How might universities that are affiliated with a Christian organization, or “Church,” apply the values enunciated and illustrated in the gospels in ways that distinguish such schools as specifically Christian? Do academic administrators at colleges and universities that are formally affiliated with Christianity apply the preachments by Jesus in the New Testament, let alone ask the question? At most, the question, when asked, is usually answered in terms of increasing financial aid, but in the gospels Jesus is not oriented to programs, but instead to interpersonal relations, specially as bear on the marginalized or outsiders in general—the proverbial last being first and most people who regard themselves as first, as last. How might faculty members who delimit their application of academic colleagues to scholar who are on the same faculty, hence at the same college or university? An unlikely example of a Christian values being applied by a professor at Yale, a university whose privileging of exclusivity and thus exclusion is well ensconced (and known) can be contrasted with the organizational culture at the Roman Catholic Church’s official university in the United States. Any cleric administrators at the Vatican who regard the Protestant denominations, or sects, as instances of compromised Christianity might want to take note of the contrast between the Catholic University of America and Yale.
Prime facie, the Catholic University would naturally be assumed to be saturated with Christianity and thus with the value that the gospels’ Jesus places on universal benevolence as the essence of human love, whereas Yale (and Harvard) would be supposed to be diametrically opposite. My years of experience at both of those Ivy League universities supports such a conclusion, for the faculty and non-academic managers whom I regularly encountered both as a student (and then visiting alumnus) at Yale and a visiting research scholar at Harvard seemed to relish excluding people deemed to be inferior or outsiders even if they had a formal affiliation with the university. Treating some insiders as if they were outsiders has been ensconced in the organizational cultures of both Yale and Harvard.
So when Kenneth Minkema, director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale’s divinity school, taught a seminar on Edwards at the university’s rare-book library, I, as an alumnus auditing the course, was stunned in 2025 when Minkema favorably answered the request of a poor, local woman as she happened to pass by the seminar room in the library. “Yes, you are welcome to join us,” the professor told her. She did, and in fact asked a decent question at the end of the two-hours. Obviously, the university codifying Minkema’s compassion into a university open-door policy would not be practical even just in terms of seating, but as a genuine, specific act of compassion for a humble outsider who relished learning (Margaret happened to attend many visiting lectures on campus, as they were open to the public), the Yale professor applied his Christian faith in real time and quite practically in his vocation as a college teacher. Coincidentally, I was on campus that term doing research on the relation between self-love and Christian love (caritas) in Pierre Nicole’s essay on the topic, and was incorporating Edwards’ stance on the sin of self-love. It is indeed possible to take leave of a narrow self-interest that is encapsulated by an exclusionary organizational culture and spontaneously reach out to an outsider in humane compassion that does not hurt the person emotionally.
What I encountered for a week while I was at Catholic University of America after having been invited by its new president to do my research there (I was by then retired from teaching) was antipodal to how Minkema responded to Margaret at Yale. Even though the librarians at Catholic University knew that their head boss, the president of the university, had invited and approved me to be in residence that semester expressly to do academic research and write, and even though the university library’s holdings were modest, the librarians refused to allow me access to online books and articles. An associate provost told me that people who had been at the university for decades were not comfortable with the new president’s practice of inviting scholars to campus. That both that provost and the librarians, and even the university’s president himself, reneged on getting back to me on the issue of being able practically to do research, which required access to online books and articles, not so subtly informed me that I was indeed not welcome; I was an outsider. So, I decamped from the university after just a week.
Enough employees, whether academic administrators, cafeteria workers, or librarians, had been in lockstep in how they treated and regarded me as an outsider not deserving the respect that is appropriate for a scholar at a college or university that I was able to unpack my sleeping MBA degree and diagnose the organizational culture and, furthermore, to marvel at how distant it was to Christian values and praxis in the gospels.
Therefore, it is ironic that the Catholic Church’s university in America was actually so anti-Christian, whereas a Yale professor had been able to transcend his university’s culture and act on the basis of his Christian faith. In the Gospel of Mark, the disciples repeatedly miss Jesus’s points whereas outsiders, such as a woman at a well, grasp what Jesus is trying to convey. The rich man who hosts Jesus refuses to give up his wealth to follow the Son of God, and yet a meagre fisherman leaves his boat behind and follows. The Way into the presence of the kingdom of God turns the world on its head. How many “Christian” colleges (or divinity schools) have a supportive organizational culture to instantiate Jesus’s preachments in the gospels?
Both as a student and returning alumnus at Yale, I found the culture at its “Christian” divinity school to be very ideologically and theologically intolerant, and students studying the Hebrew Bible there told me that they felt like outsiders in that “Christian” ethos. So too, the librarians at Sterling library were oriented to excluding rather than being inclusive, especially ideologically. A nonacademic library-security manager even threatened to block my access to the library because I had suggested to the librarian’s secretary that the security guards who regularly walked (noisily) through the main reading room ask loud, talkative students there from local universities to be quiet. The manager, whom I had not met in person, sent an email so hostile and accusatory that even one of Yale’s policemen wanted to “have a word with her.” Yet even after that, manager sent me another threatening email and the librarians looked the other way. Even as an alumnus, I was deemed an outsider by non-academic employees/managers. The librarians at Widener library at Harvard were no better, and relished distinguishing visiting research scholars who were still teaching (or even emeritus) at other universities from those of us who were not, as if the Ph.D. degrees of the latter were thereby invalid.
Even in spite of the authentic Christian faith evinced by the professor of the Edwards seminar at Yale, I would say that neither Harvard nor Yale is likely to absorb the Christian way of relating interpersonally any time soon, especially toward outsiders and even insiders who are treated as outsiders, and I would say the same thing about Catholic University of America even though, unlike Harvard and Yale, greater Christian expectations apply to that university because it is formally affiliated with Christianity. Put another way, at least the faculty, librarians, and non-academic employees at Yale and Harvard are not being hypocrites, unless, however, they happen to be at the university’s “Christianity-oriented” divinity school.
