Leadership in Christian Higher Education

By Michael Wright and Arthur James

Universities and Colleges with a Christian affiliation have in recent years sought to renew and redefine their identities and almost all have rearticulated their mission for the modern age after a long and serious process of reappraisal. This process has been accompanied by an ongoing discussion of the nature and identity of higher education itself. This discussion has required leadership that is different from most secular leadership.
This book provides a range of experienced voices, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, that reflect on the character and mission of leadership in Christian higher education in the 21st Century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781845405960

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Title page

Leadership in Christian Higher Education

Edited by Michael Wright and James Arthur

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This collection © Michael Wright and James Arthur, 2010, 2016

Individual contributions © respective authors, 2010, 2016

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Contributors

Professor James Arthur

James Arthur is Professor of Education and Civic Engagement at the University of Birmingham and was formerly Professor and Director of the National Institute of Christian Education Research at Canterbury Christ Church University. He has written widely on Christian education and his recent books in this area include: Faith and Secularisation in Religious Colleges and Universities (published by Routledge in 2006) and John Henry Newman in the Contiuum Library of Educational Thought (published 2007). He was awarded a CBE in December 2009.

Professor Michael Wright

Professor Michael Wright is the Vice Chancellor of Canterbury Christ Church University and, from 1997, was the Principal in its earlier position as a College and University College. His academic discipline is law. Before Canterbury, he taught law and was an academic manager at universities in Bristol, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Both personally and in a professional capacity he has been a member of a number of education, church and community organisations. He is a Lay Canon of Canterbury Cathedral and a Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Kent. He is a former Chairman of the Council of Church Universities and Colleges (Britain) and chairs the Board of Trustees of the Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion.

Dr Joel Cunningham

Joel Cunningham has been Vice Chancellor, President, and Professor of Mathematics at Sewanee: The University of the South since 2000. From 1979 to 2000 he was a faculty member and administrator at Susquehanna University, first as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Mathematics and, from 1984, as President. An early member of the Campus Compact for student public service and a trustee of the Council of Independent Colleges, Cunningham chaired the Commission on Policy Analysis of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and was president of the Society for Values in Higher Education. He has been Chair of the Association of Episcopal Colleges, the Appalachian College Association, and the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association; and Treasurer of the Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion. He has served as a leader in the Lilly Endowment-funded Council of Independent Colleges program on vocation and mission for college presidents and prospective presidents and is one of the founders of the Vocation in Undergraduate Education initiative.

Dr Nirmala Jeyaraj

Dr. Nirmala Jeyaraj, MSc, PhD is the former Program director (2008–09)of the United Board for Christian Higher Education (UBCHEA), Hong Kong and former Principal (1996–2008) of Lady Doak College, Madurai, India. She is a Biologist specialized in Molecular Biology and has more than three decades of teaching and research experience with several publications to her credit. She was a Visiting Professor for a year at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian College, North Carolina, USA and a Visiting Scholar at the Wolffson Institute of Biotechnology, University of Sheffield, UK. Based on her exposure and experience in Higher Education in both Asia and the West, she has published several articles on various issues in Higher Education and has edited books on the same. She has also held other leadership positions such as the Vice President of All India Association for Christian Higher Education (AIACHE), Member and Chair of the Executive Committee of CUAC and a member of the Syndicate of Madurai Kamaraj University.

Reverend Dr Jeremy Law

Jeremy Law is currently Dean of Chapel at Canterbury Christ Church University, a position he has held since 2003. After a geology degree at Aberystwyth and postgraduate research in geology at Leeds University, Jeremy trained for the Church of England ministry at Salisbury and Wells Theological College. As part of his training he completed a theology degree via Southampton University. Ordained in 1987, he followed a Curacy at Wimborne Minster in Dorset with an Oxford DPhil in the theology of Jürgen Moltmann under the supervision of Rowan Williams and Paul Fiddes. For nine years, from 1994, he was Lazenby Chaplain and Lecturer in Theology at Exeter University. His research interests and recent publications have included work on the theology of human evolution, the ecological interpretation of theology and a theology of boundary that seeks to link together the being of God and the origin of life.

Professor Gerald J Pillay

Gerald John Pillay was born in the former British colony of Natal in South Africa. He was awarded a BA, a BD (with distinction) and Doctor of Theology from the University of Durban. He also achieved a DPhil in Philosophical Theology from Rhodes University.

After lecturing at the University of Durban-Westville he became Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of South Africa in 1988, a post he held for eight years. During this period he was also variously Guest Professor at North Western University, Illinois; Research Fellow at Princeton University; Visiting Professor at Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia; Guest Professor at Rhodes University and Visiting Professor at the graduate school at AMBS, Indiana.

In 1997 he became Foundation Professor and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Otago University, New Zealand’s oldest University, based in Dunedin in the South Island. He was asked to serve as the first Head of Liberal Arts within that University in 1998. He has served in various senior leadership roles at the University of South Africa, the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria and the University of Otago.

In 2003 he was appointed head of Liverpool Hope University College - an institution whose first founding College was established in 1844. He became its first Vice-Chancellor when Liverpool Hope was given full university status in July 2005.

Professor Pillay has served on editorial boards of two international journals (Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae and Verbum et Ecclesia), has presented papers at numerous international conferences and has served on various public and educational bodies. He has published extensively and is an internationally respected scholar.

A New Zealand citizen, Professor Pillay is a Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Merseyside.

Dame Janet Trotter

Dame Janet Trotter trained to teach religious studies at a Church College in the 1960s and taught a range of secondary school pupils for eight years before joining King Alfred’s College Winchester as a lecturer in Theology and Education. In 1978 she was promoted to the position of Head of Professional Education. From there she was seconded to Church House Westminster in 1984 to be interim College’s Officer during a period of transition for all voluntary colleges in the UK and then moved to Lancaster to be Vice Principal of St Martin’s College.

In 1986 she became Principal of the College of St. Paul and St. Mary in Cheltenham and led it through merger to university title in 2001. She had a number of national roles while in this position and was a member of the Higher Education Funding Council, the Teacher Training Agency and the Quality Assurance Agency (Degree Awarding Powers Advisory Committee).

Dame Janet retired from the University of Gloucester in 2006. She currently chairs the Foundation for Church Leadership, the Gloucestershire Hospitals Foundation Trust and Winston’s Wish, a charity for bereaved children: she is also a member of the governing bodies of two universities.

Dame Janet has honorary degrees from a number of universities, both in the UK and overseas, and was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2001.

Introduction

The origins of this book, which can perhaps best be described as a collection of personal essays in which the contributors reflect upon their experience, lie in various conversations which the editors have had during the past ten years. Each of us has spent time over those years considering, from both a practical and theoretical perspective, what it means to have leadership responsibilities in Christian higher education.

Is it different to higher education generally?

How does it extend beyond ‘signs and symbols’?

How has the challenge changed over the years?

Are there any lessons to be learned from taking an international perspective?

Are there differences between the various Christian denominations?

What is the role of chaplaincy?

How and in what ways should the curriculum reflect a Christian dimension?

This collection of essays does not purport to offer the answers to those questions although it does touch on all of them. What it does do is to offer the considered views of a number of people with whom we have worked over the years and whose reflections would, in our opinion, be of interest and assistance to those facing the challenge of leadership in Christian higher education. The essay have not been edited other than for the purpose of producing a consistent style.

We are grateful to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chancellor of Canterbury Christ Church University, for his contribution which, at his request, he prepared once he had had the opportunity of reading all the essays.

The book in no sense represents an attempt to offer a prescription for effective leadership of a Christian university. It is simply intended to stimulate further reflection and discussion on a matter which we regard as both important and interesting. We hope it achieves that objective.

Professor Michael Wright

Professor James Arthur

Canterbury, December 2009

Greater Expectations: Vision and Leadership in Christian Higher Education

James Arthur

The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion.

Theodore Hesburgh, President of the University of Notre Dame

In 1867 the noted agnostic John Stuart Mill gave a three hour inaugural address on his election to the honorary position of Rector of St. Andrew’s University in Scotland. He described what he thought should guide a university and was insistent that ‘it is a very imperfect education which trains the intellect only, but not the will ... The moral or religious influence which a university can exercise, consists less in any express teaching, than in the pervading tone of the place ... It should present all knowledge as chiefly a means to worthiness of life.’ Mill believed that this would be done by personal influence, as he said: ‘There is nothing which spreads more contagiously from teacher to pupil than elevation of sentiment’. In an age prior to the secularisation of the universities Mill still thought, as a secularist, that religion of some kind could form part of the purpose of an university education and he even regretted that ‘the great question of the relation of education to religion’ was suffering from the dogmatism of the religious on one hand and the secularists on the other (see Robson, 1984: 348). John Henry Newman, writing his Idea of a University a couple of decades before had of course insisted that the tone of a university and the personal influence exercised by its leaders were essential ingredients of providing for a liberal education.

In an early sermon of 1832, ‘Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth,’ Newman asks how Christianity has made its way and held its ground in the world. He answers that its chief strength has not been in rational arguments, but rather it has ‘been upheld in the world not as a system, not by books, not by arguments, nor by temporal power, but by the personal influence...’. It is impossible to understand Newman without grasping the depth of his commitment to the principle of ‘personal influence’ which pervades all his writings. Personal influence, for Newman was more important than organisation and books, as he said: ‘The heart is commonly reached, not through reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us’. You could say he had a theory of ‘personal influence’ born out of his own life and practice and he emphasized constantly the importance of imbuing the whole secular order with a Christian spirit and tone - including education. For Newman, the ‘personal presence of a teacher’ was indispensable for education of any kind and he therefore adopted what might be called a ‘personalist’ approach to education. In regard to leadership in higher education it could be said that the purpose is to influence others and to enthusiastically pursue identifiable goals related to the core mission of an institution.

In a recent lecture Alasdair MacIntyre (2009) described how Newman gives two more or less complementary accounts of the meaning of the word ‘university’: the first being viewed from the aspect of what is taught there, the second from the aspect of those who constitute it and what they do. Newman therefore complements the essence of the University with the need for a higher principle of authority as its guide and governor, which he defines as its integrity. Newman’s own words from ‘The Rise and Progress of Universities’ on the power of knowledge that is personally embodied is pertinent here:

I say then, that the personal influence of the teacher is able in some sort to dispense with an academical system, but that the system cannot in any sort dispense with personal influence. With influence there is life, without it there is none; if influence is deprived of its due position, it will not by those means be got rid of, it will only break out irregularly, dangerously. An academical system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils is an arctic winter; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron University, and nothing else.

The personal influence of a leader of a Christian University is the key to the kind of tone established and the direction given to that higher education institution. The first duty of a leader in a Christian institution is to be always willingly identified as a Christian by students and staff and by all who visit the College or University. Church affiliation does not make a university Christian, but the ethos created and sustained through personal leadership can make the difference in these institutions.

The Christian faith must surely inform the leader of a Christian institution to what values are worthwhile and so leadership must be therefore a process of personal influence that emphasizes goals - quite simply it is leadership as a result of what one believes, values and does. Indeed, the power in the vision for an institution is not usually captured by its mission statement, but it certainly can by its leader on the basis of their vision and principles, producing a leadership that is underpinned by the motivations and passion behind their actions, thoughts and words. There are two immediate challenges to this personal influence and tone setting. First, some might argue that Christianity seldom dictates leadership that is distinctive in the sense that non-Christians might not say or do more or less the same thing on a given subject. Second, it is also not clear that particular Christian commitments produce or lead to leadership styles which set Christians apart from everyone else. Therefore, there does not seem to be any specifically ‘Christian’ view on leadership, just as there is correspondingly no such thing as a stereotypical Christian higher education institution. Christian higher education institutions can and do differ dramatically from each other and it is important to recognize that there is no single way to understand and implement their stated vision. Nevertheless, the values of an institution should be observable in the leadership as well as in the environment. Consequently, all leaders of Christian institutions should be asking some common questions that have a direct relationship to their faith and chief among these is: How should their