We’ve learned from several credible sources that less than a month before firing seven tenured professors, the Cornerstone Board of Trustees authorized the removal of all tenure protections from all tenured faculty in every discipline across the university, turning them into āat willā employees who could be fired at any time. While the word ātenureā still exists on faculty contracts, in practice the Board has eliminated tenure at Cornerstone University.
In her piece at Religion News Service, Kathryn Post reports that a new Employee Handbook was issued in mid-May āthat adds tenured faculty to the list of employees who can have their employment terminated with or without cause.” Post adds: “Also removed is a statement preventing tenured faculty from being terminated āif non-tenured faculty members are retained in the same discipline to teach courses the tenured faculty member is qualified and capable of teaching.āā
Heide Cece, Cornerstone’s Executive Vice President for Enrollment Management and Marketing, says that this new handbook āis board-approved.”
The changes to the handbook are covered in depth here.
The stripping of tenure from a whole body of tenured professors is an abuse that ought to incense faculty at every institution of higher education in the country. If a Board can evade the strict set of causes by which a tenure contract may be terminated simply by dissolving the contract and forcing tenured faculty on to an āat willā contract, then tenure never really existed. Every tenured faculty in the country would be an āat willā employee living on borrowed time. And as we see with the seven tenured professors fired from Cornerstone, that borrowed time can run out very quickly.
This action of the Cornerstone Board of Trustees, presumably with the full backing of President Gerson Moreno-RiaƱo, reveals the low regard the institution places on the academic competence, teaching ability, and institutional service of tenured faculty. Cornerstone is now showing its disregard not only for the arts and humanities, but for every discipline, even in its vaunted āmarket-alignedā programs. Is the practice of turning tenured faculty into āat willā employees on a whim in violation of these faculty membersā contracts? Is this legal? I guess only time will tell.
To summarize:
- There is no longer any academic freedom at Cornerstone. Faculty can be fired for any comment that the administration does not like.
- The Board of Trustees has reneged on a promise it made to all tenured faculty members. These family members made career and family decisions based on the grant of tenured employment.
Sources tell us that two of the terminated professors had been elected chairs of the Faculty Senate. One of them had been the Chair of the Senate that presided over the 42-6 no confidence vote for incoming President Gerson Moreno-RiaƱo in 2021. Our sources tell us that the Faculty Senate was unilaterally abolished by the Board of Trustees in the Fall of 2022 and replaced with a watered-down āAcademic Senateā made up of volunteer faculty and a large group of administrators. Members of this new “Academic Senate” had to be approved by Bradford Sample, Vice President of Academics at Cornerstone. Sample chaired this new “Academic Senate,” replacing the faculty-led chairs who presided over the pre-2022 Faculty Senate.
Unfortunately for Cornerstone, the Board of Trustees has a history of not doing its job properly when it comes to issues of tenure at the institution. In 2007, the Board of Trustees, on the advice of then President Rex Rogers and Provost By Bayliss, suspended the possibility of attaining tenure for all tenure-track faculty (although they did not take away tenure from faculty to whom it had already been awarded). Justifying this change, the Rogers administration ācited a trend away from tenure, which can impede efforts to adjust staffing to market forces.ā (Sound familiar?)
Any institution has a right to stop granting tenure. So there was no strict legal problem with Rogersā actions, which, again, only stopped the future granting of tenure, not the protection of tenure already granted. Nevertheless, this policy provoked a faculty backlash. Faculty rightly cited loss of reputation, difficulty in hiring and retaining well-qualified faculty, and the possibility of low faculty morale. The furor eventually led to President Rogersā resignation after it was discovered that he had not properly informed (and some said deliberately misled) the Board about the nature and consequences of the changes. In the 2008-2009 academic year, new President Joseph Stowell, and new Provost Rick Ostrander, restored the tenure track.
Reflecting on the tenure debacle under Rogers, the then Chair of the Board of Trustees, Dan Wielhouwer, admitted that the Board ādid not take sufficient time to deliberate tenure before dropping it.ā He confessed that coming from business backgrounds, the board was not familiar with how institutions of higher education understood the concept of tenure. āA lot of us are in the business world where a life contract is unusual,ā he noted. But in the end, Wielhouwer celebrated the move to restore tenure: āDo-overs are great. And we’re going to do it right this time.ā
Today the Board seems to be making the same mistake all over again. Although this time, it is much worse. This administration has authorized the removal of tenure from those who were already tenured. Such a move goes beyond what Rogers tried to do.
Dan Wielhouwer is listed on the Cornerstone website as an āEmeritus Trustee.ā The current Chair, Rick Koole, may want to call him up for some history lessons.
We recently received access to a June 10, 2024 letter from Cornerstone president Gerson Moreno-RiaƱo inviting faculty to a June 18, 2024 meeting “to reflect on the rationale for strategic decisions that are taking place this summer.”
Strategic decisions? This looks more like a purge.
This looks like part of a wider movement across the conservative world. You don’t make the connection in your piece, but how can we miss the similarities between what’s happening at Cornerstone and the plans contained in Project 2025? In that plan, Civil Service employees (read: tenured) would have their status changed to “at-will.” It doesn’t take any leap at all to infer that both the faculty at Cornerstone and the Federal employees would be subject to ideological tests to keep (or get) their jobs.
Turn off education and turn on indoctrination.
I left a tenured position to make a move to Regent University, which had sought me out for a position in their School of Divinity. I was promised, in writing, that I would be considered for early tenure after four years. GMR and Cece were rising in the ranks of academic leadershipāwith GMR already wreaking havoc in the undergraduate program over which he was dean (eight undergraduate faculty were terminated that year.) When the time came, I wasnāt even allowed to apply for early tenure. I was told that was reserved for āsuperstars.ā I served on the faculty senate which was gutted when GMR became VP for Academics. I resigned and was replaced by a dean-appointed faculty member who had only begun teaching about three years before, after serving as a military chaplain p; neither did he have a publication record. He quickly became president of the senate. I was tenured when I reached the qualifying years of faculty status, but tenure then was essentially a five-year contract. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, I got out before I had to reapply.
Thanks for sharing, Kimberly. I’m sorry you had to go through this.
John: Great point. We need a bigger, macro piece on the connections you suggest here.
To shed some light into the board difficulties, there’s a private group on FB called āSupporters of Dr. Gerson Moreno-RiaƱoā. This group was started on October 23, 2021, right around the time of the no-confidence vote. In 2022, it was known that at least 5 board members were part of the group. In the group, posts slandering and attacking faculty members were a regular occurrence. The board did nothing to address those posts, and in some cases even supported the posts. Here’s a sampling of the posts the board would have seen and didn’t address (names anonymized but we do have record of who it was):
Person 1:
“To the 42 faculty who voted āno confidenceā in a president thatās only been on the job for three months, do you really think the board made a mistake? They knew exactly what they were getting into. They sent out a survey to thousands of alum to help guide in the search and decision process. I believe the overall response was Make Cornerstone Biblical Again.
So faculty either need fall in line or move onto another college. …
We need to get back to preaching the WHOLE gospel (that includes sin and repentance). And it needs to preached over and over again in chapel and in the classroom. Itās an error to think everyone that attends Cornerstone is a Christian. Cornerstone IS a mission field. Donāt forget that. Every single CU alum knows someone that were classmates that are now anti-God.
We need revival on campus thatās grounded in holiness not social justice. True revival is evident when the moral atmosphere is changed to align with what God desires. False Christians embrace sin, but True Christians fight it. The gospel can change people, colleges, cities, and even nations. We need the gospel at Cornerstone. Thatās what God desires. (134 Likes)
In Reply:
Board Member A: “As a Board member you are right on. He has our confidence. God and our mission statement is our course for the future.”
Person 1:
“Sad to hear how many faculty have begun to follow the non-Christian academia, rather than holding firm to Biblically based values. Sounds like more housecleaning is in order.
Board Member A:
“He is the Man for this time in Cornerstones purpose Leading us and Satan is against him.”
In response to people alleging that faculty was no longer teaching a biblical perspective
Person 1: “…It is frustrating and sad to hear first hand from my kids who attends CU …what they are teaching or allowed to teach and the people theyāve brought onto to campus to also teach such things that go directly against Gods word.”
Board Member A: “As a Board member I would like to have you send me the names of those professors making these statements”
Additionally many posts the board would have seen included the call to fire faculty or characterized CU as a place that needed to be cleansed:
Person 17: Totally agree with your post and I fully support the new President at CU!!! Love that he is making bold moves and not shirking his responsibility to clean house!!!
Person 1 (in private message): āDo you believe the 42 who voted against this president. Also didnāt vote for Trump? Again, this seems strange but Iām convinced there is a correlationā
Person 33: Of the faculty vote of no confidence
Thatās how you know heās doing something right!
Person 1: [faculty member] undermining the current president and trying to create an uprising among alum and faculty is a pretty bold move while still employed. Iām sorry, but [faculty member] are a big part of why CU is in this mess.
Person 17: [faculty member] should be fired and escorted off of the CU campus immediately. Period.
We also have evidence of CU employees interacting on the page. CU admin & board never attempted to correct the narrative around faculty and did not intervene in the conversations calling for the faculty who voted no confidence to be fired.
Person 22:”Does anyone here have a connection to the presidentās office? I would like to organize a meeting between him and ministry leaders and pastors (many of us are alumni). I would like to meet him, hear his vision, let him hear our concerns, and then respond to all of this collectively.
In Reply:
CU Marketing Employee, in charge of CU Facebook page: “Hey [Person 22] Iām on staff at Cornerstone. Iāll pass this along and see if we can set something up. Heās very open to talking to local pastors and wants to build on those relationships. Thanks for this idea!”
There are more examples of comments on CU’s official page that were never addressed by admin or board:
In reply to Faculty being fired:
Person 14: Oh! I certainly hope so! And then begin replacing with God fearing Bible believing Christian instructors.
Person 18: perfectly so. They rebelled against him before he started his first day. Thatās completely unbiblical. They are in rebellion and need to repent or be removed.
Person 14: Welp! There you have it! 2/3 of the faculty need to be removed. The Light is beginning to shine! Keep the faith Cornerstone! Jesus Himself said that if they hate you, itās because He is hated.
It has been a purge for a long time…