It was a college class on religion that taught me about the history of academia in the United States. Prof. Ferm walked us through why schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth were founded, and what decisions they made as they grew.

Over my lifetime those lessons have come back to me often as I’ve considered the life cycles of other institutions of higher education. One of the big themes: many schools begin with a lofty vision of being a community, a “city on a hill,” an institution with a mission to serve the people of the region, a commitment to a creed and its advancement, etc.

And then, over time, they decide that the way to achieve longevity as institutions is to think of themselves as businesses. Which so often leads them to an awkward attempt to marry a business mindset with an eleemosynary or non-profit vision. And failing at both.

To be good at a business requires a sense of distinctiveness, a business proposition that makes one’s product the right choice. But when schools depend on similar sources of funding, accreditation, and assessment, the pressure to conform to competitors outweighs the drive to distinctiveness.

To be good at being a community built on a mission requires the community to be ever mindful of that mission, and to let it guide (at least at the macro level, if not at the micro level as well) major decisions. Fidelity to that mission might even run counter to balancing the books in the short term. It might require teaching donors why the mission matters rather than conforming the mission to the mission of donors. It might even mean telling accreditors what their standards are too low.

This is not an easy path to chart. A few schools divorce themselves from federal funding, but then find themselves in need of the funding of a few wealthy donors with their own missions. Some stick to their mission and find themselves living lives of poverty in order to keep the doors open. A rare few manage to continue to tell their own story to donors, and count on the alumni to believe strongly enough in what they experienced and gained to continue to fund it for those who come after.

I wish I had wisdom to say what a school should do. Instead I have charity enough to pray for those who must decide, and for those who will go through the education they provide, for those who might fund education through various means, and for those who will live with the consequences. Kyrie eleison.