In 2022, Rev. Christian Preus made a stir throughout the LCMS when he presented his paper entitled, ‘Bad Company Corrupts Good Morals: The Only way to keep a Lutheran College Lutheran.
In his essay, he noted how many Lutheran colleges and universities, in their push to grow, began accepting larger and larger amounts of non-Lutheran students and hiring non-Lutheran faculty to the point where they reached critical mass of nonbelievers. The process resulted in the collapse of institutional culture, mission drift, and the promotion of anti-Christian ideas on these campuses. Preus’s paper did not seek to wag a self-righteous finger but he sought to offer a solution: Luther Classical College. Hе argued for the creation of a college staffed entirely by Lutherans, accepting only Lutheran students. With the idea that ‘good company creates good morals,’ Preus argued that the proposed college would avoid the pitfalls of previous attempts and actually be a place that cultivated virtue rather than experimentation with degenerate lifestyles and Marxist philosophies. The hate and the criticism immediately came in. It was utopian. It eschewed all conventional business practices (apparently higher ed is a business) and would be condemned to ‘irrelevance’ and ‘weirdness.’ It simply would not work.
As long as Luther Classical College remained an idea, most criticisms remained just as valid as Preus’ proposal. Armchair higher education consultants could pontificate on whether or not LCC could accomplish the stated goals. Would it really foster ‘Christian Culture’ or would it be some strange homeschool ‘Benedict Option’. Ultimately, the idea had to be put to the test, and, to borrow a concept from military history, the ultimate arbiter of all ideas is the result. Now it has been nearly four months since LCC’s first students moved to Casper, and from my vantage point as dean of students and as a professor, I can report on some of the initial results.
I first realized that LCC’s student body was something different on the first day of class. I began my introductory lecture using a lot of the stock techniques that I have developed over the last ten years of teaching, which all moved toward the single goal of defusing a hostile audience. I stopped mid-lecture. One could feel an entirely positive vibe from the classroom. The students were noticeably engaged, eager to learn, and just happy to be there. I did not need to defend myself and my subject to these students. They were already bought in, so I moved along to talking about Philip Melancthon. Four months later, even after slogging through Herodotus, Thucydides, and Arrian, the students still retain that vibe in the classroom. They read. They ask thoughtful questions and are extraordinarily respectful. No professor at LCC is allowed to ‘mail it in’ on their watch. Perhaps, this is what Christian culture looks like in the classroom. Likewise, the same culture expresses itself throughout student life at LCC. Trusting in the idea that ‘good company creates good morals, the college has piloted a minimalist student affairs bureaucracy limited to providing students with certain essential functions. Rather than coddling the students, LCC gave them the freedom to take up the mantle of adult responsibility and care for one’s neighbor. They stepped up to the challenge. Nobody tells the students to go to chapel or church on Sundays, they just do. They utilize the gifts provided at LCC. Rather than seek out professional counselors, the students utilize counsel and private confession and absolution from LCC’s clergy on staff. They settle their differences in a Christian manner with the goal of winning over one’s brother. The result is that rather than lurching from one student crisis to the next, the dean of students finds himself with the time to work on other essential functions for the college.
They self-organize. In the student houses, they created rotating meal preparations and cleaning schedules. Everyone makes sure that those without cars get a ride to campus. They have organized their own events: game nights, dances, and potlucks. They started their own coffee and tea fund, which one student faithfully prepares every morning. When my family lost our baby in the womb at 19 weeks, the students came together and gave gifts out of their hearts to create a care package for us that even included coloring books for the kids. Nobody told them to do it. They just did it.
The students make or break a college. Student culture is an essential piece of that puzzle, and that can only be determined by the students themselves. In my decade of experience in higher education, I have seen student affairs staff attempt to deliberately control and form student culture. The result tends to be bureaucratic waste, and an unwitting training of students to be good subjects (no matter how much a college touts its mission to create citizens), who passively respond to the impulses of faceless bureaucracy at best. It can also turn into a woke-ist or pietist police state at worst. Likewise, the herding of cats approach of the modern ‘multiversity’ can create a fractured series of student subcultures that never intertwine and often conflict with each other (the same can be said of their faculties). LCC has a critical mass of good Christians and may God will that it always stay that way. These students encourage one another as brothers and sisters in Christ in doing good works. Rather than drag each other down, they drag each other (even the professors) up.