The comparison with the story of Steven Salaita is interesting. Salaita was denied tenure at the University if Illinois apparently because of pressure from the public ,, particularly Jewish supporters of Israel. There was no pretense that the decision was based on Salaita’s academic work on colonization oft north America because he had been vetted by the faculty at the University of Illinois. Oord’s tenure at a private evangelical school was ended using a shallow claim of economic necessity .. despite overwhelming support from his students and other faculty at Northwest Nazarene University. Ironically the public role in both stories is similar. In Salaita’s case an ardent public group convinced Chancellor of UI, Phyllis Wise, that the UI faculty of Native American studies misjudged Steven Salaita’s qualifications. Certainly, after listening to the man’s diatribe about Israel I do think there is reason to worry that his work on colonization of North America could be more polemic than academic. That said, I doubt that Wise, based on her actions on the Aprikyan case at UW when she was UW Provost, will be able to prove that UI’s actions did not infringe on Salaita’s fee speech. The issues at NNU are different because NNU is a private school and, I imagine, it’s rights to practice bigotry and deny science is protected as much as Saliata’ s rights to free speech. The NNU President, David Alexander, might have been better off claiming that his decisions was simply based on the right of the supporters of NNU to over ride the academic judgment of the NNU faculty.
Last March, the day before April Fools, Tom Oord got an email saying he was fired.
Gilberson calls this the “Fundamentalist Witch Hunt.” The disturbing thing is that the story he tells is not that different from the story at the University of Illinois where Steven Salaita was denied tenure apparently because of objection from the Jewish community to Salaita’s anti Israel stand.
The email Thomas Orrd got on the night before April 1st, was not a joke. Orrd was on vaction in Hawaii when the David Alexander. the President of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) emailed the message that Oord’s tenured position as full professor at NNU had been terminated.
Of course people do get fired, even while on pleasure trips to Hawaii. What makes this a sad story is that for 13 years Professor Oord has been one of the few faculty at NNU with a recognizable academic reputation beyond the evangelical community. Professor Oord has 20 books on his CV and brought over a million dollars of grant money to the small, unsung liberal arts college. He was wildly popular with students as a teacher.
Part of the problem is that Oord has attempted to reconcile fundamentalist beliefs in God with science, an idea he calls “open theism.” His approach is to take the view that the Deity responds in love—rather than coercive control. Events are driven by God’s love, rather than by a rigid, foreordained set of rulings. Fundamentalist critics called him a heretic and had been vying for his termination for years.
Tenure is a major obstacle to firing anyone. So, how was a successful, tenured professor fired? A year ago, Alexander informed Oord that a theological review board was investigating him. The board could find Oord a heretic making him unsuitable to serve as a professor of religion in a Nazarene college.
Of course, firing a tenured professor creates a legal mess. In the US the First Amendment right of free speech was created in part to protect academic freedom and that freedom has been upheld by our courts. Salaita’s objection to the actions at the University of Illinois are now in court because that school claimed he was denied tenure for vaguely defined academic reasons. Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) however, claimed that Oord was fired ut of financial necessity. Supposedly a small downturn in graduate enrollment, required the termination of only one faculty member. This occurred in a year NNU was celebrating its great financial health because of increases n enrolment. To quote a great man, “I am shocked, shocked!”
President Alexander assured alumni that his wildly unpopular decision was “not focused on any single individual.”
The Daily Beast’s Karl W. Giberson reports that:
“As I write these words hundreds of dismayed NNU students are wearing bright-red shirts on campus, emblazoned with Oord’s motto: “I choose to live a life of love.” Almost 2,000 people, many of them current and former students, have joined a Facebook group called “Support Tom Oord” (just renamed “Support Tom Oord & NNU) in the past two weeks.
I asked on the “Support Tom Oord” Facebook page if anyone believed Alexander was telling the truth in his claims that he was not targeting Oord. No one does. Apparently on April 14 NNU faculty met and overwhelmingly voted “no-confidence” in the president. The trustees have now launched an investigation into the entire affair; the president has apologized in writing to the faculty for losing their trust; and Oord’s termination is “on hold” although not rescinded.”
The controversy at NNU is, tragically, just one of many related incidents that have plagued the Church of the Nazarene. In 2007 biologist Richard Colling was forced out of another Nazarene university for his book arguing that evolution was true and should be understood as God’s way of creating. In 2010 I left Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) after years of being attacked by fundamentalists as a heretic for my views on science.
A few years earlier a colleague had been forced out of ENC for refusing to condemn gay marriage in his social work classes. Two months ago the chaplain at another Nazarene university was demoted for a sermon questioning whether enthusiastic warmongering was compatible with Jesus’ command to love our enemies. An entire college could be staffed with the victims of fundamentalist witchhunts in the Church of the Nazarene. And, if we add the victims of witchhunts in other evangelical traditions, we could staff a major research university.
The controversy at NNU is one battle in the long war that is being waged—and slowly won—against thinking evangelical Christians. Battles at the various institutions are eerily similar and unfold along the following lines: Progressive, educated scholars push their traditions to make peace with new ideas, to be open to reconsidering historical positions on human origins, the nature of God, the morality of homosexuality, the meaning of Bible stories, the status of other religions. Such conversations have long been part of religious traditions that, in earlier centuries, managed to make peace with troubling notions like the motion of the Earth. Fundamentalists threatened by new ideas push back but they typically lose when the war is waged on the field of ideas. Evolution, alas, is true and most educated people understand that.
So, the battles are fought instead with political and financial weapons. Fundamentalist pastors, youth ministers, and concerned lay leaders apply pressure to college presidents behind the scenes to get rid of progressive faculty. During my years at ENC, a few irate fundamentalist pastors withdrew their churches’ financial support of the college because of me. Youth pastors would tell the enrollment office not to send recruiters to their churches because they did not want their young people going to a college that taught evolution. This was exactly what happened at Olivet Nazarene University when Richard Colling was forced out. And few doubt that Oord’s termination is anything other than President Alexander’s surrender to similar pressures.
In the short run, silencing controversial voices does quiet things down and probably creates space for college administrators to think about other things. But this peace is an illusion. American evangelicalism’s failure to make peace with the progressive scholars within its ranks—or even keep the conversation going—has alienated it from a broad range of scholarship. In The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, historian Randall Stephens and I lament that most evangelicals now get their science from young earth creationist Ken Ham, their history from the discredited revisionist David Barton, their social science from the homophobic James Dobson.
Evangelicalism’s greatest scholar is probably historian Mark Noll who, ironically, now teaches at the University of Notre Dame. Noll coined the term “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” to describe the intellectual crisis of his religious tradition—a crisis created by that tradition’s inability to break free of the fundamentalism out of which it arose.
In a few weeks we will know if Professor Oord’s pastoral, controversial voice will still be heard in classrooms at Northwest Nazarene University, encouraging students to think and to follow evidence and reason wherever it leads. Many suspect it will not. And that, once again, the fundamentalists will have won.