Fact-challenged. History-challenged. Tolerance-challenged.

Check, check, and check. That's right, this must be a post about the upside-down world of ivory towers and the inside-out people that reside therein. From the Inside Higher Ed website, an anecdote from Timothy Larsen.

I had lunch this summer with a prospective graduate student at the evangelical college where I teach. I will call him John because that happens to be his name. John has done well academically at a public university. Nevertheless, as often happens, he said that he was looking forward to coming to a Christian university, and then launched into a story of religious discrimination.

John had been a straight-A student until he enrolled in English writing. The assignment was an “opinion” piece and the required theme was “traditional marriage.” John is a Southern Baptist and he felt it was his duty to give his honest opinion and explain how it was grounded in his faith. The professor was annoyed that John claimed the support of the Bible for his views, scribbling in the margin, “Which Bible would that be?” On the very same page, John’s phrase, “Christians who read the Bible,” provoked the same retort, “Would that be the Aramaic Bible, the Greek Bible, or the Hebrew Bible?” (What could the point of this be? Did the professor want John to imagine that while the Greek text might support his view of traditional marriage, the Aramaic version did not?) The paper was rejected as a “sermon,” and given an F, with the words, “I reject your dogmatism,” written at the bottom by way of explanation.

Thereafter, John could never get better than a C for papers without any marked errors or corrections. When he asked for a reason why yet another grade was so poor he was told that it was inappropriate to quote C. S. Lewis in work for an English class because he was “a pastor.” (Lewis, of course, was actually an English professor at Cambridge University. Perhaps it was wrong to quote Lewis simply because he had said something recognizably Christian.) Eventually John complained to the department chair, who said curtly that he could do nothing until the course was over. John took this to mean that the chair would do nothing and just accepted the bad grade.

Read the entire piece. Yep, I'm sure this sort of thing is exactly what was intended and dreamed about by the Christians—scholastics, monks, nuns, etc.!—who founded universities back in the good old days of the "Dark Ages." Thankfully, we now live in the most enlightened, tolerant, and open-minded culture in the history of the world—and if you disagree, well, you can forget about ever teaching Queer Studies at the University of Unintended Secular Hilarity.

Comments

[David K. Monroe]

Wow. Get a load of the comments page for that article. Post after post of people essentially, saying, "No, you idiots aren't being persecuted. But if you were, it would be A-OK, because you deserve no respect."

[LJ]

“I reject your dogmatism,”

Chesterton would say that this was an error of fact. What the professor should have said, to be accurate would be "I reject your dogma." That was the real problem. The student John just put down the wrong dogma. Had he agreed with the professor's dogma he would have received high marks. He would not have been penalized for being dogmatic because nobody is ever considered dogmatic who agrees with the popular dogma.

[Janny]

The only protest of any of this that will get action is for alums to quit sending money to the institution in question. That was among the things that prompted the U. of I. action with Ken Powell (meager though it was, at least it was something)...not just the thousands of people who joined the Facebook page and wrote to the administration of the university. Follow the money. If alums have the guts to say, "Until you pursue legitimate scholarly inquiry and exchange of ideas at this university, and cease being nothing more than a bully pulpit for secular liberalism, you can count on exactly zero dollars from me," then things will change. But if people wring their hands on one side, and then contribute to said university in the hopes that maybe their contributions will bring about change...they're kidding themselves and being taken for a ride that can only end with them wondering what went wrong.

Follow the money. If it stops, the abuse stops. Universities cannot continue to be propaganda factories if the funds to support them dry up, and in contrast, funds are channeled instead to institutions that honestly promote "higher learning."

JB

[anonymous]

I teach physics at a state university, and my experience with both students and administration compels me to make the following observations.

1. Unless he has evidence, the student's description of his experience has to be taken with a grain of salt. A year or two ago a student complained to the department chair that I had called her stupid in front of the class. Of course I had not. When we finally figured out what she was complaining about, it was that she had come to the front of the class to ask me for what amounted to the answer to a question on a midterm. I told her that it was her job to tell me. She complained that that implied somehow that she was stupid, and that it had been overheard by other students. I was warned to be more careful in what I say to students.

Yes, even Bible-believing, Evangelical Christians can tell a story that paints them in a better light than would an objective recitation of the facts. John's story of the noble student oppressed by evil faculty makes him a little too heroic and a little too faultless for me to accept it without documentation. Make it your son in a calculus class and you'd see what I mean.

2. As I mentioned above,the department head can always call in a faculty member for a good chewing out, even if he can't so easily intervene in a grade conflict before the semester is done.

3. A great deal of deference is given to the instructor of record, and this is as it should be. Having administrators micromanage grading would create far worse problems.

4. The department head probably could not affect a grade until the end of the semester for the simple reason that a grade doesn't exist until the end of the semester. Test grades and assignment grades are not recorded on a transcript. Once the grade is recorded, every university has procedures for appealing a grade. John needed to read his student handbook.