On a Friday afternoon, around 2:30 p.m., Philip Graham Ryken is posing for a photoshoot.
Staff from the Wheaton College alumni relations team fill his Blanchard Hall office with light stands, a camera and a range of college-branded hats.
Ryken, in a navy suit, stands in a bookshelf-laden corner, lights bearing down. At 6’3”, he’s taller than everyone else in the room. The photographer, junior communication major Josias Torres, has to stand on a stool to get the angle right. While Torres finagles the setup, Ryken tries on the different hats. He balks at a high-profile orange baseball cap.
“I doubt it’s a good look for me,” he warns. “But for Wheaton College, I will wear it.”
From the amiable, easy atmosphere in the room, you’d never expect that somewhere on the internet or in his inbox, someone is most likely winding up to find fault with Ryken. He estimates he receives some form of criticism every day. And that’s in peacetime, when he’s not navigating a crisis.
Ryken, going into his 14th year as president of Wheaton, has had to get used to this. He’s led Wheaton through perhaps its most tumultuous years, as the divides in American evangelical culture cut across the historic Christian campus in suburban Chicagoland – with effects that can ripple all around the world. Ryken himself, although caught in the middle of divides over race, sexuality, gender and theology, projects a stable figure trying to listen and learn while holding fast to his convictions.
When photos are finished, Ryken says he doesn’t need to see the results, but Torres clicks through them anyway. Ryken approves with a quick, shy glance at the camera, as if he’s waving off a compliment. The alumni team files out, taking their Wheaton hats with them.
It’s another afternoon in the workday of the president. He takes most meetings in his office suite, a courtesy his executive assistant Heather Mack says is granted by people who meet with him, to keep the president’s schedule on time and save him from running around campus.
His daily calendar is a revolving door of student chats, alumni one-on-ones, Senior Administrative Cabinet (SAC) member briefings, committee and board sessions, scheduling with his assistants, speaking gigs, fundraising trips, prayer meetings and hosting at his home.
Amid all of that, he finds time to attend events across campus throughout the week. On any given night at the college, there’s an academic lecture, a sports game or meet, a recital, a worship night, a dance or all of the above. Ryken usually makes an appearance at a few.
Ryken remembers what it was like to be a student at such events. While attending Wheaton from 1984 to 1988, he ran the gamut of student activities: he led tours as a Deke, was a resident assistant on Traber Hall’s second floor, was on the Orientation Committee, served on the student cabinet for the Office of Ministry and Evangelism, worked at HoneyRock, Wheaton’s camp in the North Woods and played intramurals. The intramurals he still dabbles in: once as a player, now, as he gets older, as a coach.
Around campus, Ryken makes a point of knowing everyone’s names. He greets students personally. He cheers athletes by name from the sidelines, and, according to athletic director Michael Schauer, the students really notice. So do staff and faculty.
“I think we all feel like we know him,” Schauer said. “And that’s really hard when you’re talking about several thousand people that report to him.”
In his office, the shelves of which are piled high with everything from faculty books and Bible commentaries to Dickens and Adichie, Ryken holds office hours with students most weeks.
These conversations are led by pastoral questions, too: regardless of the topic, he often asks about their sense of vocation and their involvement at church; he remembers details about their families; he talks sports with them. When students invite him to something — a weekly Bible study meeting, a floor event, an intramural tournament — he does his best to show up.
“This is not just a place where he’s come to work,” said Paul Chelsen, vice president for student development. “It’s a place that he’s coming back home to, and I think that’s pretty special.”
Ryken’s experience of Wheaton began when he was two years old. His father, Leland Ryken, an Iowa-born English professor, joined Wheaton’s faculty in 1968, fresh out of his Ph.D. program at the University of Oregon. Leland Ryken’s three children, of which Philip is the oldest, grew up in Wheaton’s suburban surroundings as their father taught Milton, Lewis and the literature of the Bible.
Nancy Ryken Taylor, the youngest, remembers her brother as a teenager. He was five years older than the middle sister, Margaret, and ten years older than Taylor. Growing up, Ryken did “all the smart people things.” He attended Wheaton Christian Grammar School, competed on the debate team at Wheaton North High School, collected academic accolades, and tutored peers and even briefly an adult family friend in statistics.
He had attended church services at Pierce Chapel on the college’s campus and spent summers on college-sponsored trips to England with his parents and cohorts of Wheaton students. Enrolling at Wheaton College was a natural next step.
In his first few days on campus, he met Lisa Maxwell ‘88, whom he would marry before their senior year. After graduating with a double major in English literature and philosophy, Ryken went on to a Master’s in Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, followed by a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Oxford.
When the Rykens returned stateside in 1995, he joined the staff of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. In 2000, at the age of 33, he became the church’s youngest senior minister. Nine years later, as a trustee for his alma mater, he saw a list of criteria as the Board of Trustees began to search for a new president. Ryken couldn’t help but notice that all those criteria applied to him.
Returning Home
The outgoing president, Duane Litfin, agreed. Several years earlier, Litfin, who had helmed Wheaton for 17 years, told Ryken the job might one day be his.
“He took that in, and said, ‘Hmm, really?” Litfin remembers. “And that was it, that’s all. And I never came back to him about that.”
Five years later, when the presidential search committee began, Litfin spoke up for Ryken whenever he was asked.
“I couldn’t have told you who was on the list that the search committee was looking at, but I knew Phil would be on that list,” said Litfin. “And when I was consulted, I said, ‘I don’t think you’re likely to be able to do better than Phil Ryken.’”
In February 2010, the Board of Trustees unanimously approved Ryken’s candidacy. His second-youngest daughter, Kathryn, now a senior at Wheaton, remembers the night at a local Chili’s in Philadelphia when her parents told the family that they would be moving to the little suburb of Wheaton, where they had spent plenty of time visiting the Ryken side of the family. With a tearful Lisa at his side, Ryken broke the news of his departure a few days later to the congregation at Tenth.
That summer was full of festivities and introductions. Marilee Melvin ‘72, who served both Litfin and Ryken in turn as executive assistant, remembers being surprised by Ryken’s vigorous involvement in planning the ceremony.
“I said, ‘Dr. Ryken, we’re planning it for you. You don’t plan it for yourself,’” Melvin said.
After the ceremony, Ryken wrote 300 thank-you notes to everyone who had participated in the ceremony. That was the beginning of Melvin’s understanding of Ryken’s extraordinary work ethic, she said.
He learns as fast as he works: many colleagues note how much Ryken can and will take in just about anything. He loves sports as much as he loves philosophy and science. He’s ready to dig into any topic.
Kirk Farney, vice president for advancement, vocation and alumni engagement, said that instinct and love of learning, coupled with humility to embrace different ideas, is what distinguishes Ryken as a leader.
“President Ryken is unique in that even though he takes in information and comes up with opinions quickly, he also takes in new information and new opinions very openly, and often will change his mind based upon that,” Farney said.
This openness to new perspectives was a trait some felt was needed in Wheaton’s president as the college entered the 2010s.
The school was doing well despite the aftermath of a recession, with 3,005 students enrolled for the fall of 2011, down only a couple dozen from the previous year, according to data from the Illinois Board of Higher Education. But faculty were hoping a new president would bring a different approach to the campus culture.
Ryken’s predecessors had taken a “magisterial” approach to the school’s Community Covenant and Statement of Faith, wrote Andrew Chignall ‘96, then a professor at Cornell, in an article for the SoMa Review in 2009.
A core group of administrators would determine how to interpret the rules and then share their interpretation with the campus. Chignall said that faculty were hoping a new president would open up more room for a spectrum of input.
“How much wiggle-room for reasonable, charitable differences in interpretation can be allowed while still preserving a school’s distinctive confessional character?” Chignall said, describing what he predicted to be the existential challenge of the next president’s tenure. (Chignall did not respond to a request for comment for this article).
Presiding in Tension
Fourteen years into Ryken’s presidency, Chignall’s prediction seems prophetic. Since Ryken has been in charge, American Christianity has undergone skepticism about institutions of religion and existential debates about the church’s flexibility for social progress and racial diversity, and a loss of adherents as the population of religiously unaffiliated adults rose dramatically.
Thus, the controversies that have put Wheaton’s name in the news since 2010 have largely involved the intersection of interpretive differences and social issues. Ryken, while taking fire from both sides of the aisle, has steered the college through tension over race, theology and sexuality.
Tensions over gender and sexuality surfaced early in his presidency and continue today. In 2011, a group of alumni formed a network called OneWheaton to provide support for LGBTQ and allied students and alumni, in response to a chapel message which stated that living faithfully to Jesus was incompatible with a same-sex relationship. In 2015, Julie Rodgers, a self-described celibate gay Christian who had been hired the previous year as an associate chaplain to support students navigating same-sex attraction, was fired.
In 2018, Refuge, a group for students navigating same-sex attraction and gender identity issues, was disbanded after five years of existence, before being relaunched two years later under the umbrella of Student Wellness. It remains as a confidential support group led by a student cabinet and advised by Chelsen.
The last decade of Wheaton’s approach to sexuality has been criticized by both sides. The Princeton Review ranks Wheaton 11th on a list of the most LGBTQ-unfriendly colleges. A 2015 incident where a student was hit with an apple after asking Ryken in chapel why the Community Covenant lays out theological convictions on sexuality but not on baptism or the Eucharist was met with national media attention. Much of it called out the college’s code of conduct for LGBTQ students.
While some assailed Wheaton — and Ryken — for adherence to traditional ideas about Christianity and sexuality, changing political and social conditions regarding race brought out the opposite kind of Wheaton critics: those fearing the infiltration of “wokeness” in American institutions.
These concerns were aired most recently in a fiery opinion piece by Tim Scheiderer, a freelance writer, which appeared on Fox News’ website on Jan. 31, 2024. Scheiderer argued that Wheaton was going “woke” and straying from its biblical commitments. Without citing sources, Scheiderer blamed, in part, the teaching of critical race theory and perceived softness on gender and sexuality.
Scheiderer’s argument is not a new complaint. Parents, alumni and even former employees and students have written scathing, cross-referenced articles about Wheaton’s approach to race and sexuality. But on the Facebook boards and aforementioned blogs, the article was just one more log on the fire.
“The Fox piece speaks to a truth about this school that shows it is slowly but surely losing its moorings,” wrote one self-described alumnus in a Facebook comment on the Fox article. In the same comment section, alumni and others defended the college’s convictions and condemned the article.
The fears from some alumni, donors and prospective parents that Wheaton is “going woke,” stirred in part by Ryken’s focus on diversity, has not deterred him. From the beginning, Melvin said, Ryken had a desire to learn what Wheaton needed to do to be more hospitable to students and community members of color.
“Presidents Chase and Litfin, as well as Ryken, shared the vision and revelation that the kingdom is every tribe and tongue and nation,” Melvin said. “But the focus now has new clarity and intensity for Ryken. He has had life lessons that helped him understand how God is at work in the racial problem in the US, revealing a double-standard in our hypocrisy as evidence in the continued segregation of black and white churches, among other things.”
Billye Kee, associate director of the Office of Multicultural Development (OMD), saw this vision from the beginning, too. She remembers helping as a staff member at Ryken’s inauguration, while she was working for Career Services, the predecessor to the Center for Vocation and Career. Since then, she’s seen Ryken acting on both a vision and a plan for diversity at Wheaton.
“Plans can change,” Kee said. “Dr. Ryken had a vision, and typically a vision, especially if it is from God, will not change.”
Efforts To Increase Diversity
In 2018, Ryken made one of the most significant steps in implementing his vision through the addition of a position to his cabinet: Chief Intercultural Engagement Officer. He appointed Sheila Caldwell, then a diversity advisor to the president at the University of North Georgia.
In 2020, Caldwell launched the Rodney Sisco Symposium, a now-annual event held on a Christian campus to promote leadership and diversity in honor of the late Rodney K. Sisco, former director of the Wheaton OMD.
Caldwell, along with the office of Student Development, also organized the first Minority Senior Recognition Ceremony in May 2021, and around the same time, she announced her intention to leave Wheaton for Southern Illinois University. The ceremony garnered some criticism online, with conservative commentators referring to it as “racially segregated” and proof that Wheaton was “going woke.” But it has been held every year since.
Since 2010, Wheaton has gone from 13 percent minority students to 28 percent, according to data from the office of Institutional Research. Ryken acknowledged that a more diverse student body, faculty and administration brings unique challenges because the constituency of the college is no longer as monolithic as one might expect.
“That makes life harder, not easier,” he said. “It makes life better in many ways. It makes life richer. It gives us expanded opportunities to understand the church and understand ourselves. But when you’re leaning into areas of racial and ethnic difference, when you are a more global community, there are just things that are harder about that, that take more intentionality.”
This past fall, a Historical Review Task Force (HRTF) spent two years researching Wheaton’s history, and ultimately produced a comprehensive report in October 2023 about Wheaton’s racial history. The report included a commitment from the Board of Trustees to rename the library, named for former President J. Oliver Buswell. The Task Force’s findings revealed Buswell’s hesitancy to enroll Black students during his tenure at Wheaton in the mid-twentieth century.
Shirley V. Hoogstra, outgoing president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, of which Wheaton was a founding member, has worked with Ryken since her accession to the role in 2014. She mentioned the HRTF report as an admirable example of Ryken’s leadership and institutional goals.
“It is a theologically deep and sound report, done in the excellent way Wheaton does reports,” said Hoogstra. “And Dr. Ryken’s leadership style consistently supports that kind of truth and excellence.”
The campus and public response to the historical review was largely positive, although some criticized the decision to scratch Buswell’s name, calling it an un-Christian expression of cancel culture.
Student leaders in the OMD saw the HRTF report as an important step in the right direction, and the achievement of some of their longtime hopes, like the library name change. But some voiced concerns about what the report lacked, particularly, a survey of student culture regarding race as well as institutional policies.
Alani Oyola, senior English Writing major and vice president of Unidad Cristiana, the Latino student union, said that some in her circles were more upset by the timing of the report, which came out on Sept. 14, the day before Hispanic Heritage Month began. The annual Unidad chapel, which had been scheduled for the following day, was rescheduled at the last minute to make room for a service led by administrators and focused on responding to the report.
At a later town hall where Ryken took questions about the report, he said the timing was coordinated with his own travel schedule and to give the community time to read and process the report. Oyola commended Ryken’s ownership of the decision, but said she wasn’t satisfied. She said OMD student leaders questioned why Ryken hadn’t taken the OMD’s programming into consideration.
“I was disappointed by that answer,” she said. “Because I was like, ‘Dude, really? You were navigating this momentous decision around your travel schedule?”
Responses to Tension
Even in hard moments, Ryken rarely, if ever, becomes noticeably shaken. As criticism comes, family and close friends sometimes get more concerned than he is about how it’s affecting him. But they see Ryken cling to his Christian faith.
“Some of us around him get a little bit more worked up than he does, because we’re worried about him and how he’s coping,” said Taylor, his sister. “And he is able to trust the Lord and do what he’s supposed to do. He has the confidence to say, ‘This is before me today, and I will do what I think is right, and it’ll be okay because the Lord is sovereign.’ It’s not about him, it’s about God’s glory.”
Those closest to him try to avoid asking about the provocative headlines or buzzy campus issues when possible, Taylor said. In this, his home life and work life are separate, or at least, his family tries to keep it so. On certain tough occasions, close friends and family have gathered at the Rykens’ home to pray together about a decision or its effects on the campus.
When tension really hurts, Ryken said, is when the campus itself is split, or when outside observers make conclusions about the college’s motives when all the information can’t be shared.
“And you feel like, ‘If you just actually knew what had happened, or if you actually knew what motivated this decision,’” he said. “People think it reflects poorly on you and that’s why you’re not saying anything, but it may actually not be appropriate to share, it may actually reflect poorly on others, but that’s not really helpful to our community to share.”
Perhaps the tensest moment of Ryken’s presidency came in 2016. That year, Larycia Hawkins, professor of political science, was placed on administrative leave and then fired after announcing her intention on Facebook to wear a hijab during Advent in solidarity with Muslims. Students protested, faculty circulated letters of support, parents and donors threatened to withdraw funding and the story was broadcast all over the world. Ryken, six years into the role, was named in every critique.
Still, eight years later, the Hawkins mentions persist when critics take aim at Wheaton. Ryken and his family have had to get used to personal attacks, largely online. Mostly, he’s able to let it go. He knows that’s always part and parcel with leadership, especially high-visibility leadership.
“If there’s criticism of the college, it’s going to be criticism of me, in one sense or another,” he said.
When a crisis happens, whether it’s an intracampus conflict, the death of a student, or a faculty controversy, the people around Ryken notice how he projects a pastoral calm.
“He’s a non-anxious presence in a time of crisis,” said Chelsen. In those moments, Chelsen said, the pastoral Ryken is front and center.
That steadiness, some say, can be perceived as distance. Timothy Larsen, professor of history and Christian thought, said that although he sees Ryken’s calm approach as a leadership strength, he has observed moments where people seek more of a sympathetic response. That can also mean that it’s not clear where Ryken stands on an issue.
“When people have done something very unjust, he’s not the one who can articulate why people feel so outraged,” said Larsen. “Because of his calmness, the faculty are not always sure if he sees this as a problem. But he’s waiting for how to deal with it, or if he does not really know it’s a problem, because he’s not letting on very much.”
Ryken has lost friends and colleagues because of decisions he’s made, whether as a direct result of an administration decision or because of theological differences revealed by one. As president, he said, you have fewer opportunities to develop true friends. His friends are largely those who have known him since before he was president and other college presidents around the country.
Running a place like Wheaton isn’t something he can easily check at the front door when he gets home.
Looking Forward
College presidents often measure their impact in capital campaigns, which are targeted fundraising efforts over a set period of time, usually four to five years at Wheaton. President Litfin, when he refers to his own time as president, still talks about its highs and lows in terms of the capital campaigns he oversaw.
Ryken is looking ahead to the end of the current one, called “Faithfully Forward,” which kicked off in 2022 and includes significant funding for renovations to athletic facilities and the library as well as more funding for financial aid and scholarships. By June 2026, the college hopes to raise $225 million to fund these projects.
Some of his vision for the future of Wheaton includes the continued development of a vibrant campus culture coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic was the “final death blow,” he said, for some well-loved campus traditions like class movie nights, where each class would make a film for the year and hold a red-carpet premiere in Edman Chapel. Ryken also recalls a lost “dynamism” in Lower Beamer in the evenings, and more students once involved in extracurricular activities for fun, two aspects of student culture he said he misses.
Ryken knows the role of the Christian college president, along with its secular counterpart, is changing fast. Presidents in general are staying in the job for increasingly less time: according to a 2023 report by the American Council on Education, a typical president has been in their position for an average of 5.9 years, down from 8.5 in 2006. Going on 14 years, Ryken bucks the trend.
The job also requires more and different skills than it used to. Hoogstra, the CCCU president, said the news cycle that presidents must deal with nowadays requires them to have more media competency than they once did. Once they hit social media, campus stories don’t stay on campuses; they can spiral into controversies that require careful presidential responses. In the last six months, the Israel-Hamas war has resulted in the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, among others, resigning after their statements on campus free speech regarding the war sparked outrage.
There are also different financial pressures facing colleges in general. Hoogstra said the oncoming shortage of college-age students is tightening college presidents’ abilities to get their aims accomplished. There’s also a reckoning in higher education more broadly about the purpose of college in light of changing job markets and the steep cost of higher ed, which Hoogstra said demands different approaches from colleges on how they make a degree appealing.
As Christian colleges around the country shutter, shift to online-only or strengthen their political positioning, financial concerns are a prominent theme. It’s a significant change from most of Litfin’s years, when Wheaton, like other peer institutions, had a surplus in its budget nearly every year.
“There are very few institutions that have anything like that kind of operating margin anymore,” Ryken said. “And it means that you’ve got fewer resources to do the things that you want to do. So your great ideas matter less because you don’t have the resources to carry them out.”
Ryken said he’s optimistic about where the college’s budget is going now, thanks to the Strategic Budget Review, which wrapped up in 2022 and resulted in some faculty and staff downsizing and slightly higher student fees, among other budget reductions.
When he talks with prospective students, Ryken is realistic with them. He tells them about the specific opportunities that Wheaton can offer them in their intended program of study, even in scientific fields where they might be skeptical of a liberal arts approach. And while the medical school placements and career outcomes are healthy statistics, he reminds prospective students of the timeless Wheaton values: relationships with faculty and peers and a focus on learning how to learn.
Yes, things are changing in prominent ways for Wheaton, for his role and for higher education, Ryken said. But the campus he knew as a child is still alive and well, present in more than the limestone of Blanchard Hall.
“What impresses me more about higher education, including Christ-centered higher education and Wheaton, is the things that feel the same,” he said. “In so many ways, it’s a similar relationship between faculty and students. Students are thinking about their calling, ‘What’s my place in the world,’ ‘How am I going to use my gifts?’”
Those who describe Wheaton College’s place in Christian higher education have many epithets for it: the “standard-bearer,” the “Harvard of Christian schools,” the “flagship evangelical” institution. If Wheaton is a flagship, Philip Ryken is its captain. There is wind, and there are waves, but they’re not the main problem; keeping the ship heading in the right direction is his mission and purpose.
“To me, there’s always an overarching challenge: remaining academically, biblically, theologically faithful to our Christ-centered liberal arts mission from one generation to the next and staying on course,” he said.
“And there are all kinds of things that are trying to knock you off course, all kinds of things that come up that are challenges on the way. But that’s the meta-challenge, which has been the challenge for past and probably future presidents of Wheaton College as well.”
