This week and next, I’m making a couple of short road trips to speak at two very different schools: small Berea College in Kentucky and huge (massive? gargantuan?) Ohio State University. Tonight, I’m speaking to the Berea InterVarsity chapter about the Emerging Scholars Network and serving Christ as a professor. Next Wednesday at Ohio State, ESN, along with the Christian Graduate Student Alliance, Student Christian Fellowship, and the Fellowship of Christian Faculty and Staff, is bringing together ESN members at OSU for an informal networking lunch. (Here are the details on the lunch if you are interested in attending.)
It’s hard to imagine two American schools more different from one another. Berea College is a liberal arts college with about 1,500 students, founded in 1855 as a nonsectarian Christian college and today emphasizes its religious inclusivity. From its beginning, it was both integrated and coeducational as an expression of its Christian beliefs (it even went to court against the state of Kentucky in an effort to remain integrated during the Jim Crow era). Today, Berea is perhaps best known for not charging tuition. Instead, all students attend under a work-study scholarship program. [Read more…] about Comparing Research Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges