Saturday, December 26, 2015

Strange bedfellows in Wheaton College tenure flap

There is irony in Wheaton College's campaign to rid itself of a tenured professor for straying from Christian and Wheaton College orthodoxy that should not go unnoticed. It stems from the local, nationwide and now worldwide interest in Wheaton's suspending tenured political science professor Larycia Hawkins for wearing a hijab to express solidarity with her Muslim neighbors. Hawkins is following in a long line of theologians promoting ecumenicalism among religions to bring humanity in harmony with the universe. Wheaton College, apparently, wants none of that, suspending the nine year tenured Hawkins and conducting an inquiry, inquisition is more appropriate, to withdraw her tenure and then fire her. While conceding her wearing the hajib, in itself, does not violate the statement of faith all faculty members must sign and practice, Hawkins inquisitors see it as a fourth a final example of her heresy. They no like her writing about what Christians can learn from Black Liberation Theocracy, which connects the Bible to troubling Christian support for slavery and oppression of blacks. Next up in her transgressions was a Facebook posting of Hawkins at a Halsted Street home the SAME DAY as the Gay Pride Parade, an obvious example of guilt by gay association which exits only in the warped minds of the college purists. Strike three was Hawkins' suggestion the College use 'diplomatic vocabulary' for conversations about sexuality in school curriculum. The hijab and her call linking it to solidarity with Muslims facing unprecedented attacks from the crazed haters in our society, pushed Wheaton College leaders to their self destructive action.

The irony? School Provost Stanton Jones claims Hawkins' article on Black Liberation Theology seemed to "endorse a kind of Marxism." But Provost Jones and the College elders are the ones following the Marxist line of obsessing about orthodoxy to the point of losing sight of their true purpose of serving mankind. We might say that in the Larycia Hawkins, Wheaton College dustup, Marx and Jesus make strange bedfellows.

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