“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the fifth annual conference by The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, “Faith, Freedom, and Higher Ed: A Vision for the Soul of the University.” I’m Paul Kengor, the executive director of the Center.

Higher education was a natural choice for our conference this year, given that 2009 is the 25^th anniversary of the historic Grove City College case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

What has happened to American higher education since 1984? An acceleration—an accelerated decline in some troubling trends and disturbing dynamics that began at the start of the 20^th century, and took a sharp, progressive turn for the worse by the end of the 20^th century.

There are now more than ever numerous threats to traditional-sacred teachings and moral-religious absolutes—to faith and freedom—often, ironically, flying under the banner of “diversity.”

It is really that word, “diversity,” which is the buzzword capturing the modern spirit of modern higher education. And yet, this inclusive term seems to exclude the one form of diversity that ought to matter most in a university—diversity of ideas. Ideological diversity. And it certainly too often excludes Christian values.

Our colleges have become incredibly—and once unthinkably—secular places.

The ironies and contradictions are rich: Many of America’s elite, prestigious universities, from Harvard to Princeton to Columbia, were founded by religious people with religious missions—missions that those colleges and their faculty now often firmly reject and frequently ridicule. Today, the longtime mission statement of the typical college, even some purportedly Christian colleges, constitutes a form of false advertising.

If parents only knew the true intentions of many of the educators to whom they turn over their money and their children. The late Richard Rorty, the philosopher and devout atheist, argued that secular professors like himself need to “arrange things” so that incoming students who enter college “as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists” will “leave college with views more like our own.” The goal of education, said Rorty, is to help these youth “escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.” Rorty was bracingly candid in his message to parents: “We are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”

Now, some may dismiss Rorty as an extreme example. Fine, but he’s not as rare as you think. And he’s a rare example of candor.

In short, the American university is nothing like it once was; it has arguably lost its soul. As our lead speaker today, Dr. George Marsden, has said in the introduction to his seminal work, The Outrageous Idea of Christian scholarship, “Contemporary university culture is hollow at its core.”

Indeed, words and notions like “wisdom,” not to mention “virtue,” are not on the syllabus of the modern college, where faith has been divorced from learning. Thankfully, that’s not true for Grove City College. I ask all of you here that as you walk by our Student Union, read the words chiseled on the walls outside of the building. That’s the wisdom I’m talking about. Amazingly, those words were chiseled there not two centuries ago but at the dawn of this 21^st century. Think about that.

If I may finish, not surprisingly, with a quote from the late President Reagan—for two reasons: First, because Reagan supported Grove City College during its battle in the 1980s. Second, because Reagan is Reagan and, as everyone here knows, I’m always looking for an excuse to quote Reagan….

In a speech to Georgetown University on the occasion of its 200^th anniversary, in October 1988, Reagan feared what happens to free, democratic societies and educational institutions when they scrap religious faith:

At its full flowering, freedom is the first principle of society; this society, Western society. And yet freedom cannot exist alone. And that’s why the theme for your bicentennial is so very apt: learning, faith, and freedom. Each reinforces the others, each makes the others possible. For what are they without each other?.... Tocqueville said it in 1835, and it’s as true today as it was then: “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is more needed in democratic societies than in any other.”

Reagan finished with this: “Learning is a good thing, but unless it’s tempered by faith and a love of freedom, it can be very dangerous indeed.”

Well, we at The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College are not making that mistake. If our universities don’t pass along this wisdom to the next generation of leaders, teachers, opinion-makers, and culture-shapers, who will? The government? We hope to pass that along during these two days.

So, we welcome you. And I turn this over to Dr. Paul Kemeny to introduce our kick-off speaker, Dr. George Marsden, who graciously—very graciously—allowed us to borrow the title of his book, “The Soul of the American University,” as the subtitle for this conference.

Thank you.