|
A Fundamental Change is Needed: The View from WCIU
Ralph D. Winter
Wednesday, November 13, 2002, revised December 2004
The reason for the founding of our university corporation was, first, to master the red tape involved in the granting of a completely valid Ph.D. and then to make that degree as efficiently available as possible to mission agencies for certain of their missionaries and national leaders. Indeed, the first degree we offered was a Ph.D. degree. Only later did we apply for authorization to grant the M.A. and finally the B.A. degree. (Note that we do not seek students but mission agencies through whom we might work. We don't enroll a "student" unless that person comes with the backing and sponsorship of a mission agency.)
We were convinced that without slighting or lowering the traditional standards in the slightest it would be possible for the Ph.D. to be acquired by a busy missionary or national with far greater flexibility than existing schools offered. Many schools establish a program that is most convenient to them rather than what is most reasonable for overseas missionaries or nationals. (A Calif. state examiner remarked, "Your doctoral program is as strong as Stanford's.")
In California the majority of institutions of higher learning settle for "Full Institutional Approval" by the State, which over forty years ago decided that the various private offices of accreditation were not really working for education in general but mainly as unions trying to keep new institutions from coming into existence.
The William Carey International University was born as a corporation on February 25, 1977, was authorized to grant a Ph.D. degree within
a year, and gained the highest State distinction, "Full Institutional Approval" about five years later.
Up until "Full Institutional Approval" there would have been no reason to apply for private, "regional" accreditation since the private office (The Western Association of Schools and Colleges, WASC) related to California (and Hawaii), had decided, once the state machinery was established, that it would only deal with schools that had already gone through the State's approval process.
Once fully approved by the State, our approach to WASC was further delayed by the fact that our campus was still hanging in the balance. It was not until 1989 that it was clearly ours. Once that hurdle was past we did not approach WASC due to what I would consider an overly cautious or perfectionistic perspective coupled by an internal conflict over the question of whether we should build a faculty from missionaries who brought their support with them or procure faculty by paying salaries.
Why not pay salaries? First, but not most important, is the fact that our major public, mission-minded donors, are not as likely to give to an educational institution as to missionary support.
Secondly, and more importantly, is the fact that our potential students (missionaries and national leaders) as well as our potential collaborating missions, are more likely to trust an entity that is of their own kind, and which isnot competing with them for funds.
By now the internal polarization on the issue of faculty recruitment has largely disappeared along with some of those for whom paid salaries was the only way to go. Right now we are clearly committed to building a faculty from career missionaries with higher degrees.
Progress of a sort
Our first major effort has been the development and administration of an off-campus study program structured as a college-credit three semester-unit course. By now we teach in over a hundred USA locations, reaching 5,000 new students per year. Several accredited colleges and universities as well as WCIU offer credit. We employ 900 professors who teach in one or more of the 15 week-night classes. This involves well over 500 trained “coordinators” who locally organize and administer the course. This course is now in other languages and packaged in various ways in different countries. Our basic “reader” for this course ( Perspectives on the World Christian Movement ) is further employed by at least 100 other schools. It may be the most widely used text on missions of all time.
Our second major effort was to pilot an M.A. degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Our purpose was merely to establish the fact of the need, and to run a pilot program other schools could follow. Ours was a very high quality program and soon many schools employed our curriculum and even tried to hire our faculty. When enough Christian colleges picked up the challenge (and after we had ourselves awarded 66 M.A. degrees in this field) we gave over our entire program and its specialized library to Biola University.
As mentioned, the first degree we granted was actually a Ph.D. and under the leadership of James Oliver Buswell III we have maintained across the years a carefully designed “classical” option in that area. But we have not sought students for this, expecting arrangements through existing agencies.
Our biggest project of all time, is an effort expended during the last ten years in developing a complete off-campus curriculum that radically integrates both college and seminary studies into a single 32 semester-unit M.A. degree program. These carefully engineered 320 lessons (4.5 hrs per lesson) rely on 100 textbooks and an additional 500 articles and chapters reprinted in 35 additional “readers.” This effort during those years involved an average of six faculty and has occasioned a cash investment of over $1 million dollars. Few schools could set aside that many people and that amount of money to develop the curriculum for a particular degree.
An accredited Christian university employs this curriculum now in its original M.A. level form. The same curriculum has also been adapted by another accredited college as an upper-division college major. We ourselves now have a first-year-of-college version of it that supplies a remarkably Biblical, global, mission orientation in the form of first-year “General Studies.” These first year units, transcripted by an accredited college can then be carried to Stanford, Wheaton or Harvard.
Even prior to all these activities WCIU has assumed for years that the best way to build its ideal program would be to establish “Field Deans” around the world, both regionally and also functionally, right within major mission agencies . Such deans could perform all of the functions of a university except for the final red tape, which we could handle at a central location. In any given case, an agency after some years of doing this kind of work through WCIU, could fairly easily go on to form its own university corporation and proceed with separate accreditation. Many smaller agencies, however, might never make that additional step.
However, the goal is
WCIU's main purpose for existence as a laboratory university has thus never been to attract as many students to itself as possible, but to hammer out the most flexible graduate programs that would serve the mission community, and to demonstrate to existing Christian graduate institutions both at home and abroad how they might do likewise.
In this sense WCIU's purposes are inherently transitional. What it does in the next five years will be quite different from what it would otherwise have done if a major sea change had not been taking place in the sphere of schools sponsored by Christian purposes.
I believe that the 100-year “detour,” or “tangent,” of Evangelical education into non-standard, counter-cultural Bible school, Bible institute and seminary categories (the last hold outs in the USA being now the seminaries) must very rapidly be redirected if the Christian movement is going to escape the long-standing criticisms of social isolation and anti-intellectualism.
The emergence of 41 new “Evangelical universities” in the mission lands, which Joel Carpenter's study ( International Journal of Frontier Missions , Vol 20: 2, 3, 2003) so startlingly describes as almost entirely lacking mission agency initiative , is in effect an outline of the problem and as well as of a possible solution. Evangelicals in America have been much slower to recognize the strategic error in the 100-year “tangent” of incompatible “religious” alternative education.
There are not 41 new Evangelical universities in the USA, even if you go back 20 years in order to include Biola University as a “new” university. Only in the last five years have we seen a definite trend for Evangelical “religious” schools to become universities. Examples in addition to Biola just a stone's throw from here would be the Pacific Christian College becoming Hope International University, a school which had already transitioned from Bible school status), Vanguard University, which started out as a Bible school many years ago, and more recently for years was the Southern California College, and Azusa Pacific University. In all three cases, as well as at Biola, an ordination track is available.
The urgency of our assisting and encouraging this transition is reflected by the fact that although the 157 older Bible institutes in the USA have all at least begun to move toward standard categories of education, nevertheless some 3,000 Bible schools of various levels across the mission world are apparently not seriously thinking of that kind of change, and, alas, many new “Bible schools and Bible institutes continue to be born in this country.
More seriously, the “eruption” of 41 Evangelical universities in the mission lands does not appear to be a move to reform Bible schools or seminaries. In most cases they are attempts to prepare Evangelical believers for secular employment, an activity quite distant from what those mission agency projects of a theological character have in mind, and very few have a sense of “holy calling” either to an ecclesiastical or secular task.
Thus, our existence as a university is meant to carry the message that our pattern is the preferred way to train ordained leaders in and for the Christian movement both at home and abroad, as well as serious believers who find their holy calling in the midst of the so-called secular world. We seek to model the kind of educational vehicle which we feel will best both at home and abroad.
We believe it is crucial to employ the culturally accepted university pattern, and we believe it is necessary to recognize the “holiness of most of the tasks of the world. We cannot be salt and light in the world with merely dedicated believers in the religious categories. We cannot conquer disease at the microbiological level or corruption at the industrial or political level if all we do is prepare ministers and missionaries for a holy calling.
The fulfillment of this vision is slow in coming. While some overseas schools already employ our massive curriculum, no such schools that I know of have moved to the university pattern, and few mission agencies have shown any great interest in the “universitizing” of their key personnel either missionary or national.
Wycliffe is in one dimension a monumental exception, with more Ph.D. members than are in all the other agencies as well. However, even Wycliffe does not routinely rely on the university tradition for the Biblical, historical and theological grounding of its people. Its academic focus is almost exclusively on the vocational (linguistic) aspects of its task.
My hope and expectation is to see many agencies soon get in step with the university tradition and make full use of its cultural and socially acceptable contours. This transition cannot be forced. It can be facilitated. What could be a better development toward that end than for one or two major mission agencies to join forces for at least a few years to commandeer this vehicle, this tool, and to make room for smaller agencies as well?
Such a move would readily attract foundation support. But it is very obvious that such a thing will require very high-level catalytic efforts. Most agencies are content to solve their own problems. Wycliffe in particular, however, has always opened its academic programs to everyone. That's how I got started in graduate studies back in 1948 at the University of Oklahoma! Campus Crusade, of course, is an extravagant example of doing things in which other agencies can share. It would be a great step forward for either or both of these two trusted agencies to be involved in this new direction. |
