Life at Chesterton House

Across the country, elite universities are locked in a power struggle with the federal government. Up here at Chesterton House, an independent, Christian, residential study center at Cornell University, the Ithaca campus is also undergoing a slow-motion collision between a hyper-politicized campus and an antagonistic executive branch.

But more is happening below the headlines. The national discussion is far removed from the typical on-campus experience. Despite the breathless coverage, it’s largely irrelevant to most students which president is listed on university letterhead, what new names the old DEI agencies have, or what headline speakers may visit campus next year or not.

Contrary to conservative hopes, leadership reshufflings and externally imposed sanctions cannot fundamentally alter the academy’s ethos. The upshot is that those hoping for a genuine transformation of campus culture are bound to be disappointed; contrary to conservative hopes, leadership reshufflings and externally imposed sanctions cannot fundamentally alter the elite academy’s deeply imprinted ethos. The mere outward compliance of universities will not create what is most needed: virtuous communities and cultures.

Yet there is a different story quietly developing underneath the headlines, one of steadily growing, virtuous subcultures forming more organically and nurtured through small, independent, and strategically located university-adjacent institutions rather than from top-down initiatives.

The mere outward compliance of universities will not create what is most needed: virtuous communities and cultures. A Tale of Two Campuses

Visit Chesterton House’s two-acre residential community (one of the largest intentional Christian communities in all of secular higher education, with 30-40 residents in any given semester, located steps away from Cornell’s campus), and you will find three bustling residential facilities. Inside, you’ll be greeted by the sound of hearty laughter, the smell of home-cooked meals being prepared by students in the kitchen, whiteboards filled with both problem sets from STEM classes and poetry and Bible verses, and books and magazines of the highbrow intelligentsia strewn about, as well as Christian publications such as First Things.

You’ll hear conversations that range in depth from favorite chocolate-chip-cookie recipes to the problem of evil to the meaning of vocation to the migration habits of birds. There are distinguished lecture series in the evenings, where students sit on the floor in a crowded room to hear speakers deemed too controversial for the main Cornell campus (both from progressive perspectives that religious communities typically shun and, even more strikingly, from conservative perspectives that university audiences often banish from campus discourse). Yet all of these speakers are welcomed as valued interlocutors, even as they are questioned in an ongoing community conversation.

But this mini-campus doesn’t keep to itself. The organization in fact holds the majority of its 300-plus events per year on Cornell’s main campus. The off-campus base enables an on-campus ecosystem, with highly active student involvement resulting in aggregate attendance numbers well over 8,000-9,000 per year.

The key to this seemingly impossible combination is the undercurrent of religious conviction that only a religiously enchanted and energized community can provide. Such a community can live courageously because they have a larger metaphysical vision of a good and gracious God who guides His people to take on suffering and sacrifice for the sake of neighbor. This leads to communities that embrace gratitude and thoughtful respect for learning from tradition even while questioning it, rather than catering to the prevailing campus cultures of outrage and victimhood.

That is also why our students have much more intergenerational contact than do typical college students. Rather than staying in the artificial bubble of 18-22-year-old mass culture, they are mentored weekly by older Christian leaders from local churches across the community, where they get to know both elderly and newborn fellow parishioners. Students routinely cook for many dozens as they host social events such as community dinners. Others attend incredibly high-level academic discussions with dozens of guest Christian scholars from across the nation, in all different fields and from all different political persuasions. Students engage in integrating faith with their academic and vocational work. They also engage in one of the largest Public Reading of Scripture programs in a secular university, where we offer a free meal to anyone and everyone while listening to the entire Bible in one-hour stretches.

All of this could not feel more different from dysfunctional campus-student cultures where ideological conformity is the norm and the presumption is that historical, orthodox religious beliefs represent toxic forces of bigotry and exclusion. That has not led to happy communities. Instead, the hallmark of campus life seems to be increasing digital isolation, political shrillness, and loneliness. If you visit the main campus, you’ll likely be greeted by students walking and sitting by themselves while scrolling. Dining halls are filled with solitary diners tapping away. Underneath the surface, students battle seemingly ever-increasing levels of anxiety and mental illness. The background noise comes from hyper-professional pressures and transactionally shallow relationships.

Institutions such as Chesterton House are building out an alternative vision of how higher education could look. Cultivating a Subculture

While not widely known, institutions such as ours at Chesterton House, along with a number of other para-educational institutions adjacent to (yet independent of) these universities, are fast-growing. Together, they are building out an alternative vision of how higher education could look. Students in these subcultures are unlike those you see in news stories; they are intellectually adventurous, curious about unfamiliar (or unpopular) views, willing to charitably try on many perspectives instead of screeching at any perceived violation of progressive purity tests, and, most importantly, just generally happy, well-adjusted, and fun.

The real story is happening at the more nebulous layer of relationships, communities, networks, and patterns of life. How did this subculture arise? It wasn’t any singular executive decree, policy, or initiative, though important institutional developments helped along the way. For example, when every other organization fell over itself to issue an overwrought and dubiously sincere “Black Lives Matter” statement in 2020, Chesterton House’s board passed a resolution to formalize institutional neutrality as the default around our public statements, before that ever became a trendy phrase in the mouths of college presidents. When our accredited courses were subjecting us to the whims of ideological biases from accreditation agencies, we dropped the accreditation entirely and switched to a noncredit course system (and our students have, if anything, responded in greater numbers than before). And, yes, we have had a number of important institutional boundaries we have had to defend, on issues such as gender expression and identity, as we have strived to preserve our religious character rather than dilute it in the face of university lawyers and HR offices.

But, important as this is, it is only part of the story. Policy and institutional frameworks are necessary but insufficient. The real story is happening at the more nebulous layer of relationships, communities, networks, and patterns of life. In short, the real story is one of building a subculture.

Growing subcultures is a different kind of work that requires long time horizons, patience, and hospitality. Over the past quarter-century, slowly and out of public view, Christian Study Centers like Chesterton House have done this at several dozen campuses across the country. Much as large monastic institutions became hubs for civic life, culture, community, learning, and social programs during the Middle Ages, these centers are taking on the slow work of revitalizing campuses by fostering small and growing cohorts, student groups, and networks, all with robust patterns of intellectual and social life that imprint long-lasting impacts on student participants rather than merely offering one-off events or speakers.

Because we grew our programs upstream of culture, they have a depth and durability that lasts, unlike the fad-of-the-moment presidential initiative to be unrolled in the next term. So, yes, we have programs; there are award-winning courses, seminars, reading groups, social programs, and distinguished lecture series, all offering alternative spiritual, theological, ethical, and political discourses to the reigning campus-civic quasi-religion. But these 300-plus events a year, across many different programs and communities, are really the end result of a whole new ecosystem of campus life within the larger Cornell campus.

Universities now struggle with attempts at “viewpoint diversity” but are at a loss about how to create it. In their almost comical displays, they can resemble a vegan restaurant awkwardly trying to rebrand as a steakhouse. The fundamental problem is that most university stakeholders have little desire to genuinely grow in the virtues of intellectual and table hospitality to those with viewpoints they consider intolerably evil or bigoted or retrograde. So the feeble initiatives that result are mostly top-down window dressing, perhaps bringing in some conservative headliners and provocateurs and hoping that this suffices to call a campus “viewpoint diverse.”

Religious traditions, on the other hand, have been in the business for millennia of developing cultures. When such religious communities exemplify the fundamental habits of mind that manifest in certain intellectual and moral virtues, it means that viewpoint-diversity initiatives now focus less on the speaker and more on the audience.

If higher education has any chance of reform in the future, the most important changes will go beyond top-down policies, legal initiatives, or even any federal-government-imposed package of carrots and sticks. All of those are important, necessary conditions at best but insufficient. The real question is: Who is developing real-life students into exemplifying the kind of academic culture we want to see? Chances are, when you find them, there is something like a Chesterton House in the mix. For those interested in the dynamics of campus life, this merits closer attention and points to an important alternative way forward.

Vivek Mathew is the executive director of Chesterton House, a Christian Study Center at Cornell in Ithaca, NY.