Academically Speaking

CHOICE
“Ostrander . . . provides a nuanced exploration of Christian higher education. . . . Recommended.”

“Academically Speaking offers a rich tour of American higher education. Ostrander’s ability to draw on a wide range of experiences as a student, professor, college administrator, consultant, and founding director of a Christian study offers insights and encouragement for anyone interested in understanding the landscape of higher education today.”
—Charlie Cotherman, author of To Think Christianly: A History of L’Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement 

“Embodying the posture of a teacher as storyteller, Ostrander weaves together his fascinating personal academic journey with historical and contemporary insights regarding trends in American higher education. The book will be a refreshing and engaging read for anyone who loves narratives about intellectual pilgrimage. Ostrander’s vast array of roles and experiences in higher education also affords him a unique ability to speak insightfully about the strengths and struggles of both Christian higher education and Christians in higher education.”
—Perry Glanzer, Baylor University 

“With a historian’s eye for seasons of change, Academically Speaking is a reflective memoir about Rick Ostrander’s three decades in a network of faith-based colleges and their consortium partners. From the cadence of bike riding to his wife Lonnie’s music lessons, Ostrander is a relational storyteller who values the spiritual formation of students in authentic community. A scholar and traditionalist at heart—yet futuristic and visionary in his optimism—Ostrander is one of our most important cultural translators and advocates for Christian higher education in the twenty-first century.”
—Karen An-hwei Lee, Wheaton College 

“For those whose Christian higher education careers have launched more recently, Ostrander’s career journey will instruct and expand a vision of what this precious niche of American higher education has been and could be. The book shares pragmatic wisdom from an author with years of administrative experience, a background of professorial expertise, and a lifetime of Christian prayer and practice. The book’s conclusion is worth the entire read, recommending that Christian colleges and universities offer authentic community as a salve to loneliness, a treasure with both mission integrity and market value in these immensely challenging times.”
—Jenell Paris, Messiah University 

“Reading Academically Speaking is like paging through a lovingly curated scrapbook of memories on the bookshelf labelled ‘Christian higher education.’ As a discerning guide and historian, Rick Ostrander brings candor and wit to the telling of his own story, one that remarkably weaves people and places significant to American evangelicalism around the turn of the twenty-first century. This book is especially poignant for Christian academics shaped by Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind—for we will recognize Ostrander’s journey as our own.”
—Felicia Wu Song, Westmont College

“Academically Speaking is an enlightening journey through Christian higher education in the United States. Rick Ostrander is a uniquely qualified guide to that journey, weaving a historian’s insights into his own four-decade story of involvement with many of the people, institutions, and moments that have shaped the movement.”
—Noah Toly, Calvin University 

“Few educators can match Rick Ostrander for deep experience at an astoundingly wide range of universities and colleges, in both teaching and leadership. His candid and subtle memoir is a journey through some of the most interesting moments in the last half-century of Christian higher education; it’s full of lessons on where Christian teachers, students and administrators have been, and where they’re heading.”
—Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill