A Model for Higher Ed

IN A BID to relive our traveling days, my best friend from college and I took a weekend road trip to Berea, Ky., to check out a folk music festival. We got to be dancing fools again for one beautiful, moonlit night, imbibing hippie music to our hearts’ content.

We also got a heart full of something else—a little thing called the American Dream.

In addition to being home to a cool new music festival, that little holler in Kentucky is home to Berea College. I’ve stepped foot on more than 100 campuses in my 10-plus years running Interfaith Youth Core. Berea is unique.

Maybe it’s because it was started in 1855 by a slave owner’s son as an interracial, co-educational school seeking to live out the school’s motto, drawn from the book of Acts, “God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth.” Maybe it’s because the admission requirements include being smart, being willing to work hard, and being poor. Maybe it’s because the tuition is free. Maybe it’s because all students have a 10-hour-a-week campus job, ranging from office work to janitorial work.

Yes, you read all that right. A man whose family owned slaves took the Bible seriously enough to risk his life to start a college that educated blacks and whites and men and women, together, a decade before the civil war came to a close. Yes, you have to be poor to get into Berea. Yes, there is no tuition. And yes, students in classes with renowned professors such as bell hooks are emptying trash cans 10 hours a week, making a physical contribution to the collective.

At the local pizza joint, we ran into a white guy with a pony tail and a wide smile. He’d grown up in a Methodist family in West Virginia. His roommate at Berea was a Texan whose father was one of Malcolm X’s bodyguards. Now the president of Berea’s Young Alumni Association, he spoke of the college as a place that welcomed a wide range of diversity (geographic, racial, religious) and created an environment where people with those different identities could build positive, meaningful relationships. 

This was not my first visit to Berea. I’ve spoken at a couple of the college’s convocations, and I’m proud to call the immediate past president, Larry Shinn, and the current president, Lyle Roelofs, friends. I know how hard both of them work to keep Berea going. Providing an education for poor smart kids for free takes an awful lot of presidential fundraising. It’s inspiring to note that one-third of current Berea students make personal donations to the college out of their meager work-study paychecks.

There is something deeply satisfying about returning to a place that believes in its mission enough to live it out. I’ll be writing a check myself after this most recent visit.

I’m sure Berea could charge tuition and still get a lot of quality applicants. I’m sure it could say that Christians from Appalachia were its only focus, or that black Muslims from Texas might be smart and nice but they ought to go elsewhere. But then it would not be Berea College.

There is much hand-wringing about both higher education and religion these days—too expensive, too cloistered, too privileged, not relevant.

It is inspiring to bear witness to an institution that draws the best from religion to fashion a model for higher ed.