Called to Teach
Growing up in a small village for a while, then on a farm about three miles down the road, and then attending high school (graduating class of 53) in the county seat ten miles further, I had never met a psychologist or psychiatrist. I do not remember any counseling centers or counselors anywhere within 50 miles. There was a state hospital (insane asylum) about 50 miles away in Traverse City, but we seldom visited the city, so I remember driving by it only once or twice.
I had no idea at that time that there was any conflict between psychology and many Christians. I was surprised to find that there was great hostility between psychology and Christianity during the 1950s and the 1960s. Psychology was the science of behavior, but many of those involved in treating the mentally ill and counseling people with problems were influenced by Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. This resulted in psychology being rejected by many Christians. Likewise, many psychologists viewed Christians as needing the “crutch” of religious beliefs or even as being mentally ill.
As a result, there were very few Christian psychologists, especially in the field of general/experimental psychology. I found psychology to be fascinating and decided to major in it. I talked about it with Lee Fisher who taught most of the psychology courses. I also talked with Dr. Charles Keys, our class sponsor, since at that time students did not have individual advisors. I felt that God was calling me to do something that I had never considered, teach to prepare future pastors rather than becoming a pastor myself.
Finishing College
In addition to taking psychology courses, I realized that I would need a reading knowledge of two languages as research tools to get a PhD degree; so I took a year of German my junior year. I also took the course in statistics in the math department to prepare for graduate school—as well as three or four advanced math course just for fun.
Bonnie (my wife to be) and I discussed this change in my major, and she approved being the wife of a psychologist rather than the wife of a pastor. My parents and grandparents supported this change in direction. However, some other people thought I should not do it.
During my senior year at Asbury, Ruby Abbott, the cousin of my father, who had sailed into Honolulu Harbor on the way to India as Pearl Harbor was attacked, talked with me in the kitchen of her father’s home up on Bohemian Road near Horton Bay, MI. She pled with me with tears stream down her cheeks, not to go into psychology, that I would lose my soul if I did so. She said that it was terrible, even worse than philosophy. I questioned what I was doing, because here was a missionary with more than 20 years of service questioning what I was doing.
Graduate School
In 1963 I began doctoral work at Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, in the program General-Theoretical Psychology to get as broad a background as I could as preparation to teach in a Christian college. This was basically a program in experimental psychology, and I chose to major in Learning (Animal). That time was near the beginning of the cognitive revolution in psychology, and Wayne State was on the cutting edge with a new Center for the Study of Cognitive Processes. Within the department I had minors in cognitive processes and statistics and outside the department I had a minor in mathematics.
I made it through graduate school on what writing skills I had. I knew the answers, and most teachers did not take off many points for the minor errors I made. When it came time to write my doctoral dissertation, I chose to develop a mathematical model to explain the partial reinforcement effect in learning and then to test some of the predictions it made. Rats given food each time they ran down an alley to the goal box quit running sooner when the food is discontinued than do rats given food only part of the time. The body of this dissertation was only 79 pages long, and it contained many mathematical equations. The appendix contained the derivations of many of those difference equations. So I had the fun of using some of my math knowledge and had many fewer words than most dissertations.
During the fall of 1966, while running my dissertation study, I met a faculty member in the hall. He was not on my committee, and I had never had him for a class, but he knew I was conducting my dissertation research. He said that I needed to begin planning for where I would work after graduating. I said I was going to teach at Greenville College, a Free Methodist college in southern IL. He was aghast that I was going there.
Once a week for six consecutive weeks other faculty members or students met me somewhere to tell me why I should not go to Greenville. My advisor, a graduate of Stanford University, arranged for me to have a post-doc for a year at Stanford saying, “A year in San Francisco can’t hurt anyone.” Another told me how much money the state of Michigan had wasted on me; another told me how the faculty had wasted four years each on me; and another said I would drop into oblivion and they would never hear from me again. The sixth week my advisor called me aside and told me that he wanted to make sure I understood that he did not approve of what I was doing; he had just given up on me.
I was terrified about what they might do to me during the final defense of my dissertation! I knew that they could refuse to sign my dissertation meaning that I would not get the PhD. However, none of them really understood my mathematical dissertation, because they did not know difference equations. They asked only trivial questions, and they did not make me make any changes in the dissertation. Apparently they had all given up on me and just wanted to send me on my way.
Greenville College
I taught at Greenville College in Greenville, Illinois, for three years in the late 1960s. My training was in experimental psychology, so I taught courses in that area during that time, courses such as statistics, experimental psychology, and physiological psychology. I did get a grant from the national institute of mental health, but it was for an experiment with rats! I never taught courses in counseling or clinical psychology. However, learning theories and the animal experiments forming the foundation of those theories were the basis for many of the clinical techniques that helped suffering people to change maladaptive behaviors.
Asbury College
I taught at Asbury College for 32 years beginning in 1970. During the first 20 years the subjects I taught were similar to those at Greenville. In addition, I taught history and systems of psychology and developmental psychology as well as some other subjects. Although I never taught courses in counseling or clinical psychology, many of my students became counselors, pastors, or missionaries. About five years after I completed my PhD, I really wanted to write about the integration of psychology and Christianity. I asked several of the English professors to critique what I wrote. Instead of correcting me they tried to be encouraging with comments like, “Keep trying, you really have something to say.” I didn’t need encouragement to write, but I did need to be told what I was doing wrong, why it was wrong, and how to do it right. I finally had Dr. Richard Sherry critique something I had written, and the paper came back so red that it looked like he had bled all over it.
That was just what I needed! I said, “Rich, if I pay you by the page, will you edit everything I write?” He agreed, so for a whole year he read everything I wrote. The red marks grew fewer, the clarity got better, and I learned how to at least get the mechanics of writing correct. I was not then, and still am not now, a really good writer; but I am able to say things well enough in writing to get the ideas across.
Scholarship
After I learned to write, I wrote dozens of journal articles and half a dozen books, mostly related to the integration of psychology and Christianity. The first two books were self-instructional volumes about General Psychology published by Christian Academic publications in the late 1970s. The second two books were written for scholars and professionals. Psychology from a Christian Perspective and General Psychology for Christian Counselors were published by Abingdon Press in the early 1980s. I soon realized that my writing had less influence on either students or professionals than I had hoped. Therefore, I wrote Understanding Adolescence for parents and The Love Triangle: Sex, Love, and Dating for adolescents, published in the late 1980s by Victor Books. These books also went out of print after the initial printing.
Although I had learned to write, I seemed to have little impact on anyone. I had no idea that material in all of these books would impact thousands of missionaries in the future. At that time I had no idea how life would change relative to what Bonnie and I were doing.
Changes
I had gone into teaching seeing my role in the Great Commission as one of preparing people to be pastors and missionaries. When I began teaching at Asbury College in 1970, psychology was one of the largest majors on the campus, and about half of the graduating psychology majors went on to seminary for further preparation. Others went on to graduate school, into youth ministry, and into a variety of other lines of work.
With my background in statistics and love of math, I was the one in the department usually preparing data for reports and various kinds of assessment. I watched the percentage of psychology majors going into “full-time Christian service” gradually drop from about 50% to about 10%. This was not working out as I had thought it would.
At about the same time the psychology department changed the general psychology textbook used to Psychology by David Myers, a gifted writer and Christian professor of psychology at Hope College. Several editions of his text included a graph of the results of the UCLA Education Research Institute annual survey that they have conducted each year for half a century. The American Freshman survey asks about 200,000 freshmen at all types of colleges and universities many questions, and one set of questions asks them about their goals and values. One of those questions asks them to rate “Being very well-off financially” and another asks them to rate “Developing a meaningful life philosophy.” The figure below shows how the answers have changed over the years, actually beginning the year I began teaching.
In 1967, my first year of teaching, about 80% of freshman thought that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was important, and 40% thought that being very well off financially was. A decade later, in 1977, the freshman thought both goals were equally important. Still another decade later by 1987, they had completely reversed so that only 40% thought that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was important, but 80% thought that being very well off financially was. Those percentages have continued at that level for the next quarter of a century.
When I began teaching, very few students took short-term missionary trips or served overseas for a summer. The longer I taught the more short-term mission trips they seemed to make, but the number of long-term missionaries seemed to be declining. Also, by the end of the 1980s I had more and more children of “helicopter parents”, and more and more students were postmodern in their thinking (although I did not know the term at the time, I could see it frequently). All of these, as well as other factors, led to my becoming more and more disillusioned with teaching.