THE TRANSFORMATION OF WESTMONT *JONATHAN H. HESS* Dean of Students Westmont College Westmont's role in transforming culture is, I believe, a crucial issue. Hardly anything we are about is more important than our potential to influence young men and women to become agents of transformation throughout society and the world. We want students to become change agents in their chosen vocations and spheres of activity--our emphasis on preparing leaders suggests this value--yet in practice we seem to prize this outcome substantially less than other outcomes such as cognitive development, writing, spiritual maturity, and skill in critical thinking. I believe that, along with the evangelical church, we have lost much of our transforming cutting edge in this culture. The way in which our graduates have assimilated into the mainstream of the church and secular society makes it difficult to identify clear patterns of their transforming influence. For my purposes in this paper I am assuming that transforming our culture is central to our mission and that at present we are not achieving this nearly as significantly as is possible and desirable. I dream of the time when Westmont becomes a strong, prophetic voice in our society. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Robert M. Bellah, et al., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) has stimulated me to pursue a different but related line of questioning. Why is the transformation of culture not a more visible result of our collective efforts? What keeps us from producing transformers? I submit that Bellah and associates' analysis of our national habits of the heart provides some helpful insights in this regard and is quite applicable to Westmont. The central thesis of Habits of the Heart, as I understand it, is that we have "put our own good as individuals, as groups, as a nation ahead of the common good." Individualism has indeed become cancerous in our society and it threatens to destroy our common historical ideals. Ironically these ideals flourished to a large extent because of the freedom to pursue individual success. I am persuaded that Westmont too suffers from this "impasse of modernity." In so many ways we experience the tension and contradiction between individual good and the common good. The faculty dining room brouhaha is an example of this tension. [Should the faculty have their own dining room? Who should have access to that room?] While almost no one believed that the pro or con of a faculty dining room in and of itself was high on our educational agenda, it consumed time and effort and caused widespread division quite disproportionate to its intrinsic importance. There was a general recognition that the issue was blown out of proportion, but each side tended to blame the other for the escalation. More current yet is the debate over Spring Sing. [An annual music/dance extravaganza put on by students, it is Westmont's largest campus event with up to 80% of the student body participating.] Over the last few years there seems to be a renewed concern on the part of the faculty about the quality and quantity of Spring Sing. It is not "Christian" enough and it detracts from more noble pursuits, specifically classroom work. An increasing number of faculty are expressing their displeasure with Spring Sing by scheduling exams close to the event, apparently hoping to discourage student participation. Regardless of the relative merits of Spring Sing, this approach to solving an important community educational problem by "pursuing individual good" seriously undermines what might well be the common good of the students and the college community. Another example of the dissonance created by competing goods relates to the process of developing the college's mission statement. Of the four interest groups most directly affected by this decision-making process--trustees, administrators, faculty, and students--each group seems to want unilateral control over what makes up our mission while hoping other groups will feel valued and involved in the process of defining the mission. The situation has been more agonizing, I suspect, because we have found it almost impossible even to agree on a process. At this foundational level, this crucial dimension of our institutional life, we have been plagued by our unwillingness to submit our various individual and group goals to the common good. All this results in what Habits of the Heart calls "improvising alternatives." For example, we tinker with curriculum, continually debate our mission, change personnel, modify evaluation and reward systems, alternately emphasize and ignore many worthwhile issues such as management, integration, excellence, competence, critical thinking, and building community. We are prone to blame others too: the church for producing biblical illiterates, the lower schools for being soft on academics, administrators for being unilateral in policy making, faculty for being too specialized, admissions staff for being too easy or too hard in their admissions practices, parents for being too vocationally oriented, students for being lazy, and staff for wishing they were faculty. Bellah and associates attribute our inability to break the "impasse of modernity" to what they call our "profound ambivalence." I find their argument in this regard impressive, and once again, quite applicable to Westmont, if not all "Christian" colleges. We believe in compromise, yet we are slow to do so, especially when issues important to us are involved. We "bad mouth" and avoid committee work while at the same time fear exclusion from decision-making processes. We applaud accountability until it affects us personally and contradicts our self-perception. We support those personnel changes with which we agree and decry those with which we do not. We recognize the legal, fiduciary, and educational responsibilities of the board of trustees, but at the same time impugn their educational expertise and competence. We champion the rights and interests of consumers in the marketplace but prefer that students defer compliantly with our agenda for their college life. We preach forgiveness but we seldom find ourselves apologizing or asking for forgiveness from our friends and colleagues. We deeply desire unity and harmony but we leave unchallenged, sometimes for years, known bitterness and hurt between friends and colleagues, not to mention hurt and resentment left unreconciled within ourselves. We are critical of students' unwillingness to confront each other and to police themselves, yet we faculty and staff are hardly any different. We extol the virtues of scientific inquiry and vigorous research but frequently resist the application of such knowledge to our own practices. For example, during my early years at Westmont, I down-played the importance of applying sound management principles to my work, in part because I did not understand management, and in part because I was somewhat threatened by change. We are indeed profoundly ambivalent. To transform our "out there" culture (be it students or society) we must, I submit, transform our "in here" culture. We will transform culture to the extent that we are a transforming community. We will be a transforming community to the extent that we are being transformed individually and corporately. (By "we" I mean faculty and staff.) Students will become transformers to the extent that they see and feel us being transformed. We are a microcosm of the society discussed in Habits of the Heart. And too often we approach our task (as co-laborers for Christ and as educators) in the characteristic American way--with individualism and freedom to pursue our individual goals as hallmarks. With respect to transformation, probably more than we like to admit, we reap what we sow; we reproduce of our own kind. In conclusion, I submit that Westmont's, and most other Christian colleges', role in the transformation of culture in a manner true to scripture, will increase far beyond what it is now if there is a deep unity of mind and spirit within the community; first, about who we are as co-laborers in the Body and second, about the nature of our mission. Habits of the Heart suggests that the litmus test for assaying the health of society is how it deals with problems of wealth and poverty. I believe that the litmus test for assaying the spiritual and transformational health of Westmont's society may well be its commitment to a deep expression of unity. Paul's prayer and admonition in Philippians, chapter 2, is directly relevant. We must not only live together in love and harmony, we must live and work as though we had only one mind and spirit between us! We must never act from motives of rivalry or personal vanity and we must in humility think more of one another than of ourselves! We must learn to see things from other people's points of view. Are we willing to plumb the depths of what his means to all of us? How might this affect some of our most cherished individual hopes and dreams? What might it mean for my own raison d'etre (for most of my time at Westmont) of implementing a student development philosophy of education at the college? I don't know the answers, but the possibilities simultaneously frighten and excite me. With honest answers and God's help we could become His prophetic voice to our society at large--but only after we first let Him work in our own community.