Education Quote by Tony Campolo

The line lands like a brochure sentence, and that’s partly the point. Campolo isn’t trying to be lyrical; he’s staking out moral territory. As a clergyman speaking from inside an evangelical institution, he’s using the language of “commitment” the way churches use creeds: to signal identity, police priorities, and reassure listeners that faith isn’t just private piety. “Highly committed” is deliberately vague, more posture than program, but it functions as a pledge to audiences who worry that universities (especially Christian ones) drift into comfort, abstraction, and careerism.

The phrase “the poor and the oppressed peoples of the world” widens the frame to the global South and the era’s activism-inflected Christianity: liberation theology, civil rights aftershocks, and a growing insistence that the Gospel has public consequences. It’s also a subtle rebuke to missions-as-charity. “Among” implies proximity rather than outreach from a safe distance; it’s an ethics of presence, not just aid.

Then he snaps the focus back: “a special commitment to the city.” In American religious culture, “the city” is code. It evokes race, immigration, inequality, crime-panics, and the long history of white flight and suburban church growth. Campolo is saying: we’re not opting out. We’re choosing the contested space where need is visible and where moral rhetoric has to cash out in messy relationships, not just donations. The subtext is institutional legitimacy: a university earns its Christian credibility by staying close to the people most likely to be ignored.