You may not have seen it coming, but it's almost guaranteed by evolution (yes, bad word choice I know). Once evangelicals got involved in the public square, it was a lock they'd start to look hard into high class academia and how they could put their own spin on it, just as the Catholics have. Charlotte Allen has a nice piece at the Opinion Journal that does a good job of getting you up to speed on Christian Academia version 2.0:
But numbers don't tell the whole story. Many religious schools, traditionally regarded as second-tier or worse, have improved the quality of their students and of their academic offerings, sometimes dramatically.
The evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois and the Reformed-affiliated Calvin College in Michigan now rank among the nation's leading liberal-arts institutions. Baptist-affiliated Baylor University in Waco, Texas, has embarked on an ambitious program to boost itself into the nation's first rank by hiring 220 new full-time faculty members. The percentage of Ave Maria's law graduates who passed the Michigan bar examination last year was higher than that of the University of Michigan's graduates. Orthodox Jewish Yeshiva University is on U.S. News & World Report's list of the nation's top 50 research universities, while Wheaton ranks 11th in percentage of graduates who go on to receive Ph.D.s.
You knew I'd excerpt the part that mentions Baylor now, didn't you?
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