Who Will Stand Up for Christian University Faculty?

We Have A Collective Action Problem

Yesterday, Wheaton Visiting Professor Joey Cochran wrote a remarkable post on The Anxious Bench (where he serves as editor). He recounts how shortly after the Hamas October attack, he had written a piece for Anxious Bench on the topic. He followed that with a social media post critiquing the Just War narrative being embraced by many evangelical thought leaders.

The following Friday evening, I crafted a social media post (since retracted) in response to the ongoing “Just War” narrative on social media. My original intent argued that it is easy to center voices from positions of safety and privilege. However, it’s more pertinent to center voices that are close to the carnage of hostilities.

Nonetheless, we continue to privilege white, western voices in these conversations, which comes as no surprise since those voices have policed the world, intervened in trans-national affairs, and profited through the arms production that undergirds escalating global violence.

When I crafted the post, I knew it would touch a nerve. That’s what thoughtful public work does. I had no idea how much it would cost my family.

I discovered the next morning that the post had awoken the angst of detractors. Notably, Andrew Walker, the ethics professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, set in motion the ire of a cadre of critics, including Mollie Hemingway, William Wolfe, Tom Ascol, and Meghan Basham.

As it happens, Joey and I already had scheduled a Zoom conversation for yesterday. We were talking about his forthcoming book on “Brand Evangelicalism”, my book, evangelical gatekeepers (like those above), and life at Wheaton. Naturally, we also spent time discussing what he wrote about in yesterday’s Anxious Bench piece.

The good news is that some of Joey’s administrators and colleagues had come alongside to provide support in light of the attacks. Given some of Wheaton’s past challenges, there is some encouragement to be drawn from that.

On Sunday my Department Chair phoned me. Then a face-to-face meeting followed on Monday, in which my Department Chair prayed for me, encouraged me, and affirmed my place in our history department. A day later the Faculty Vice-Chair visited me and shared how these events coincided with the Trustee lunch. The President, Provost, and Faculty Vice-Chair watched everything unfold over lunch, including my swift reaction to retract the post, which I was commended for doing.

These conversations occurred in the shadow of recently watching the Same God documentary on Larycia Hawkins, a psychology professor at Wheaton College, who had been removed from faculty, after a viral social post instigated an organized campaign to eliminate her from Wheaton’s faculty.

He reports that while grateful for the quiet sympathy offered by colleagues, there was not a robust defense offered. He writes:

Nonetheless, I publicly stood alone. No one came to my defense when an organized campaign of white Christian nationalists targeted me.

It’s notable that Joey’s situation has so much in common with countless others in Christian Higher Education. Just last week I wrote about Matt Warner’s non-renewal from Grace. Before that we had Julie Moore at Taylor and Samuel Joechel at Palm Beach Atlantic. There have been so many others that made less news — especially when people are on contingent contracts or the institution doesn’t offer tenure (as if that matters these days!).

What is it that encourages faculty colleagues to offer quiet sympathy while withholding more vocal support? In short, for far too many Christian universities it is just too risky to challenge the operating ethos of the institution. Challenging “The Brand” attracts attention and you might just be next on everyone’s radar. Better to stay in your office, focus on tomorrow’s class prep, and leave the vocal defense to the faculty with tenure or who have retired and aren’t afraid to push back (note: it’s me!).

Photo courtesy of Zoo New England

If a faculty member rises out of their proverbial hole, there is a serious risk that that faculty member will get placed on some administrator’s list. Not that they’d act on it. They’d just keep in handy for when the next round of program efficiencies are debated.

Throughout my career I heard young faculty members raise concerns about speaking out about institutional decisions. They believed that sharing their views would be met with retribution from administrators. I would try to reassure them that there is such a thing as shared governance and academic freedom. That any administrator who engaged in such retribution was failing at their task. Unfortunately, there are far too many administrators bent on proving my view wildly optimistic.

For more senior faculty members, it is also difficult to challenge the powers that be. If one has been teaching for decades at the institution — doing professional research in summers, Christmas break and the occasional Friday afternoon — job mobility (already challenging at best) is severely hampered. Newly minted PhDs have a stronger research record and they’re cheaper. Besides, your kids are involved in school and have friends and are into sports and your spouse’s job is great. Can you risk all that just to fight today’s newest battles?

Besides, there are some faculty members in the institution who are loyal to the administration. If you venture out in support of an embattled colleague, you’ll be accused of stirring up trouble and division in the institution. They will likely spiritualize the dissent as damaging to institutional culture.

There was an interesting discussion on Facebook in response to Joey’s Anxious Bench piece. Some wondered if the AAUP might provide support to the attacked faculty member. Or maybe the accrediting body could step in.

I responded that I’ve known cases where the treatment of a faculty member has drawn the attention of the AAUP. They do an investigation which might take a year and then offer a report placing the institution on their sanction list. But they have little power to change anything. Furthermore, I fear that many Christian universities would take an AAUP sanction as a badge of honor, claiming that they are “being discriminated against by a secular organization that is demeaning their Christian values”.

Since I serve as a team chair for the Higher Learning Commission, I know that there is little that can be leveraged on that front. The HLC staff is very unlikely to become involved in personnel matters. An HLC team only comes to campus once a decade and unless the crisis emerged right before the visit, it’s likely only to be addressed in passing, if at all. I did suggest that faculty members should volunteer to serve on internal accreditation planning teams to become familiar with the accreditation criteria and make clear where things fall short. As long as a non-faculty team is writing and editing the report, everyone will put on a happy face.

So if there are too many internal forces keeping faculty members from speaking up and AAUP and HLC (or the CCCU) aren’t going to do the trick, is it hopeless? Maybe.

But as I argued last week, perhaps there’s a way that faculty members from across the Christian university landscape to come together. I don’t know exactly what that would look like.

I do have some rudimentary ideas and the first step is hosting a conversation among interested faculty members and former administrators. Yesterday I put out a question on my private Facebook page asking if there was interest in a Zoom conversation the first week in June.

One person said the problem of faculty members being singled out has reached critical mass. Another astutely said “The only thing that works is solidarity. They’ll pick us off one by one (and have been).”

I’m reluctant to say anything more about the things I’ve got in mind until after that call. And I recognize that institutions could ignore anything we come up with just as they would the AAUP.

But I’ve decided it’s way past time to begin to collectively work to support our colleagues in ways that their institutions can’t or won’t.

So far I have about a dozen people interested, even if all of them cannot make this particular meeting. I think that’s the right size for a preliminary conversation, but I’m hopeful that there might be more outreach in months to come, especially as I begin doing PR stuff for the Fearless Christian University book.