Earlier this month, in the wake of her own attention-grabbing press conference, Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins was worrying about something besides the fact that the school is trying to dump her.
Since then, students and faculty at Wheaton and other schools have been protesting on her behalf; 67,000 supporters have signed a petition seeking her reinstatement, and the school has attained a certain notoriety. That’s what was foremost on Hawkins’s mind.
—American Association of University Professors’ Hans-Joerg Tiede
This exemption also leaves the usual concepts of academic freedom in the dust. If the college wants to revoke Hawkins’s tenure for suggesting that Muslims and Christians have the same God, the relevant question will be “whether that’s consistent with Wheaton’s religious beliefs or not,” Groff says. And if it is, “whether it’s the same standard that they apply to everyone.”
On the phone after the press conference, Hawkins had this to say: “People wouldn’t work at Wheaton if they weren’t committed to the ideal. We teach about political science, but we also think about Jesus’s politics, about how we live out our Christian faith. That’s the unique nature of Wheaton that I love. And what saddens me is that this has cast doubt on what kind of Christian commitment the statement of faith embodies. It’s a wonderful doctrinal statement, but it can’t be perverted and twisted to be used as a weapon against faculty who might do something that people on the outside or even on the inside deem controversial.”
