Conservative thinkers and activists have long worried that the faith of young people would be threatened by the dangerous skepticism they learned in college.

A recent flap at Florida Atlantic University demonstrates the continuing worry over the anti-faith teaching on offer in American higher education.

In this story, student Ryan Rotela protested when instructor Deandre Poole told students to write the word “Jesus” on a piece of paper, then stomp on it.  According to reports, Rotela claimed to have been suspended from class for his unwillingness to complete the assignment.  The university later apologized.

The flurry of interest in this story among conservatives tells us something about their attitudes toward higher education.

Paul Kengor, for example, executive director of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College, told Fox News’ Todd Starnes this sort of Jesus-bashing was typical of today’s higher education.  This sort of lesson “reflects the rising confidence and aggression of the new secularists and atheists, especially at our sick and surreal modern universities,” Kengor said.

This anxiety over the goings-on at “modern” universities has a long lineage.

In 1922, for example, William Jennings Bryan warned that even among rich and powerful families, college threatened students’ faith.  One of Bryan’s acquaintances, a US Congressman, told Bryan that his daughter had returned from college only to inform him that “nobody believed in the Bible stories now.”  Nor was this an isolated case, Bryan argued.  Other Congressmen and prominent clergy had shared similar stories.  Children had gone off to school, only to return with a set of values and ideas abhorrent to their parents.    [See William Jennings Bryan, In His Image (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1922), 120.]

Patriotic conservative activists in the 1930s shared these worries about the nature of “modern” schools.  In 1935, for instance, New York Congressman Hamilton Fish denounced the socialism and communism that had corrupted leading schools such as Columbia, New York University, City College of New York, the University of Chicago, Wisconsin, Penn, and North Carolina.  Such schools, Fish charged, had become “honeycombed with Socialists, near Communists and Communists.”

Conservatives have long worried about what goes on once America’s children go off to college.  What will students be asked to do at college?  What will they be forced to learn?  Will they be punished if they refuse to stomp on Jesus?

**UPDATES:  Juan Williams has offered a defense of the Jesus-stomp lesson at Fox News.  And the Texas Freedom Network Insider has reported that the instructor of the controversial lesson is a leader in his Biblical-Christian church, Lighthouse Worship Center Church of God in Christ.  Does that matter?