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While interviewing seniors at our university, we came across a curious and disturbing trend. Students of color were less active in any local church. This finding pushed us to ask: does this gap exist throughout Christian college campuses? We answered this question using survey data from over 800 seniors at Baylor University and a national sample of over 6000 students from 34 Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) institutions. As suspected, many students of color on these campuses attend church less often than their white classmates, despite similarities in beliefs. We suggest some possible reasons for this gap.

Faith-based colleges and universities in America have historically been described as "church-related." Unfortunately, this classification is too one-dimensional, revealing virtually nothing about how faith-based identity influences the mission, rhetoric, curriculum, or policies of institutions. Although scholars have advanced sophisticated typologies of Protestant and Catholic institutions, we propose that we still need a new means of empirical analysis to determine the degree to which the faith identity of an institution influences important administrative, curricular, and co-curricular decisions. We then apply our Operationalizing Faith Identity Guide (OFIG) to Protestant institutions in the United States to demonstrate the helpfulness of its application.

Although higher education scholars have examined chaplaincy in college and university settings, we are not aware of any studies that have sought to examine chaplains who live and serve in residence halls. As such, we conducted a collective case study of three Protestant institutions with residential chaplain roles--Taylor University, Pepperdine University, and Baylor University. We present an overview of each institutional model employed for residential chaplains and provide comparative analysis. All of the models we analyzed utilized students as residential chaplains, provided joint residence life and spiritual life training, navigated tensions with other roles in the institution, and took advantage of institution-specific resources and contexts. However, these roles had slightly different foci, used students of different academic levels, and were compensated in different ways. In light of our findings, we believe institutions without residential chaplains should see potential options for incorporating such a role into their campus structure, and those who already have residential chaplains should continue thinking about the structure, strengths, and benefits of their current models.

Unlike the liberal arts college, American graduate education started as and continues to be a secular affair. The last four decades, however, have produced growth in both the number and quality of Christian graduate programs. The question we asked is: do American Christian institutions engage in graduate education Christianly? To answer this question for Protestants, we undertook a theologically-guided discourse analysis of the 638 graduate programs at the 41 top ranked Protestant Christian universities in the United States. In particular, we looked at the marketing, objectives, and curriculum. We found only one-third of the graduate programs demonstrated even one piece of evidence demonstrating Christian distinctiveness.

For Christian colleges and universities, students' spiritual formation and character development are important outcomes. However, unlike academic outcomes of retention and graduation, systematic efforts to measure outcomes of faith and character are far from ubiquitous. The purpose of this article is to report the efforts of Baylor University to address the gap between mission and measurement. Guided by prevailing theories, an interdisciplinary research team launched the Baylor Faith and Character Study in August 2018. Data collection for the broader project involved surveys and interviews at three points in time: a student's first semester at Baylor, a student's final semester at Baylor, and 10 years after degree completion. Preliminary, cross-sectional findings from survey data reveal that levels of religious belief and practice were nearly equivalent for first-year students, seniors, and alumni, while seniors exhibited stronger character in several areas than first-year students. A discussion of conclusions and implications closes the article.

Christian colleges strive to nurture the religious faith of students. Our study examines the relationship of curricular and co-curricular activities on two dimensions of faith maturity--vertical and horizontal. Analysis of survey data from seniors at one Christian university showed that the factors of discussing religion with peers and spending time with people of the same faith are associated with higher levels of vertical faith maturity, and discussing meaning/purpose with peers and volunteering are associated with higher levels of horizontal faith maturity. Participating in religious retreats, food or clothing drives, and workshops on racial/cultural awareness are related to both forms of faith maturity. We conclude with suggestions for implementation.

The relationship between faith-based institutions and students who identify as LGBTQ+ has attracted considerable attention of late. Most of this scholarly attention, however, has focused upon the students themselves. In this article, we examine the contemporary experience of 371 student affairs leaders (SALs) who serve as the primary mediators between the desires and demands of LGBTQ+ advocates, scholars, and students, and the policies of current administrators. This article reports on previously unexplored data from a larger grounded theory study on Christ-enlivened student affairs to answer the research question: How do SALs at Christian universities approach LGBTQ+ students in light of the Christian mission of their institutions? Data were collected using a qualitative questionnaire of 301 SALs, as well as extended interviews with 70 SALs. Participants' moral/theological responses included a collection of Christian virtues and rules. They indicated a range of helpful practices--including how they handled campus groups--but generally agreed on the dearth of training and education they had received on the topic. In our discussion, we compare our findings to the recommendations of previous scholars before elaborating our own list of recommendations. Our suggestions for Christian campuses include a re-imagined policy statement, a commitment to education rather than training, a focus on the spiritual needs of students, and some recommendations for LGBTQ+ campus groups.

Higher education scholars have varied views about the importance of moral experts for college students. To complicate matters, higher education scholars and student affairs professionals often have little knowledge of students' perspectives regarding such questions. This article provides a longitudinal case study analysis of students at a mid-size, faith-based research university, exploring how students seek moral expertise through social support from members of their social or religious communities. We interviewed fourteen students in their first and third years of enrollment regarding their understanding of moral expertise. Findings suggest students sought out moral experts with religious organizations and peer mentors providing the primary sources of moral expertise.

Scholars studying Christian higher education frequently suggest that faculty are the campus constituents with the most influence over the future of an institution's Christian mission. Thus, both faculty hiring and development are important elements for maintaining and strengthening the Christian identity of a university over time. Despite this importance, we do not know of a study that has surveyed the missional faculty-development processes of Christian colleges and universities. We utilized a survey research design to determine how Christian institutions educate faculty to integrate their Christian mission into their teaching, scholarship, and institutional service. We found that institutions tended to offer introductory trainings and workshops early in the career of faculty. After these early programs, the most effective faculty development resources identified were the conversations facilitated through discipline-specific academic journals and professional organizations. Moving forward, the institutions from which we heard hoped for increased resources and institutional prioritization for these conversations, especially at the advanced and senior faculty level. In conclusion, we suggest four opportunities for practical innovation to ensure future growth and engagement of faculty development for Christian mission: include a proactive approach to hiring practices, place a renewed emphasis on Christ-animated scholarship, continue to expand the conversation beyond the humanities, and introduce programming and incentives aimed at engaging senior faculty.

Moral philosophy in early American collegiate education founded its understanding and pursuit of virtue on the theological truth that humans are made in God's image. Therefore, to fulfill our purpose, we need to acquire creaturely analogues of God's virtues. Later American moral philosophy scholars and texts, however, began to use a different rationale for teaching virtue--we need virtue to support American liberal democracy. As a result, by the late twentieth century, American moral educators at the collegiate level only focused on helping students develop a small set of virtues related to students' professional and civic identities.

Historically, Australian higher education has been statist, uniform, and secular. Indeed, up until 1989, even communist Poland had more Christian universities than Australia. Only in the last 3½ decades have eight different Christian universities and colleges emerged. This article first explores the origins of these new institutions and the historical factors that allowed for the emergence of Australian Christian higher education (CHE). It then employs the recently developed Operationalizing Christian Identity Guide (OCIG) to determine the extent to which these new Australian institutions use their Christian identity to guide administrative decisions. The OCIG identifies the number of publicly expressed markers that indicate whether and how Christian identity makes a difference in key administrative decisions regarding the life of the institution. These markers include things such as membership requirements for the board, president, faculty, and students; the institution's official rhetoric and mission; the number of required Christian courses; and the nature of co-curricular programming. An analysis of these institutions using the OCIG reveals that Australia's Christian institutions are observably distinct from their secular Australian counterparts in key areas such as mission, hiring practices, curricular requirements, co-curricular opportunities, and student conduct codes. All of these Christian institutions require core courses that extend beyond professional education. Within the Christian sector, significant diversity also exists regarding religious symbols, funding, and governance. A comparison of these Australian institutions to Christian institutions in the United States and Canada, however, finds that Australian institutions operationalize their Christian identities less than institutions in these countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over 50 years, a group of Christians has cultivated a movement to revitalize Christian education at secular universities. These leaders formed centers for Christian thought (CCT) to reengage the Christian faith with the intellectual life (and vice-versa) and work with students, staff, and faculty within American universities. At present, there are at least 41 CCT in the USA, but little empirical work has been done to explore this type of Christian education. In this paper, we used a collective case study of five established CCT to answer the following research question: What are the distinctive features of Christian study centers and institutes for Catholic thought, and what is the nature of Christian education they offer? Each center we studied exhibited characteristics unique to its institutional context and yet shared some key educational elements with other centers. In sum, CCT used hospitality and intellectual fellowship to engage the riches of the Christian intellectual tradition to satiate the human appetite to live an integrated life. The center staff believed that living the integrated life would strengthen the global church and thereby benefit the university and society. Although CCT are distinct from Christian colleges and universities, opportunities exist for mutual learning between them that could help perpetuate the Christian intellectual tradition. For example, CCT could benefit from the faith integration conversations happening on Christian campuses, who could, in turn, learn from the holistic approaches of CCT and benefit from hiring faculty who were involved with a center as graduate students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a focus on the holistic formation of students, nonreligious narratives shape student affairs theories and professional practice guidelines. Recognizing this problem, Christian scholar-practitioners have authored a growing body of literature about what might be distinct about Christian student affairs. This article provides an analysis of the theological foundations used in this literature. Our aim was to locate the unique theological building blocks for a more comprehensive Christian theology of student affairs. Our analysis found that placing and practicing the profession of student affairs within the Christian narrative produced noteworthy distinctives in every aspect of student affairs.

Although there are many reasons why one could consider current manifestations of general education a disaster area, this article focuses on its ethical failures. First, I will demonstrate the central importance of moral purposes to justifications for general education. Second, I will describe how the failure to connect the moral aims that originally animated general education to a complex understanding of our fundamental identity, alongside a general marginalization of moral discourse in the academy, has produced an inability to match the content of general education to the moral ends used to justify it. Rather than the incoherent approach to general education used today, I argue that general education should focus on the individual that the university is ultimately meant to serve--the student. Such a shift requires, as John Dewey noted, nothing short of a revolution. Higher education certainly provides students with tools but it provides students no direction as to what is worth building, I propose a general education that instructs students about, and cultivates capacities toward excellence in, the great human identities (e.g., neighbor, friend, citizen, family, steward of nature and culture, race, gender, etc.).

Throughout American history, scholars called Christian higher education by other names. They used terms such as "denominational," "sectarian," "church-related," "church-sponsored," "church-based," and "church-affiliated" higher education to describe Christian higher education. What these terms failed to include, however, were the increasing number of nondenominational institutions that began to emerge in the nineteenth century. In "The Dying of the Light," James Burtchaell (1998) did include these institutions in his argument. He suggested that nondenominational colleges and universities had the same weakness as denominational institutions that abandoned their church connections. In fact, compared to institutions that kept their church ties, in Burtchaell's eyes, they appeared to be weaker institutions since they lacked direct denominational support. Apart from Burtchaell's one historical case study, very little empirical literature exists that supports this argument. This study explores this claim empirically, and compares faculty attitudes, theological beliefs, and religious behaviors at denominational and nondenominational institutions that are part of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU). Respondents included 1,999 full-time faculty from 49 CCCU institutions. Contrary to what certain scholars claim, results demonstrated that faculty at nondenominational institutions did not significantly differ in their theological beliefs from their denominational counterparts. Further empirical research is needed to understand the reasons for this outcome, although we offer some possible hypotheses.

Most sources from which college students derive their sense of worth are contingent and, therefore, often unstable, especially for students in high-performance educational contexts. Thus, this qualitative study sought to identify the extent to which 142 undergraduate students from eight elite colleges or universities derived their worth from noncontingent, universal sources and the degree to which students had internalized these sources. Only 40 students (28%) identified universal worth as their source of worth, and many of these students struggled to maintain it. The particular institutional context was the major correlate of students' reliance on sources of universal worth. Contingent self-worth and contextual factors appeared to inhibit the formation of universal worth, providing educators with opportunities to intervene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the purpose acquisition of young emerging adults (18-23), scholars claim we need to learn the types of purposes to which they are committing and how they conceptualize purpose differently from other related concepts such as future goals and the good life. To address these issues, we examined interviews with 229 young emerging adults about their life purpose, future goals, and conceptions of the good life. Although the interviewees' purposes and future goals fit within shared categories of achievement, relationships, religion, and moral concerns, important differences also emerged. While one fourth of the sample lacked purpose, no one lacked a vision for the good life or future goals. Moreover, their future vision of the good life focused more on individualistic concerns such as happiness, material acquisitions and personal experiences with family being the only communal interest.

Although scholars know an increasing amount about the benefits of self-control and grit for college students, they know less about what influences self-control and grit in students. In this study we examined influences on self-control and a key element of grit in a national sample of college students. Results indicated that 5 of the 13 predictor variables significantly contributed to self-control and grit: others-focused purpose, time spent socializing, time spent in academic activities, success-focused purpose, and importance of religion.

Though numerous studies have identified factors associated with academic misconduct, few have proposed conceptual models that could make sense of multiple factors. In this study, we used structural equation modeling (SEM) to test a conceptual model of five factors using data from a relatively large sample of 2,503 college students. The results indicated that there is a significant direct association between students' reported lack of self-control and academic misconduct. The association between these two variables was also mediated by students' degree of academic preparation, their involvement in structured and non-structured leisure activities, their perception of opportunities to cheat, and their attitude toward academic misconduct.

Race plays a significant role in shaping sense of belonging in higher education. However, little research has analyzed religion and belonging at universities. In this study, we test four hypotheses about race, religion, and belonging with survey data from a Christian university in the South. For first-year students, Asians express less belonging than Whites, but no other differences by race or religion appear. Among seniors, Black, Asian, and nonreligious students report lower levels of belonging than White and Christian students, respectively; however, religious minority students, including nonwhite religious minority students, do not report lower levels of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

College is a setting and time of profound change in the lives of emerging adults. This change can include shifts in identity related to politics and religion. Given widespread attention to the alignment of religious people with conservative politics and less religious people with liberal politics (i.e., the "God Gap"), we ask: do college students who become politically liberal lose their religion in the process? Using longitudinal panel data, this study examines changes in political identity and religiosity among students at a Protestant university. Findings reveal changes in students' politics align with changes in public and private religious behaviors, certainty in belief, agreement with core tenets of the Christian faith, faith maturity, and closeness to God. Whereas students who become more politically conservative increase their religiosity, the inverse is true for those whose politics become more liberal in college. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research yields inconsistent findings about the association between religious variables and academic cheating among college students. In this study, we investigated possible reasons for this disagreement by examining whether, and to what extent, three particular religious variables: religious identity, affirmation of importance and religious services attendance, are associated with academic honesty among college students. Specifically, we utilised a sample of 2503 American college-aged students from Gallup® daily tracking survey and used analysis of variance (ANOVA) to address the proposed research question. Research findings indicate that religious service attendance is positively associated with academic honesty among college students. Specifically, students who attend religious services more frequently are less likely to be engaged in academic misconduct than students who attend less frequently. This finding remains consistent when other important factors such as student attitudes toward cheating and gender were included in the analysis.

What is known about college students' search for purpose more than ever before due to the scholarly attention devoted to purpose development over the past two decades. This growing research on purpose increasingly makes it clear, as Tim Clydesdale ( 2015 ) writes, that when colleges "launch sustained conversations with students about questions of purpose, the result is a rise in overall campus engagement and recalibration of postcollege trajectories that set graduates on journeys of significance and impact" (p. xvii). Yet, scholars also find that not all purposes or purpose conversations are the same. The authors sought to discover how students' think about purpose, what purposes inspire them, and what influences their development of purpose. To find answers, the authors drew upon numerous sources, including interviews with 110 college students (ages 18-25) from 10 colleges and universities. They interviewed students at a variety of institutional classifications (e.g., a regional university, different types of liberal arts colleges, and various levels of research universities) as well as different missions (private, public, religious, and secular). The authors asked a variety of questions aimed at discovering how students perceived how college helped their purpose development and what purpose or purposes they currently espoused (if any). What the authors discovered both did and did not surprise them.

McCabe, Butterfield, & Treviño (2012) recently proposed a model for helping universities cultivate a moral culture of academic integrity. This qualitative study examined how a national sample of 75 students perceived the moral culture within their university using the McCabe et al. model as a basis for analysis. The analysis revealed that interviewees consistently focus on the overarching negative messages and elements found in the culture while also downplaying the problem of academic dishonesty. Moreover, students did not identify elements of the culture that might transmit positive ideals. Finally, a love of learning was not students' motivation for academic honesty; instead, external goods played a motivating factor in an avoidance of cheating behavior, including not wasting money and not getting caught. The results of this study may be helpful for administrators as they consider how they communicate their academic integrity policies to their campuses, especially in terms of creating a positive campus ethos.

Research shows that the effects of athletics on virtue development are mixed. Religion provides people with a meaning-making system, community, and practices that can promote the cultivation of virtues and possibly enhance the impact of athletics on virtue development. Yet, little empirical research has assessed moral outcomes when religion and sport interact. The present study examines intrinsic religiosity as a moderator of the effect of athletic involvement on virtue and self-worth outcomes in collegiate student-athletes. Participants (N = 1930) were religious college students in the United States, 22% (n = 415) competing in an intercollegiate varsity sport. Moderated regression analyses revealed, contrary to predictions, that religiosity did not significantly moderate trait courage, trait patience, or goal patience. Consistent with predictions, religiosity significantly moderated goal courage, approval self-worth (i.e., the extent to which people base their worth on approval from others), and moral self-worth (i.e., the extent to which people base their worth on their own virtuousness). Whereas religiosity was associated with higher goal courage for non-athletes, the association was stronger for athletes. Religiosity was not associated with levels of approval self-worth for non-athletes, but the more religious athletes were, the less important other people's approval was for their sense of self. Whereas religiosity was associated with higher moral self-worth contingency for athletes, the association was stronger for non-athletes. Applications for practitioners and future directions for researchers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]