In 1995, I taught a non-credit night course in Russian church history for what would become the Russian-American Christian University (RACU). It was a memorable experience on multiple counts.
The class was held in rented space on the old campus of the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University, where a larger-than-life bust of the school’s namesake Congolese communist martyr was on display in the lobby. Outside my classroom windows were the walls of the Donskoi Monastery, where the Bolsheviks imprisoned Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon until his death in 1925. I team-taught in a stimulating partnership with a friend, Orthodox journalist and future priest Yakov Krotov. And I was teaching unusually attentive students as eager to learn as any I have ever encountered.
For a few short years, less than two decades (1996-2011), an American-style Christian liberal arts university sought to plant seeds in Moscow, where the soil would grow increasingly rocky and thorny. Explanations for RACU’s demise are easy to come by. They include an evangelical constituency limited in size and financial wherewithal, economic instability (including the 1998 ruble crisis and the 2008-09 recession), a political order devolving from pseudo-democracy to authoritarianism, deteriorating Russian-American relations, growing xenophobic nationalism, and a declining pool of college-age youth.
Above all, RACU could not overcome increasingly crippling state restrictions on private higher education and the lack of an established rule of law, which fueled (and was fueled by) pervasive corruption. Though the school was predominantly evangelical, it made earnest efforts to develop positive relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, efforts that were successful with some hierarchs but less so in the immediate neighborhood of its new building, which barely opened before pressures on all sides forced its closure and sale.
Fighting to Survive
Taking into account the overwhelming odds against RACU, a key question comes to mind: How did the school manage to survive as long as 17 years and produce ten graduating classes? Part of the explanation for its endurance lies in the enthusiastic support it received from elements of the U.S. Christian college network, as well as generous contributions from evangelical donors on and off its board. (Full disclosure: I was a member of that board.) But the chief reason for RACU’s resilience was the competence and character of its founding president, John Bernbaum, who writes about his experience in Opening the Red Door: The Inside Story of Russia’s First Christian Liberal Arts University.
Bernbaum’s preparation for the post included a Ph.D. in European history, work in the U.S. State Department, decades of teaching and administrative experience with the Washington-based Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, and a gift for networking and donor development. Just as critical to the enterprise were Bernbaum’s abiding sense of God’s leading and a seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of energy, optimism, fortitude, and perseverance.
In the context of global Christianity, RACU was part of a rapid, multi-continent expansion of faith-based higher education over the past half-century—a phenomenon ably documented in the 2014 volume Christian Higher Education: A Global Reconnaissance. Compared to Asian and African newcomers, RACU’s imprint was quite modest, at least quantitatively. With a student body that never exceeded 200, it was dwarfed, for example, by the 3,500 students of South Korea’s Handong Global University (founded one year before RACU) or the 10,000 students of Nigeria’s Bowen University (founded in 2002).
So why write an entire book on a school with such a limited lifespan and a quite modest enrollment? For one, the saga of RACU’s hard-fought, short-lived existence bears telling because it played out in Russia, a nation that rightly commands the world’s attention, for good or ill. In addition, RACU’s promise and plight serves as a cautionary tale demonstrating the obstacles confronting any institution struggling to prevail in an environment of widespread corruption, economic uncertainty, and the arbitrary exercise of power.
Source: Christianity Today
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