A New Plan For Oberlin College's Future

Why Was Change Needed?

My alma mater, Oberlin College, has been having trouble fulfilling its budget needs and has been sagging in academic ranking. A major initiative has looked at solutions summed up in a final "One Oberlin" report.

What was the bad news that motivated these big changes (sources omitted, not in quite the same order and categories as in the original)?

Key facts about Oberlin’s budget: 

o Without change, Oberlin’s cumulative deficit would have reached $162 million in 10 years beginning in FY2018 Note: This projection has already been mitigated by cost reductions underway during FY2019. 

o Reductions of $11.1 million in the baseline budget are planned from FY2020 to FY2024 across the institution through the regular budget process — including the equivalent of 25 faculty FTE through attrition. Yet these reductions alone will not balance our budget. For this purpose, attrition includes both the decision to not replace some faculty members who leave Oberlin or retire, as well as the elimination of some vacant visiting professor lines. Cutting through attrition does not mean that all faculty hiring or replacement will end; similarly, the normal channels of faculty hiring and alignment will allow reallocation of replacement positions as needed. 

o 83% of annual operating revenue comes from student tuition and fees. 

o In 2016-17, Arts & Sciences realized net revenues of $23.9 million after direct and indirect costs, while the Conservatory lost $11.1 million.   

o Arts & Sciences students bring in, on average, $10,000 more in tuition revenue per year than Conservatory students. Note: The Conservatory provides more financial aid per student in order to effectively compete for students with other top conservatories.  

o Revenue loss based on lower costs of OSCA model yields a negative financial impact to Oberlin of $1.9 million per year. Note: Includes foregone student revenue, less program management costs if they reverted to the College. 

Key facts about employee costs: 

o Employee compensation — all faculty and staff — makes up 63% of Oberlin’s budget. 

o The average salary for Oberlin’s Arts & Sciences faculty is 11.3% less than peers with whom we compete in recruitment, the Sweet 16. 

o Adjusted for inflation, faculty and A&PS have forgone $5.5 million in total compensation since 2017 through salary freezes and benefits cuts. Note: Difference is based on projections of budgetary impact if there had been typical raises and no change in benefits during those two years.  

o Oberlin’s average hourly staff wage is 34% higher than the average of four other Northeast Ohio liberal arts colleges (Kenyon, Dennison, Ohio Wesleyan, and Wooster). Note: These colleges represent similar institutions within the same region. 

o Health care benefits cost $9,849 per year for each faculty and A&PS employee; health care benefits cost $16,984 per year for each hourly employee. 

Key facts about students: 

o In 2018, almost 80% of students admitted to Arts & Sciences who listed music performance as their primary interest enrolled somewhere else. 

o 38% of our prospective students showed a strong interest in business. 

o 42% of returning students have a strong interest in global public health.  

o 91% of students admitted to the Conservatory listed career preparation as very or extremely important. 

o Oberlin Arts & Sciences students secure career-related jobs by graduation at roughly half the rate of their liberal arts college COHFE peers. 

What Will Change?

Some of the most notable changes proposed (as paraphrased by me) are as follows:

1.  Reduce the size of the music conservatory by 100 students and increase the size of the arts and science division by 100 students (since arts and sciences students generate much more revenue per student). This would also increase the competitiveness of the conservatory program, potentially making it more prestigious. The Conservatory is currently operating at a big, per student, deficit.

2. Hire some post-graduate fellows from top institutions to teach in the conservatory, because they can be quite good but are cheaper than tenure track faculty.

3. Increase music offerings for arts & sciences students (and remaining conservatory students) to make that more of a draw with resources freed up from reduced conservatory enrollment.

4. Add concentrations in business and in global health that would be more of a draw to potential students.

5. Increase interdisciplinary activities as a draw to potential students and faculty, and a way to react more quickly to a changing environment within academia.

6. Improve career services offerings, and the orientation of the college towards helping graduates develop careers as a draw to potential students. Ultimately, the implied hope is also that more students will "do well" instead of only "doing good" and that this will increase future donations to the endowment.

7. Improve winter term offerings so that 25%-30% of students stay on campus, some of which would involve ExCo (i.e. student taught class options, expanding an existing program in the college while keeping costs down). This would be accomplished, in part, by offering two credits of regular college credit for some options and, in part, by providing better options. This would be in part a draw for new students, in part a community building effort, and in part a way to utilize campus infrastructure resources and teaching capacity more efficiently.

8. Consolidate administrative functions currently incurred at the department level into multi-department divisions within the Arts & Science division in order to reduce administrative expenses.

9. Improved winter term offerings, reduced department level administration, and an increased arts and sciences enrollment, and increase music offerings for arts and sciences students, is intended to demand more teaching capacity from existing faculty than they currently provide (in lieu of laying off faculty). Professors will be expected to work harder, but they will stay employed.

10. Significantly reduce the amount of administrative and hourly staff (almost everywhere but career services) while integrating them with each other better, and significantly reduce the above market compensation paid to hourly staff right now. Compensation for faculty would probably be increased somewhat.

11. Reduce the amount of building space used by 20% by utilizing the rest more efficiently (especially by reducing boundaries between departments and departmental administrative space) and phasing out the least desirable buildings that drain the college's resources.

12. Increase the amount charged as rent to student co-ops so that there is not a net financial subsidy of them. The increase would be about $3,220 per 590 students who dine in co-ops, with a somewhat smaller increase for those who dine in co-ops but don't live there, and a somewhat larger increase for the 180 who both live and dine in co-ops. The data indicate, contrary to conventional wisdom, that co-op students are, on average, are more affluent than the average Oberlin student. Co-ops are significantly less expensive than ordinary dorm and dining service options: "In 2018-2019, to dine in a co-op costs $3,900 a year ($4,330 less than campus dining service). Living in a co-op double and dining in a co-op costs $8,730 ($7,608 less than living in a campus dorm and dining in campus dining service); living in a co-op single and dining in a co-op costs $9,900 for the year ($6,438 less)." Some of this savings arises from the labor provided by co-op students, but quite a bit of the savings, it turns out, comes from subsidies from the institution via below cost rents for the spaces used by the co-ops.

Analysis

Of Oberlin's nearly 3,000 students, nearly 2,400 are enrolled in the College of Arts & Sciences, a little over 400 in the Conservatory of Music, and the remaining 180 or so are enrolled in both College and Conservatory under the five-year Double-Degree program. Allocating double degree students 50% to each division, the planned cut in the size of the Conservatory's student body is about 20%. The increase in the size of the College's student body is about 4%. The targeted total enrollment would remain unchanged.

Admission to the Conservatory will become much more selective almost immediately, the student to faculty ratio in the Conservatory will fall, and career services will improve, as the changes are phased in over four years. Oberlin is currently ranked 7th in the nation for its music program (ahead of John Hopkins, the University of Southern California, Yale, Northwestern University, Carnegie Mellon, Indiana University, Bard College, Shenandoah University, and UCLA). The only institution which is not purely a music program (and the only institution which is not in a major coastal city) that is ranked higher is the University of Rochester (which is ranked 5th). It isn't unthinkable that Oberlin could rise to the number five spot with this change.

The increase in arts and sciences enrollment risks lowering admissions standards, but the clear intent of the plan is to mitigate that risk by upping the college's game in terms of new draws to the college that address several of the biggest factors that data shows has been causing prospective students to choose other schools instead of Oberlin in terms of curricular options. A 4% increase in comparable quality admissions yields is not unrealistic with some significant data driven changes in the college's offerings. Ideally, the changes will strengthen the attractiveness of the college even more and will allow it to become more selective again, something that has been slowly declining over the last couple of decades.

The plan has earned wide consensus support from faculty and other interested constituencies, and I am inclined to agree that this is a solid plan for dealing pro-actively with a gradual but serious crisis facing the college in a way that builds on the institution's strengths without compromising its core values, and with only completely unavoidable pain. (I am also struck, as someone who was highly involved in the student-faculty governance system while I was at Oberlin at how similar that system is now to what it was then.)

This is a better plan than what would have been the easiest and less thoughtful option - to decrease enrollment across the board to make it possible to lay off more faculty and increase endowment funds per student, continue to cap faculty pay, and to reduce financial aid in the college of arts and sciences (increasing tuition in either the college or the conservatory, and reducing financial aid in the conservatory, is largely foreclosed by market forces).

Oberlin College Appoints 15th President In Its 184 Year History

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Carmen Twillie Ambar has been named the 15th president of Oberlin College. She will transition to Oberlin this summer and be on campus full time beginning in September. . . .

Ambar has served as the 13th president of Cedar Crest College since 2008, following a highly successful tenure as vice president and dean of Douglass College at Rutgers University, where she was the youngest dean in the University’s history. Cedar Crest has thrived under her leadership. Three straight years with budget surpluses and a 35 percent growth in net assets have allowed the college to make significant investments in the campus without borrowing, and the college’s endowment has increased by almost 92 percent. Ambar has presided over the launch of 18 new academic programs and, during her tenure, Cedar Crest has seen enrollment growth in six of the last seven years and this fall will welcome its largest freshman class since 2007. . . . 

At Cedar Crest, she led initiatives to expand the access of high-impact practices for all students including: “The Sophomore Expedition,” a shared short-term study abroad experience funded almost entirely by the college for all sophomores beginning spring 2018; campus vibrancy initiatives and a robust First-Year-Experience that have increased retention by 11 percent; the 4-Year Guarantee, which provides a clear path to graduation; dual degrees, to help students get their master’s faster; and living learning communities. Under her leadership, the diversity of the student body increased from 16 percent in fall 2008 to 37 percent in fall 2016, with the highest increases in Hispanic and African American populations. . . . 

Ambar serves on several boards including the Colonial States Athletic Conference, for which she is Chair; the Women’s College Coalition; and the Pennsylvania Campus Compact board. In 2014, she was honored by the governor’s office as a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania. Additionally, she has earned several awards for her support of women including the 2012 Girls Scouts “Take the Lead” Award, the 2011 American Association of University Women (AAUW) Gateway to Equity Award from the organization’s Allentown Branch, and the 2010 Athena Award from the Women’s Business Council (WBC) of the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce.

Prior to her time at Rutgers, Ambar served as assistant dean of graduate education at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. As an attorney, she previously worked in the New York City Law Department as an assistant corporation counsel. 

Ambar earned her juris doctorate at Columbia Law School, her master’s in public affairs at Princeton University, and her B.S. in Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She is married to Saladin Malik Ambar, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Senior Scholar at the Center on the American Governor at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Ambar has ten-year-old triplets, Gabrielle, Luke, and Daniel.

From here.

The Firebrand Generation

A recent color piece on Oberlin College in the New Yorker Magazine tags the tempestuous cauldron that is my alma mater as the exemplar of the "Firebrand Generation" of younger millennials.

The stories have a familiar ring. Student government institutions that I put in place when I was on campus are alive and well (e.g. a student senate headed by "co-liaisons" rather than a study body president).  The general tenor of the P.C. and identity politics have continued on the trend line it was on when I was there.

Oberlin isn't a utopian model. But, it is a canary in the mineshaft at the bleeding edge of identifying cultural trends and activist issues. Sometimes I think the issues it fights over are misguided, but I take a great joy in knowing that Oberlin is still a place where almost everyone seems to give a damn.

Against Consensus

L.A. Kauffman has a fascinating historical and practical article about the use of consensus decision making by grass roots activists, together with related notions like Feminist process, something I am familiar with from my college days at Oberlin College, and its antecedent, consensus decision making by Quakers.

The bottom line conclusion, that consensus decision making can be dysfunctional outside of small groups, is correct, but I do fault her for failing to recognize that extent to which some of the other decision making processes are fellow travelers with consensus decision making, but do not actually involve a consensus requirement.

She states:

The complex liturgy of consensus process — from the specialized language and roles (“facilitators,” “vibes watchers,” “progressive stack,” and more) to the elaborate hand signals (“up-twinkles,” “down-twinkles,” and the like) — has functioned as much to signal and consolidate a sense of belonging to a certain tradition as it has to move decisions forward.

But, many of these specialized features of "Feminist process" aren't necessary consensus based and weren't used in connection with a consensus requirement most of the time when I used them.

The "progressive stack", for example, applies to how discussion was organized.  In a progressive stack, people who want to speak are identified so that they don't have to keep their hands raised, but rather than being called upon to speak in chronological order, someone who has said less in the conversation is given priority over someone who has already participated in the conversation a great deal.

The hand signals are nothing more than a "straw vote", used in all sorts of consensus decision making forums (like juries) and in all sorts of non-consensus decision making forums (like political caucuses).

The notion of divorcing the role of a "facilitator" from that of the true group leader, is an idea as old as having a Speaker Pro Temp in the U.S. Senate, which is certainly not a consensus based organization, although Senate rules like those of grassroots groups, often place greater importance on giving everyone a full opportunity to participate than the parallel rules of the U.S. House of Representatives or Robert's Rules of Order.

Feminist process norms that are widely followed in activist groups are more a rejection of Robert's Rules than they are an affirmative endorsement of true consensus based decision making.

Also, even traditional rule based decision making systems that call for votes in the ordinary case, often acknowledge that the process can be speeded up on many matters with "unanimous consent" (another U.S. Senate favorite), with decisions by "acclimation" (used for example, in rare instances, in electing a Pope), and in voice votes, all of which can function as consensus matters.  For example, many decisions in political conventions involving thousands of people entitled to speak and vote are made by unanimous consent in practice.  The same is true of most votes in most small civic organizations (e.g. churches and family reunions committees).

Of course, one of the main ways of generating consensus is "tradition", something that Quakers and many other small non-governmental organizations have, but that large grass-roots organizations may lack.

Computerized Matchmaking ca. 1965

My alma mater, Oberlin College, was the first co-educational college in the nation and also one of the first to have co-ed dorms.  When I was there, our dorm had co-ed bathrooms and showers (not unlikely the fictional college in the movie "Pitch Perfect"). 

So, perhaps it is not surprising that it was also a pioneer in computerized match making with freshman Paul Lewis operating a computer dating systems  off the college's mainframe computer back in April of 1965 (47 years ago) when the data input method of choice was still punch cards. 

The service didn't last, but Oberlin still has a very high percentage of graduates who end up marrying each other (now in both opposite sex and same sex unions), although I couldn't find a precise figure easily at hand.

The Morning After Pill And More

When I was in college, back in the early 1990s, my partner and I had occasion to use the "morning after pill" after a condom we were using busted.  At the time, it was an off label use of birth control pills that the campus health service at Oberlin actively promoted in the student handbook, with encouragement from the campus sex cooperative which provided contraceptives, sex toys, lubricant, and practical advice for sexually active people (hetrosexual, homosexual and bisexual) at cost.

The morning after pill (also known as "emergency contraception") is simply a high does of birth control pills taken within five days after unprotected sex or a contraceptive failure (preferrably sooner).  The morning after pill reduces the likelihood of getting pregnant by about 83%-89% if taken within 72 hours, and is more effective if taken within the first twelve hours after having sex.  (Incidentally, douching or similar methods to try to remove semen from the vagina immediately after sex without a contraceptive are almost totally ineffective.)

Insertion of a copper intrauterine device (IUD) by a medical provider in roughly the same time period also operates as a form of emergency contraception but is far less commonly used for the purpose.  Both methods were invented in 1975 and these became widespread off label uses of these forms of contraceptions in the 1980s. 

Since then, a great deal has changed.  The British approved the use of oral contraceptives for "morning after" use in 1984.  On label approval of this use of oral contraceptives in the United States came fourteen years later.  "The FDA approved emergency contraceptive pills in 1998 for use up to five days after intercourse." In 2006, the FDA authorized pharmacists to provide emergency contraception without a prescription to women eighteen or older.  Modifications to the FDA initial regulations later in 2006 allowed it to be purchased by men or women, and a court ruling in 2009 extended the availability of the pill to seventeen year old men and women. 

Young women sixteen or younger, however, still need a prescription to get emergency contraception, even though a young woman as young as twelve or thirteen years old (and in some cases even earlier) can get pregnant.

How often is the morning after pill used?

When it was available only with a prescription, in 2002, only 4% of sexually active women had used it.  When it was an off label use of oral contraceptives in 1995, a few years after I had an up close and personal encounter with emergency contraception, only 1% of women had used it.

Since it has been made available without a prescription for most women (although not always actually available at pharmacies, a story that I shared a staff journalism award with my colleagues covering at Colorado Confidential), 11% of sexually active women ages 15-44 have used it, a 275% increase. 

In truth, this understates the impact of making the morning after pill available without prescription, because morning after pill use is much greater among women who have been young ad unmarried since it became available without a prescription in 2006.

Oberlin The PhD Factory

My undergraduate alma mater, Oberlin College, ranks 18th in the nation (according to the National Science Foundation) in the number of science and engineering PhDs it produces per hundred bachelor's degrees awarded nine years earlier. It also produces PhDs in the social and behavioral sciences at a high rate. Indeed, the descriptor the "Oberlin 50" is used to describe small liberal arts colleges that produce far above average numbers of PhDs.

The top twenty colleges on the list are:

1. California Institute of Technology 35.2
2. Harvey Mudd 24.9
3. M.I.T. 16.6
4. Reed 13.8
5. Swarthmore 12.9
6. Carleton 11.7
7. University of Chicago 10.8
8. Grinnell 10.5
9. Rice 10.5
10. Princeton 10.3
11. Harvard 9.9
12. Bryn Mawr 9.7
13. Haverford 9.5
14. Pomona 9.1
15. New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology 8.7
16. Williams 8.4
17. Yale 8.4
18. Oberlin 8.2
19. Stanford 8.1
20. John Hopkins 7.7

The average overall ranges from 1.0 to 3.0 depending on the type of high educational institution involved. Liberal arts colleges overperform in the sciences, but produce much lower percentages of engineering PhDs. Were one to make an apples to apples comparison by looking at science PhDs per graduating science major, the number for the liberal arts colleges would be even better (Oberlin's rate, for example, is diluted by the fact that a sixty of its graduates are from its music conservatory and by its lack of an engineering school).

Then again, perhaps one reasons that liberal arts colleges produce so many PhDs is that an undergraduate liberal arts degree by itself doesn't have much economic value even though it is an asset when one applies to a graduate school.  More general interest and less traditional institutions have their numbers diluted by large proportions of their undergraduates who are chasing degress in fields like business and education and nursing that can be immediately translated into employment without going on to earn a PhD.

Combine selective admissions and few other options and one is going to see lots of your graduates go onto PhDs.

Yes, Oberlin Really Is A Liberal College

Oberlin College, where my wife and I graduated with our undergraduate degrees, has the fourth most politically liberal student body of 496 schools ranked at the website MyPlan.com based on an opportunistist non-random survey sample of 11,339 graduates of the schools in question (after Evergreen State, University of California Santa Cruz, and Bard). The college from which my brother and his wife graduated was ranked 7th most liberal. My sister-in-law's alma mater was ranked 13th. My father's alma mater was ranked 253rd most liberal out of 496. Hope College, from which my wife received some credits towards her degree, was 477th out of 496. Miami University, of Oxford, Ohio, where I grew up and took some classes was 442nd out of 496 in liberal political identity of students. CU-Boulder ranked 47th.

For what it is worth, I was reviled in some quarters while I was in college as a conservative, although of course, the political identity is relative and I was really only moderately liberal by campus standards even then. Out of about 3,000 students when I was there, Oberlin has about 600 people who were members of the campus socialists, about 40 Trotskyists, and about 8 members of the Republican club.

Oberlin has been on the frontier of progressive politics since its inception in the 1830s, at which point it was the first co-educational and the first interracial college in the country.

Hello Neighbor

Another Obie blogger has moved to Colorado and I didn't even notice.

Who knew? Mount Virtus did.

Honestly, we don't have much in common politically and I don't read her blog, but I haven't seen the less famous Mr. Malkin since I wrote an article or two as a token liberal for a publication he founded in college (pack rat that I am, I probably have a copy somewhere in my basement) and would love to see how life has been treating him over drinks one of these days in neutral territory, like Castle Rock.

FWIW, I also recently put in a good word for David Harsanyi recently with a die hard anarchist capitalist, explaining that while Mr. Harsanyi is sometimes provocative, that he is not stupid.

Godless in Kalamazoo

The family is in Michigan right now, and yesterday they went to look at Kalamazoo College. When touring, they were told that a majority of students identify as atheists or agnostics.

From here, via Hell's Handmaiden.

Kalamazoo was founded by the American Baptist Church (i.e. the relatively moderate Northern Baptists), but is currently not affiliated with a religious denomination (much like my alma mater, Oberlin College, which was founded by revivalist clergy, but ultimately shed its religious affliation and its theology school, which went to Vanderbilt in 1966).

News From Oberlin

Oberlin brought me good and bad news this week. This observation in the math department alumni newsletter made by day:

Here's a proof that we can be optimistic about love in the world:

Pull the petals off a daisy, one by one, alternating "She loves me," "She loves me not," etc. (Substitute the pronoun of your choice.) We would like to end with "She loves me," which requires an odd number of petals. It is known that the number of petals on a daisy is a Fibonacci number. But two-thirds of the Fibonacci numers are odd (exercise), so QED.

-- Arthur T. White, Oberlin College class of 1961.

The bad news, an Oberlin alumna was investigated by the FBI and New York City police department terrorism task for based on obviously humorous statements on her myspace page and those of a friend of hers (her Daily Kos diary on the subject was the most recommended at the popular site for a while).

Onion Sends Up Oberlin

The Onion has a noice story allegedly relying on a report from Oberlin College Women's Studies professor Barbara Klein. It is entitled: Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does, which while not true, like most Onion articles is frighteningly close to the truth.

As recently as 15 years ago, a woman could only feel empowered by advancing in a male-dominated work world, asserting her own sexual wants and needs, or pushing for a stronger voice in politics. Today, a woman can empower herself through actions as seemingly inconsequential as driving her children to soccer practice or watching the Oxygen network.

While Barbara Klein is a fake, the Oberlin Women's Studies program is very real. In fact, when I was in student government there, one of my greater achievements was helping to authorize allocating a new faculty slot to women's studies through a joint faculty-student committee in charge of such decisions.

Charles Finney Where Is Your Christian Legacy?

Tony Campolo at the Huffington Post mentions Charles Finney, one of the co-founders of Oberlin College, my undergraduate alma mater, as an Evangelical Christian who was a leader in progressive social movements like abolition and women's sufferage (he could easily have added prohibition, the town of Oberlin was dry until just a few years ago, and the anti-Masonic movement, which resulting in the entire baseball and football team being expelled, which went hand it hand with them at the time).

Campolo also rightly notes that William Jennings Bryan did carry on that part of the Evangelical tradition a little longer. But, then, outside the African-American community, the trail of progressive Evagelical religion seems to grow cold.

Campolo notes the apparent indifference of the Evangelical Christianity today towards the plight of the poor, bringing up the old saw that "Evangelicals are people who believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth." And, the notion of a liberal Evangelical really does seem to have become an oxymoron these days.

Of course, back then people who felt like that, once the party was formed, were Republicans, as the Republican party from its formation and until well past the end of Reconstruction, used to be the liberal political party on social issues. Indeed, a number of county by county and state by state election result maps separated by a century or so are striking in the extent to which there was a true reversal of the party affiliations while political ideologies remained remarkably stable over more than a century in geographic areas as small as a county.

Oberlin College was no exception to this trend. The political inclinations of the folks at Charles Finney's Oberlin certainly stayed with the institution, but the Evangelical Christian movement did not.

When I was there the number of Evangelical Christians, while more numerous in the community than Republicans, was small. In an effort to give Christianity a second chance, maybe it was just the Lutherans who were mistaken, I spent my time there affiliated with Christ Episcopal Church, and the college student group there probably outnumbered all of the Evangelicals on campus, and other mainline Christian churches had similar modest sized quite followings, especially amongst the less politically inclined conservatory of music students who often were headed towards careers in sacred music. But, hell, even the Trotskyists probably outnumbered the Evangelical Christians.

The theological seminary left for Vanderbilt in the 1960s, and was converted into a dorm (it was called "Asia House" when I was in attendance), around the same time that Oberlin entered its "modern era" characterized by fewer curriculum requirements, a student run experimental college, co-ed dorms and later co-ed bathrooms in some of those dorms, and so on.

Did Finney's remarkably Christian centered progressivism simply secularize? Did it migrate out of the Evangelical movement in a religious realignment to parallel the political label changing? Or did it simply die out with its missions accomplished and no more on the immediate horizon? What happened?

Some traces of Finney's legacy comes up in Southern Democratic party politics.

Until the 1960s and the Republican Southern strategy, the Democratic party was the dominant party of white Southern Evangelicals. Evangelical Dixiecrats were Democrats with something of a populist cast. And yet, until then, Evangelical Dixiecrats were Democrats with something of a populist cast. Huey Long was no believer in civil liberties or civil rights or the rule of law for that matter, but they did embrace a vision of society that was generous to the less well to do. Huey Long's 1928 campaign "slogan of 'every man a king, but no one wears a crown'—[was] a phrase adopted from William Jennings Bryan."

Did hearts harden as Americans left rural America in droves during the Great Depression only to find impovershed cities? Long, for example, turned against FDR and started to oppose New Deal legislation and plotted to realign the political parties with a third party designed to split the left before he was assassinated.

Did it happen in the 1950s, when Eisenhower embraced in "God We Trust" on coins, "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance and the like as a part of the Red Scare as a finger in the eye of the "godless communists" as World War II became the Cold War, and Christianity became an "us" versus "them" affair, instead of a domestic dialog?

The Republican "Southern Strategy" to win support in the 1960s from White Southern Dixiecrats, who were often also Evangelicals, by opposing the civil rights movement concluded the transition of the Republican party from the party of Lincoln to the party of abortion and tax cuts of the 1980s that eventually offered us conservative Christian George W. Bush as a Presidential candidate. Even George Wallace favored stronger social programs for the less well to do at the same time he was taunting hippies and standing up for segregation, and started out in his political career as a progressive. Does the transition has no deeper roots than this?

I don't know where or when it happened, but somewhere, the Evangelical Christian legacy of Charles Finney either died or was transformed and relabeled. I don't really know what happened to it, but, as I note above, there is certainly plenty of suggestive evidence on the issue.

Hat Tip to Colorado Comments.