Church Schools Navigate ‘Precarious Time,’ Elder Gilbert Says in Washington, D.C.

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By Tad Walch, Church News

The gospel-centered missions of BYU and BYU–Pathway Worldwide make them unique and valuable in higher education, Church Educational System leaders said Tuesday, June 4, at the first meeting of the new Commission on Faith-based Universities.

Sponsored by the American Council on Education, the commission launched with a conference at the historic National Press Club near the White House in Washington, D.C., that brought together presidents from 35 religiously affiliated schools, including Georgetown, Yeshiva, Baylor and Pepperdine.

Elder Clark G. Gilbert, General Authority Seventy and Church commissioner of education, is one of the inaugural co-chairs of the new commission, along with Shirley Hoogstra, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which represents 180 schools.

“This is a precarious time where schools of diverse faith backgrounds need to work across boundaries to strengthen areas of shared emphasis, from religious freedom to accreditation protections,” Elder Gilbert said. “These relationships didn’t just start around this commission. The Church Educational System has worked with the presidents of other faith-based universities for a generation.”

He said those relationships built a foundation of trust with peer institutions and their presidents.

“Doing this with the American Council on Education gives this effort increased credibility and collective support,” Elder Gilbert said. “Increasingly, our friends of other faiths and our colleagues in the academy are looking not only for engagement but also leadership from the Church Educational System.”

Hoogstra said the American Council on Education serves 1,700 schools, of which 200 identify as faith-based. In all, 1.8 million students are enrolled at religiously affiliated U.S. colleges and universities, she said.

ACE’s president, Ted Mitchell, a former U.S. Undersecretary of Education, said: “We want to increase the visibility of the important contributions of faith-based institutions, and we want to create collaboration amongst you.”

BYU President C. Shane Reese spoke on a panel about how religion can be a source for innovation in research and scholarship. He said BYU leans into scholarship that is of strategic interest for the school and the Church.

“So often, I think that there is this false dichotomy set up, that you have to choose between being scholarly — academically rigorous — and leaning into a life of faith,” Reese said. “We see those things not as competing interests but rather things that are mutually reinforcing. That pursuit of truth really is a grand and glorious aim that we can achieve because of our faith mission, not in spite of our faith mission.”

He said BYU pursues research in areas that reinforce the core institutions of society.

“We’ve been keenly interested in how we might strengthen the institutions of family, of religion and human flourishing and the institution of the constitutional government that really protects those interests. We love that scholarly, rich, rigorous scholarship can support that very aim.”

Baylor President Linda Livingstone said some Baptists initially found it difficult to embrace research, but Baylor made the transition to a top-level research institution in part by embracing what it can do differently. For example, a researcher who had independently studied how people with disabilities are or are not included in Christian congregations volunteered to move his research to Baylor for the support of like-minded researchers.

Several presidents of Latter-day Saint schools attended the conference, including BYU–Pathway Worldwide President Brian K. Ashton, Ensign College President Bruce C. Kusch and President Bonnie Cordon of Southern Virginia University, an independent private university aligned with the principles, values and teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though it is not endorsed or sponsored by the Church.

President Ashton spoke on a panel about religion as a source of innovation in providing students access to higher education and helping them complete that education.

President Ashton said BYU–Pathway’s religious mission spurred innovation to dramatically reduce the costs of admission so students in economically disadvantaged areas of Africa, for example, can access higher education. BYU–Pathway now has 70,000 students in 180 countries who pay as little as $5 per credit, depending on where they live.

This spring, Ashton added, BYU–Pathway also began to offer three-year degrees after winning approval for them from its accrediting agency.

“Now that’s thinking outside the box,” said the panel’s moderator, Ilana Horwitz, the Fields-Rayant Chair in Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University.

President Reese said BYU’s academic and spiritual missions are inseparable.

“We don’t fundamentally see that there is a conflict between science and faith,” he said. “I think far too often those are pitted as rivals and things that compete with one another.”

Rabbi Ari Berman, president of Yeshiva University, said his school also is guided by the idea that faith and science are partners. He said the discussion of whether faith can be compatible with science should be turned on its head.

“I don’t think it’s faith-based schools that need to be asking that question,” he said. “I think it’s your secular university that needs to ask what happens when you have a science that’s not undergirded by values? And where does that lead? That to me is the essential question that needs to be put on the table. I think, particularly, we can help drive that conversation.”

The commission’s two keynote speakers were respected educators who separately delivered BYU forum assembly addresses earlier this year, Harvard law professor Ruth Okediji and Freeman Hrabowski III, the president emeritus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Okediji said she grew up uncertain whether it was possible to be a “deep intellectual and passionately in love with the gospel of Jesus Christ,” because she didn’t know many Christians who were serious intellectuals.

Hrabowski said he was able to insist that his installation ceremony as UMBC’s president include both the minister from his youth and his minister at the time because a university needed to learn about its president as much as its president needed to learn about the university.

The two keynote speakers said faith-based institutions should focus on their unique purposes and identities at a time when many students in higher education never encounter scripture, the values taught in scripture that have undergirded American citizenship or other faith-related information. Because many students now are not exposed to that in education, they said, those students often misunderstand what scriptures actually say and what religions actually teach.

“Help them understand and learn about faith-based universities. What they think is often wrong,” Hrabowski said.

“I challenge you to think about your moral vision and your moral values,” he added, “and to reach out to other institutions, understanding there will be differences but will be commonalities, also.”

Hrabowski said it is incumbent on religious people to help bridge divides.

“We in faith-based higher education,” he said, “must connect with each other to say to our society, we want to do the right thing.”

The theme of building bridges is one that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ President Russell M. Nelson has modeled during his tenure as leader of the global faith.

As he has met with groups large and small of Latter-day Saints and with world political, social and religious leaders, President Nelson has invited the building of “bridges of cooperation rather than walls of segregation.”

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