A Christian Word on Professorial Impact

In the present university world, we talk a lot about impact. Our research is measured by its impact on our academic discipline, according to how often it is cited and by whom. Woe to the professor whose research always winds up in journals with a low JIF. The leading accreditor in the field of business, AACSB, requires that each business school or college explicitly identify and measure the impact it is making on the larger community and society. Universities are ranked, by such publications as Times Higher Education, in part according to the impact they are having on social issues such as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

One could interpret this fixation with impact as an unwelcome result of the continuous rise in university tuition. The value proposition of a university education is now so strained by rising prices that simply turning students into “better citizens” is no longer sufficient. Through its supply of student loan funding (last year topping $1.5 trillion)¹, the federal government has become a major stakeholder in American higher education and it needs to justify its investment to the US taxpayer.

The government has a number of tools it can use to pressure universities into delivering value for money. While government agencies’ direct funding of university research has been in the headlines of late, it is through the accreditation of universities that the federal government wields the heavier weapon. Each of the regional accreditors, whose satisfaction is required for universities to operate, owe their own power to recognition from the Department of Education. The independent Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), which recognizes over half the regional accreditors in the US and over 80 specialized institutional and program accreditors, is itself reliant on the government for recognition. When the government puts pressure on CHEA, the accreditor of accreditors, that pressure trickles all the way down to university programs – demonstrate that you are having a positive impact on the world, or else.

In the Christian university space, impact is a complicated matter. We have opportunities to impact the world in more ways than just supplying valuable educational content. As missional institutions, we organize student opportunities for ministry both at home and abroad. We evangelize those without faith commitments among our student bodies and disciple those who are already committed Christians. We support churches, parachurch organizations, governments, and businesses through faculty consulting and by providing them with the next generation of trained professionals. We move upon the world through prayer and petition. We acknowledge the scriptural truth that we cannot create positive change by ourselves. Either we join the Lord in what He is doing or our efforts are ultimately futile (Psalm 127:1). Nonetheless, back in the here and now, the major work of a professor is to conduct research, publish her findings, and then pass that advancement on to her students in the classroom.

One of the benefits of being in the professor gig is that our work can outlive us. The students we teach hopefully continue to put our lessons into practice long after we have gone to our reward. Our writing also can speak beyond the grave. The most cited scientific paper is an article from the Journal of Biological Chemistry published in 1951. How many citations does it have? More than 350,000 recorded in the Web of Science database.² (NB: I have intentionally refused to research whether the scientists who wrote that paper are still among us. May they live forever.) I regularly rely on source material in my research from authors who have long since passed. They are still making an impact on me and on all those who engage with my own published work. In the same way, we can hope that our publications inform and alter the landscape of our disciplines such that the academics who follow us can produce more truth, more beauty, and more goodness. It is the legacy we hope to offer for those who come after us.

In this sense, university professors are like the ancient Israelites of Joshua’s day. We have been settled in various towns among our tribesmen. Each of us has our assigned plot to sew and harvest, and we must steward it well. A good farmer bequeaths his fields to his children with fewer rocks and more enriched soil. A good vintner leaves his vines with deeper roots and more productive branches. A good sheep herder leaves behind a bigger, stronger flock than the one he inherited. In the same way, professors who only consume the knowledge generated by others and never contribute to their discipline may be misusing, if not squandering, their intellectual inheritance. The cost of producing terminally degreed academics represents a significant societal investment for which society understandably requires a return, and there are not that many of us working to generate that return. While the number of PhDs awarded to foreign citizens has risen rapidly, the number of PhDs awarded to Americans has risen only slightly since 1976.³

There was one Israelite tribe, however, with different expectations. The Levites received no tribal allotment. They were stationed around the country in small communities, but their inheritance was the Lord (Deuteronomy 18:2). They may well have upgraded the soil that surrounded their homes, but they measured the quality of their work by the spiritual health of the nation. During the times of national revival, the tribe of Levi was in its element. Priests offered sacrifices, worshippers lifted praise, and those responsible for the sanctuary kept it both beautiful and efficiently operating. During times of spiritual malaise, both the sanctuary and the nation descended into ruin.

For Christian serving in universities, this may be our lot as well. We live in the same world as non-Christian professors and sometimes office next door to them, but because of our dedication to the Lord, exactly what we do and how we do it may sometimes look different. We may have the same publishing requirements as any other professor, but when a distressed student is outside our door seeking help and discipleship, the compassion of Christ will require us to interrupt our research and at least triage the student’s situation. We may grade the same student deliverables as that professor next door but we commit our students to prayer and hope for their success, rather than imposing unfair deductions on them to reach our desired DFW rate. We freely offer an untenured colleague first authorship on our combined writing so that he can satisfy the demands of his department, and we take on consulting work selectively, seeking opportunities to do good to “those who are of the household of the faith” (Galatians 6:10). Regardless of the city or the university in which God has stationed us, we are all called to wash the feet of the people God has placed in front of us.

The measure of our success is never just the effectiveness of the work itself. There is unlikely any eternal significance in how many classes we have taught, how many articles we have authored, or the number of committees upon which we have served. Neither is it necessarily relevant how many, if any, non-profits we helped, clients we represented, or budgets we balanced. We serve a Master who had a very limited audience and who never wrote anything that has survived to our time. The measure of our success, the measure of our impact, is the level of obedience we offer to our calling. The entire Old Testament religious system was built around rites of sacrifice, but the Lord desires obedience to His commands (to love God and neighbor) more than any of those rites (Mark 12:33).

Our obedience will look different in different contexts. Sometimes the Levites were obedient by meeting out justice on their sinful kinsmen (Exodus 32 – but please don’t look for modern day equivalents). More often they were obedient in simpler tasks, like carrying the Ark of the Covenant, packing up the tabernacle for transport, or serving as door keepers or musicians. Their obedience testified to the people that God’s commands were important, that His ways were right, and that He could be trusted. May our labors provide the same testimony, even in the everyday work of the college professor. If we have to sacrifice our score on ResearchGate to sustain that obedience, so be it. Our impact on the Kingdom and on the culture will be greater, even if it goes uncelebrated within the academy.

It may be helpful to ask at this point, what might our disobedience look like? These instances will tend to be more obvious but have just as much variety. When we neglect our responsibilities to our students and our institutions in order to pursue our own selfish ends, we are disobeying the command to love our neighbor. That disobedience may undermine not just our own testimony but that of all Christian faculty, and society will suffer if Christians become less trustworthy because of my poor workmanship. When we compromise our dedication to the truth of God and Scripture, we fail to obey the Lord’s command to love Him. I have felt the scorn of fellow academics when I brought my Theistic assumptions to bear on the issues we debated. I definitely felt the temptation to minimize my Christian arguments or even to abandon them and proceed on more academically acceptable bases. Perhaps you have felt that too. May the Lord sustain us in those moments lest our unsaved colleagues interpret our silence to affirm their views that God is either unknowable or uncaring.

For my academic colleagues, please keep up your research, writing, and teaching. Keep producing timely work of excellent quality. You are doing great things for your discipline and maintaining the reputation of the people of God as valuable in the larger society. At the same time, let us never lose sight of the Lord to whom we are dedicating that work and always stand ready to sacrifice what we must to impact the Kingdom by our humble obedience, by our simple acts of loving God and neighbor. Let’s set ourselves to make an impact there and never forget where our inheritance lies.

1. Government Accounting Office. 2024. “Federal Student Loans: Preliminary Observations on Borrower Repayment Practices after the Payment Pause.” Federal Student Loans: Preliminary Observations on Borrower Repayment Practices after the Payment Pause | U.S. GAO/
2. Richard Van Noorden. 2025. “These are the most cited research papers of all time.” Nature. These are the most-cited research papers of all time.
3. Jason Richwine. 2024. “Immigrants in U.S. Doctoral Programs.” Center for Immigration Studies. Immigrants in U.S. Doctoral Programs.