able to compete with “secular” universities because the goal of “secular” universities is to produce wealthy and, on worldly terms, successful alumni well-integrated into the modern politico-economic system which will then feed resources back into the university through direct and indirect state subsidies. The mission of the university is subordinate to the mission of the political and economic society, i.e. America here, which is largely to create highly mobile and flexible worker-units who have modern values. To the extent that Christian universities have a different mission, they will not be able to compete on the same terms, though they might get by.

How then are Christian colleges supposed to get funding? It can only do so to the extent its students, alumni, donors and supporters understand, internalize and live out (materially significant) differences between the Kingdom and this world. Otherwise, heck, why not just send my kid to UCLA, finances being equal, if he can get in?