Eastern Mennonite University, are governed by the Mennonite Board of

Education, which sets policy and assists in the process of presidential selection.

The Board of Education also mandates that at least 55 percent of the colleges'

students be Mennonite. While Mennonite church membership is not essential

for employment, faculty are expected to be sympathetic to the church's

understandings of faith and life, and more than 90 percent of Goshen's

current faculty are members of Mennonite congregations.¹¹The 1995

"Church and College in Partnership" conference, as well as annual meetings

on campus for Mennonite church leaders and regular visits by the Indiana-

Michigan Mennonite Conference Advisory Board, function as reminders to

faculty, administrators and students of the school's remarkably tight

relationship to institutional Mennonitism.

Mennonites trace their origins to the 16th-century Anabaptists, part of

what is sometimes called the "left wing" of the Reformation. Distinctive

emphases of the Anabaptists included the separation of the church from the

11_{In "Church Related Colleges and Universities:Problems, Prospects and}
Proposals," A Point of View (September 1991), Duane Ferguson, director of the
Committee on Higher Education of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) provides a
classification of Presbyterian colleges which may be helpful in describing
GC's relationship to its founding denomination. Among his categories are 1)
peripheral, in which there is "little intentional cultivation of the essential
features of church relatedness"; 2) historical, where "a conscious effort is
made to speak about the historical roots and founding vision" but where the
institution has chosen other values and goals as primary, usually ones held
widely in higher education; 3) dimensional, where the institution
"intentionally supports church-relatedness" and there is "a department of
religious studies that includes an emphasis on the denomination's central
goals which are "not cased in theological or ecclesiastical language or seen as
an integral part of the church's mission"; and 4) central, where the central
mission of the institution "is viewed as an extension of the mission of the
church" and all faculty, administrators, and trustees are recruited "with an
eye to the institution's church relatedness."I suspect Goshen College would be
closest to the "dimensional" category, with some additional elements of the
"central" designation -- and with the public perception by many Mennonites
and community persons that we are simply "historically" connected to the
church.

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