Office of the President

David Crabtree

David Crabtree was born and raised in Oregon. He received his B.A. in Russian Languages and Literature in 1975 from the University of Washington. After finishing college, David attended Scribe School at Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California. Over the next few years, he made several extended trips to Europe, spending about three years in three different counties. Twice he went to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) to study Russian at Leningrad State University. He spent nine months in Paris working as an au pair and a year in Rome working with missionary organizations helping Soviet Jews emigrate to the United States. In 1982, he began working for McKenzie Study Center (MSC), where he had met his wife, Susan. The Crabtrees currently live on a small farm just outside Eugene, where David and Susan have raised and homeschooled their four children, two of whom attend Gutenberg College.

David taught in the Biblical Exegesis program at MSC for seven years, until MSC discontinued the program. Because the program did not grant students a degree upon completion, students had difficulty justifying to themselves and to family the sacrifices that such a program required; MSC therefore discontinued the program when it was unable to attract and retain enough students to support itself. On the basis of their experience with the Biblical Exegesis program, however, several MSC staff members decided to return to school to earn advanced degrees in order to make possible a degree-granting program at some time in the future. David earned an M.A. in Classical Greek and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Oregon.

As a graduate student, David began to think about higher education. For most of history, the goal of education had been to impart wisdom and maturity—that is, to teach students how to live wisely. The questions at the heart of education were issues at the heart of being human: What is man? Who is God? How ought man relate to God? Modern society, however, has adopted the historically recent perspective that the goal of education is training for the workplace. This shift has been so complete that educational institutions now avoid the very issues on which education historically focused. As a result, a student can go through the entire educational process without ever thinking about the most critical questions of human existence—without ever thinking about what it means to live a good life.

Furthermore, David concluded that our colleges and universities are not doing a good job of teaching basic learning skills. For example, MSC had designed the curriculum for its School of Biblical Exegesis assuming that the students would enter the program already skilled (that is, equipped to read difficult works with understanding, to write well, and to think critically), but although most of the students were college graduates, most had not mastered these skills. David began to discuss with his colleagues at MSC what would constitute a sound undergraduate education—one that would have been good preparation for the School of Biblical Exegesis. Their conclusions led David and three colleagues to begin designing an undergraduate program patterned after the Great-Books curriculum. After two years of planning, Gutenberg College opened its doors in 1994.