About 10 years after I became the president of Fuller Seminary, I received a letter from a college student asking me for career advice. His goal in life, he said, was to be the kind of academic president that I was, and he wondered how he should prepare for that role. I wrote back, telling…

Many colleges and universities, within the CCCU and without, continue to be faced with difficult questions regarding which academic programs to retain and which to “consolidate.” There are an incredible number of factors that inform each of these considerations, and I do not covet those who are tasked with the corresponding decisions. It is often…

Should there be a distinctively Christian approach to engineering? If so, is it possible? After all, Christians and non-Christians seem to agree on all the technical details in engineering, like integration, derivation, Fourier transforms, and finite element analysis. So why do we take a distinctly Christian approach to engineering? The first and foremost reason that…

Dear Non-Believing Colleagues: My open letter is divided into two parts. The first one opens with a parable of sorts. An atheist professor once approached a colleague with a sensitive question. The latter was a religiously devout academic from a distant foreign country who appeared to hold traditional views. “In your view,” she asked, “is…

The following excerpt from Nadya Williams, Christians Reading Classics, is published with permission from Zondervan Academic. *** Sometime in the mid-fourth century BC, a young man, Ariston, was walking home one evening from the shrine of Persephone in Athens. Suddenly, a middle-aged man named Konon along with his son and a couple of other associates…

In my class on disabilities, I recently experienced one of those sacred moments when I could see how Christ animates learning—not through curriculum or lesson structure, but through the hearts of students. From the very first day, I sensed something different about this group. Their responses, their willingness to listen, and their genuine care for…

One intriguing question that has puzzled scholars in the study of history has been: why did science as we know it today develop in the West and not the East? After all, one could argue that Asian cultures had empirical interests and cultural humility that could have fostered a similar sort of study. In the…

Over the past twenty years, the needs of university students have changed significantly. As Jonathan Haidt adeptly chronicles in his Anxious Generation, mental health and loneliness, depression, and anxiety are rampant among today’s youth. COVID only exacerbated this. Recognizing these challenges, two Whitworth professors from disparate disciplines set out to craft a course to address…

It’s common to observe that digital technology has undermined the assumption that institutions are trustworthy. Some people lament it, and others celebrate it, but everybody sees it. Thanks to the Internet, institutions have lost much of their authority to shape common knowledge. This certainly includes institutions of higher education, Christian and otherwise. It’s less common…

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,…