Before I get ahead of myself, I’ll comment on the original theme of brain washing. What a term…I mean if I don’t know I’ve been brain washed, or believe the claim to be false how does the accuser prove that it happened in the first place without going through the same experience that I had? I do know that I was challenged to think for myself and that some very important events changed my view on political and social issues. Did I come out more “liberal”…I guess, but I still consider myself somewhat conservative (although I prefer the independent label).

Like many of my Mennonite college brethren I had the opportunity to spend time in a third world country (Lesotho). That experience alone taught me more about social justice then any professor (who may have brain washed me). When I take part in discussions on other websites with others who haven’t had this opportunity I soon realize how lucky I was. How do you discuss poverty with someone who simply believes it is nothing more than a matter of hard work? Do my views that Jesus calls us to feed the hungry and cloth the poor equate to something other than what is based on the teachings of Christ?

Secondly, when it comes to the academic setting you can ALWAYS figure that there will be squabbling amongst the ranks. However, I say it’s actually healthy. It forces discussions and pushes the envelope. Would you really want to attend a college where everyone agrees with everyone? I also find it a little unfair to label professors…as a student I thought I “knew” many of mine. However, what I thought was not always all that spot on.

All said…I would go back to EMU if I had to do it all over again.

Are you local these days - meaning in the general H’burg area?

E-mail me: tallgirl71@yahoo.com

Aaron, a couple of things you say resonate with me. The apparent divorce of so many faculties from any kind of grass-roots reality, and the sense that they are basically talking to other (elite) academes. Of course, this cuts both ways, since in general, those outside academia have absolutely no interest in what goes on in academia and at least a great deal of suspicion of academic methodologies anyway. My own experience is that my time in undergrad and then in sem did absolutely nothing to help me live life in the “real world,” but that is a story for another time perhaps. (And I know now at 37 what I didn’t know at 27, namely, that I am autistic, which knowledge would probably have been useful back then…) I don’t regret the schooling though, because Biblical Studies and Theology are still my main passion along with philosophy and writing poetry. I digress…

On the “liberalizing” influence of a college education, I think that the trend is pretty well documented. What some would see as an insidious tendency within higher education though I think is largely a result of students beiong confronted with a wider spectrum of memes and ideas, especially if they get cross cultural experience, than they would have without attending college. Generally speaking, those influences tend to be liberalizing. Even students who come out of those experiences with a basically conservative political/theological orientation are usually more liberal than their friends and family who have not. But your point on the more conservative influence generally of administration is well-taken. I remember well in the early nineties at EMU vigorous discussion of “mission” vs. “financial solvency,” and where different members of administration and faculty stood on those issues. I have a feeling those debates continue to this day.

Somasoul, re the issue of “molding minds,” I also resonate with you there. I think generally it’s not so much a question of a specific liberal agenda as the fact that many professors - presumably of various ideological stripes - are not comfortable with sound pedagogy, what I think of as real teaching, which you allude to in wanting to be asked questions. I.e. they don’t understand the difference between teaching - with it’s give and take and respect of the one taught as well as openness to being corrected on the part of the prof - and indoctrination. (I look back and see I’m starting to repeat myself from an earlier post so I’ll shut it down…)

blessings…
Tony

In general, I think a lot of professors are liberals, at least by US standards, though moderates by those of most other countries. A counter-balancing force is that of administrators, donors, corporations, and government.

The curriculum is skewed to the right, with entire programs deserved to serve corporate interests (compare the size of business schools to those of peace and justice ones).

Also, the problem with the liberal professors is that they are selling solutions that don’t get at the problems. The few radicals that you find, are often too divorced from reality - academics that lack the practice element, who have been convinced that writing academic articles/books for an elite minority audience of their peers is the way to go. And radical solutions are also hard to envision as they are often a far step from our current circumstances.

Of course. ;)

Actually, I assume you are referring to my last sentence “I want to be asked”.

What I mean is that I want professors to ask questions and see where a class draws its conclusions from. Not that my answer would be correct, but open ended questions produce thought.

Among conservatives we usually think that colleges are run by liberals and courses taught by liberals. I don’t know if this is a problem. I do know that I don’t like to be taught to by people who are unwilling to ask questions, who see their own beliefs as the end-all-be-all.

I think that’s why I left school. I was tired of being told, I wanted to be asked.

Melissa, I agree with Steve that you hit the nail on the head with your comment about - how to summarize this in a nutshell? - profs being unwilling to stand the same critical scrutiny of their views by students that they expect the students to perform to some disliked reactionary ideology. My point really isn’t about specific professorial personalities of the 90’s but rather what it means to have a thorough, humane, compassionate, biblical critique which one is just as willing to apply to oneself as to someone else. This is still something I have to work on daily in my own life.

I have been out of the academic fold for about 10 years, but am at least briefly returning to finish my MAR at Eastern Mennonite, so I would be interested to pose a question to the forum as a whole (if anybody is still reading this one that is:))…What are your feelings as students, faculty, staff, admin, family members and fellow believers, about where the situation is today? Is “brainwashing” what really happens in Mennonite Colleges - bible departments or otherwise - today? In what ways might it be similar or different to the 90’s? Just getting my feet wet after a long hiatus…

When their actions are so at odds with their “internal” faith, then according to the Bible and all the theologians I mentioned in my last post - then there’s something wrong with their inner faith. They’re either out and out lying about what they believe, or seriously misgudied/deceived (afterall Hitler sincerely believed he was doing the right thing). James said, “Show me faith without works, and I will show you my faith with my works.”

And while I was at EMU, we were sometimes asked to forgive people and professors who made choices or engaged in actions that seemed fundamentally at odds with their strong internal faiths. Loving rather than judging seemed to be the right choice to make.

The problem with the radical liberation theology as taught at EMU was that they seemed to think the internal wasn’t neccessary, and they leaned toward moral relativism, “Well, what’s right for you may not be right for ________. We shouldn’t judge, we should just love,” an attitude very soundly rejected by Wilberforce, Booth, Bonhoeffer, and Calvin Shenk ;-)

Wilberforce also said, “Authentic faith will always be evidenced by changed lives,” and let me tell you all - I witnessed that first hand when I worked for the Salvation Army in Winchester, VA. I saw the love and grace of Jesus Christ put in action like I never saw it before, and I saw the fruits of it. When I worked in the shelter on Sunday night 4-12, people would come over from the church and tell me all about when the lived in the shelter and how their lives were changed. The people working at that Salvation Army LOVED those people, and that was what made the difference. I later worked for another Salvation Army where the attitude was more, “We help the scum because we’re the Salvation Army and that’s what we’re supposed to do,” and the difference/lack of love was evidenced in the lack of lives changed.

The one thing that I always appreciated from the politically radical Bible professors was that the application of faith had real meaning in real life; that if you were going to live your faith you would think about your actions and the consequences of those actions.

Neither camp was perfect; that was made abundantly clear over and over again.

It wasn’t that one camp taught better critical thinking than the other camp but that critical thinking happened because students held the two extremes in their hand and learned to navigate between them in a way that was personally meaningful.

I am also a former student of Steve Dintaman, and a peer of Tony’s. My problem during my years at EMU was that the profs who harped the most about critical thinking - and having problems getting the students to do it - were rarely the ones who actually wanted us to apply critical thinking. What they wanted was for us to think like them because (in their opinion) any intelligent thinking individual would. Some of these professors were every bit as rigid and intractable in their beliefs/thoughts as they accused fundamentalists of being. My memory of Steve was that he was always very transparent/honest in his faith journey and wasn’t ashamed to admit in front of the students that he had come to believe some of his older beliefs were wrong/changed his stance on issues. He made it okay for us to think that we didn’t have to know what we believed on a certain subject RIGHT NOW, and that it would be equally okay for us to change our minds down the road. I am proud to be an EMU alumni, but I’m even more proud to be able to say that I was one of Steve Dintaman’s students.

EMU’s loss is LCC’s gain!!

I remember one professor in particular who was accused by many, not without merit, of indoctrination rather than teaching. During my undergrad years I’m not sure I would have understood the distinction, because I tended to rather emphatic exhortation of (what I considered to be) biblical propositions without much sense of hermeneutical nuance, as I recall. But in later years I came more and more to appreciate the real difference between indoctrination - which itself involves a kind of disdainful utilitarian manipulation for the production of cookie-cuttered “witness-bots” to go forth into society - and the kind of real instruction which involves respect for the student, willingness to be challenged spiritually and existentially as well as intellectually, and unfeigned mutuality. (I warmly remember Steve D. as a representative of the latter kind of instructor, to whose teaching I owe much of my personal and theological formation as a believer, but that’s another topic…)

There is some legitimacy to the concern about “brainwashing”, at least as it applies to my somewhat dated experience. (I’m not sure where things stand in academia now because I’ve been out of there for a few years.) But there is also a dimension that includes a generalized frequent mistrust of various societal entities for academia itself, i.e. the “my child went to college and lost their soul” argument. This applies obviously not just to the notional debaucherous worldliness that is said to occur there, but more to the point, doctrinally and spiritually in the Christian sense.

Perhaps the issue is more one about the willingness - or even the ability - to think critically, and how that is negotiated along the lines of student/teacher relationships and in the ecclesial community generally. Issues of faculty politics and collegiality feed into this as well, a dynamic that I understood almost nothing about in 1994 and have come to grasp more through work experience in the secular world and relationships generally. The real bugbear here is the tendency of social networks to stultifying, ossified group-think. And this of course is particularly problematic in an educational/confessional/ecclesial establishment (the Mennonite) in which community is treated with a reverence that possesses near-sacramental overtones. I’m rambling a bit and also limited by my lack of recent experience in Anabaptist academia (to which it seems I’m returning for a bit) but these are thoughts that occur as I look back, at times with wonder and more than a little amusement.