“Christians cannot afford to be indifferent to the outcome of this struggle for the single most important institution shaping Western culture. It is at the university that our future political leaders, our journalists, our teachers, our business executives, our lawyers, our artists, will be trained. It is at the university that they will formulate or, more likely, simply absorb the worldview that will shape their lives. And since these are the opinion makers and leaders who shape our culture, the worldview that they imbibe at the university will be the one that shapes our culture. If the Christian worldview can be restored to a place of prominence and respect at the university, it will have a leavening effect throughout society. If we change the university, we change our culture through those who shape our culture.”
— J.P. Moreland Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview
“The university is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world . . . More potently than by any other means, change the university and you change the world.”
— Charles Malik (1906-1987), President of the UN General Assembly, in “A Christian Critique of the University”
*“Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the Cross of Christ.”
— Jonathan Dickinson (1688-1747), 1st president, Princeton University
“If I had to say anything about the general intellectual climate of American universities with respect to faith, addressed to young believers entering such an institution, I would warn them. I would say, ‘Watch out, because they are going to kill you with kindness.’ You’ll be allowed to practice and express your faith openly, but you will not be taken seriously.”
— Dr. Ken Miller, Brown University professor
*“I am much afraid that the universities and schools will prove to be the gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount.”
— Martin Luther (1483-1536), Reformation leader
“College isn’t the place to go for ideas.”
— Helen Keller (1880-1968)
“Learning is not compulsory…neither is survival.”
— W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993), statistician and mathematical physicist
“I use that trust [that college students have in their professors] to effectively brainwash them…our teaching methods are primarily those of propaganda. We appeal-without any demonstration-to evidence that supports our position. We only introduce arguments and evidence that supports the currently accepted theories and omit or gloss over any evidence to the contrary.”
— Dr. Mark Singham, evolutionist professor, in “Teaching and Propaganda,” Physics Today (vol. 53, June 2000), p. 54.
“…[T]he university is indeed the place where we receive advance training in how to serve the gods of our age?education does in fact transform and mold our vision of life so that we serve as guides in a culture led by idols?”
— Brian Walsh & Robert Middleton, in The Transforming Vision (1984)
“Religion is the only solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man toward God.”
— Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), Founding Father
“The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.”
— John Milton, British poet, in “Of Education”
“…[K]ey persons within journalism (especially publishers and editors, and also journalism professionalizers from the ranks of the universities and the active press) actively sought to minimize and ultimately to undermine traditional religion”.
— Richard Flory, Biola University Sociology professor, in The Secular Revolution
“Atheism is on the run. Darwinism is on the ropes; Freudianism is passé; and the only serious Marxists left in the world seem to have gravitated to the English and history departments of American universities. Indeed many colleges have become a kind of old folks home for recalcitrant Reds, where they can rant and rave all they want, but where no one really takes them seriously any more.”
— T. M. Moore, theologian
“Professors and students claim to be on a quest for truth while denying that it exists or that anyone could identify it if it did. Such is the nihilistic atmosphere in major universities around the world.”
— Dave Hunt, discernment ministry leader
“In college, [Christian students] are assaulted by secular relativism, and if we don’t prepare them, they will be like lambs led to slaughter.”
— Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship
“College [has] more and more replaced the church as the source of new values, of new ethical outlooks.”
— Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), American novelist
“Colleges and universities are corrupting the minds and morals of the next generation.”
— James Nelson Black, in “Freefall of the American University”
“Colleges [have] forfeited the responsibilities of in loco parentis and have gone into the pimping and brothel business.”
— Vigen Guroian, Loyola College professor
“Our Bible curriculum here is so bad that it is inoculating the students against the gospel and the Christian life.”
— South Florida Christian high school Bible teacher (2005)
“The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”
— Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), signer of the Declaration of Independence and physician
“College campuses have become fascist colonies of anti-American hate speech, hypersensitivity, speech codes, banded words and prohibited scientific inquiry.”
— Ann Coulter, syndicated legal columnist
“Young men and women are being enticed to think of themselves as two selves, one that is mind and reason in the classroom and another self, ‘after hours,’ that is all body and passion. They begin to imagine-though few entirely believe it-that they can use (that is, abuse) their bodies as they please for pleasure, and that choosing to do so has nothing to do with their academic studies or future lives. In reality they are following a formula for self-disintegration and failure.”
— Vigen Guorian, Loyola University professor
*“Let every student well consider…that the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ.”
— Harvard College Laws (1642)
“Education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible.”
— Dallas Willard, USC philosophy professor, “Renovation of the Heart”, p. 47
“We need to be preparing our children for going out into the world, where everything they believe may in fact be challenged.”
— Tony Arnold, Director of Media Relations for Campus Crusade for Christ
“The average college graduate’s proficient literacy in English [the ability to read lengthy, complex texts and draw complicated inferences] has declined from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent ten years later.”
— Chuck Colson, BreakPoint, “Musical Mush: Are We Impairing Our Capacity to Think?” 2/6/06
“A lack of basic Bible literacy hampers students’ ability to understand both classic and contemporary work?. The Bible is not only a sacred Scripture to millions of Americans, it is also arguably – as one professor put it – the most influential text in all of Western culture.”
— Dr. Marie Wachlin, author of “Bible Literacy Report II: What University Professors Say Incoming Students Need to Know”
“In many cases students are never exposed to competing ideas within their families, churches, or Christian schools, and as a result they go out into the world unprepared for the intellectual battles they are about to encounter, especially on secular college campuses.”
— Nancy Pearcey, “Total Truth” (2005)
“One of these days they are going to remove so much of the ‘hooey’ and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn ’em something that they might accidentally use after they escape.”
— Will Rogers (1879-1935), American humorist, actor and comedian
“I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.”
— Steve Irwin (1962-2006), Australian “Crocodile Hunter”
“[T]he survey found fewer than 1 percent of the [academic] scientists took the Bible literally, while 25 percent thought it was ‘the inspired word of God’ but not to be taken literally in its entirety. About 75 percent agreed the Bible ‘is an ancient book of fables recorded by men.”
— Elaine Howard Ecklund, Rice University sociologist professor and director of “Religion Among Academic Scientists” study, The Washington Times, 8/15/05, p.A3 (cited in American Christian College Journal, 10/05
“By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative… with 50 percent of faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans… 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative. ‘What’s most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field,’ said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and co-author of the study [based on the 1999 North American Academic Study Survey].”
— Howard Kurtz, American journalist in “The Washington Post”, 3/29/05, p. C1
“College is a time for excess, for experimentation. It is four fleeting years of free-spirited indulgence . . . Don’t waste it. Use that finite period to live on your won terms, let go.”
–New York Times editorial, October 6, 2006, A27
“To educate a child in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
— President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
“If I had to do it all over again, I would speak less and study more.”
— Billy Graham (1918-), Baptist evangelist
“Colleges are breeding grounds for eating disorders and unhealthy obsession with food.”
— Courtney Martin, in “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters”
“Blame it on an analytical background, perhaps, but the survey found fewer than 1 percent of the scientists took the Bible literally, while 25 percent thought it was ‘the inspired word of God’ but not to be taken literally in its entirety. About 75 percent agreed the Bible ‘is an ancient book of fables recorded by man.’”
— Elaine Howard Ecklund, Rice University sociologist in “Religion Among Academic Scientists”, presented to the Association for Sociology of Religion, 2005 (The American Christian College Journal, 10/05)
“Schools [are]…institutions monopolizing the daytimes of childhood.”
— John Taylor Gatto, NY State Teacher of the Year (1991) and author, in “The Public School Nightmare: Why Fix a System Designed to Destroy Individual Thought?” http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/resources_gatto.html#top
[Speaking about politics, but it could apply to several things:] “You have to be an intellectual to believe such nonsense. No ordinary man could be such a fool.”
— George Orwell (pen name for Eric Arthur Blair), (1903-1950), British author and journalist
“Today’s child is bewildered when he entrs the 19th century environment that still characterizes the educational establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects and schedules.”
— Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Canadian scholar/philosopher/educator in 1967
“The college environment is very conducive to hooking up. On campus there is a relatively homogenous population of young men and women living in close proximity to each other with no strictly enforced rules monitoring their behavior. Students generally socialize amongst themselves, which fosters a sense of safety or comfort and they share the mantra that college is a time to “let loose” and party. All of these things factor into why the hookup culture flourishes on campus. “The hookup culture definitely affects the genders differently in at least two important ways. First, women are far more likely than men to get a bad reputation for how they conduct themselves in the hookup culture. Women can get a bad reputation for many different things, including how often they hook up, who they hook up with, how far they go sexually during a hookup, and how they dress when they go out on a night where hooking up may happen. Men who are very active in the hookup culture may be called a “player”; women, on the other hand, get labeled a “slut.” Second, women are not getting what they want from the hookup system. Women often want relationships and most are dissatisfied with how often hooking up leads to “nothing,” i.e., no ongoing, stable relationship. There are certainly many cases where a woman does not want a hookup to evolve into a relationship, but on average women are far more interested in a hookup turning into “something more” than men are. This puts women in a difficult situation. If they do not hook up at all, they are left out of the dominant culture on campus and will likely have difficulty finding opportunities to form sexual and romantic relationships with the opposite sex. However, if they do hook up, they have to walk a fine line to make sure they do so in a way that makes them a part of the mainstream on campus without crossing the line and getting negatively labeled. “Although hookup encounters generally occur at night after students attend parties or go to local bars, several students I interviewed mentioned feeling like they had to be “on” 24/7. This fishbowl existence is all part of what I call the “sexual arena” on campus where students are constantly watching one another, gossiping about one another and judging one another for how they look as well as how they conduct themselves in the hookup culture. “I think traditional dating is surviving alongside of hooking up in the larger culture, but on campus hooking up has replaced dating as the primary means for students to meet and form sexual and romantic relationships. This does not mean that students never go out for dinner and a movie. The “date” still exists among college students, but it is couples who are already in an exclusive relationship who do it. In other words, the pathway to a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship where a couple might go on a date begins with hooking up. In the dating era, students would go on a date, which might lead to something sexual happening; in the hookup era, students hook up, which might lead to dating. This is a reversal of the traditional order of things. The problem is that many college men are pleased with the status quo; they can hook up and if they want to pursue an ongoing relationship they can, but they are under no obligation to do so. Women, on the other hand, get increasingly frustrated after freshman year with how often it seems that hooking up leads to “nothing.” “Several of the students I interviewed mentioned the “walk of shame,” which refers to a college student, usually female, walking home the next morning after a hookup encounter in the same outfit he/she was wearing the evening prior. Given that students dress differently for “going out” at night than during the daytime, it is obvious to onlookers when a student is doing the walk of shame. One of many interesting things about this phrase is that students use the word “shame” at all. If students accept hooking up and believe that “everybody’s doing it,” then why do they use the term shame when referencing a hookup encounter? I think that phrase actually underscores an important issue: Many students are struggling with the hookup system.”
— Kathleen A. Bogle, LaSalle University sociologist and author of “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus” (2008), in an interview with Andy Guess (www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/29/hookups)
“For most people, college is a waste of time.”
— Wall Street Journal article title by Charles Murray, 8/13/08, page A17 http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121858688764535107.html
“First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn’t meet the goal. We will call the goal a ‘BA.’ … The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.”
— Charles Murray in “For Most People, College is a Waste of Time,” Wall Street Journal, 8/13/08, page A17 http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121858688764535107.html
“The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students…. We are going to go right on trying to discredit you [parents] 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…. I think those students are lucky to find themselves under…people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents…. I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers. The only difference is that I serve a better cause.”
— Dr. Richard Rorty (1931-2007), American postmodern (postanalytic) philosopher and former professor at University of Virginia, Wellesley, Princeton and Stanford, quoted in “Rorty’s Rebels” by Ed Veith in World Magazine (September 6/13, 2008, p. 31)
“We have now educated ourselves into a state of complete imbecility.”
— Malcolm Muggeridge British Journalist (1903-1990)
“Intellectuals resist faith longer because they can: where ordinary people are helpless before the light, intellectuals are clever enough to spin webs of darkness around their minds and hide in them. That’s why only Ph.D.s believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas in the world (such as Absolute Relativism, or the Objective Truth of Subjectivism, of the Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness and the Meaninglessness of Meaning, which is the best definition of Deconstructionism I know.”
— Peter Kreeft, Boston College philosophy professor
“Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.”
-– Sir Claus Moser (b. 1922), British-Jewish statistician and civil servant
“In a completely rational society, teachers would be at the tip of the pyramid, not near the bottom. In that society, the best of us would aspire to be teachers, and the rest of us would have to settle for something less. The job of passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor anyone could have.”
–- Lee Iacocca, in “Where Have All the Leaders Gone?” p. 217
“The only ground of hope for the continuance of our free institutions is in the proper moral and religious training of the children, that they may be prepared to discharge aright the duties of men and citizens.”
— President Zachary Taylor (1784-1850)