“Our faith commits us to engaging the world all around us,” said Kevin den Dulk, a political-science professor who graduated from Calvin in the 1990s, during an interview in the DeVos Communication Center, which sits across from the Prince Conference Center bearing the secretary’s maiden name. (Her mother, Elsa, is also an alum.)

Den Dulk’s words aren’t just PR fluff; it’s a concept borne out by the school’s 141-year history and the Dutch-influenced part of western Michigan it calls home. The Christian Reformed Church is a Protestant tradition that has its roots in the Netherlands and has been deeply influenced by the theologian Abraham Kuyper, a believer in intellectualism—specifically the idea that groups with different beliefs can operate in the same space according to their convictions while respecting and understanding others. “Fundamentalism is really anti-intellectual and Calvin is the exact opposite,” said Alan Wolfe, the author of a 2000 Atlantic piece about efforts to revitalize evangelical Christian colleges.

As Wolfe noted, Christian colleges are no monolith. Where evangelical colleges like Calvin, Pepperdine University, and Baylor University are “part of a determined effort by evangelical-Christian institutions to create a life of the mind,” fundamentalist schools like Bob Jones University have often taught that the bible should be taken literally and resisted intellectual debate. As Wolfe noted, quoting the historian Mark Noll, fundamentalists had "a weakness for treating the verses of the Bible as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that needed only to be sorted and then fit together to possess a finished picture of divine truth." Professors and students at Calvin said they feel that distinction is often blurred when people talk about religious colleges, as is the fact that students at Calvin have long grappled with social and political issues that some fundamentalist Bible colleges have studiously avoided.

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Buried in the dusty stacks of Calvin’s library are clues about the topics that gripped the campus when DeVos—then called Betsy Prince—enrolled at the school in 1975. A November article that year in the Calvin Chimes student newspaper, now part of the library’s collection, bears the headline “Black Community Discusses Problems With Law Enforcement Officials, Sets Goals.” A piece the following year entitled “Cultural Poverty” reports on a “racial-awareness conference” where students “spoke of the need for history courses on minority groups.” The story pointed out that most of the scholars and writings students studied were Caucasian, and urged readers to push past the notion that western culture is “most influential” and question “why this civilization is most influential.” Later the piece asserts that the reason has to do with the “arrogance” of western people.

The fall after DeVos graduated with a degree in business economics in the spring of 1979, the school’s magazine, Spark, published an article called “Calvin Probes Shortcomings,” about how minority students were not always served well at Christian schools and Calvin, specifically. “It was apparent from the discussion that there were differences of opinion regarding the extent of the problem and what actions should be taken to redress the situation,” the article said. One black alum, the piece continued, “noted that, although he was deeply grateful for his Calvin education, he had reluctantly concluded that he could not always recommend a college education at Calvin to black friends and members of his congregation.”