Education: Higher Learning

If it weren’t for the guy in the Kelly green trucker hat emblazoned JESUS IS MY HOMEBOY and the Bibles poking out of several backpacks, this Friday morning cell-biology class could be at any sun-soaked California college. At least until the day’s lecture turns to evolution. “Darwin wasn’t necessarily a God hater,” says Assistant Professor Jon Milhon, in between slides of mitochondria. “You don’t have to agree with his theory. I personally don’t. But the man wasn’t an idiot.”

Milhon is a biologist at Azusa Pacific University (A.P.U.), the U.S.’s second largest evangelical Christian college, with 8,200 students attending its palm-tree-lined campus in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, north of Los Angeles, and seven satellite locations. Enrollment in the nation’s 104 “intentionally Christ-centered colleges,” as the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities calls them, has risen 27% since 1997. That’s more than three times as fast as the growth at all four-year schools. A.P.U. is booming–its student population is up 53% over the same period–and it is becoming a model for how a Christian college can reinvent itself in a modern age. The U.S.’s galloping evangelical movement is fueling part of this growth, but so is a population of young adults craving an active experience with God and spirituality. As it expands, A.P.U. is challenging the stereotypes of evangelical colleges as weak academically and ultraconservative socially. Can an institution that doubts Darwin and mandates chapel attendance provide an education the mainstream world respects? God willing, say students and faculty at A.P.U.

“Young people want to know something bigger than themselves,” says senior Marcus Robinson, 24, an art major from Pomona, Calif. Robinson describes himself as “feeling out this whole God thing,” when he applied to A.P.U. at his pastor’s urging. Like Robinson, most college students are pondering spirituality, according to a study under way at the University of California, Los Angeles. More than three-quarters of college juniors told researchers they discuss religion and spirituality with friends, and 68% said they are “feeling unsettled about spiritual matters.” But 62% said their professors never encourage classroom discussions of religion or spirituality. “There’s a [gap] between the degree of interest in these issues that young people display and the extent to which colleges inspire students to explore them,” says Alexander Astin, director of UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute.

At A.P.U., professors invoke religion not just in required theology courses, but in biology and English as well. Carole Lambert, an English professor and Fulbright scholar who came to A.P.U. from the University of California, Berkeley, says she introduces spirituality into classroom discussions, telling her students when reading books about war, for example, that she is a pacifist because of how she interprets the Scriptures. Professors at A.P.U. must sign a pledge affirming that they “believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative word of God” to work at the college, a requirement gladly accepted by the faculty, many of whom say they were tired of teaching “half-truths” at secular colleges and feel relieved to “come out of the closet” as Christians. The oath policy has cost the school in dealings with the outside world, including the loss of a $3.4 million government contract to run an early-education program last fall. But it also opens A.P.U. to the world of rich and dedicated Christians, who in just the past year helped boost the school’s donations 50%, to $12 million. At a time when President George W. Bush is trumpeting new faith-based initiatives, schools like A.P.U. seem poised to benefit.

Yet while its status as a Christian college frees A.P.U.’s students and faculty to explore spiritual issues and enjoy the largesse of the broader community of evangelical Christians, it can also proscribe classroom debate. “I was trying to ask the professor in my foundations-of-ministry class if he thought creation could be taken figuratively,” says senior Travis Taylor, 21, a math major who attended a Christian high school in Temecula, Calif. “He said that was a dangerous way of looking at things. What’s dangerous about asking a question?” Not a thing, most professors would say, and most at A.P.U. do. While the school’s theology professors teach the creation story, its scientists also teach evolution “as a theory,” says Milhon. “It’s important that students speak the language of evolution. I don’t say what they should believe.” Nonetheless, Taylor’s experience reflects the school’s roots as the first Bible college on the West Coast, founded in 1899 as a training school for Christian workers. When Lambert arrived in 1986, the campus still felt more like a revival tent than an institution of higher learning. “We used to call it Camp Azusa,” Lambert says. “There was lots of singing. We were not in a scholarly mode.”

In the 1990s, however, A.P.U. president Richard Felix envisioned the school as a flagship Christian university and launched its first formal fund-raising campaign. Under Felix, now retired, A.P.U. introduced an honors program and a science research institute, created academic scholarships to lure better students from both religious and secular high schools, quadrupled its graduate programs and nearly doubled undergraduate enrollment. Even as the school grew in size, the mean SAT score of freshmen began a steady climb, rising 72 points in the past five years, to 1,102–82 points above the national average and a sign that more serious scholars are filling the seats at chapel.

Among them are students like freshman Morgan Altizer, 18, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., who turned down UCLA’s honors program to attend A.P.U. Altizer, a runner, says she reached her decision after she met each school’s track coach. At UCLA, “they wanted to know, ‘How fast can you run? How high can you jump?'” Altizer says. “Here, the coach wanted to know about my whole person, about my spirituality.” The philosophy major admits she still grapples with her decision. “Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Why am I at a Christian school? No one’s gonna respect me [academically],'” Altizer says. “But I’m not here to get a job. I’m here to become a person.”

For a Christian college, A.P.U.’S atmosphere is decidedly mellow. There is no dress code: women wear tank tops and low-rise pants, and men have earrings and ripped jeans. Male and female students can visit each other’s dorm rooms until midnight on weekends or 10 p.m. during the week. A rarely enforced prohibition on dancing was dropped in the late 1990s. There is no faith pledge, although students must sign a document agreeing to certain “spiritual and social expectations”–no drug, alcohol or tobacco use on campus and no unmarried cohabitation or homosexual activity on or off campus. There is a mandatory 120 hours of community service.

Students, even the Muslims and Buddhists that administrators say are on campus, must attend chapel three mornings a week, but the service can feel as much like a pep rally as church. Stuffed onto risers and folding chairs in the event center, the young adults sing along, raise their arms and sway as student Christian rock and gospel groups perform. Leaning on a lectern in front of a towering video screen, campus pastor Chris Brown, in jeans, sneakers and a goatee, cuts from photos of A.P.U. students “who need our prayers” to a scene from the Jim Carrey movie Bruce Almighty. In his sermon, Brown makes references to his winter-break road trip, Jell-O and The Simpsons’ pious neighbor Ned Flanders.

The school is 74% white and overwhelmingly upper middle class and Californian. At nearly $20,000 for full-time tuition and fees, A.P.U. is cheaper than some private colleges but expensive compared with the state’s high-quality public universities, whose tuition and fees for residents are under $6,000. While most white students say the instant they stepped on campus A.P.U. felt “like home,” many minority students say they struggled to adapt. Joyce Tai, 26, an Asian-American master’s candidate in college student affairs, was drawn by a unique administrative program but finds life in this Christian bubble startlingly different from her undergraduate experience at California State University, Fullerton. “I’m taking a diversity class. I’m looking around. Where is the diversity?”

At the same time, it’s the sense of being in a kind of Christian haven, away from the world’s traumas, that can make the campus seem especially welcoming for protective parents and religious students from large public high schools. A.P.U. professors seem to enjoy a closer bond with their students than those at many secular schools because of the 12-to-1 student-faculty ratio and the faith they have in common. At A.P.U., students talk about visiting their professors’ homes and meeting their families. Biologist Milhon describes himself as “like a marriage counselor” for some of his students.

Combining this soft-touch Christian approach with a steadily improving academic program has made A.P.U. the kind of college that appealed to someone like Jonathan Oliva, 23, a recent premed graduate from Moreno Valley, Calif. Oliva was considering San Diego State University when he was recruited by A.P.U.’s soccer coach and won over by the college’s 90% success rate for getting students into medical school. Once he arrived on campus, Oliva found the Christian environment fostered his interest in science in a particularly meaningful way, as he traveled on medical-mission trips to Mexico and India to fulfill A.P.U.’s service requirement. Working for Mother Teresa’s hospice-care program in Calcutta for two summers, he says, “got me away from the books and reminded me why I made the decision to go into medicine in the first place.”

Oliva has just been admitted to his first-choice medical school, Michigan State University, but he describes the process of defending his Christian college education to med-school admissions counselors as a painful one. “The questions were, ‘So you’re a conservative person? So you’re a fundamentalist? So you come from a small school?’ Well, not really. There are a lot of misconceptions about Christian schools.” A.P.U.’s mission is to prove them wrong.