School presidents celebrate the value of faith-based higher education

WASHINGTON — Nearly 2 million students attend faith-based colleges and universities, a fast-growing segment of American higher education that now has a new tool to share its story.

Over 50 college and university presidents gathered Monday at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the nation’s capital and vigorously applauded after watching the first episode of a new BYUtv documentary series, “Higher Ed: The Power of Faith-Inspired Learning in America."

“Faith-based institutions are the bedrock of American higher education, and we’ve not paid adequate attention to that role and to that responsibility,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education.

ACE launched a Commission on Faith-based Colleges and Universities last year and Monday’s event drew the presidents of dozens of commission member schools, including Notre Dame, Yeshiva University and Brigham Young University.

The event also drew representatives of the U.S. Department of Education, the Faith Angle Forum, the American Enterprise Institute and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, as well as reporters from The Washington Post and other media outlets.

The new BYUtv documentary highlights students and presidents at three faith-based schools — Catholic University of America, Taylor University and BYU-Hawaii.

“This is a way of saying, ‘Faith institutions have a contribution to make,’” said Elder Clark G. Gilbert, the commissioner of education for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Two additional episodes will be released in August and will include students from other commission schools. Those schools amount to 10% of the nation’s colleges and universities and are excited to tell their stories, four presidents said during a panel discussion.

Their stories need to be told even to people of faith, said Ryan Burge, the event’s keynote speaker and a well-known analyst of data on faith and religion at Eastern Illinois University.

Burge said it’s a myth that college is a place where students lose their faith.

“College is not antithetical to religion,” he said. “In some ways, it accelerates religion, enhances religion.”

Data shows that the more educated Americans are, the more faithful they are, Burge said. He has found that the more Americans are educated and faithful, the more they flourish in numerous data sets.

“To summarize, education is good. Religion is good. Education plus religion is good,” he said. “It causes trust. It makes us more loving of our neighbors. It increases our income. It increases all these outcomes.”

In the documentary, Isabela Barboza said she decided to attend Catholic University of America because she decided that “if religion is part of my life, it has to be part of my education and formation.”

Taylor University student Hannah Wylie, whose parents attended Harvard and Brown, said she struggled before turning down her own Ivy League offer to attend the small evangelical school in Upland, Indiana. She is grateful she did.

“I wanted to be taught to think deeply about things I was doing,” she said in the documentary. “I wanted to do things for a purpose.”

Every college and university president in America is grappling with data that shows students facing a crisis of meaning in their lives.

Rabbi Ari Berman, the president of Yeshiva University, took a moment of gratitude during the panel discussion because he found the documentary powerful.

“Young people are looking to university to find themselves and their values because they are not seeing answers to their deep, existential questions in the ephemeral choices being offered them in other institutions,” he said.

Lipscomb University President Candice McQueen said she was grateful the documentary illustrated what colleges and universities like her Churches of Christ school in Nashville, Tennessee, bring to the table.

The Rev. Robert Dowd, president of the University of Notre Dame, said his school takes a both-and approach to the holistic growth of its students.

“Notre Dame is a place where we educate the whole person, where both faith and reason are engaged, where matters of the heart as well as the life of the mind are very much valued,” he said. “We want our students to grow not only in understanding, in knowledge and in technical skills but in wisdom, and we want them to grow in faith, hope and love.”

Among those in attendance were BYU President Shane Reese, BYU-Idaho President Alvin Meredith, BYU-Pathway Worldwide President Brian Ashton and Ensign College President Bruce Kusch.

BYU-Hawaii President John Kauwe wasn’t at the Kennedy Center, but he was seen in the documentary riding a skateboard on the Laie, Hawaii, campus in white Nikes with a black swoosh and a splash of blue.

“What faith-based institutions offer is another type of belonging,” Kauwe says in the 30-minute film.

The presidents met in working groups in the morning to learn about best practices around issues like hiring people who fit a school’s mission and how to share and elevate stories about their faith-based schools.

Elder Gilbert said the Commission on Faith-based Colleges and Universities creates a friendship for every school.

“There is connectivity for those who always feel like the odd man out,” he said.

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