EDITORIAL
Dr. Vinoth Ramachandra drew a series of circles on the board. He was working from that tremendously significant lecture given by Max Weber to German students in 1918, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Scholarship as Vocation). Dr. Ramachandra, a nuclear engineering Ph.D. from Imperial College, London, now leading the InterVarsity-like student movements in south Asia, was helping the assembled students and faculty from twenty plus nations grapple with modernity. Each circle represented a closed sphere of human action, and a university professor should, Weber held, work with total commitment to his/her own sphere of scholarship. Integration of spheres is not possible today. So Weber suggests to future faculty a narrow world of ever deepening knowledge about an ever narrowing area of thought.

That represents the ideal of today's academic world. Even those who do very little research measure themselves by those standards. But, as Vinoth pointed out, that is not a necessary or desirable principal of scholarship. Indeed for the Christian it is foolish ! All truth is God's truth. Did He design it to exist in sealed containers, isolated from each other? Daniel and his fellow Hebrew students knew literature, language, customs, culture, theologies and dream interpretation-knowledge all across the curriculum! These are models for today's academics (Daniel 1:17)

So the question for us is how are we uniting knowledge and integrating learning? Do we sit in on colleagues' lectures, look through library holdings in other fields, design courses with colleagues from other disciplines? We, who believe in the one God of all knowing, should reject the medieval walled kingdom approach to the university and see all of learning as our calling. Let us be leaders in restoring the "uni" in university and in bringing wisdom to marshal knowledge in the name of our Lord, the Logos.

KEEPING UP
A major category of our calling as believers is stewardship. A major category of stewardship for faculty should be the university. What can we do as stewards of all God's resources to make tertiary education the best it can be?

Two resources that will help you be better stewards of your own position are the following books: Exiles from Eden, Religion and the Academic Vocation in America, by Mark R. Schwehn, 0UP, 1993, 138 pages; and Prescribing the Life of the Mind, An Essay on the Purpose of the University, The Aims of Liberal Education, The Competence of Citizens, and the Cultivation of Practical Reason, by Charles W. Anderson, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, 160 pages.

Mark Schwehn writes as a Christian. He is pleading for a re- structuring of our whole conception of higher education via communitarian values. He starts by analyzing a serious malaise of our profession: professors..."believe that their calling primarily involves making or advancing knowledge, not transmitting it." The source of this problem? "The fact that university faculty tend to think that classroom teaching and collegiality are strangely not part of their "own work" is a tribute to the socializing power of the graduate schools." His first chapter looks at Weber's essay mentioned in the preceding editorial. Weber..."insisted that separate departments of learning were finally so many warring gods, self sufficient spheres in permanent and irreconcilable collision, not parts of some large whole."

Schwehn traces this narrow focus of today's university to Weber's perception-largely agreed to by American faculty. From the late 19th century on, faculty consciously adopted the German model of research first, teaching second. In Weber's own words we would then produce "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart." While higher education up to the 20th century worked to form good character, Weber's model has worked to produce "objectivists" who have no time to build character. On the older model the soul of the university was edification, the standard university aim today is simply scholarship.

Schwehn's major contribution in my mind is his exegesis of Genesis 2. He shows how community and common effort are there at God's command from the start. He made us to care for and work with one another.

In chapter 4 he deals with strong questions and disagreements that could be raised in response to his ideas. He particularly points out that we don't have to measure academic success by noting only various academic monographs; we do know how to evaluate teaching. He recommends that administrators recognize two groups of differently gifted faculty. One group should be encouraged to invest itself in teaching, yet engage in research and teaching to some extent. Group Two would be aimed at research primarily but not excused from some teaching and service involvement. Course assignments should reflect this difference. Group 1 having larger assignments, Group 2 smaller, yet both honored and advanced as warranted.

This book will challenge and inform you and equip your university to better serve students and the public.

The second book sets a high value on religious reality but is not openly Christian. In the first two chapters, Anderson describes today's university and defines his theory of practical reason which he would use to reconfigure the university. Here is his evaluation of the university today. "The more important questions probably have to do with that vague sense of disappointment experienced by students, parents, faculty, administrators, and the public at large. The university does not quite live up to our expectations. It is not quite as good as it should be. Somehow the university seems adrift, spinning its wheels, aimless. It does not seem much interested in teaching, but worse, it does not quite seem to know what to teach. Is a curriculum built around narrow and sometimes exotic research specialties really suited to ennoble the life of the mind or prepare people for the work of the everyday world?"

In chapters three through five he wrestles with tough questions of what the university can and should teach. I like his way of phrasing a basic distinction: "Education is the public purpose of the university and inquiry is its intrinsic function." He is very conversant with the tempests and politics in the struggle today over what our program of education should look like, but he speaks to the confusion with clarity. "The task of the university is to find out what can be done with the powers of reason. Its real work is to produce useful ways of thinking." He sees that epistemology is at the center of the problem-how do we get reliable knowledge. "Community in the life of the university is important to knowledge. For understanding to advance, we must think alike and we must also think differently, but above all, we must think together."

Chapters six through eight advance his solutions. The suggestions are workable but call for very significant changes.

These books are provoking, equipping and accessible. Both are short and highly readable. I think Christian faculty could join with colleagues in very profitable discussions of these two books which I highly recommend.

MODELS OF MINISTRY: ACTING AS MENTOR AND ADVISOR FOR MINORITY STUDENTS
by M.R. Foster, Department of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, The Ohio State University

A few years ago, I was asked to serve on the Minority Engineering Program Advisory Board-a committee of faculty, administrators and some community people that gives advice on activities for minority students in the College of Engineering of the Ohio State University. God has raised our consciousness in several ways over the past 25 years to the issues of race in America, so I began to note the inequities in my own department. We had graduated only a handful of African-American and Hispanic students over the more than 40 years of the department's existence. We always had many black and Hispanic freshmen designate our department as a major, but few made it through. Why? There are, of course, many reasons. We believe that some of those reasons can be dealt with internally, in the department-which is what we set out to do.

I undertook, with the support and help of my wife, to be advisor and advocate for the minority students of my department. The specific things that we do are quite simple, really, and I list those below for the sake of others who might like to attempt similar activities on their campuses.

1. An evening study table every Tuesday night of the academic year, from 6-9 P.M. in a classroom of the department's building on campus.

2. Careful academic advising of all minority students. I asked the department chairman to appoint me as faculty advisor for all the minority students in my department; that is, now, around 25 students. I try to be available to these students very frequently during the week; I encourage them to call me about any matters at all, in the office or at home.

3. Social events. My wife and I invite all of the students over to our home once every quarter, for some food and conversation.

The goals of these activities are twofold: First, to give the students every opportunity for academic success by providing good advising as well as tutoring-type help. Peer learning at the study table happens, now, as much or more often than "tutoring" of students by me. Specifically, since there are students present at the table from all years, often older students, who have successfully completed a particular course, can provide helpful insights to the younger students. Second, and actually more important than the specific activities, we hope that the students will realize that there is someone in the university who cares whether or not they succeed-we want the students to know they have a share in the department; it is their department, not "ours". I believe this has begun to happen.

This program has been going for about three years now, so on Tuesday nights, sometimes, an alumnus will drop by. It is hard to quantify how important it is for a freshman student from a small, mostly black urban high school, sitting there on a Tuesday night struggling through calculus, to get to know other people like himself who have just graduated or are in the final year, about to graduate. They begin to believe that it can be done!

My wife and I do not see this effort as a specifically evangelistic enterprise, though we freely discuss our faith with students at times, when appropriate. Many of the students are Christians. I have sometimes prayed with a student after an especially disappointing grade report. God has called us to minister to these students and to show Christ's love in any way we have opportunity.

We are grateful to the Lord that, last spring, in a dramatic break with this department's history, three African-American students graduated as aeronautical/astronautical engineers; one is in law school, one in graduate school in engineering and one is still job seeking at this point in time. My wife and I are also most grateful to God that He has allowed us to get to know some minority students and to be blessed by their friendship.