The following article is in correspondence with a series of interviews taken place between me, Felix, and Gina Vance, Ph.D. (Head of Westminster College Campus Life). This is the first portion of an interview targeting politics:
Moving on from the topics of Covid, political pressures, and internalized qualms across campus are pressing matters. We all have our assumptions and impressions; conversing about politics amongst the student body can be a challenge. Troubles are brought to the forefront. In rather generalized terms, Vance wants you to uphold all that is true of the liberal arts—constructing fortitude. Mental triumph and personal solidification are amongst Vance’s most favored expectations. One thing’s for sure, Vance doesn’t want heavy topics viewed as an opaque area where people tend to look the other way, almost like rubber-neckers on the highway.
1. Do you think the environments in higher education cultivate, attract, or enhance any particular mindset, especially ones that hold any particular politic views?
“Let’s talk about the landscape of higher education first, you have a wide variety of institutions, you’ve got community colleges who were designed to educate a population of students who maybe would have not gone to a traditional four year institution and really designed for local community. Then you’ve got your state funded institutions, and again, most of them have histories as either land grant institutions or sort of the state funded education, originally for teacher education largely, expanding into other majors. Then you have your small private liberal arts institutions who also vary greatly. The mission in every institution is important, but the mission in small private institutions is incredibly important, it speaks very much to who they intend to invite in. My strong opinion is that higher education serves the masses, and that individual students will make decisions based on a place that aligns with their values, so I don’t consider that to be political ideology necessarily, but values are definitely a part of a political ideology. In terms of attracting students, students who really want a Christian education are going to go to a Christian college. We [Westminster} are not a Christian college by designation. A Christian college is somebody who has a narrower admission and pool specifically seeking students to identify their Christian faith. Higher education at large isn’t indented to be a political tool, its intent is to expand the minds of the students that are there.”
2. Considering how schools in Western PA acted in political intensity, how do you think Westminster compares, such as with BLM or Roe v Wade?
“I don’t know what other institutions were doing because most of them were in a very same space, there were a bunch of public statements that came out from corporations, government agencies, churches, religious institutions, as well as educational institutions. I think we did some similar things, and may not have been as adamant…I think we rose to the occasion in similar ways but also in very different ways from other institutions, in ways that worked for us….We have a first amendment, we have some speech language as a private institution, we have a lot of latitude in how we uphold that, but we as an institution tend to follow the first amendment fairly closely. So students who want to gather in a particular way have a right to do so on our campus, what we ask is time, place, and manner. How do we minimize the disruption of the education of students at large.
In the summer, our students really are home, where as a larger institution may have more academic activity and more student presence…by the time we got back to school and the business of the school year, and in the absence of a student group who wanted good conversation around Roe v Wade. So much of what we do around the educational spaces, there are really good learning opportunities to be had when these social movements happen in the world.”
3. What are your views about change, progress, and conservation, especially in the context of how Westminster is historically a religious institution, and how that relates to campus life?
“I will go back to mission…the reality is that the worlds changing around us and it always will be, change is inevitable and it must happen. At the end of the day, who we are as an institution must be mission driven. Our mission is about developing competencies, characteristics, and commitments of human beings at their best. Change can happen at this institution, progress can happen at this institution, but we always need to point back at that mission…we always need to know that what we are doing is around that call for us, and frankly our mission hasn’t changed…it has been written broadly enough that it allows for adaptation to the oral context. How we did mission over the covid days looked very different….We were founded with a very progressive idea…the founders explicitly wrote that this institution would be open to men, women, and people of color regardless of their faith tradition. That is an incredibly progressive idea for any religious institution in 1852…in terms of conservation, conserving who we were at our very foundation. There is also this language of progress right out of the gate.”
“I don’t know that you can have progress without change.”
Definitionally, that is correct.
As Vance states, the purpose of a college education, specifically a liberal arts education, is to have you question yourself and come out the other end stronger and more equipped. Vance cannot understate it; critical thinking is essential to the cultivation of the human person. To view the counterpart to this interview, check out the HOLCAD for the article titled Interception of Political Thought with Gina Vance.
