Eastern Mennonite University

Paper for Entry into the Initial Five-Year Contract

Introduction. At the May 2005 university faculty meeting, the faculty expressed support for a proposal brought by the Academic Cabinet to ask faculty preparing for the first five-year contract to write a paper on how the Anabaptist Mennonite perspective informs their teaching of their discipline at EMU. This assignment grew out of discussions occurring at EMU in the spring of 2005 and is presented within this context in the rationale that follows.

Rationale. How can EMU remain a university with a vision and practice that is solidly Anabaptist Christian in a society that pushes it toward assimilation? How can EMU remain closely tied to its Mennonite denomination as both the denomination and the institution become more diverse and live in an environment of increasing pluralism and polarization? These are the questions asked in the spring of 2005 as part of a consultation with Dr. Robert Benne, who authored the book Quality with Soul.

In his book Dr. Benne suggests that maintaining or strengthening denominational ties requires three things: 1) a comprehensive vision of the Christian faith that permeates the university, 2) an ethos that is established through chapel and other activities that arise out of the faith tradition, and 3) maintenance of a critical mass of people—employees and students—from the particular denomination to embody its tradition. Critical within the people category is the faculty. In Benne’s words, “If the Christian account is to be publicly relevant to the central task of the school—its education—then the right kind of faculty is indispensable. Faculty members will not only have to be adept at teaching, scholarship, and service, but also at a fourth category: institutional fit. Ability to contribute to the identity and mission of the Christian college is as important a criterion as the traditional three” (p. 191). He further suggests that integrating faith and learning requires both talent and thorough preparation (p. 191). Thus, he appears to be suggesting that there must be a deliberate effort to ensure that faculty are prepared if their particular faith tradition is going to influence their teaching and scholarship.

Benne elaborates the many forces that pull institutions away from their founding tradition, such as the desire to appeal to a broader market and the modern rejection of revelation as a source of truth. In his speech at EMU he named particular challenges that we face. For instance, he suggested that we have a not-so-strong intellectual tradition in which to ground our educational task. So how do we go about maintaining or strengthening our ties to the Anabaptist Mennonite tradition and the best that it represents?

In the table talk following Dr. Benne’s speech, faculty and staff made clear their support for forging strong ties to the Mennonite Church. Further, they offered many suggestions for how to do this. Some of these suggestions centered on how faculty teach and what EMU provides in the area of faculty development. For instance, persons said that EMU should do the following:

These comments following Dr. Benne’s presentation led us to ask the obvious question: What does it mean to be an Anabaptist teacher/scholar at EMU? What difference does it make that a person is an Anabaptist Mennonite Christian (or teaches at an Anabaptist Mennonite Christian university) as he or she teaches mathematics, literature, nursing, counseling? How is the classroom or pedagogy changed because of this identity?

The question of how to integrate a particular faith tradition into the classroom is not a new one. In fact, there had been at least two recent discussions on this topic at EMU. First, in March of 2004 visiting scholar Harold Heie led a faculty discussion on integrative questions in the disciplines. He defined an integrative question as one where responses require drawing from both one’s disciplinary knowledge and one’s Biblical or theological understanding. Second, in a spring 2005 meeting graduate faculty focused on the topic: “Graduate Teaching from an Anabaptist Perspective.” In his remarks at the latter meeting, seminary professor Mark Thiessen Nation suggested that one of EMU’s challenges is “To discern contextually what it means to be Anabaptist (or teach within an Anabaptist institution), knowing that it has implications for:

Counseling professor David Glanzer also spoke to this issue in his comments at the same graduate forum. He argued that EMU has developed programs (graduate in this case but applicable to all) that express a deep sense of caring and that “promote servant leadership, the common good, the dignity of each person.” Yet, he asked how an identity based on these values distinguishes EMU from any other Christian educational program. Does it make any difference that EMU espouses an Anabaptist worldview? Do students hear EMU faculty articulate a clear Anabaptist worldview while connecting this to the discipline under study?

Graduate schools provide disciplinary knowledge. Where does one learn to do the things Mark and David named? It is, perhaps, unlikely that new faculty members can articulate clearly how the Anabaptist perspective shapes their teaching, no matter what their denominational background. As the EMU faculty becomes more diverse, some new faculty who do not belong to the Mennonite denomination have very little understanding of what it means to be Anabaptist Mennonite. The questions raised above suggest that faculty could benefit from deliberate orientation to the unique vision, mission and values of this Mennonite university, as well as from ongoing reflection on how this tradition shapes their teaching. There are a number of authors of recent books that could help us to think about these issues.

Addressing this issue is critically important as the EMU faculty becomes more diverse and as we seek to permeate our university with a comprehensive vision of the Christian faith from an Anabaptist perspective. There was a time when we took these things for granted. That time is no longer. We must become more deliberate in ensuring that our faculty are prepared to teach at an Anabaptist Mennonite university, both through good orientation of new faculty and through ongoing faculty development. Recently, we have expanded the initial orientation of new faculty to the ethos of EMU. Now in 2006 we are inaugurating an activity in the ongoing development of new faculty as described below.

Assignment. Each faculty member, as part of preparation for the first five-year contract, is asked to prepare a paper addressing the following question: How does the Anabaptist Mennonite perspective inform my teaching of my discipline at EMU? A second way of phrasing this assignment is as follows: Reflect on the integration of your scholarly discipline and teaching within the framework of Anabaptist theology and practice. The length of the paper is unspecified. The resulting papers will be shared with EMU colleagues in Tuesday luncheons and placed on the provost website for sharing with our students, as well as colleagues in other universities.

This activity will provide an opportunity for new faculty to participate in the discovery of what it means to teach within the tradition of this university and to engage in scholarship that helps all of us to develop a better understanding of how our Anabaptist worldview connects to our curricula and our pedagogy. The bibliography below is designed to help inform and stimulate thinking as faculty begin this assignment. Please let us know of additional books you discover as you do this assignment.

 

Bibliography 

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