The King’s College is a non-denominational, small Christian private college located in New York City. It is facing financial difficulties and may close this summer, like many other small private colleges. The notice posted on the website states: “The Board selected May 31st, 2023 as a deadline for raising sufficient funds to continue operations throughout the academic year 2023-2024.” According to recent budgetary requirements, this amount could reach as high as $12 million.
I was the provost at TKC from 2005 to 2007. Although it’s been nearly 20 years, that period was crucial in the formation of the college. I have also maintained my contact with some TKC faculty members and, over the years, hired quite a few TKC alumni. This means I’m close enough to TKC to know what went right and wrong, but not close enough to want to fight for its survival. What might the (likely demise) of this college mean for other colleges, and for American higher-education in general?
History of the Institution
Every college or university has its own history. Most students and professors have a vague idea of the past, but it still affects them today. TKC was founded by a radio minister in the 1930s. The college moved around several times before it acquired a campus at Briarcliff Manor, up the Hudson. The college was forced to close in mid-1990s due to poor financial planning. However, it retained its New York State Charter. The college was reopened in the Empire State Building on a few floors with funding from Campus Crusade for Christ, now called Cru.
The college was at a point where it had a campus, a few staff members and faculty, an unwarranted amount of confidence and very little realistic information about the future. The college tried many contradictory strategies, all loosely based on the idea of bringing Christian higher education into the heart of Manhattan. It had no coherent program or compelling reason to attract students. J. Stanley Oakes from Cru, who was responsible for the college’s reopening, began to understand the problem. He decided that TKC should be an academically challenging college for students who would otherwise have been eligible to attend elite liberal arts colleges, but wanted a Christian education. In this context, “Christian” meant “evangelical Protestant”, with a Baptist flair.
At the time, I was the associate provost at Boston University and also the chief of staff to the president. Oakes, who had heard about me from TKC, thought I was a perfect fit: an evangelist Christian with extensive administrative experience at a large, secular university. He offered me the position of provost at TKC, and I declined.
After a few years saying no, and a number of unwelcome changes to my secular university I decided to try TKC. Oakes was true to his word when he said he would give me free reign in hiring faculty and developing curriculum. I promised him a rigorous curriculum that would quickly eliminate students who weren’t up for the challenge.
The first year was great. It was a great first year. We lost 40 percent of our students at the end that first year. This was exactly what I had predicted and expected, but it scared the board of directors and Oakes who thought that the college might be wiped out if there were another year like this.
Then came a series of unwise decisions: plans for intramurals, mission trips and pressure to boost grades. The freedom I was given in the first year had now been taken away, so I told Oakes I would be leaving at the end the academic year.
During this time, his behavior had become increasingly erratic. In my last month, he was diagnosed as having a brain tumour that required immediate surgical intervention. The tumor was removed successfully, but the damage to his brain was irreversible.
The college’s new direction was prompted by my departure and Oakes’s disability. The college went through many presidents, provosts and other administrators in quick succession, all with their own priorities. It was interesting to note that they all retained, in a large part, the basic curriculum which I had created. They altered it, added to it, and diluted it. But they also claimed that it remained intact.
This is a common occurrence in the history and development of institutions. The claim is that the innovations or renovations of later regimes are in line with the original principles. So they think, this is how institutions preserve their history.
Students
TKC’s biggest success was the ability to attract outstanding student. Many of the students in my time were sons or daughters of missionaries. Others were homeschooled. Some were older than usual, having tried other ways to become adults. Unexpectedly, a large number of students were international. Most of them were white but there was also a significant number of “students from color”. They were all bright and ambitious but very few had been challenged intellectually or academically. Innumeracy was the one obvious weakness that was common to all students. They were not all ready for calculus in college, and a surprising number of students struggled to understand basic algebra.
In 2005, I discovered that more than half of these students (who had all been recruited on different grounds) welcomed the new curriculum with enthusiasm. They were suddenly faced with general education requirements, and a core course focused on economics, politics, and philosophy. Faculty were given the task of eliminating grade inflation where the median grade at TKC was a C. It was widely known that TKC was going to make its mark in graduating students with excellent writing, speaking, and thinking skills. All academic and extracurricular work, such as debates and speaking tournaments, was centered around competition.
All students were on the same page with the PPE major and PPE focused general education program. The students studied the same texts and developed a vocabulary for discussing them. The missionary child, who was raised in Siberia, would study Shakespeare’s Coriolanus with an immigrant, from Ghana, to try to understand the conflicts between nobility and democracy, family and patriotism.
This was a meal that only a few students would enjoy. Other students were confused. My brief was to establish the college as an exemplary liberal arts institution. The most impressive thing about this was the number of students who rose to the challenge.
This program has been able to survive in a remarkable way, likely because the faculty I recruited have stuck around and are still determined to teach this course. When I say that it has survived, a good metaphor would be embers. The fire may have burned out, but if you poke around in the ashes, there are still some hot coals.
What Went Wrong
Oakes told me very early on that he wanted the college to rapidly grow its enrollment, from a handful to thousands. He wanted to create graduate programs and a law faculty. In a series of emails, I told him to drop all his ideas. The college would thrive if they deliberately chose to stay small. It is true that it could never cover its costs through tuition with classes of just a few hundred students, but expanding would mean lowering standards and dramatically increasing costs. Hiring, housing and student services costs would skyrocket.
The applicants for a very small college that has a reputation for academic rigor will never be lacking. The cost of operating such a small college would be paid for by the community as a whole, who recognize the importance of having their own elite college that is tuned to their educational priorities.
My alternative won for a time, not because Oakes had been convinced but because the word spread quickly about what TKC was becoming. Students with ambition and intelligence applied. This included more and more students who weren’t even Christian or evangelical. Despite this, it was impossible to expand the student body quickly. The will was there, but the way wasn’t. The will to succeed was corrosive. Admissions staff “sold” to prospective students that the college had all kinds of programs, but it did not. The academic side caught up by adding new options. The “media, culture and the arts curriculum” was added to the political, philosophical, and economics curricula. There were also nine majors and 13 minors.
What ever the merits of each major individually–e.g. Finance, English, and humanities were all majors that fragmented the curriculum, moving the college towards the American model of higher education, where students are divided into undergraduate specializations. The “core” of the college–the courses that all students take–was reduced, and emphasis was lost on teaching every student how to think, write and speak at a high level.
After I left, I continued to interview and hire TKC graduates that could compete with applicants from Yale or Columbia. Then, they began to fall embarrassingly short and I couldn’t find anyone who qualified for an internship. The King’s College, I thought, was doomed. It would only be a question of time until the market affirmed that conclusion.
The same story was repeated when I spoke with TKC graduates on my staff, and the few faculty members that I knew. The college was a popular place for students to stay in New York City. TKC, oddly enough, continued to advertise itself as an academically rigorous institution. Last week, I was shocked to hear a TKC professor compare the academic preparation of TKC students to that of Princeton students at a Manhattan Institute sponsored conference. I know that Princeton isn’t what it should be today, but to call it a lie or a delusion would be an understatement.
The Ladder Falling off
I have suggested that the problem was a soaring ambition. The King’s College aspired to be big and powerful, not small and effective. The college’s desire to grow was based on biblical principles. Matthew 28:19 says that Jesus told his disciples to “go and make disciples in all nations.” Jesus did not say to lower admissions standards or create new programs in order to maintain enrollment. He worked with just twelve apostles to reach all corners of the Roman Empire. In its later years, I think The King’s College may have worn its Christian commitment a little too lightly.
Its ill-fated attempt to enter the online education market was based on a mistaken assumption that it would be able to generate large revenues from this venture. Some degree mills are able to make money by tricking students into paying for their degrees, but a smaller number of institutions has been able to develop educationally valuable online programs. Most of the successes are in technical fields where content can be compressed and presented in a way that requires little interaction from the instructor. TKC never offered these courses. The online venture was a chase for fool’s gold.
Entropy at the college was also evident in its proliferation “centers” such as centers for journalism, Hebraic thinking, and black experience. These centers have merits. However, they are more suited to graduate institutions or liberal arts colleges with lots of money and students. Another sign of decline was the college’s desire to demonstrate its breadth, when it couldn’t even handle basic academics.
TKC never lacked major donors. Throughout the years I’ve known the college it has been patronized by wealthy people who have strongly supported its mission. Even major donors will eventually stop giving or become apprehensive if they realize that the institution’s perception of itself is far off from reality.
Add to this list of details the college’s inconsistent recruitment of managers, and its strange choices of management priorities. The college was initially run by a group of students who were under the supervision Campus Crusade for Christ in the late 90s. They had little experience in the field of higher education administration. They had no knowledge of accreditation, federal and state law, or higher education economics. They were unable to manage the costs, which were borne by donors who were patient. It took too long to get rid of them, and then it was too late. The college had become over-staffed with administrators who were experts at running up costs while adding little substance to their program.
The End is in Sight
Axel Oxenstierna was a seventeenth-century Swedish diplomat who wrote to his son, in 1648, in Latin: “Do you know, son, how little wisdom is used in the governance of the world?”
This is one of my favorite quotes, which I keep close at hand. It’s applicable to all public policy situations, everywhere, and was perhaps at the height of its reliability during the Covid shutdown years and the Biden Administration. The Covid shutdown ravaged universities and colleges, but perhaps not as much as it despoiled the public schools. The federal government’s misguided spending temporarily bailed out higher education, but it also masked the fact that the shutdown had ruined their recruitment plans.
TKC found it difficult to sell a college based on New York City’s attractions after the city had lost a large part of its business and the streets, subways and other public places were crowded with drug addicts and sociopaths. This was, of course, partly due to Covid. The rise of a “progressive regime” that rejects the rule of laws in favor of the nostrums for woke social injustice may have been the main reason. The big universities in the city still attract students who are attracted to the postmodern urban squalor. However, this is not a good thing for Christian families seeking a safe, small college.
TKC’s description now is as follows. Lower Manhattan is where you’d go in 2023 if you wanted to “gain a robust intellectual basis for principled leadership across society?”
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TKC’s decline can be attributed to a number of bad decisions made along the way. However, even the sum total of these bad decisions could have been borne in an age of American prosperity and cultural confidence. The conservative side of the country, on the other hand, sees nothing but ruin and destruction. It is difficult to imagine that a college such as King’s could survive.
The National Association of Scholars has grown from a small, but influential group to a powerful one with the help of TKC graduates. TKC graduates were the driving force behind our groundbreaking study What does Bowdoin teach? The examination of summer reading programs. TKC alumni blazed the trail for our critical examinations of both the sustainability movement, and the divestment campaign. A TKC alumna was the first to report on China’s subversive Confucius Institutes. TKC alumni lead our development and communication work.
It’s not a small amount of money. These alumni are now doing important work, and will continue to do so for many years to come. I am proud to have been a part of their achievements. I am also a little sad that this book’s last chapter is now over.
