Forever is a Long Time: Reconsidering Universities' Perpetual Endowment Policies in the Twenty - First Century

College and university officials in the United States have long invoked a combination of Anglo-Saxon legal precedents, plus the obligations of responsible philanthropic stewardship, to justify policies of perpetual endowments. Closely related to this general principle has been the practice of not spending more than the annual earnings (in other words, interest and dividends) from an endowment. Our historical analysis provides a counter to this contemporary conventional wisdom that has been accepted with little critical consideration in American higher education. Rediscovery of philosophical arguments, and actual cases of foundations and philanthropists who placed limits on the life span of gifts, demonstrates how historical research can provide an informed base for reconsideration of government and institutional policies and practices that shape giving and spending at colleges and universities in the twenty-first century.The grounding in economics for our study is Howard Bowen's 1980 "revenue theory" of college costs. The historical precedent for our policy analysis comes from eighteenth-century France, as advanced by A.J. Turgot, to shape national economic development. Its implications for higher education in the United States is illustrated by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller's reservations about a perpetual endowment for an educational project: "Forever is a long time . . ." Our historical research addresses the consequences -- pro and con -- of government policies requiring colleges to spend endowments at more than a marginal annual rate and in a fixed period of time; and, secondly, are there good reasons for donors to colleges to voluntarily opt to increase spending and place time limits on gifts

The Bible and Creationism

Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) marked a significant challenge to traditional understandings of the Bible and Christian theology. Darwin’s theory of organic evolution stood in sharp contrast with the Genesis account of creation, with its six days, separate creations of life forms, and special creation of human beings. More than this, Darwin’s ideas raised enormous theological questions about God’s role in creation (e.g., is there a role for God in organic evolution?) and about the nature of human beings (e.g., what does it mean to talk about original sin without a historic Adam and Eve?) Of course, what really made Darwin so challenging was that by the late nineteenth century his theory of organic evolution was the scientific consensus. That is to say, American Protestants had no choice but to reckon with Darwinism. For many Protestant intellectuals, clergy, and laypersons, this was not an enormous obstacle. That is, and in keeping with previous Christian responses to scientific developments, many Protestants adjusted their understanding of the Bible and their theology to accommodate Darwin’s ideas

Righting America at the Creation Museum

On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting zoo with camel rides, the site conjures up images of a religious Disneyland. Inside, visitors are met by dinosaurs at every turn and by a replica of the Garden of Eden that features the Tree of Life, the serpent, and Adam and Eve. In Righting America at the Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., take readers on a fascinating tour of the museum. The Trollingers vividly describe and analyze its vast array of exhibits, placards, dioramas, and videos, from the Culture in Crisis Room, where videos depict sinful characters watching pornography or considering abortion, to the Natural Selection Room, where placards argue that natural selection doesn’t lead to evolution. The book also traces the rise of creationism and the history of fundamentalism in America. This compelling book reveals that the Creation Museum is a remarkably complex phenomenon, at once a “natural history” museum at odds with contemporary science, an extended brief for the Bible as the literally true and errorless word of God, and a powerful and unflinching argument on behalf of the Christian right

Time Is Of The Essence: Foundations And The Policies Of Limited Life And Endowment Spend-Down

In contrast to congressional hearings and proposed punitive legislation, we consider the present and past proposition that institutions, especially nonprofit foundations, opt voluntarily and by decision to spend down endowments. And, by extension, for many cases, it includes consideration that boards and donors may wish to plan for deliberate dissolution of funds or foundations to coincide with a fixed, finite target date for addressing solutions to specific foundation programs and agenda items

The KKK and UD in the 1920s

Given the recent events in Charlottesville, it makes sense to think of the time - less than a century ago - when the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) terrorized the University of Dayton, and when students fought back

The Juvenile Curfew: Unconstitutional Imprisonment

Faced with rising crime rates, many municipalities in recent years have enacted juvenile curfews. Professor Tona Trollinger uses an ordinance enacted in Dallas, Texas, as a framework for analyzing juvenile curfews. The author discusses various prudential and constitutional objections to these curfews, including both substantive and procedural due process challenges. The author concludes that the admittedly valid governmental objectives underlying such curfews do not override their constitutional infirmities

Review: \u27Religion in America Since 1945: A History\u27

Anyone who has taught a course in U.S. religious history knows the daunting challenge of adequately dealing with the riotous diversity of religion in America. This challenge moves from daunting to nearly overwhelming when one gets to the years after World War II. But now comes along Patrick Allitt, professor of history at Emory University, who, in Religion in America Since 1945, has managed to create out of this apparent chaos a lucid, compelling narrative of recent U.S. religious history. Of course, and as Allitt observes in his introduction, in order to “prevent the book from taking the form of a mere list or set of encyclopedia entries” he is forced to give only passing attention to “vast areas of American religious history” (p. xiii). Readers will be thankful that the author chose to be selective, as the result is a coherent, graceful account. It thus may be the worst sort of academic quibbling to suggest that the book could have benefited from more attention to mainline Protestantism (how the writing of American religious history has changed!), peace churches, and Native religion. But it is not quibbling to lament that there is almost nothing here on Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement (the latter does not even appear in the index), given that, as Grant Wacker and others have made clear, this may be the most important religious movement of the twentieth century

Fundamentalism

In America fundamentalism is a movement within Protestantism that was organized immediately after World War I in opposition to modernism, which included liberal theology primarily, and also Darwinism and secularism. A subgroup of evangelicalism, fundamentalism staunchly affirmed with evangelicals fundamentals of the faith, including the deity of Christ, his virgin birth, his bodily resurrection, and his substitutionary atonement. What distinguishes fundamentalists from other evangelicals is their strident opposition to modernism. They are, to quote George Marsden, militant anti-modernist evangelicals

Review: \u27What Would Jesus Read? Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America\u27

In this interesting book Erin Smith analyzes popular religious books since the late nineteenth century with an eye toward understanding why – despite the scorn heaped on them by intellectuals -- they have been so beloved by their readers. Rather than being a comprehensive survey, What Would Jesus Read? consists of five case studies: the Social Gospel novels (1880s-1910s), Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows (1925), post-World War II religious self-help books, Hal Lindsay’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), and books for “the seeker” from the past twenty-five years. Smith’s focus is on white Protestant readers; working against the overworked liberal-conservative binary, she argues that these readers, who are “believed to be at opposite ends of the religious and political spectrum,” actually “share a culture of religious reading” (302) in which what really matters is “if these texts worked – that is, made them better people, managed their fears and anxieties, and made them feel as if their lives mattered” (7)

Revealing the ‘social consequences of unemployment’: the Settlement Campaign for the Unemployed on the Eve of Depression

This article analyzes the strategy and rhetoric of the National Federation of Settlements’ 1928 project on unemployment. During the Hoover years settlement workers assembled an extensive catalog of case studies, which offer a glimpse into the home life of the jobless and their families at the beginning of the Great Depression. From their research the NFS Committee on Unemployment published a series of books and articles that depicted the unemployed as the undeserving victims of economic change, and called for policies to protect them. Throughout, settlement workers focused on the families of the unemployed, drawing on gendered notions of work and family and lifting up policies that protected male breadwinner households. Thus, settlement leaders re-cast unemployment as a social, rather than an economic, problem. In all, settlement research, writing, and reception presented a skeptical voting public with a palatable argument for social insurance that brought the experiences of the jobless to the voting public and to policymakers, demonstrating a process of “policymaking from the middle.” In so doing, they redeemed the newly unemployed and the insurance plans intended to protect them.https://digitalcommons.snc.edu/faculty_staff_works/1020/thumbnail.jp