Original Missions Still Make Sense in Private Institutions of Higher Learning

by Jack Cashill

In the Kansas City area, as throughout the nation, private colleges and universities have a more urgent mission than their publicly funded peers, and that primary mission is survival.

To survive, these institutions have defined any number of distinct strategies. What intrigues the observer about these strategies is that in very few cases do they represent a rejection of the institution's initial mission so much as a refinement or even an expansion of the same.

In this month's Industry Outlook we explore in some depth the entre-preneurial adaptations that many of these institutions have made. We do not, however, give adequate recognition to the inspiration behind their founding, an inspiration that in most cases remains viable today.

Ottawa University, located in Ottawa, Kansas and in several other campuses around the world from Milwaukee to Malaysia, has made a name for itself an ambitious, entrepreneurial institution. Although Ottawa has extended its programs worldwide and adapted to changing curricular needs, it has, if anything, reinforced its commitment to Christian values and liberal arts. In the way of background, the college was founded in 1865 by Baptist lay persons and so named to recognize a 20,000-acre land grant given by nearby Ottawa Indians to ensure a private Christian education for their own and others' children.

As testament to the continued viability of the Christian educational mission MidAmerica Nazarene University of Olathe was founded a full century after Ottawa and quickly became a valued part of an expanding metropolis.

The area's Catholic four-year colleges and universities--Rockhurst and Avila Universities in Kansas City and Benedictine College in Atchison--have all likewise continued to honor their original missions despite making curricular adaptations. Benedictine, the oldest of the three, proudly traces its roots back to 1859. Rockhurst, which was founded in 1910, continues to honor the 450-year-old Jesuit tradition. And Avila University, founded during Woodrow Wilson's first term, has been proudly professing its Catholic heritage for nearly ninety years. The newest Catholic college in the area, Donnelly College founded in KCK in 1949, is curiously the most discreet about its heritage and mission. Donnelly defines itself as an "independent community college" but one that is "affiliated with the Catholic Church."

Although no area college has rejected its original mission, a few have de-emphasized it. William Jewell College in Liberty, for instance, made news last year for rejecting the control and thus the funding of the Missouri Baptist Convention. Yet this was hardly the revolutionary move that was reported. The college had maintained an active Baptist identity since its founding in 1849. And even today, after its break, it retains a specific and obvious commitment to "cultivating leadership within an environment that values Christian ideals and spiritual growth." In sum, the values that inspired its creation remain viable today even if the governance model has changed.

Park University in Parkville has pulled away a bit more. Founded in 1875 as an independent Christian institution, Park now defines itself as an "institution of higher learning com-mitted to the pursuit of knowledge, to intellectual and social development, and to work and service within a non-sectarian Christian setting." Still, even if Park does not actively position itself as a Christian university, it proudly retains its motto of "fides and labor" faith and work.

Like Park, Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas no longer actively defines itself as the Methodist institution it once was. Founded in 1858 as the first senior college in the state of Kansas, its name at least continues to honor Bishop Osmon Cleander Baker.

What strikes the observer is how relatively old the area's colleges and universities are, public or private. On average, no institutions in the area can match their lasting power. To a large degree, the future of the culture depends on their retaining the spirit of their founding and ideally renewing it.