Story here. The upshot is that a professor gave a student an assignment she didn't like for ideological reasons, and she filed a Title IX complaint. The college, in a true exhibition of spinelessness, fired the (tenured) professor without due process to placate the student. It'll go to court, and I suspect the professor will win both the lawsuit and some sort of settlement, but this sort of thing is going to be the death of Christian seminaries if it continues. It also shows the unbiblical mindset of both the administration and the student since it violates Paul's teaching that Christians should deal with their own issues and not resort to lawsuits (1 Cor. 6:1-8). In addition to all the other junk we have imported from China over the last few decades, it appears we have also imported their Cultural Revolution. College administrators are running scared from their own students, and dissenting faculty are simply being thrown to the wolves. I keep telling people that this virus of postmodernist wokeness isn't coming out of the pews. It's coming from the colleges and seminaries, and thence into church leadership. Seminaries have followed in the wake of their secular university counterparts for two reasons: one is ideology (many in the faculty and administration are radicalized themselves); and the other is money (seminaries like every other institution of higher education has seen both costs and fees spiral in the last two decades). This also cements my belief that colleges and seminaries should go back to gender segregation. Co-ed colleges were a huge mistake.
They exhibit the same behavior and characteristics as secular and anti-Christian universities such as Harvard… there is no difference between the two To me it exhibits an excessive worldliness in our Christian institutions, they are not sufficiently distant and separated from the World and it’s evil world views
I think one of the things that hurts Christian schools most is the need for accreditation -- to get accredited, they often need to accept (or even embrace) doctrines that run contrary to Christian teaching. The solution for this, of course, is to stop worry about being "accredited"; it's an empty bit of credentialism that says nothing about the intellectual rigor of the school. But without accreditation, there are no federal or state dollars, and the dollars are what colleges and seminaries are really after. They want those federal loan bucks. I'm not sure what the percentage is of seminary students who take out student loans, but it's a huge number. If those students can't get loans for a specific college, they'll simply go somewhere else and take their tuition money with them. Federal money in the form of guaranteed loans has been one of the primary corrupting agents in higher ed in recent decades. They impoverish students with huge amounts of debt that cannot be discharged, and all in payment for an education that increasingly means less and less. A B.A. is now what a high-school diploma used to be; an M.A. is now the baseline for professional jobs (and even many non-professional jobs). And as for the glut of PhD's, there's an entire tribe of postgrads working minimum-wage jobs as they struggle to find open spots in industry or academia. But realistically, how many positions for PhD astronomers, philosophers, theologians, or "women's studies" majors can there possibly be? And all this is quite apart from the point that modern university education in the liberal arts is terrible, and even the engineering and hard sciences schools are going down the tubes fast. I've seen MBA graduates who not only can't write well, but can't even spell. Seminaries are churning out MDivs who don't know a word of Koine Greek or Hebrew or Latin. The seminarian academic press is in pretty terrible shape; just look at the titles coming out of big houses like Baker Academic, Zondervan, or InterVarsity and you'll see what I mean. Some scholarship in the field is still quite good, especially in the textual criticism and systematic theology areas, but a lot of it is just junk.
Or better yet, there should be Christian accreditation agencies, since we do need to know who is serious and worth considering.. but as for secular accreditation agencies, I frankly don’t give a rip about what the World considers to be accredited, but if a Christian institution marked it as such, according to its standards, then that would be meaningful to me and I wholly support your point about funding, we must rapidly retreat from all federal funding, as that is the string which the puppeteer pulls to control Christian institutions!
Where does it say that? It says: I see nothing mentioned about the complainant complaining over an assignment or that the complainant was a current student.
The "article" was published by a right-wing organization whose apparent purpose, from what I can tell, is to reduce funding to public universities whenever and however possible: Clearly they have an ax to grind, and that's the first problem with this story. The second problem is that this isn't "news". National Review also had a published article about it on July 9, 2021, linking to the Martin Center article, as though the event itself had just happened. It actually happened around this time last year, meaning, that's what the professor was fired. The events themselves leading up to the firing happened over the course of several years prior to that. The National Review article merely refers to it as "a recent case at Berea College in Kentucky". Clearly they were searching for something they could frame as a culture war issue (and they had to dig pretty deep to find it), and then present it misleadingly as though it just happened. Third, the "article" published by the Martin Center (linked in the original post above) is by the guy who was fired. If you're looking for objectivity, you won't find it there. No one gets to be a judge in their own cause. Which brings me to my last point: Fourth, the whole matter has already been adjudicated, and what happened is no longer a matter of mere opinion. Here is a quote from the actual court ruling: Read the whole ruling. It's a fascinating window into the processes and procedures of higher education. What it's not is a reason to engage in a culture war food fight.
That is something I simply cannot understand. I know the UK and USA are extremely different when it comes to these things. We very strongly support public funding of education, healthcare, social care, etc., here in the UK. I am not saying we are right and the USA is wrong. We are simply different. However, it is always something that jolts me because I have a totally different mindset from Americans on this issue. The college from which the professor was dismissed is Christian. Would it have received any public funding? I understand that in the USA public funds cannot be given to religious organisations; although, I am sure people find ways round that .
No, I would say that statement is accurate, with the caveat that it’s just one political party, which represents a minority of citizens, which calls itself “conservative” but is actually a strange mix of nationalism, libertarianism, anarchism, and aspiring plutocracy. The rest of us are perfectly sane and agree with the British.
I feel precisely the same way. I often joke with my housemate (who is a member of our conservative party, called the 'Liberals') that if he was in the states he would be a Democrat, which irks him. But it's true. A healthcare policy like Obamacare wouldn't be dreamed up by our most avid right wing mainstream politicians, and although naturally the rhetoric of the right-wing in Australia is to attack US politicians like Bernie Sanders, half his policies are things our right wing parties would defend to the death if someone suggested repealing them. It's strange how the overton windows of our countries have drifted so radically apart since the 60s. I would blame it on optional voting pushing politicians to the extremes to motivate their base to show up, but the UK doesn't mimic the US either, and voter turnout is pretty similar there.
Yeah a lot of Americans don't realize that in comparison with other democracies, what we have is two right-wing parties, one tending toward the center, the other moving toward the edges. We have never had a strong left-wing party in the United States. The closest we ever came to adopting universal public health care was during Truman's presidency, right after World War II. Nixon wanted to do something like that but it never came to anything. By the time Obama came along, at the height of his popularity and with control of both houses of Congress, the most his party could achieve was a plan that relied on, and in turn supported, the private sector, via an individual mandate to have coverage, again provided and administered by the private sector. A true public option was never seriously on the table, though there were many that would have preferred it. And until Obama came along, the idea of pairing an individual mandate with private coverage (rather than adopting a single payor system) was quite popular among Republicans, especially in the early 1990s.
Based on the snippet you posted from the court ruling, it appears that the validity of Porter's claim was not adjudicated; instead the case was dismissed on procedural grounds, because he waited too long to file suit and the statute of limitations ran.
I now have skimmed the link you provided, and the ruling is on nothing more than procedural motions to dismiss by the defendants. Defendant Sergent was unsuccessful in his motion to dismiss, and the college was partially successful (some counts were dismissed due to the statute of limitations). This ruling does not dispose of Porter's case, nor is it the result of a trial on the merits; thus, unless there has been a subsequent trial and ruling (which is not reflected by your link), it is inaccurate to state that "the whole matter has been adjudicated."
The ruling does address issues of substance; it wasn't merely procedural. The only point I'm making here is that when one reads through the whole thing - which most people have neither the time nor the inclination to do - it's evident that this is not the 'culture war' slam dunk the James Martin Center and National Review claimed it was (and how important it is to rely on primary sources for these things). NRO basically spun a narrative out of thin air that fit a preconceived format that its readers already wanted to see confirmed in their "reporting", based on a piece published by an organization that has an ax to grind against state-funded institutions of higher learning. That, and the original piece on the Martin Center website was published by the actual guy who was fired. NRO fudged on when the events themselves occurred, wording the article like it was something recent when in fact it had happened a year before, in 2020. So there's bias all over the story, and there are all kinds of problems with it from a journalistic standpoint. Then it was innocently shared here as "news".
In your mind, this person doesn't qualify as a "primary source"? Could any source be more "primary" than that? Bias? In the American media? Say it ain't so, Joe! (Seriously, I actually laughed out loud when I read that.)
I was referring to the NRO piece when I wrote that. Sorry, I should have been more clear. Obviously, you're correct about the Martin Center piece being a primary source since one of the participants wrote it; it's just not unbiased (and the publisher certainly isn't). That doesn't mean it's automatically wrong, just suspect. That's why I went looking to see if there were any court documents about it. The NRO misleadingly framed it as a culture war issue when the actual situation was considerably more complicated.
Granted. But that's the reality of the modern media landscape. The New York Times and the Washington Post are every bit as biased, just in the other direction. Bias sells. Everybody has to compete with cable TV and the internet now. Though I will say that there never was a golden age when American media wasn't terrible. Our journalism has pretty much always been lousy, going way back before the Revolutionary war. Even the august science journals Science and Nature have thrown in with the postmodernist woke crowd. (Though Nature has been declining for a long while now; their "peer review" process has been a joke for years.)
I don't buy into postmodernist arguments about there being no such thing as 'objectivity'. In the case of the MSM, in my experience such sentiments are often just an excuse for the extreme right and extreme left not to pay attention to things they simply don't like. Sometimes there just aren't enough facts and it's necessary to reserve judgment. Other times finding out what happened is an easier matter, just by going to a more objective source. We'll never know the whole story but after some time there are usually enough verified facts to establish a tentative causal chain and then work from there.