More than a decade before I joined the faculty at Northwestern College in 1992, injudicious Supreme Court decisions gave established legal precedent for tax-funded colleges and universities to exercise “racial prejudice” in their admissions policies. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), Justice Lewis Powell ruled that colleges and universities “have a compelling governmental interest in attaining a diverse student body, and race is one aspect of diversity.”[1] With his ruling, Powell effectively authored and authorized the policy that has become standard policy at academic institutions, allotting preferential status to applicants based on their “protected class” ethnicity to attain “a diverse student body.”
The standardization of the practice of giving prejudicially preferred status to select “protected ethnic groups” at taxpayer-funded academic institutions cast a long shadow that invoked those entrusted with leadership at the Coalition of Christian Colleges (now the CCCU) with headquarters in Washington, D.C., to intimidate administrators at donor-funded Christian colleges and universities to comply with their Racial/Ethnic Diversity Initiative of 1991. All member institutions were required to establish and staff a Racial/Ethnic Diversity office on campus because, allegedly, “Coalition schools failed to mirror the ethnic diversity of the surrounding culture.”[2] And, as board members, administrators, faculty, staff, students, and constituents of all CCCU academic institutions would soon learn, their failure to represent the “ethnic diversity” of their respective surrounding cultures accurately, though perhaps unintentional, was nonetheless “institutional racism,” a sin for which every white member of those institutions must repent.
In the second article in this series—“Understanding the Times 2.0—An Invisible, Electrified Ideological Wall”—I recount the momentous three-day event in January 1993 on the Christian college campus where I was midway through my first year as a member of the faculty. Three chapel sessions featured Staley Lectures delivered by Tom Skinner as a messenger on behalf of the Coalition of Christian Colleges, calling board members, administrators, faculty, staff, and students to repent for their alleged compliant guilt of “institutional racism.” Skinner was sent to the campus as an acclaimed “minister of reconciliation” under the auspices of the Coalition of Christian Colleges to move the administrators to implement the CCC’s Racial/Ethnic Diversity Initiative. Later in 1993, when the fall semester began, our college administrators announced the establishment of the Racial and Ethnic Diversity on Campus office (REDOC) and half-time staffing by a female Honduras-born faculty colleague.
So, the CCC’s Racial/Ethnic Initiative achieved its goal at our college. Periodic missives from the REDOC office found their way into faculty mailboxes. It was evident that the REDOC director was fully committed to the “diversity” agenda and the worldview that fueled discrimination to achieve the objective. Until 1995, when a new full-time director was hired, because the REDOC director’s role was part-time, she made her presence known but not aggressively, an approach later changed with the new REDOC director. Nonetheless, her promotion of “diversity as an outcome” prompted some to raise necessary questions concerning its origins and worldview.
The faculty’s Integration of Faith and Learning Committee (IFL), of which I was a member, had many discussions concerning “multiculturalism and diversity,” the nomenclature by which the agenda was then designated. The year earlier, the committee called on me to deliver a lecture to the faculty and administrators on October 26, 1993. The title of my presentation was “A Biblical Foundation for Christian Liberal Arts Education: Christ, ‘The First and the Last.’” Recently, I presented an updated version titled: “The Integration of Faith and Thought Is Not the Scholar’s Work but the Creator’s Work Already Accomplished.”
Given the increasing discussions the committee had concerning “multiculturalism and diversity,” the members decided to host a debate forum for administrators and faculty colleagues on that topic. The committee chair made arrangements with the REDOC director to have her participate in a friendly debate forum with a member of the IFL committee concerning the “multiculturalism and diversity” program at our college. Because I had made a presentation the year earlier, and likely because I was the most informed and outspoken opponent of the “multiculturalism and diversity” agenda, the members of the IFL committee appointed me to serve as the committee’s debate participant.
On November 9, 1994, the evening before the debate forum was scheduled to be held, the chairman of the IFL committee called me to let me know that the REDOC director canceled her participation in the forum. He simply said, “She doesn’t want to debate you.” That was the first of numerous occasions my efforts to discuss the issues have been summarily halted by the diversocrats among us who were entrusted with causing division. Of course, I mean those charged with the task of advancing the cause of “diversity on our campus.” Rather than cancel the forum and blacken the eye of the IFL committee, the chairman asked me to make a presentation on my own. So fortunately, because I had read, researched, and prepared well, I spent the entire night writing my twelve-page presentation. One who conspicuously did not attend the event was the REDOC director, who refused then and thereafter to engage me on the assigned topic.
In the next blog entry, I will provide essential aspects of my argument with quotations. Here, I offer only an outline followed by a brief commentary on how my presentation was received.
The title of my presentation was: “Empowering the ‘Disadvantaged’: A Christian Agenda for a Politically Correct Age.” The first segment of the presentation was: “Who are the ‘Disadvantage’ among Us (speaking politically correct, of course)?” After offering a historical sketch of the emergence of alleged “victimhood” within the power dynamics framework of the “oppressors” versus the “oppress,” I presented an assessment of the state of affairs then present. I followed with a summary of six policy approaches American higher education had adopted to rectify the alleged oppression of the alleged oppressed.
- Presumption of Guilt (Oppressors)
- Presumption of Victimization (Oppressed).
- Affirmative Action: Society’s Remedy for Victimization (Oppression).
- The “Academization” of Victimization: Multiculturalism & Diversity.
- Political Correctness (Ideological Double Standards).
- Real Oppression of Alleged Victims of Oppression.
Then I concluded by offering answers to the question: “What shape should a Christian policy toward the ‘Disadvantaged’ take?”
During my presentation and the Q&A session after, it became evident that other than members of the IFL committee, few who heard my presentation were knowledgeable or conversant with the subject. Thus, they had little appreciation for either (1) the extent of my research and all-night preparation or (2) the requisite courage it took to challenge thoughtfully the engineering on our campus of “diversity as a goal, an outcome” in place of acknowledging diversity not assessed by skin color but as an existing reality wherever humans reside. Most administrators and faculty colleagues seemed ignorant, even oblivious, concerning my critical assessment of “multiculturalism and diversity” as a worldview antithetical to Christianity and thus having no proper role at our Christian college. Some, however, made it evident with annoyed responses that they already, in November 1994, uncritically accepted, if not embraced, the ideology and thereby reckoned themselves holy.
I made the case that advocates of “multiculturalism and diversity” purposefully chose these terms because they serve well their deceptive agenda. They cleverly and deliberately exploit the malleable slipperiness of these words. Academic administrators and professors who advocate multiculturalism trade on its confusion with multicultural education. Multiculturalism is a worldview; multicultural education is education that exposes students to the world’s diverse cultures with an attempt to examine the values and practices of other cultures as objectively and as fairly as possible in a non-doctrinaire manner but in the Western tradition of liberal education.[3] Multicultural education recognizes that of all world cultures, American culture historically has been the most diverse religiously and ethnically, but that such existing diversity is a subcultural contribution to and subordinate to America’s blended culture rather than existing separately or independently from it. Multicultural education has always acknowledged the vast diversity of the world and within the United States. Multiculturalism and Diversity, a worldview, deceptively presents itself as multicultural education while repudiating and supplanting its teaching concerning the reality of diversity with its goal of engineering and imposing its version of diversity. This worldview’s objective is to destroy Western culture, Christendom, and Christianity itself.
That diversity is an existing creational reality throughout the world, and especially in American culture, is not what interests diversocrats. For them, diversity is an objective to be achieved, an agenda to be implemented, and a social restructuring to be engineered, overriding the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. Multiculturalism and diversity, purposely chosen expressions because they are readily malleable and easily manipulated, are integral to the Orwellian Newspeak vocabulary.
Lack of worldview thinking among colleagues became readily evident, especially during the Q&A session and in the talk that followed. I purposely avoided trigger words, such as Cultural Marxism, as I spoke of the anti-Christian worldview that sees the whole world in terms of oppressors versus oppressed. Though I steered clear of certain words that might incite offense, I emphatically reasoned, “If we as a Christian college embrace this seamless ‘diversity’ worldview to engineer ‘diversity’ as a goal to be achieved, twenty to twenty-five years from now, we and other Christian colleges will be confronted powerfully with the temptation to change our admissions policy concerning individuals who identify with or practice same-sex relations.” I explained, “No one can pick and choose a portion of the ‘diversity worldview’ and discard other portions. The same worldview grounds the push for diversity as an outcome concerning groups allegedly needing protection: America’s blacks, women, and same-sex individuals. These outcome objectives form a unified whole.”
I was decidedly generous when I offered this warning because I knew that a year earlier, discussions concerning “homosexual orientation” and “homosexual conduct” had thrust other Christian colleges—Calvin, Eastern, Gordon, Wheaton, Nyack, and Bethel—into the news.[4] In fact, faculty members and administrators at Northwestern College surely knew that neighboring Bethel College, less than two miles north of our college, was constrained in the spring of 1993, after an extended and public controversy, to terminate Professor Kenneth Gowdy for endorsing the acceptability of monogamous same-sex relationships for Christians.[5] Could my faculty and administrative colleagues be as oblivious as their reactions suggested? It became evident that many colleagues thought in bits and pieces, not in wholes. Worse, some exhibited annoyed reactions to my presentation as they scoffed at the linkage between accepting “diversity ideology” and endorsing same-sex sexual relations. From their reactions and subsequent conversations, it was apparent that they did not comprehend the comprehensiveness of “multiculturalism and diversity” as a worldview. They failed to understand that diversity advocates employ the same assumptions, attitudes, appeals, and arguments to advance their causes, whether the allegedly oppressed class for whom they advocate entails ethnicity, dark skin color, the female sex, or sexual preferences. This is true, of course, because all these causes originate from a shared ideological worldview, Cultural Marxism.
Thus, three months into my second year of teaching at Northwestern College, I came to realize that the Christian college where I taught was like others. Personnel, from the board of trustees down through the ranks of administrators, faculty, and staff, were generally lacking both the requisite curiosity and capability to countenance and engage in disagreements, intense or mild. The REDOC director’s refusal to engage in a cordial debate was symptomatic of a posture that pervaded the college. Disagreements could be tolerated to the extent that faculty members would confine discussion of points wherein they disagreed to their limited spheres of influence, such as their classrooms or offices. As is generally true throughout academia, academic colleagues are too insecure to broach contentious issues, whether mild or intense.
Despite all the excessive talk about the “integration of faith and learning,” academics are expected to “stay in their own lanes,” remaining confined to their hermetically sealed disciplines, an idea that directly opposes the truth, famously expressed by Abraham Kuyper, a line Christian academics and administrators are fond of quoting, though their practice reveals they do not truly believe it.
No single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!”[6]
Students expect professors to intelligently discuss issues that span disciplines. However, when I did the same in public forums where faculty colleagues from other disciplines were present, I found a range of reactions: (1) a few followed my reasoning and agreed; (2) some took immediate offense because they regarded me as transgressing onto their turf, (3) others more patiently disputed the legitimacy of my reasoning across the disciplines, and (4) for days and weeks, even years following, some maliciously misrepresented my claims and arguments, deliberately stirring trouble by resorting to slander, valiantly working to rid the college of my presence.
Academia, including Christian academia, is heavily populated with colleagues whose personal and intellectual insecurities prompt them to protect their turf by building protective walls around their academic disciplines. Thus, being an accomplished Christian academic, informed, well-researched, confident, and willing to speak courageously across a range of disciplines has become uncommon and dangerous, needing to be reined in. Jesus’ saying is apropos—“A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household” (Mark 6:4).
[1] Peter Wood, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 99-145. Allen Bakke argued that he had been denied admission to the Univ. of Calif., Davis, School of Medicine despite having credentials superior to those of others who were admitted because of their “minority” status. He won in the California Supreme Court, but the Regents of the Univ. of Calif. appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where they prevailed against Bakke.
[2] James A. Patterson, Shining Lights: A History of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 93.
[3] On the demise of classical liberal education under assault by multiculturalism, see Dinesh D’Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: The Free Press, 1991; New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
[4]A year earlier, Christianity Today published Andrés Tapia, “Homosexuality Debate Strains Campus Harmony: Homosexuals at Christian Colleges Press for Acceptance,” 37.14 (November 22, 1993), 38-40. “Most of the schools involved in the recent controversies either officially make, or are considering, the distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual conduct. Gordon College, for example, is evaluating whether to change its handbook’s wording to prohibit ‘homosexual acts’ rather than ‘homosexuality’” (p. 38).
[5] Willmar Torkelson, “Christian Colleges Settle with Ousted Professors,” Christianity Today 37.2 (February 8, 1993), 61. This brief article featured professor Kenneth Gowdy’s termination from Bethel College and Walter Dunnett’s termination and settlement from Northwestern College. I was hired as Walter Dunnett’s replacement.
[6]James D. Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488. This citation derives from Kuyper’s inaugural address titled “Sphere Sovereignty,” delivered at the dedication of The Free University of Amsterdam in 1880. This was Kuyper’s rebuttal to anyone who might allow for theology to have its own department in a university but would dismiss the notion that theology is a constituent aspect of every academic discipline, whether the sciences, medicine, law, economics, history, psychology, languages, etc.