Head, Heart, and Hand: John Brown University and Modern Evangelical Higher Education

by Richard Ostrander, George Marsden (Foreword)

Traveling evangelist John Brown believed that conventional colleges had become elitist and morally suspect, so he founded a small utopian college in 1919 to better combine evangelical Christianity and higher education. Historian Rick Ostrander places John Brown University in the long tradition of Christian education, but he also shows that evangelicalism had largely separated from mainstream higher education by the twentieth century. This engaging and objective history explores how John Brown University has adapted to modern American culture while maintaining its evangelical character. Brown set out to educate the poor, rural children of the Ozarks who had no other opportunity for schooling. He wanted to instill in them not only religious zeal but also his conception of what constituted significant work, namely manual labor. His concern with practical work is evident today in programs for broadcasting, engineering, teacher education, and business. His sons made academic excellence an institutional priority and gradually transformed the school into an accredited, respected liberal arts college. Head, Heart, and Hand deftly connects the story of John Brown University to the larger currents of American education and religion.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2003

Reviews

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rick Ostrander's institutional history, far better written than most examples of that genre, is the story of how John Brown University wobbled uncertainly from the imagination of its founder, a charismatic, turn-of-the-20th-century evangelist with almost no formal education, to become in the intervening eighty years, a more-than-creditable institution of higher education. Ostrander, a former academic dean at JBU, has done a fine job of research and writes both sympathetically and critically. He also makes a strong effort to place JBU in its historic context, especially in regard to the parting of the ways between fundamentalism and evangelism during the mid-twentieth century, at which time JBU took the road to the left. But a weakness is Ostrander's insistence that the dramatic transformation was actually continuity in disguise.