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In today’s episode, we chat with Jack Haye, President of Patrick Henry College. Discover how the principles of classical Christian education shape this school and how they uphold their mission of training intellectually and spiritually grounded leaders who will positively impact society.

If you’re looking for a post-high school experience that aligns with the K-12 classical Christian education children receive through Veritas Press, visit Patrick Henry College!

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler

Hello again, and thank you for joining us for another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Jack Haye. Welcome, Jack.

Jack Haye

Thank you very much. Honored to be here.

Marlin Detweiler

Jack has been the President of Patrick Henry College, I believe, for nine years and prior to that, the chairman of the board. How many years were you the chairman?

Jack Haye

From the very beginning of the college from 1999. So I think I left the room during a board meeting. I came back, and I was chairman.

Marlin Detweiler

Well, I've had those things happen too. It's a shame when going to the bathroom works against us! That's great. That's funny. It's great. So, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family and upbringing, your education, and the kind of things that led you to this point in your life.

Jack Haye

Yeah. Thank you very much. Well, I grew up, my dad was a Baptist minister, and so I was a preacher's kid, and we moved around a lot, but developed a real love for music early on. And when I went to school, I decided to study music. And so I did an undergraduate degree in music at Baylor University. And, really thought I would pursue that and continue on and maybe do PhD work and teach the college level. But, you know, sometimes God has a different plan. And I actually was led into an MBA program and did a master's degree in finance, and then worked 30 years as a corporate banker. So I was a corporate banker with a music degree.

Marlin Detweiler

I'm curious, what’s your your music background?

Jack Haye

I was a voice major.

Marlin Detweiler

It was voice, okay!

Jack Haye

I was a voice major. That's exactly right. And if it wasn't so [inaudible], I'd sing for you.

Marlin Detweiler

Yeah, I wish we could! And I wish I could sing with you, but neither are probably a good idea at the moment.

Jack Haye

That's exactly right! But, you know, that really instilled in me a love for the classics, and studying liberal arts and being a liberal arts undergraduate. And one of the great things about liberal arts education is that it gives you a broader way of looking at problem-solving. So when I first started my banking career, I thought I was competing against MBAs with, you know, they had undergraduates in accounting or finance or whatever. And I thought, well, maybe I'm at a disadvantage. But after a couple of years, I really felt that I pulled ahead because I had other things I was interested in. I could write well, I had a broad range of things to draw into a conversation. And so it just, it was a huge benefit, to have an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts and, so, worked as a banker in 19– mid 1990s. Michael Ferris…

Marlin Detweiler

If I may ask, where was your schooling?

Jack Haye

The undergrad was at Baylor University.

Marlin Detweiler

Okay. You may have mentioned that I may have missed that.

Jack Haye

No, that's fine. Then, the graduate school was the American Graduate School Thunderbird out in Arizona. And, that's a school that required two languages at the time other than your own language too, because it was kind of a preparation for international business and international work. And so I did mine in French and Arabic. And again, because I was a liberal arts person, language acquisition was something that I was used to, and it came pretty easily for me.

But I never lived in the Middle East, so you can appreciate this. You know how I have plans. God has plans, right? So my plans were to go to the Middle East, work for a big bank, live the life of the expat. And this was 1981, right when everything just crashed. But the Lord had different plans.

So I moved to Houston right after grad school and began working there in the mid-90s, 1990s. I ran across– we had started our family and were homeschooling right across Michael Farris, who was the president of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association.

Marlin Detweiler

I've had Michael on here and, it was wonderful to hear some of the story of HSLDA and their successes in the early years, making homeschooling legal in all 50 states.

Jack Haye

That’s right! And he's a visionary, you know, I mean, to spend any time with them, you know, he's got it. He's got ten ideas within ten minutes. And, so the Lord just gifted him incredible ways. But he and the HSLDA board were thinking about how they could use their platform to make an impact beyond high school. Because as Mike traveled around, Christian parents were offering off and asking, “Where can I send my kid to college?” And he felt he didn’t have a very good answer for them. And so he gathered a group of people to begin thinking about what would it look like to start a school, to start a school that was very specifically oriented around Christian classical education.

And so he pulled together a group of about eight of us, attorneys, business people. And we began praying about this. And the question he asked early on is, are we raising a generation that could write the Constitution or write the Bill of rights that would recognize that all of our rights are in all of our inalienable rights, that we consider those and everything will flow from God and not for man. Are we raising a generation that understands that? And, you know, we couldn't honestly say that we were.

So, we set about to begin this idea of praying about starting a college. And this was 1998. So we spent two years working with educational historians to look at when was the last time that the Academy was producing faithful scholars. You had to go back pretty far. And so we went back to the 18th and 19th century and then began to look at what was the curriculum like that? What were they studying? What books were they reading? How were they learning to discuss and debate really important topics in a way that still honored civil discourse? How were they doing all that they were doing?

Marlin Detweiler

Well, before you do that and unpack that a little bit, tell me what time frame you identified as the place where things got derailed.

Jack Haye

Well, it definitely started coming off the tracks by the early 1800s.

Marlin Detweiler

Okay, so the Horace Mann period would be connected to the coming off the rails?

Jack Haye

Yes. That's it. And, you know, you begin to commoditize or sort of industrialize the education. And so it's the output that's the most important. And it needs to look exactly like all the other outputs that come out, right? And so, in the process, you know the individual that's being– it becomes more about information than formation.

I think that's such an important thing because education should be about helping to form. Now you have to look now and see students are being formed one way or the other. And so you have to ask the question, are they being formed in ways that are helpful both to themselves, into their communities and into the world.

So we started looking at that. And out of that came, and the rest of the question, will, what will it take to bring that curriculum forward, that type of curriculum forward into the 21st century? And so, what resulted from that was our 63- unit core, which, for the first two years, everyone takes the same thing.

And so they enter the cohort. And so everyone is going to study rhetoric. Everyone is going to study foreign language, theology, physics, geometry, US constitutional law, freedoms, foundations.

Marlin Detweiler

What was the time frame of this? Now? Patrick Henry started when?

Jack Haye
2000.

Marlin Detweiler
So, it would have happened in the 1990s.

Jack Haye

When we were putting it all together in the late 1990s. And we opened the class in the fall of 2000, was our first class.

Marlin Detweiler

I'm sorry I keep interrupting you, but I'm trying to contextualize because this is really curious to me. Doug Wilson, who wrote Recovering Lost Schools of Learning in 1991. That was a book that impacted me and many other people to pursue classical education as a thing for K-12. Did that resurgence impact Patrick Henry at a collegiate level?

Jack Haye

It did. In fact, if you remember, you're exactly right. In the 1990s, there was an increased renewed interest in classical education. And so these parents were discovering this classical model and then coming to the end of the 12th grade and saying, where do we go now? Because they're thinking well, they're beginning to write well, they're scoring well.

And if you look at most curriculum that was out there at the time, there wasn't an extension of that. And that's one of the things we still deal with. And in talking to classical high school students, they say, “Well, I've already read these books,” but if you read a classic work when you're an eighth grader or ninth grader, and you read it when you're 20 years old, it's going to be different, right?

Because good books. What's the old saying? We don't read good books; they read us.

Marlin Detweiler

I heard that. I remember I mean, I’ve forgotten a lot of things, so I'd probably have. But that's a really impactful thing!

Jack Haye

It is. You think about the books that have been most impactful in your life. I can think about the ones in mind. And I pick up again and again, and I'll read them again and again because it's not just me turning pages, but they're stirring something in me. And I think that that's that classical model does that. It causes us to think deeply about big questions and not just, how to gain information about various things.

So we started the school in 2000, and now there are several fundamental principles for us. The 63-unit core remains, let's say. And Doctor Veith, you know, he would say that is the most important thing that you have to protect, no matter what you do. Don't mess with the core. And so that's certainly something that is a big deal for us because you can get pressure about lots of things. But, in fact, two years ago, the American Council of Trustees and an alumni actor, does a survey on what will they learn. And I don't know if you know this survey or not, but it's really interesting, where it came from, they were doing, just some research work at the university level several years ago and just asked the question of how many schools were requiring English literature to be taught.

And they were shocked at how few had that as a requirement. And so they decided it would make an interesting study to go out and look at how many classes are required classes, that universities requiring, and it's just called their what will they learn project. And it just and on the actor website and they basically identified six buckets of types of learning: mathematics, foreign language, civics, and that sort of thing. Six buckets. And they scored 1,100 schools based on their general education curriculum of what their deal was, I think parents want to know what their kids are going to study, right? And if they're certain foundational things. So what they found is that there were only this year, there were only were 11 schools, that required courses in all of the six buckets out of the 1,100 schools. And in a very small number, only seven required all six. And there's a seventh bucket there, seventh category and only. So those seven got an A-plus. And Patrick Henry was one of those, because in addition, we have an eighth bucket for us. And that's theology because we believe that's the sciences. And it sews those all together.

And, so it's this idea that, you know, over time, you and you mentioned, man, and this idea that general education has fallen out of favor out of sort of a, customized, just kind of filling the menu. You just design your own degree. And we believe that students, especially 18 to 22, it's such an important time for them. There's so much that's going on, that there's a great opportunity for them to experience a lot of intellectual and spiritual formation during those years, but they need to be guided. They don't need to be left on their own, just to try and decide for themselves.

Marlin Detweiler

I've theorized that college, for many, has become a very significant half-step into complete independence. You know, sometimes kids think at that age that they're fully independent, but in most instances, they are independent, except for assuming the financial responsibility of that independence. And so it's not a full-orbed independence, but it's a healthy place to go from substantially dependent to entirely independent. And the education that you're describing is really helping them understand that in real, substantial ways.

Jack Haye

Yeah. And I think another way of thinking about independence is self-government, you know, a way that they will order their lives; how would they come to understand their loves? And are those loves misplaced, or are they things that will bring about flourishing in their lives? So is moving towards self-governance in a way that not only cares about themselves but cares about other people as well.

Marlin Detweiler

That really helps paint a vision for how things started and maintaining as Doctor Veith said, a focus on don't give up the core. Seems one of the principles of keeping what you started with intact. But what is the vision for the school now? How has it evolved in the, couple, two decades and a half, since its inception?

Jack Haye

Yeah, it's an interesting question because, we look at mission a lot because a lot of institutions, you can get mission drift going on. And it's easy to happen. We don't accept any government funding, which is a really important thing for us from the very beginning. So that it really is an educational project. It's not about having to subscribe to various programs, that come with the strings of government funding.

And we don't have any debt. So we're blessed in both of those categories to be able to really focus on the educational project, for what we're called to do, and not get distracted by the latest thing that comes down the track. So we remind ourselves often about why we exist. And we ask the question, if Patrick Henry didn't exist tomorrow, what would be missing? What would be missing from the landscape? Because there are a lot of Christian colleges or a lot of the people that are doing good things. But we feel that the niche that we're specifically focused on in Christian classical education is a very important niche.

So you're asking about vision. We're continuing to grow. We don't see ourselves as being a huge place. That's not what we're designed to do, because the gearing between student and professor has to stay low to have the kind of mentoring relationships that are so important in this kind of model, so we’re at about 420 students, we think full build-out for us would be about 900 students.

We own 130 acres in western Loudoun County, Virginia, free and clear. So there's plenty. We've only developed a third of it. We have plenty of room to grow. But it's not growth for the sake of numbers. It's growth in terms of getting the right students. The mission field is a big deal for us. And students that want to study in this model, because it's hard. I mean, we're kind of known for three things, and that's high academic rigor, fidelity to the spirit of the American founding and then an unwavering biblical worldview. And you combine all those things. And it's a unique student that wants to come and really work hard from an academic standpoint, especially these days. But the ones that do, and they do well go.

Marlin Detweiler

Isn't there an emphasis also– partly because of being located just west of DC, and maybe because of the people involved in leadership like yourself. Isn't there an emphasis on, preparing students for working in Washington and working with federal concerns? I've gotten that impression. Is that a reasonable one?

Jack Haye

Yeah. Well, yes, it is a reasonable one. That's what a lot of our students do. And because of our proximity to Capitol Hill and the success that our students have had as interns and also working in administrations and think tanks, they're highly sought after. And, in fact, we get calls from DC all the time saying we need more interns because they know how to write. They know how to, you know, to do research.

Marlin Detweiler

So they become interns. Do they also then Secret Service is a place some go?

Jack Haye

Yeah!

Marlin Detweiler

How about the think tanks you mentioned and elected officials as well? I realize there's typically a little bit of time between a college graduate and an elected official on a federal level, but is that starting to happen as well?

Jack Haye

Yeah, we're seeing it on the state level. We've had two elected state representatives. And yes, because one of our emphases is also on national security and strategic intelligence. And so all of the three letter agencies, we have alums there, but also a really strong group of interns, and it's really a great opportunity because the students that go into those internships, many times a graduate and they already have the security clearance that puts them way ahead.

In some of the comments we get back from those who are supervising their internships, talking about their ability to research things and to think through complex issues carefully, and to write about them in a way that is succinct.

Marlin Detweiler

Yeah. Well, and of course, the fact that they believe that God is sovereign over everything, bringing that into the context of a federal government conversation that believes that it is sovereign sometimes, is a nice wake-up call in that conversation. And, I gotta believe that the more you seed into that, the more we tip the scales back to a place where we do recognize God for who he is, even in a pluralistic environment.

Jack Haye

Amen. That is certainly the prayer. I was at a gathering in D.C. last spring. And a senator was speaking, and he's a very outspoken believer and he made the point. He said, “People often say that Washington, DC is just like Sodom and Gomorrah and, you know, the God's given up on it.” And he said, “But, you know, there's a difference because when God had given up, he took his people out of Sodom and Gomorrah. He's still sending people into Washington to make a difference.” And I thought, you know, that's really encouraging to know that there are people that see what they're doing is much bigger than just winning a political contest.

So I get encouraged when I get around people like that, you know, because you can read the news, and I read the news, and you think, oh my goodness, but it gives me great hope to be around these students, to see their enthusiasm in their commitment, their poise.

And I'll tell you a quick story. This past spring, I was invited to speak at a series of summits on religious freedom in Pakistan. And I took two students with me, and we spent 17 days crisscrossing the country, meeting with very high political figures, meeting with religious figures, and to watch these students carry themselves–and they were they're rising juniors, they had done their research, to ask questions. They had microphones stuck in front of them, TV cameras wherever they went.

And they handled themselves just beautifully because going into Pakistan to talk about religious freedom is not a very popular thing. And so, but you see how the Lord was just shaping their hearts to be able to stand up for people that are being persecuted in a way that is both listening, but also very, you know, we need to make some progress here. It was great.

Marlin Detweiler

Well, you've really answered a question that I was kind of leaving for the end and we're not done yet. But the thing is you always want to know what do you hope to produce.

Jack Haye

Yeah!

Marlin Detweiler

And the idea of producing young people who are way ahead of their peers and quite capable at being rhetorically effective in their engagement in cultural conversation and broader cultural issues and in the society is so important to having an impact. You know, we've, as Christians, we've been, marginalized and sometimes, I think legitimately so for just putting on blinders and wanting nothing to do with what's out there because it might be thought of and is in many instances sinful and evil, and so we don't want to be part of it. But the student that's going to have an impact is one who recognizes that for what it is, but can still engage it and hold his ground in a righteous way while being there, addressing the issues and concerns.

Jack Haye

That's exactly right. It's a matter of being firm in convictions but respectful in interactions. And so that doesn't happen by accident either, because the years 18 to 22 are so important. And as one parent told me one time that they worked really hard to get their kids through high school and they've bought a solid foundation for them. He said. But the dad said, “But the cement is still wet, and over 18 to 22. It's going to set up a lot”.

The deepest impressions that are going to be made in those four years are by two things the community that they keep and the professors they study with. And so we know that. And so we're very careful in our hiring and our, our professors generally say for a long, long time.

And then the community that we try and build is a learning community. That's based on scripture that's based on God's word to give them a solid foundation. Because you're exactly right. They have to be willing not only able, but willing to step into it. And so one of the things that I encourage that I teach a leadership class there as well, is that at the end of the day, when one student asked me one time at the end of the semester, “What is the one thing that you hope that we took from here?” And I said, “That you will lead for the glory of God and for the good of others.” Which means you have to be willing to step into complex issues. And you have to be willing to recognize that God may be calling you for that moment and be willing to step into it.

Marlin Detweiler

Yeah. One of the questions that we run into from time to time, probably more so a decade ago than today, but, asking questions in our Great Books curriculum, which is called the Omnibus, is why do we read books that have evil ideas being perpetrated by Nietzsche or Darwin or others? Why do we do that?

And the answer is because we're learning to think biblically, not only about good things, but about bad things. We want to know we're not teaching them in order to learn what the author intended. We're teaching them in order to refute what the author intended. And sometimes that involves taking on the dirt, and eventually washing your hands of it, but getting in there to understand it. And I'm glad to hear that at a collegiate level, you're seeing that also because it's a hard thing for people to realize that that's how change happens.

Jack Haye

It's true. And all important ideas have philosophical antecedents. They began someplace. And if you don't recognize where they came from, then you're going to fall for it the next time it's repackaged and are pretty read Bosman on that. So it's really important to be able to go, okay. That's a really old idea. You know, Kafka wrote about that or several years ago I had a delegation from Russia that came over and they were wanting to just they were looking at Christian education in the U.S, and they came by, and I was giving them a tour, and we were going through the college library, the bookstore.

And they were just looking at shelves and he saw the Communist Manifesto on the shelf, and he turned around and said, “Why would you have them read this?” And I said, “Well, because we need to know where not to go.” And so it is important that we recognize that these great ideas started somewhere.

And where did they go off the rail? And it's important to examine that forensically to go. They had a lot of influence. But where did you know? Where did Nietzsche go off the rail or, you know, where do we see some of these great thoughts playing out and showing the depravity of man without God? How does that work?

Marlin Detweiler

Yeah. Well, it is really great stuff. I hope that our listeners will see what's happening in a real great way at Patrick Henry. I know we've had students come there and I'm always proud to hear of our students continuing their education. That way with what you're doing. So thank you for your efforts. And, God bless you and your continued work in helping with so many others to see culture redeemed.

Jack Haye

Well, and thank you for your work, too, because the students that come from a classical education from high school are way ahead because they've already learned and they've had a spark that's been ignited in them. And we just get to build on that.

Marlin Detweiler

Yeah, folks. Thank you. We've had with us today, Jack Haye. Gotta get your last name right. I wanted to say Hays but that wasn’t right. The president of Patrick Henry College and we appreciate you being with us again today at Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. I look forward to seeing you next time.

Marlin Detweiler

Thank you, Jack.

Jack Haye

Thank you.