In the mail this afternoon I received a letter from my alma mater, Covenant College, a ‘unique’ institution located on a mountaintop just outside the incorporated city of Chattanooga, TN. In it, my semi-retired philosophy professor, Dr. Reg McLelland, beseeched my support for the college based on an ongoing ‘discussion’ occurring on the campus regarding “how to be effective classroom teachers to… students who, though Christians, are still caught up in, and influenced by, a current ‘computer and media culture.’”
Being a professor whom I once considered among the more liberal/progressive minds on campus, I was surprised to hear Reg take issue with (of all things) ‘computer culture.’ I respect a certain healthy fear of dependence upon technology, but the aversion to technological advancement that is evident in the gist of his letter strikes me as closed minded.
Reg goes on to state that “the Church of Jesus Christ desperately needs young people who have been taught to ‘bring every though captive to Jesus Christ’ as they assess the complex and often confusing world around them [and] bring salt and light to the world in which God has placed them.” These somewhat ambiguous statements are blanketed in Christian rhetoric. The college attempts to mold Christian students into thinking participants in the world in which they interact. Which actually happens, surprisingly enough… provided the world they interact in is sufficiently similar to the college’s self-imposed environment (that is to say, populated entirely by Christians).
Covenant College is the most isolated institution of higher learning I have ever experienced. Its graduates who don’t go on to pastor churches and teach in Christian high schools are often (as is my case) left wondering when exactly that $20,000+ will start working for them. The graduate is besieged by missed opportunities resulting from failure of national recognition and an education severely pigeon-holed by a avowedly conservative chauvinistic Calvanistic Christian perspective. For a college which claims to be attempting to influence the world at large, its scope is limited by its location and consequential irrelevance to the course of life of its average student.
What I, personally, have been left with is an intimate knowledge of a philosophy I no longer adhere to and its opinions on the world’s literature. Needless to say, this isn’t what I put on my resume. What does appear there is the fact that in 1 semester spent studying anglo-saxon verse at Oxford University in England I learned more about life, literature, and writing than I did in the remaining 3.5 years of Covenant College education. And I won’t even get into the severe social anxiety caused by attending a school in which I was punished for merely setting foot on the hallway of an opposite gender’s dormitory and where my roommates and I would voluntarily go without dinner each time one of us masturbated.
So, thanks, Reg and Covenant College, for your time and effort this year, not to mention for the 4 years of my life I can never have back. But you won’t be seeing any money from me to help support whatever it is you’re calling indoctrination these days.
~Christopher B. Kornman (‘04), BA English
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