"Signing the Form:
Reformed Identity and Institutional Purpose at Calvin College"
Comments presented at the session:
"Religious Affiliation and Institutional Identity: How to Tell an Anchor
from a Hobble"
Association of American Colleges and Universities/American Conference
of Academic Deans
Washington DC, January 15, 1998
David J. Diephouse
Calvin College
For oral presentation only; not to be quoted without permission.
One of our tasks as
deans at Calvin is to supervise a ritual known as "signing the Form."
We set up appointments with new faculty members and ask that they sign
a declaration called the "Form of Subscription," pasted into an old Board
of Trustees minute book, which among other things commits them to "apply
the principles of God's Word as interpreted by our Reformed standards
in the teaching of the subjects assigned to us." Faculty have been doing
this since Calvin became a degree-granting institution. Our signatures
are all there in the "Book of Life"--mine and David Hoekema's along with
that of B. K. Kuiper, the college's first historian and one of its ideological
founding fathers, who was denied reappointment in 1928 because, the minutes
record, he "had not refrained from movie attendance." These days Calvin
offers a major in film studies and counts at least one well-known Hollywood
writer-director among its alumni. Few of us can generate much passion
for the particular subtleties of doctrine that inspired Dutch Calvinist
churchmen to devise the Form of Subscription back on the eve of the Thirty
Years War. Still, the form survives, and the ritual continues.
I mention this because
I think it stands as a useful marker for the relationship between religious
affiliation and institutional identity at Calvin College. It is no accident
that the undertaking faculty sign is virtually identical to the one required
of ordained clergy and other office-holders in the college's supporting
denomination, the Christian Reformed Church ("CRC"). Despite decades of
growth and ferment, Calvin remains substantially and unapologetically
what its immigrant preacher-founders intended it to be, namely a college
of and for the church. Until very recently, active membership in the CRC
was mandatory for faculty, and the range of permissible alternatives remains
carefully circumscribed. The denomination continues to provide a "living
endowment" in the form of direct grants amounting to nearly $3 million
a year. Its governing body, the Synod, continues to exercise pro forma
oversight over faculty appointments and decisions of the Board of Trustees.
As late as the 1960s, CRC members made up well over 90% of the student
body, and they still constitute an absolute if shrinking majority.
All of this, as
a variety of national college rankings attest, at an institution that
prides itself on the quality of its education and the contributions of
its educators. Calvin is rapidly becoming a significant center of scholarship,
particularly in the sciences and humanities; of the more than 900 private
four-year schools surveyed by Franklin and Marshall College in 1990, only
fourteen boasted more alumni doctorates than Calvin during the previous
decade. This is not a place where religious identity brings embarrassment
or frustration for advocates of academic excellence; nor does serious
scholarship represent a threat to defenders of religious integrity. Whatever
problems the college may face, church-relatedness does not rank high among
them.
What anchors Calvin's
identity--and this is my main point--is a dynamic combination of institutional
ties and ideological commitment. The Form of Subscription delineates not
only a set of dogmatic boundaries but also, and more broadly, a particular
way of thinking and seeing; its function is not to foreclose inquiry but
to situate it in a coherent confessional and intellectual tradition. Briefly
stated, Calvin's project grows out of a classic Reformed emphasis on the
sovereignty of God and the resulting conviction that all aspects of reality,
including both the subjects of academic inquiry and the inquiry itself,
are charged with religious significance. The life of the mind, like every
vocation, is a call to grateful obedience and responsible stewardship.
Higher education entails, at the core, attempting to work out implications
of a Christian world view in all the dimensions of teaching and learning,
question-forming and debate, that constitute the raison d'etre of the
academic enterprise.
Calvin's history
over the past half century and more is in large part the story of an increasingly
self-conscious and self-confident articulation of this perspectivalist
agenda, commonly if somewhat imprecisely described as the integration
of faith and learning. It is an agenda that has found considerable resonance
among other religiously based institutions, and it has increasingly been
held up as a challenge to the larger academy, not least through the work
of such once and future Calvin faculty as philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff,
now of Yale, and historian George Marsden, now of Notre Dame via Duke.
What needs to be
emphasized is the extent to which this project both assumes and reinforces
sturdy ties between college and church. The college's commitment to critical
inquiry provides an antidote to institutional myopia and dogmatic rigidity.
At the same time, its status as an agency of the church provides an antidote
to the temptations of the ivory tower, the artificial disjunction of learning
and life. Calvin officially reaffirmed this status in an expanded statement
of mission approved as recently as 1992. To part company, the document
argues, would "risk stripping the college of a vital tradition and the
church of an agency of mission." As carriers of a common tradition, church
and college share the obligation to foster a community of discourse capable
of sustaining effective teaching, creative scholarship, and thoughtful
engagement with contemporary society.
At its best, this
tradition of partnership provides a source of intellectual purchase, an
alternative to the "social solecism and moral loneliness" that Leroy Rouner
describes in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article as
one of the terrors of the postmodern academy. The Form of Subscription
binds faculty, if challenged, to submit their thinking to the counsel
of the community. It does not, however, constrain freedom of inquiry.
As a sometimes controversial colleague affirmed in a recent faculty e-mail
forum, college authorities--and by extension those of the church--have
consistently defended individuals' rights to challenge accepted positions
"as long as the faculty members could demonstrate how what they were advocating
arose out of their Reformed Christian commitment." This social contract
is one reason why George Marsden, comparing his experiences teaching at
Calvin and at Cal-Berkeley, could claim to have found a more vital academic
freedom in the confessional community, where it was possible to pursue
conflicting ideas from a common base of assumptions and commitments, than
in the mecca of free speech, where debate seldom progressed beyond insoluble
differences over first principles.
For much of Calvin's
history, it must be said, what sustained the enterprise was less a positive
agenda for higher education than a compulsion to preserve tribal exclusivity.
Calvin was "our school" for "our people," most of them newly arrived Dutch
immigrants determined not to let their embrace of the American economic
dream extend to American cultural and religious mores. Hence the sad case
of B. K. Kuiper, attender of movies. Students and faculty from other backgrounds
encountered frequent and sometimes heavy-handed pressures to adopt the
separatist ways of the dominant subculture, a regime of expectations that
once inspired George Marsden, an Anglo who joined the faculty in the late
1960s, to quip: "I am not one of us." Even now, certain of these expectations--for
example, support of separate, parent-run Christian day schools--remain
more or less non-negotiable. Despite sincere efforts to counter ethnocentrism,
the ritual of signing the Form can still evoke unease, if not a crisis
of conscience, on the part of some faculty.
Meanwhile, of course,
the cultural assimilation that earlier generations fought to keep at bay
has swept full force across most of the CRC. For children of immigrants
who have grown prosperous, embraced the ethos of the marketplace, even
bought up the odd professional sports franchise, the old community cohesion
and sense of separatist purpose have eroded dramatically. Why pay to send
one's child to the denominational college if she can get a scholarship
to Stanford, or if he can go to Hometown State U at a fraction of the
cost? The college, for its part, has attempted with considerable success
to attract students from a broader range of confessional traditions. Over
the past two decades a variety of factors have therefore been conspiring
to transform the tribalist Calvin of old into a more intentional community,
deliberately committed to a diversity of Reformed expressions and to a
more visible role in the larger academy. Scarcely half of incoming students
and faculty are now members of the CRC--a matter of concern for some and
celebration for many. Intentionality has its own costs, of course. While
the college remains committed to a principle of "responsible freedom"
and has never required formal pledges of the sort familiar on some evangelical
campuses, it nevertheless finds itself increasingly driven to define and
codify expectations that were once informal and implicit, maintained through
force of community rather than the logic of published norms and procedures.
The sometimes anxious debates provoked by recent efforts to draft comprehensive
standards for faculty scholarship and faculty conduct, about which David
Hoekema could speak at length, are a case in point.
Growing pains notwithstanding,
I see little reason to believe that Calvin will soon abandon its distinctive
blend of denominational affiliation and academic purpose; the anchor of
institutional identity may drag slightly at times, but it still holds.
The tribal loyalties on which the college could long rely have arguably
begun to take new root in the college's burgeoning and increasingly non-Dutch
alumni constituency. Significantly, alumni "legacies" constitute nearly
40% of the current first-year student body; last year, for the first time,
annual giving outstripped denominational support as the largest source
of non-tuition revenue. Members of the Board of Trustees, who once saw
themselves primarily as gatekeepers of the church's interests, are becoming
increasingly active advocates of the college's mission. A detailed process
of faculty review, extending from initial hiring through tenure and beyond,
ensures that core values remain understood and embraced by those most
responsible for the day-to-day enactment of institutional purpose. Perhaps
the best index of Calvin's future direction is its success over the past
decade in attracting faculty and students from a widening array of ethnic
and cultural traditions--new partners in faith and learning prepared to
affirm the ideology and advance the project that a separatist immigrant
subculture helped launch. Provided that this cross-fertilization continues,
the ritual of signing the Form can become an act of renewal as well as
reminiscence, for church and college alike.
