The Importance of Quaker Institutions of Higher Learning,

350 years ago, amid the religious and political turmoil of 17th century England, George Fox, seeking for answers to the pressing questions of the day, had a vision that God had come to teach his people himself and that there was an inward Teacher which could speak to each person’s condition. Out of that vision, grew the Religious Society of Friends, which further accomplished the establishment of one of the most democratic societies the world has ever known, and the establishment of many of the most enlightened educational institutions the world has ever known. We are now gathered here in the midst of the turmoil of the early 21st Century to ask to what extent those colleges founded upon Fox’s vision, can answer the pressing questions of our time and can speak to your conditions. I believe very strongly that a Friends higher education is very relevant and urgently needed for it affords the possibility of a fulfilled, purposeful and happy adult life.

My strong interest in Friends education grew out of personal experience. I am a Quaker and feel fortunate to have had seven years of Quaker education: three at Westtown and four at Swarthmore College. My memories of both those schools are very vivid and happy ones. Since we are talking about colleges, I will confine my recollection to my life at Swarthmore. I remember what fun I had there, where I knew all my professors as well as the Dean and the president on a first name basis. Swarthmore is a place where the adults and young people know and value each other. It is a place where life-long friendships are made. Probably like the other schools here, Swarthmore is known as a Quaker matchbox, and it is true for me, for I met my wife on the Florida swim team trip and every part of the campus and every experience reminds us of our happy beginnings there. Swarthmore is typical of Quaker colleges, for it is a place where it is safe to be creative and to find talents you never knew you had. For example, as a final project to my New Testament class, my roommate and I wrote a baroque cantata, complete with a ragtime fugue, recitatives and chorales, on a text contrasting the paradox of salvation through works with salvation through faith. Because the college fosters scholarship and creativity: our music theory professor encouraged us to fix some of the harmonic and voice leading mistakes and perform the cantata for the entire school, and our religion professor remembered and wrote about the piece twenty-five years later in one of his books. I also remember how funny the people there were. For example, Swarthmore had a Marching Society, an impromptu band that would play at the half-time ceremonies of the football games. With a repertoire that include the Blue Danube, they would have unusual half time shows, such as a salute to the Domino Theory where they all lined up and fell over, and educational shows, such as a demonstration of the process of mitosis. The dining hall and the dormitories were places of intense and fun conversations, and the school had the perfect balance between the seriousness of our intellectual and social pursuits and the ability to laugh at ourselves. Immersed as I was in this culture, I took it for granted, and it never occurred to me that people or schools elsewhere were any different. It was my experience in law school that opened my eyes to another world. With classroom settings that were sometimes humiliating and often disenfranchising, my law school’s mission was to produce people with sound legal skills. But it never spoke about a larger duty to make the world a better place or to serve others; in fact it implied that such thinking might cause you to commit malpractice. While law school very ably taught us to think analytically, and to understand the law, what we learned was never framed in terms of larger truths: our primary duty was to be a zealous advocate for our clients. It did not have in its vocabulary the importance of intentional community building and so there was none. The career planning office openly scoffed at careers in public service, non-profits and academia. My fellow students generally followed the path they were directed by the school, and it was only due to my earlier training that I listened for and heeded the call to service. There was none of the fun, humor, imagination, community, conversation or psychological safety I knew from Swarthmore. It was through this experience that I realized what was so important about Friends education.

So, what is a Quaker education? Friends’ theology is grounded in the Doctrine of the Inner Light which says that there is that of God in everyone. Variously describing God as the light, the indwelling Spirit, the inward Teacher, the Christ within, the Doctrine has important consequences. First, divine Truth is accessible to all and is continually revealed. Friends’ education rests directly on this. The root of the word educate: means to draw out, and in Quaker schools, we draw out the knowledge that exists within each of us. Douglas Heath writes: “The primary educational principle of a Friends school is to expect and act on the expectation that every member of the community seeks to live more fully in Truth….This truth refers to universal values and principles about the good life and the Kingdom that should be.”

Given the beliefs of the Religious Society of Friends and the Friends philosophy of education, exactly how can the Quaker colleges speak to your condition? Let me begin with the most immediate: how they can affect your life and education at college.

Even in the colleges that have very remote relations with the Society of Friends, and don’t use any religious language, the schools’ origins have effects on the culture which can make significant differences on your undergraduate life. These effects begin with the admissions process. These colleges describe themselves with language couched in terms of community, trust, service, personal responsibility, tolerance, dignity, respect, personal growth and intellectual engagement. Hence, they attract those who seek these things. Other schools may market themselves to and attract those whose ambitions are not spiritual, intellectual or communal but who attend college in pursuit primarily of material success and prestige. While Quaker schools may contain such students, overall, there is a self-selection that reinforces the Quaker character of the schools. Hence your colleagues are predisposed to be like-minded.

The characteristic of these schools which will be important to you is a sense of simplicity, community and trust. The simplicity is manifested in social relationships, in dress, and in life styles. At some colleges, the way you live depends on how much money you have. But at Friends colleges, by and large campus activities are free and open to everyone. The schools trust the students and the students trust the schools and each other. This trust is manifested for example by the Haverford Honor Code, where students take full responsibility for their conduct and integrity in all academic work, including all homework assignments, papers, and exams. In return, Haverford students are trusted with a greater degree of freedom in their academic pursuits. Self-scheduled, take-home, and/or unproctored exams are a routine part of this experience. These schools are intentional communities and that is shown by how students work with one another. Students share information in a cooperative way, engaged in a common enterprise, as opposed to the intense grade competition in some schools that precludes such cooperation. The sense of community is expressed in the valuing of the whole person and the fact that every person may participate in all the activities, including sports. People are not neatly divided into jocks, artists, and nerds because it is possible for one person to take part in many activities. Community is expressed by a celebration of diversity, a diversity which is pursued because it is morally responsible and educationally sound, not because it is good marketing. These schools lack the Greek system of fraternities, and deliberately de-emphasize materialism and privilege because these run counter to a collegial and egalitarian life.

Your experience may also include an intellectualism and pursuit of justice that give these schools their special flavor. For example, Swarthmore’s Honors program is where in your junior and senior year, you take seminars, engage in independent study or do a series of scientific experiments, all of which are very similar to graduate study with a close, collegial, collaborative relationship with your professors. This course of study in the Honors program leads up to a series of written and oral examinations by those outside the school. It is this intense but highly rewarding intellectual atmosphere that most remember with great appreciation about Swarthmore. There are other examples of how an emphasis of giving to others generates a charitable atmosphere. As we speak, Earlham is holding it weeklong Plowshares Student Peace Conference promoting multicultural understanding. Guilford has a Quaker Leadership Scholars Program. George Fox University has programs on peace, and conflict resolution. William Penn University has been recognized for its competencies in compassion, conscience and leadership. I refer to just a few, but all the schools here, while using different language, emphasize the same things: compassion, conscience, leadership, peace-making, personal responsibility, devotion to intellectual and spiritual growth, and service.

Finally, reflecting my own experience, and seeming to follow Fox’s admonition to walk cheerfully over the earth seeking that of God in everyone, these schools are places where you can make life-long, fast friendships characterized by humor and care.

I note that there are many non-Quaker colleges that also encourage such things as intellectualism, cooperation and service. However, the schools here today, anchored as they are by history, tradition or mission in a Quaker belief system, do all these things by definition.

I have talked about how these schools can offer you a holistic experience at college. I now want to address how Quaker higher education can speak to the needs of the world. In the first place, Quaker education can help bridge the gap between those of faith and those who seek social progress. This so called “religion gap” is obvious in this year’s presidential election campaign, where certain wedge issues such as abortion and school prayer have been used to divide those of faith from issues of social progress. The extent of this chasm was shown in campaign literature sent in late September to voters in Arkansas and West Virginia claiming that liberals wanted to ban the Bible. As John Podesta, of the Center for American Progress has noted “Today, there is a growing misperception…that those who espouse progressive views are inherently antireligious…[However,] there are historic ties between the religious community and progressives.” Many great movements of positive social change in American history had their roots in religion, particularly Quakerism: the founding of Penn’s Holy Experiment in Pennsylvania, the anti-slavery and civil rights movement, women’s liberation, temperance and prison reform all had their roots in religion. Today, many progressive movements are supported, not only by Quakers and mainstream religions, but by evangelicals whose faith motivates them to make a more just world through abolition of the death penalty, elimination of homelessness and domestic violence, opposition to the war in Iraq, and countering the dehumanizing effects of our materialistic consumer culture. Quaker higher education can help close that rift by providing spaces where a quiet faith and social activism reinforce one another.
Second, Quaker education can also help bridge the gap between faith and science. While some say that teaching of evolution is contrary to Christianity, Friends have always found that science is part of the search for truth. For this reason, Quakers have been among the leading scientists. In the 18th Century, for example, a Quaker had a five times better chance of becoming a member of the Royal Society than a non-Friend. (The Quaker Reader, p. 2) The most recent example of this is George Ellis, this year’s recipient of the $1.4 million Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities. The Templeton Prize, which is the world’s largest annual monetary prize given to an individual, is meant to honor those who advance spiritual matters and broaden the understanding of the relationship between theology and science. George Ellis, a South African Quaker, at his acceptance of the prize, in language that reflects that Quaker belief that truth comes from science and from within said:

“We are at a stage in human history when, as we gaze with amazement and appreciation at the incredible progress of science in the last century, we can also start to see clearly some of the limits to what science can achieve. The way in which science and religion by and large complement each other is becoming ever clearer, as are the natures of the various points of tension between them, and some possible resolution of those tensions. It is a good time to look at these issues.” Unlike some religious colleges that seem to reject science, and secular schools that do not have the language to discuss the complement of faith and science, Friends colleges are ideally suited to look at the issues Ellis addresses.

Quaker higher education provides its graduates with hope. As George Ellis has said “In facing our individual and communal lives, we always need faith and hope as well as rationality, and indeed the real issue is how we can best balance them against each other.” He spoke of his country, South Africa, where hope irrationally held out against the assumption that the country would decay into a racial holocaust. “[This holocaust] did not occur,” he said, “because of the transformative actions of those marvelous leaders Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, confounding the calculus of rationality.” This hope, based on a belief in the divinity of human beings, can counter the fear that is pervading our society. As Vaclav Havel said “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” Our Quaker institutions of higher learning can instill in our graduates this hope that can hold out against a cold rationality, and manipulative fear-mongering of cynical politicians.

Friends higher education can help fill the need in our country for increased civic participation. The culture fostered in Quaker colleges, with the emphasis on personal responsibility, integrity, service and community, provides the language and models for what in means to be an active, engaged and respectful citizen. The great German sociologist, Max Weber observed that as societies become more complex, systems and rules are created to govern them, and more and more decisions are turned over to bureaucracies, experts and lawyers. The consequence, he wrote, is that people feel powerless and alienated. Our Quaker colleges, which emphasize personal engagement in consensual decision-making, in learning, and in activism, are healthy antidotes to this alienation.
I have talked about the ways our Quaker colleges can meet the needs of the world. Quaker colleges can also bring about a fulfilled, purposeful and happy adult life.
The life at these colleges is a templates for a life afterward full of meaningful and deep friendships, great conversation, and meaningful careers. Most importantly they can provide a model of simplicity. The language of simplicity is urgently needed in our increasingly cluttered world. It is not surprising that out of one of our colleges should come a book The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More, where the author, a Swarthmore professor of psychology argues that the material abundance and plethora of choices the marketplace gives us can leave us feeling less satisfied than when the options were limited. He begins the book describing his attempt to buy a pair of blue jeans. He had not shopped in years and when he went to the Gap to buy them, the clerk asked if he wanted slim fit, easy fit, relaxed tit, baggy or extra baggy; stonewashed, acid-washed or distressed, button-fly or zipper fly, faded or regular. Stunned, he sputtered he just wanted the regular kind that he always used to buy, and the young clerk, after consulting with an older colleague, directed him to the right place. He spent many hours in the store, trying on all the jeans, and examining himself in the mirror. He ended up with the best pair of jeans ever, but he was dissatisfied because a normally five-minute purchase now took an agonizing day, and his expectations were raised so high that he could never be satisfied the way he had been before when there was just one kind, the regular kind. The book then expands his paradox of too much choice creating unhappiness to many areas of American culture. Typical of our schools, this book is on-point, current, timeless, scholarly and funny. But it also makes sense that it would naturally flow from one of our colleges. The emphasis on simplicity in our Friends institutions can give us a mind-set to set standards of what can satisfy our needs, and thus resist the frazzle of today’s clutter lifestyles. Moreover, the emphasis on simplicity can affect the kind of relationships we have with our friends, family and colleagues.
While it is entirely possible for one to go for four years at a Friends institution of higher learning, and not pick up on any of the ideas I have listed above, I think that that is unlikely. I want to end with a quotation from Paul Lacey in Growing Into Goodness:

"Our goals in Quaker education are two-fold: to encourage people to make the world better, to become informed, skilled agents of positive social, political, and educational change, devoted to the fullest possible expression of the particular world image and style of fellowship represented by the Quaker testimonies; and to help our students learn to make their contributions from lives which are spiritually centered, fulfilled, and happy."

-Paul Lacey, Growing Into Goodness.

For these reasons, I believe that our Friends colleges are some of our greatest gifts to the world. They are also a gift to each of you.