IN AUGUST OF 2017 Carl Truman writes,

Colleges are where the battle for the minds of the next generation will take place.

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1997, that battle clearly underway, Augustine College opened its doors, realizing the vision of several disgruntled university professors and professionals who felt called to found an alternative institution for higher learning (a kind of ‘Benedict option’ before its time).

Its purpose: to teach what was so strangely missing from the curriculum of colleges and universities — to teach the ideas that ought to form and used to form Christian minds.

What happened to the ‘Christian college’

In the space of two or three generations, enormous stretches of the ‘Judaeo-Christian tradition’, so often invoked by educators but so seldom taught in any form, have passed into oblivion. (Christopher Lasch)

What happened to the institution that Christians once created for the good of the soul — for the welfare of youth and the common good: the residential college. This was a place invented

• • to strengthen each student in faith
• • to seek wisdom
• • and to train in virtue.

We have let it vanish and we need it again.

Aspects of the traditional Christian college can be found at other institutions but at Augustine College we have brought the old model back more-or-less wholesale (too much tinkering has cost us):

• • small in size
• • unapologetically Christian
• • undiluted by electives, majors, job training, university-style attention to hot topics and the latest knowledge
• • and completely unwilling to be all things to all comers.

The object of a college education

Russell Kirk once wrote about “the chief objects or ends” of a “church-related as distinguished from an ‘honours’ college,” saying,

The object of a college education is not success, pleasure, or sociability, but the acquiring of wisdom and virtue….
Wisdom and virtue are not the same as facts, or utility, or training, or even knowledge.
No college can confer wisdom and virtue automatically, but a good college can help its members to find the means for pursuing wisdom and pursuing virtue.

This is a uniquely important task.

The vanishing denominational college

Other kinds of higher learning have their value but this is surely of special importance to Christians, and at one time every denomination recognized this and founded its own colleges, with entirely Biblical mottoes:

“Truth for Christ and the Church,”
“In Wisdom and Doctrine, Stability,”
“All Things Cohere in Christ.”

The plan was to open this experience to young people in every province and state. These 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century colleges were not university ‘wannabes’: they respected the difference between university and college. Wrote Kirk,

A college, at least in the [North] American understanding of that word, generally is intended for the transmitting of an existing body of knowledge to young people;
it is distinguished thus from a university, which possesses advanced schools, less strongly emphasizes … teaching, and [plays up] research.

Today the enduring questions of human existence — the “body of knowledge” so central to the purpose of college — have very little place in higher education (pushed out by jobs, technology, globalization, and countless more trivial concerns).

And colleges have eagerly run after the university, anxious not to be behind the times.

Where today are those enduring questions that gave the college purpose still asked — and asked sincerely, with the insights of the past not elbowed aside by the modern ideas that (make no mistake) arose to replace them?

Where today are these questions asked — not studied as historical relics but asked, as if it were your life that they put in question?

our own institution

Christians once had the insight that asking these questions, against the backdrop of the Christian story, was a vital component of life — a key to both personal formation and the common good. John Adams wrote to his son,

“You go on, I presume, with your Latin Exercises:… in Company with Sallust, Cicero, Tacitus and Livy, you will learn Wisdom and Virtue…. You will ever remember that all the End of study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen.”

Once in our history this opportunity was made widely available: we need to make it available again.

Christians must bring back this institution that is ours, restore the Christian college idea — just as Augustine College did over 20 years ago.

For two decades this college has given students an undiluted introduction to the Western intellectual tradition, the foundation of a vision of life in accord with the Gospel. It has also introduced its students to the challenges that have supposedly ‘undermined’ this tradition, offering them an understanding of the modern world without which we cannot hope to engage the culture of our day.