Recent critics of Grove City College – furthering the incessant “Save GCC from CRT” diatribes – have called into question Grove City’s classical liberal arts background. These critics largely react against Grove City’s marketing, which has highlighted the school’s technological market-oriented additions, especially in the past six months. Yet what both the critics and marketers miss is this: in Grove City’s history and purpose – and on the ground at Grove City College today – the Christian liberal arts tradition persists, despite the pressures of higher education today and despite recent attempts to specialize programs at Grove City College.
Two central “ideas” of the university color today’s higher education spectrum. On one end sits the modern research university model, which arose in the mid-nineteenth century and focuses students’ attention on specialization, research, and vocational training. On the other end of the spectrum linger a few holdouts of an older model: the small, liberal arts college, formed, as Grove City was, to form student’s hearts and minds.
On July 7th, 2022, Grove City College announced the launch of a new endeavor: a School of Business. Three days later, Grove City again announced new majors in Supply Chain Management, Computer Engineering, and Applied Science and Engineering. The new School of Business consists of 15 majors across Marketing, Economics, Entrepreneurship, and the like, plus a MS in Business Analysis. Recent announcements include further master’s programs, including a +1 MBA program and Master’s of Science in accounting.
As chairman of GCC’s Board of Trustees Edward Breen noted in the July 7th press release, “establishing the School of Business is part of the College’s long-term strategy to create innovative programs and academic structures to attract and better serve students in a rapidly changing higher education marketplace.”
Evidently, Breen believes Grove City must innovate to remain attractive and effective for future students. The motivations propelling such innovations hum from the very language of GCC’s announcements: both July announcements began by declaring that new programs will “prepare students for success,” whether in the marketplace or in “fast-growing and critical areas of the economy.” Similarly, an October press release regarding the College’s +1 MBA program announces that students “understand that the skills and knowledge that accompany an advanced degree can make them highly employable and prepare them for senior leadership positions or business ownership.”
It seems that the noise of all that which is “fast-growing and critical” beckons the College forward toward specialization: the Grove community must keep up with what is new. As the College’s marketing suggests, continued efforts at specialization signify attempts to match the “higher education marketplace,” make students “highly employable,” and therein concur with modern ideas of the university as a mechanism for success, rather than a training ground for integration.
Continued efforts at specialization… concur with modern ideas of the university as a mechanism for success, rather than a training ground for integration.
Despite its singularity in today’s “higher education marketplace,” Grove City is not a de-traditioned, isolated endeavor. Rather, Grove City is merely one locale from a long line of institutions formed to integrate mind, heart, and soul – to unite intellectual and spiritual pursuits under one banner. We have grown and flourished among a community of similar Christian liberal arts institutions — in a garden of sorts, rising from the soil that has nourished Christian learning communities across history: the soil of the liberal arts tradition.
Integration through the liberal arts tradition represents the original aim of the university. In the first universities, Anselm of Canterbury’s principle of “faith seeking understanding” motivated medieval Christians to study philosophy and nature from the foundation of theology. Such education – as Plato partially comprehended in the cave analogy of Republic VII – historically sought to draw man out of his own darkness, enriching his understanding of the Light of Men. Medieval Christians drew on Plato and his cohort in presenting education as a way to point man towards the Creator. Conceived as such, education is an end in itself. “Marketplace” preparation and monetary benefit do not mar its traditional telos.
John Henry Newman, pioneer of Christian education, linked true education with a liberal arts education in his 1852 work The Idea of a University. Liberal arts education, he wrote, is a process
by which the intellect, instead of being formed or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest culture.
Liberal arts institutions, Newman held, exist so that minds and souls might be formed. Christian liberal arts education shapes men and women towards He who is the aim of all things, not towards aims of market-preparation or employment. Scientific specialization as telos contradicts this soul-formation prized by Newman, the medievals, and the ancients.
For liberal arts institutions trying to survive in today’s “higher education marketplace,” the question remains: can a college live in two worlds – the world of the liberal arts and of scientific specialization? If so, which world represents its primary telos? And can an institution maintain excellence in both worlds for an extended period of time?
In a 1970 Christianity Today essay, Stanley R. Obitts recognized that Christian liberal arts colleges might be tempted by market pressures to “sacrifice the philosophically integrative components of the college curriculum, and of the college scene in general” and instead add “components with greater value to the professor or student interested in specialization or in research, rather than in a general, liberalizing education.” These components, according to Obitts, could include “an inordinate emphasis on such things as the athletic program, or research facilities for the sciences or humanities, or a professionally tailored curriculum.” Though the Christian liberal-arts college must (as Grove City has) provide for these legitimate needs, “the college must never allow them to block its attempt to develop the student’s entire personality.”
Fifty years ago, Obitts contended that a Christian college that sees “its real task as the training of Christians for meeting the specific needs of the community or for taking their place in the ranks of those engaged in scientific research, business, and other fields” does impart a valuable service. Large Christian universities focused on specialization over integration – such as Liberty University or Southern Methodist University – offer valuable services.
Yet these services of market-preparation are services which have, according to Obitts, “no priority over the development of the whole man, which a truly Christian liberal-arts college claims to be able to accomplish uniquely.” Christian vocational schooling cannot take precedence over traditional Christian liberal arts training.
Evidently, the forces of vocational schooling simmer at Grove City. Yet Grove City’s care for and development of, in Obitts’ terms, “the whole man” – whether or not this focus is reflected in the efforts towards specialization, social media posts, and press releases of the school – still prospers from the soil of the Christian liberal arts tradition.
Amid its recent – and somewhat foreboding – attempts to match the market, Grove City nonetheless continues to attract students interested in integrative routes of study and maintains, for all students, a rich Humanities Core. Our administration remains committed, too, to the centrality of our vigorous core.
All students investigate historical, artistic, and faith traditions of Western Civilization through the Humanities Core. This practice acquaints otherwise uninterested students with the Great Books and with documents and events central to Western culture and government. This process invites students who would not otherwise imagine the integration of, for example, ancient Greek philosophy and early church theology to contemplate how the ideas of Plato and Augustine have not only shaped history but also may touch their everyday lives in modern America.
A handful of survey courses amid sometimes-unexcited peers, however, will not likely form the soul of a student whose personal end in education is preparation for today’s market. Hence the import of little-marketed facets of Grove City’s curriculum and culture: programs like the Classical Christian Education minor, events like the recent Lux Mea liberal arts colloquium, reading groups like the Fugitives and Fireside Poets, discussion groups from Apologetics Club to YWA, literary publications like the Quad – all these groups seek integration of faith, understanding, and life. Despite what “market needs” require – “optimizing academic structures and reviewing and reimagining the curriculum,” per the July 7th press release – Grove City persists for now in the Christian liberal arts tradition, whether or not the world, Grove City’s critics, or the innovators of Grove City can see it.
