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John Inazu on the anti-woke victory at Grove City College

John Fea   |  April 25, 2022 2 Comments

John Inazu teaches law at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and (with Tim Keller) Uncommon Ground: Living Faithfully in a World of Difference (Nelson Books, 2020). This morning he published a Twitter thread on the debate over “wokeness” at Grove City College. (Read our commentary on this debate here).

Here is the thread:

The balance between maintaining a distinctive missional identity (religious or otherwise) and honoring principles of academic freedom and intellectual inquiry is not always easy to strike. But based on this report, Grove City hasn't even come close.

— John Inazu (@JohnInazu) April 23, 2022

You don't have to agree with everything @JemarTisby says (I don't). But if you're an academic institution that invites scholars to speak (in your chapel service or elsewhere), you are inviting some amount of disagreement and challenge.

— John Inazu (@JohnInazu) April 23, 2022

I would have thought that a college would embrace a challenge to its students to learn. Read arguments, dig for facts, search for truth. Learn to distinguish the descriptive from the normative and figure out what you think about important matters.

— John Inazu (@JohnInazu) April 23, 2022

That's at least what I tell my own students and what I understand to be a fundamental purpose of higher education. My hope is that Grove City would be such a place. But this report offers little assurance of that.

— John Inazu (@JohnInazu) April 23, 2022

Heck, even Liberty University sometimes brings in controversial speakers.

Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor at Grove City, responds to Inazu:

Are there evangelical institutions that are good models of this? It seems even Wheaton and Gordon have had high profile firings and exits for Catholic or secular colleges for better scholarship

— James Kath (@rikeijames) April 23, 2022

Grove City once was. We had Tony Campolo speak nearly every year. As the attached articles show, he ruffled feathers each time. However, he was invited back year after year. There were no board committees then convened to investigate "mission drift." pic.twitter.com/BGQxfFi3Z2

— Warren Throckmorton πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦ (@wthrockmorton) April 24, 2022

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Filed Under: Way of Improvement Tagged With: critical race theory, culture wars, Grove City College, Jemar Tisby, John Inazu, Warren Throckmorton

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Stephen says

    April 25, 2022 at 7:23 pm

    These changes are all about the Evangelical Donor Class asserting the power of their checkbooks and ordering college administrators to throttle uncomfortable topics. We see this all over the country, from politically-connected board of regents interfering in governance or budgetary matters at public universities to presidents of private colleges, under financial pressure and in hock to wealthy benefactors, eliminating burrs under their donors’ saddles. We also see well-connected alumni asserting their power to keep things just as they were fifty years ago when they attended, whether they be potential admission of women (in my case) or ROTC on campus, racial awareness, LGBTQ acceptance or any other broad social change. Colleges are best advised to build a moat between donors or alumni and any governance matters whatsover and be willing to say “no” when cuts in donations are threatened. They will be all the better if they do.

  2. John Fea says

    April 26, 2022 at 10:55 am

    This is true. Sadly, many members of these boards are chosen for either their money or business experience. Few board members understand the humanities. They are vested in the survival of the institution–keeping the doors open.

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