Note: All the opinions expressed in the blog post are my own, and not that of any other individual or institution mentioned in this blog post. Likewise, I consulted none of the people mentioned in this post in advance to obtain their assent, nor did I receive their endorsement of anything I say. Accordingly, they are not to be held accountable for anything I write.
There has been some controversy recently about how my alma mater, Harding University, treats political dissent among its faculty. The occasion for that controversy has been, I think, blown far out of proportion. But the aftermath in the blogosphere has included a level of vitriol, smug self-righteousness, and plain arrogant belittling that goes far beyond what is appropriate among Christians. It is time that the Harding community thinks about who it is and how it wants to reflect its Christian identity when it comes to treating those who disagree with the (supposed) majority view in and around the school.
Quickly, the facts that are a matter of public record:
On June 20, 2008, political science professor Mark Elrod was interviewed by Rodney McCarthy, the author of the otherwise innocuous Downintheblog, about the upcoming presidential election. During that interview Mark endorsed a plethora of standard Christian positions on issues like abortion, feeding the world’s poor, and committing to peace, but also stated that he thinks gay marriage should not be something that persuades voters to vote one way or another in the upcoming election.
On June 29th 2006, the New York Times published an article about a movement among young Barack Obama supporters who aim to make the candidate more acceptable to those who have bigoted reactions to Obama’s middle name, Hussein. Mark at the time was a co-host for a Facebook group that encourages all Obama supporters to change their middle name on Facebook to Hussein on Barack Obama’s birthday, Aug. 4th. The Times quotes Mark several times in support of Barack Obama. The French newspaper Liberation has since published an article on July 5, 2008 on the same subject that also quotes Mark.
These two instances were the most recent cause for an uproar in the Harding-related blogosphere about academic freedom at Harding. Like previous moments of dissent by Mark – such as one last year when he had argued that while abortion is immoral and a tragedy, it should not be the one main consideration in picking whom to vote for during elections if none of the candidates is actually going to do anything about it – some members of the wider Harding community did not take up their disagreement with Mark, but instead turned to the Harding administration. In essence, they stated to the administration that they would not tolerate a Harding faculty member who holds such opinions, that they think Mark should be fired for expressing beliefs they do not share, and, in some cases, that they would otherwise cease donating money to Harding.
As a result, the administration asked Mark to re-affirm that he identifies with Harding’s Christian values and with its mission, which he has done. The administration informed Mark that his public association with Barack Obama posed a problem because Obama is a Democrat, and asked Mark to disassociate himself from the Facebook group that the New York Times interviewed him about with the following statement:
“Due to unanticipated publicity directed toward Harding University that was generated by my association with the ‘My Middle Name is “Hussein” Too’ event on Facebook, I am no longer involved in it.”
Moreover, the administration informed Mark that his blog was drawing too much outraged attention from the donor community. Mark reacted by making his blog private on July 9th.
In the ensuing discussions, the question has repeatedly come up whether it is healthy for Harding to stifle even mild political dissent because some donors and alumni decide to be offended by it. The question has been framed as one about academic freedom. Basically, one side has argued that Harding is a politically and academically monolithic community, that Mark was stupid to think for himself and expect to get away with saying what he thought publicly, and that Mark should be made to conform or else be made to leave. The other side has argued that this is a case where Harding has not lived up to its responsibilities as a Christian academic institution, responsibilities that include insisting that all sides of the truth be told about any issue and that charity be extended to minds entrusted to the college by protecting minority voices on campus rather than aiding those who harry them.
I do not want to place too much weight on a moment that Mark may wish should pass as quickly and painlessly as possible, but I do think that some significant assumptions have been in play in this conversation that really ought to be reconsidered by all those who, like myself, care about Harding University, and who wish to see it prosper as a respectable academic institution in the future. After all, as alumni, it is in our future whether we want it there or not – our degrees from Harding mean we have no choice but to care what happens there.
False Assumption Number One: Harding is a Republican College
Harding’s declared motto is “developing Christian servants.”
Harding’s mission does not specify a political affiliation. In fact, the majority of the Harding community has switched political allegiance over the years from one party to another. The campus was majority Democrat until the demise of the last Dixiecrats in the 1970s, and it was only when the Republican Party decided that one expedient way to win elections was to pay lip service to Southern conservatives that much of the Harding community shifted to the GOP.
I think it is safe to say that this lack of party affiliation stems from the fact that the Harding administration is wise enough to know that political parties’ main interest is in power, that politicians will change their tune to appeal to the most voters no matter what it takes, and that it would be immoral to yoke a college interested in Christian teachings to any group that pursues worldly goals – especially in a field as explicitly mercenary as partisan politics.
Of course, that does not mean that feelings about whom to vote for haven’t often been passionately held at Harding. Harding does declare a religious affiliation to the Churches of Christ, and that means that most of its administrators, faculty, and students come from the same demographic that also tends to make up the Churches of Christ. That demographic is Southern, lower middle class, and socially conservative. As a result, the secular attitudes that this demographic holds have often also been the predominant ones on campus, and they have been frequently discussed as if they were the same as spiritual values. But nowhere is upholding certain social and fiscal politics stated as part of Harding’s mission.
Presumably, this is so because those secular attitudes are subject to change while Christian values are eternal. History shows us this very clearly. Christians who are part of the Churches of Christ have themselves altered their political stance drastically on important issues over the last century alone. At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, Churches of Christ leaders urged their congregations to turn away from patriotism, voting, or any other civic involvement because their allegiance was to the Kingdom of God; now, Churches of Christ are among the most fervent believers in Christian political activism. The Churches of Christ were majority pacifist until World War II; now, they are among the denominations with the highest percentages of veterans and military chaplains. Churches of Christ were one of the last denominations to desegregate; now, they would be shocked to hear most of their grandparents were opposed to it.
Desegregation is a good example of how the conflict between spiritual values and secular attitudes played out at Harding in the past, and how the two were often falsely treated to be the same thing. Until his retirement in 1965, Harding president George Benson insisted that Harding remain segregated. His reasons were two. The first was that while perhaps he wouldn’t go so far as others and claim that African Americans had no souls and were the eternally damned sons of Ham, God did not intend for different tribes to mix and so it would be unbiblical to have black students sit next to white students in classrooms. When the student body overwhelmingly asked for the school to be desegregated in 1957, Benson interrupted the chapel service to announce that “The redbirds, the bluebirds, the blackbirds, they don’t mix and mingle together, young people!” (I’m not making this up; copies of his speeches on the matter are in the archives of the Brackett Library). His second reason was that he thought conservative donors would stop giving money to Harding if he desegregated the school. It took the new Ganus administration less than a year in office to make Harding the last Church of Christ school to integrate, without any repercussions of divine ire or bankruptcy due to donor flight.
What was a political issue people felt strongly about and muddled with their Christian beliefs had faded away. Harding’s Christian convictions prevailed over the political leanings a majority held – because of a courageous president who was not afraid to have the necessary conversations about the evil of racism.
I don’t mean to suggest that history will vindicate Mark’s political positions; it may or may not do that. What I am pointing out is that when Harding is at its best, it has a history of upholding eternal values over the social and political attitudes of those who shout the loudest, because the eternal values matter more. Harding’s commitment is not to a political party or to conservative social attitudes; Harding’s commitment is to truth. Harding should be proud of that heritage, and should be unafraid to encourage constructive dissent in order to become aware of its own blind spots and in order to challenge all sides of a given argument to refine their arguments so that the truth can prevail.
Nor is Harding politically homogeneous now. While the majority of students and faculty at Harding tend to be political and fiscal conservatives, not all of them vote Republican. At least one VP and at least two deans are outspokenly Democratic-leaning, and so is a sizable, if not very vocal, proportion of the faculty and administrative staff. This is both healthy and in line with Harding’s commitment to loving others as one loves oneself, whether they agree with one on everything or not.
(It’s also in line with the law.)
False Assumption Number Two: Harding’s Commitment to Freedom Means It Should Not Tolerate Dissent
Harding University has long been in a secondary business to that of “developing Christian servants”. Since the 1940s, it has also cultivated a campus culture committed to freedom and the American Way. George Benson’s predecessor J.N. Armstrong had advocated private piety. But after Armstrong was run out of office for holding a minority view in the Church of Christ brotherhood about whether or not the thousand year reign of Christ prophesied in Revelations would be before or after the Second Coming (how priorities change…), Benson took the post in 1936. Just a year earlier, Benson had had to flee his missionary post in China to avoid the abuses of the Communists during the Chinese civil war. When Benson returned to America, the Great Depression had hit the country, and Benson would later recount in his speeches how horrified he was to hear on trains and in the street that many American workers were beginning to think perhaps Communism or at least socialism wasn’t such a bad idea.
Benson was afraid that the persecutions Christians suffered in China would spread to the U.S. if Marxism gained a foothold, so as Harding’s new president he added to the school’s mission that of advocating the freedoms that ensure democracy and the liberty to be Christian. The way this advocacy actually took shape was in classes, speeches, and scholarship programs whose sole purpose was to argue that the American enterprise system was the root of all freedom. The lucrative side-effect was that big business was quickly enamored with Benson and donated enough money to rescue Harding from near-bankruptcy. As time passed, this led Benson to slant his rhetoric more and more in a way that embraced whatever the big business agenda of the day was. His role also changed. He spent less and less time leading Harding and more and more time on political grandstanding and on partisan punditry.
Eventually, the Benson’s preference of the political propaganda machine he had created and based out of Harding became a problem, both legally and because it threatened to consume Harding’s academic purpose. (For instance, Benson had neglected to have Harding accredited for most of his tenure.) Benson resigned from the Harding presidency and committed himself entirely to the National Education Program, the remnants of which are now still based at Harding as the Belden Center and as the American Studies Institute. While Benson persisted in his work until his death in the early 1990s, his political importance after he resigned from the Harding presidency faded almost immediately, and so did any contributions to Harding from big business. Nevertheless, most current members of the board, most members of the current administration, many Harding faculty members, and also the more rabidly partisan alumni are graduates of Benson’s indoctrination programs. They have inherited from him not just the good desire to protect freedom, but also his sometimes brisk and intolerant style that could only see the world as for or against, never as the field of questions and attempts at answers that it in fact is.
Benson’s legacy, however, would be best honored if Harding kept taking his original insight as serious as he did: That a community where the fundamental human freedoms are not respected is not just a community not worth having, but also one that will eventually do away with the Christian faith.
This includes the freedom to dissent. God is not just the Creator; he is also the great dissenter. Whenever humans think they can take care of things on their own, when they think they have finally figured everything out, when they think they no longer need to question themselves because they understand all the law and the prophets, God says, Behold my Son, a stumbling block to the Jews, and a scandal to the Gentiles. Moreover, God calls us to dissent to the current wisdom of the world, which to Him is foolishness, and he allows us to dissent even from Him, if our dissent is one of the struggles we face in life because he appears to us only through a glass darkly, and if we dissent in the faith that He will find us in the end.
Harding’s commitment to freedom is a great and beautiful thing. But it can only be a true freedom, a godly freedom, if it includes allowances for a difference of opinion – allowances for dissent. Both as an academic institution committed to academic freedom and as a community that is passionate about the American Way, Harding should encourage thoughtful, constructive dialog and be unafraid of dissent. After all, among brothers and sisters, iron sharpens iron, and the truth can take all comers graciously and courageously.
To insist on stifling dissent rather than taking it on in open and fair dialog, on the other hand, is cowardly and betrays a sense of insecurity and a lack of faith in one’s own position. Shouting others down or dismissing them smugly is not part of the American Way. It is also un-Christian. It is the opposite of what Harding has always stood for.
False Assumption Number Three: Angry Right-Wing Donors Have An Unbreakable Stranglehold on Harding’s Administration, Which Acts as Their Henchman
The pretense that some dark cabal of angry right-wing donors has an unbreakable stronghold on Harding’s administration and is just waiting for a chance to turn it into Freed-Hardeman while we watch helplessly is just that: a pretense. I would even go so far to say it’s a pretense that Harding critics like to use as an excuse to not actually engage with those things that happen at Harding that they disagree about. It also reflects a certain ignorance about how and why the Harding administration reacts to the kind of pressure we have recently heard rumors about.
Things are much more straightforward than that: Follow the money.
Let’s face it. Harding is a pauper. Schools like Harvard receive daily donations the size of Harding’s entire endowment. It’s small. It’s so small that Harding actually has to live off the tuition its students pay – a ridiculous notion for most big name schools. In fact, it’s so small that Harding has been grasping at any way to make a bit more money recently, whether it be jumping on the online MBA bandwagon, letting upper-level courses in various departments count as graduate courses so it can sell some M.S. and M.A. degrees to Chinese exchange students, starting understaffed and low-quality graduate programs in education all over Arkansas, creating a physician assistant’s program in a state that is on the RNA system, or starting other professional training cash cows like a pharmacy program – all to make some extra benjamins.
You see, Harding is in a bind when it comes to donors. It’s committed itself to a no-win constituency that doesn’t really go places much, financially speaking. It takes all comers academically. It sets low standards for in-class performance. It discourages academic competitiveness. It has no commitment to publishing or to connecting students aggressively through national conferences. And once the students graduate, it does not offer them much to be grateful for except for memories of Spring Sing, Harding swings, and marrying too young. Established and wealthy schools treat their students like assets, make sure they place high-level internships, assist them in applying to top-level graduate programs with all the weight of their faculty connections, offer them access to a well-cultivated network of industry players, and see to it that they place high-income jobs, all because they know that this way their alumni will make it big, will make big bucks, and feel invested in giving back big. If alumni place highly out of Harding, it’s because of their own network or their own efforts. And when they give back to a school, it’s the grad school that rescued them from Bible Belt middle-class mediocrity. What Harding is left with, a few well-known donor families aside, is calling school teachers and bank clerks and retired missionaries during Sunday lunch to ask for an annual donation of $100.
There is nothing wrong with that. Harding has its own priorities, and it should be praised for sticking with them even at great cost.
But what this does mean is that many of its comparatively high-level donors are basically people who would not get a hearing elsewhere, and the donors know it, and they know they can exploit Harding’s dependency on them.
The worst-case scenario of what happens in situations like Mark’s is this:
Donors with an interest in the Republican Party hear that someone at Harding openly supports a Democrat. Their interest is piqued for two reasons.
One: Like many evangelicals, they know very well that the Republican party has done next to nothing when it has been in power to change any laws in favor of evangelical causes, but at least they’re more likely to make those changes whenever they feel like it than the Democrats are. Ergo, they support the GOP as a matter of a very optimistic conscience, and think of anyone supporting Democrats as busting that bubble. They don’t like to be disillusioned, and so get angry about it.
Two: They have enough money to donate some of it, but not enough to have risen above their bitterness that taxes are keeping them from all the riches they feel they truly deserve but will never have. Thus, they support the GOP’s fiscal conservatism and view anyone supporting Democrats as people who love lazy thieves that threaten their status as God’s wealthy elect.
Also, they’re businessmen, the kind that reduces tips in restaurants if their every whim isn’t served as quickly as they can come up with one and who then sneer at the waitress when she comes back to the table with her makeup smudged from crying in the kitchen, so they know money is leverage, especially with paupers.
Accordingly, they call Harding’s administration and tell whoever is taking their call that either Harding makes sure all students continue to be godly little GOP supporters and vote accordingly, or they will quit sending money. No GOP monolith from Harding, no dough. They are, in other words, buying votes. This is immoral and illegal, but on the other hand they feel they’re doing it because God wants them to.
Since the Harding administration needs money, they do as they are told and tell any dissenters to shut up.
All those idealistic free thinkers are shocked into silence and resignation because now that one of their own has been told to tone it down, they think they are entitled to feel absolutely helpless and also feel persecuted, put down by the Man – which since James Dean and MLK is actually kinda cool.
Here’s a secret. The Man doesn’t exist. Harding ain’t Harvard. It ain’t Yale, Princeton, Stanford, UChicago, or even the University of Arkansas. That’s who truly rich Fat Cats give their money to. Harding does not have those kinds of donors, like I said. The Man at Harding is like the Wizard of Oz: a creepy little midget behind a dusty curtain who calls himself ruler and barks at the moon.
Which means:
On the one hand, the administration has to work hard to court oodles of little wizards – lots of smaller, slightly affluent donors with fond memories of the past grandeur of dancing ‘round the Maypole and nights beside the lily pond. And it has to keep lots of them happy. This makes the administration sensitive to when those donors have an ideological aneurism because their calcified geriatric brains can’t tolerate dissent about politics any more than they can tolerate not sitting in the same spot in church every Sunday or not having their exact usual meal at the Dixie Café afterwards, preferably served by the exact same waitress, hold the gravy. That dependency has become worse since Harding has been aggressively pushing endowment gifts by will, which you can only get from people twenty years or so away from the last time they changed their mind about what it means to have the right opinions.
On the other hand, it means that any alumnus or alumna willing to send any amount of money has leverage with the administration. That includes new donors and people who aren’t donors yet because they can’t afford it two years out of college. In fact, the administration would rather have donors who will be donating for a long time in the future than not. As a result, all those frustrated with Angry Right Wing Donor Cabal have no reason to feel silenced or outmaneuvered, unless they shut up and sit down.
Here’s something else that’s easy to forget. Any recent Harding alumn, even those who, as my friend James Wiser put it, “view their alma mater with no small level of confusion and embarrassment” thanks to Harding’s recent approach to academic free speech, has bought a $35,000 stake in Harding simply by going there. That is quite a bit more money than some saintly curmudgeon who paid $2,000 back in 1952 and is now promising $10,000 after they fly away in glory. And what is more, the recent alumn has invested that money into the current administration, not into those long by. That is a vote of confidence that the alumn has every right to insist to see honored.
Those $35,000 also are part of a bargain the alumn has made with Harding that means, in return for that money, Harding promises not just an education, but also a meaningful degree. Paying for a meaningful degree from Harding means that Harding has an obligation to keep that degree meaningful. That means the alumn has a right to expect Harding to remain consistent with the values of a meaningful higher education, including the freedom of academic inquiry and the freedom of speech, including political speech. If Harding instead decides to make its faculty chant partisan mantras in unison, it not only makes itself ridiculous in the academic world, but also devalues that investment of money and good faith in the current administration that the alumn made by attending Harding. Harding would be morally defrauding the alumn.
If reminded of that fact by enough dissenters, I doubt that the administration would go on doing it for very long.
Accordingly, dear disenchanted recent alumni: Do not back off. Do not give up on Harding because you think you will not be heard. Do not wait for the current board to die and the current administration to retire. Write. Call. Email. You matter. You matter at least as much as all those intellectual cowards who run to Daddy Burks because they are afraid their own point of view won’t hold up under scrutiny from one or two dissenting voices. You matter more, in fact, because David Burks likes to think of himself as a reasonable man, and because the more well-reasoned, patient, and insistent letters, emails, and calls he receives, the more easily he can feel like he ought to listen, and the more likely he is to want to do so.
Your future donations matter to Harding. Your good-will matters to Harding. And the more of you write and call and email, the more you will matter. You are no longer non-conformist undergrads who sit outside Midnight Oil and smoke oh-so-rebelliously and think of pranks to play on Dr. Burks. You’re now adults, you have real concerns, and Harding has real obligations to you. Let the others shout and slobber vitriol. You insist to be heard – with dignity, with self-confidence, and with all the best traditions of Harding like wind at your back.
I did. You can, too.
I respect your stance here as a mature, “change from the inside” approach that gives the benefit of the doubt to the Harding administration and finds inherent value in dialogue. I especially enjoyed your “false assumptions” sections, where you make a sound case for diverse political voices using Harding’s own foundations and history.
“After all, as alumni, it is in our future whether we want it there or not – our degrees from Harding mean we have no choice but to care what happens there.”
I’m afraid I don’t share the above sentiment. In fact, the easier thing for me to do in secular academia is to play the Harding card as a kind of freakish fact about me: “Hey, wanna know something funny? I got my undergrad degree in one of the most conservative private Christian institutions on the face of the planet,” followed by “I can also dislocate my shoulder and speak Klingon!” The response is always the same: “Why would you do such a thing?”
That’s the hard part. Why did we go to Harding? Anyone want to share? To be honest with myself, I went because my friends were going. I wasn’t self-actualized enough to make a sober decision, so I followed the herd. Now I’m having trouble deciding whether I would’ve gone had I to do it over again.
[...] the wanderer [...]
Not to excuse anything that went before (or since), Harding first integrated in the Spring of 1964, one year before Benson’s retirement in the Spring of 1965.
Shannon — Yes, that’s technically correct. Thanks.
Benson did continue to oppose the move, however, and in fact just what integration was supposed to mean was the cause of violent contention between him and the Ganus administration for several years afterwards, i.e. whether integration was mean to be taken as more than something that happened on paper with a few isolated token black students as proof. I happen to know about this because when I worked in the Brackett archives, I sorted and filed Benson’s correspondence and read most of it. If you want to check the Bison issues from around that time, you can find quite a lively debate, for instance, whether it would be OK to talk to black students when walking by them on the sidewalk.
My main point, though, is that this was a case where theology got muddled with social prejudices — and that the Harding community eventually overcame that.
Bryan Tarpley’s final question is one thing that I really wonder about in the midst of all this angst over Elrod’s decision. It seems like people loved their Harding experience (and everything it did for them) but they hate so much about how it goes about its business today. (And, BTW, it IS primarily a business. We could argue whether or not it should be in a perfect world, but there is really no arguing what it actually is.) To me, it sorta feels like the incongruity of how most folks hate Congress but love their Congressman.
I read this entry upon a rousing recommendation. And, I must admit, there are some very impressive features to it. For one, the length. You should be commended on taking such great pains to put all of these ideas down in print. It took a lot of time & effort, and I at least appreciate it on that level. Second, I was highly impressed with the historical lessons that you parlayed into your arguments. You certainly had some substantive knowledge to bring to bear.
That said, there was a lot here that I found disappointing. For one, there are some enormous leaps in terms of conclusions that are made on matters that really aren’t public knowledge. If an actual decision-making insider were to read this, I imagine that they might quote God from Job 38:2…
“Who is this that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge? ”
You write so matter-of-factly about interactions between Harding’s administration & Dr. Mark Elrod as if you had an intimate audience for what actually happened in the last week, or about the heart & intentions of people who generously donate money to Harding University. And it is my opinion that you betray the reader when you make such tremendous assumptions, having roped them in by wowing them with your clearly outstanding historical understanding of Harding’s past. I especially found your characterization of people who give of their own wealth utterly distasteful. I’m not going to say there aren’t any donors like that; there very well may be. But you painted that picture with an awful wide brush, and I think that was wrong.
Furthermore, you set up several false “either/or” assumptions. Either Dr. Elrod is allowed to speak openly & honestly about his chosen party allegiance, OR perhaps Harding should honestly designate itself as a Republican College. Either dissenters should be allowed to cause as much havoc as they wish, or Harding suppresses “freedom.” Either Harding makes decisions independently, or its donors are some kind of dominatingly coercive, Machavellian monsters. These are false dichotomies.
And I’ll have to admit some bias here. My bias is that I have grown weary of reading so much criticism against Harding & so much saintly praise of Dr. Elrod. It is too simplistic, and frankly just plain false, for everyone to characterize these parties in this way. I could speculate the reasons for why we do this, but I won’t pretend to have all the answers. I just think that it is pretentious for so many to do this.
Ultimately, my biggest beef with this issue is that I don’t find it all that important. A writer has chosen to limit who reads his writing. Tragedy of tragedies. My expanded thoughts on that element may be read here:
http://feetwasher.blogspot.com/2008/07/rush-to-outrage.html
… that is, if I haven’t completely offended you by now ; )
Jonathan,
I enjoyed this post and found it informative. Thank you for taking the time.
I take marginal interest in politics (just registered to vote this year), but I did read Elrod’s blog on occasion. I was disappointed to learn that his show was becoming an exclusive gig this last week. I’ve read several of the commentaries regarding this incident over the past few days, and I’d like to react to yours here.
First, I’d like to point out that the venue in which I’ve read Harding labeled as a republican university has been limited primarily to blog comments. Most of the authors have left their expression at disappointment in the current situation. I’ve heard Harding take criticism on multiple occasions due to the strict rules uncharacteristic of other universities, as well as for displaying a lack of academic diversity (perceived or real). I think you are correct in asserting that Harding is more appropriately labeled conservative than republican.
Regarding desegregation, I’m a little confused about your conclusion. To quote a few sentences:
“But nowhere is upholding certain social and fiscal politics stated as part of Harding’s mission. Presumably, this is so because those secular attitudes are subject to change while Christian values are eternal.” … “Desegregation is a good example of how the conflict between spiritual values and secular attitudes played out at Harding in the past, and how the two were often falsely treated to be the same thing.” … “When the student body overwhelmingly asked for the school to be desegregated in 1957, Benson interrupted the chapel service to announce that ‘The redbirds, the bluebirds, the blackbirds, they don’t mix and mingle together, young people!’” … “It took the new Ganus administration less than a year in office to make Harding the last Church of Christ school to integrate, ” … “What was a political issue people felt strongly about and muddled with their Christian beliefs had faded away. Harding’s Christian convictions prevailed over the political leanings a majority held – because of a courageous president who was not afraid to have the necessary conversations about the evil of racism.”
It seems to me that if Harding was indeed the last CoC school to integrate, and that if the CoC was among the last religious groups to desegregate, and if the majority of the student body wanted to integrate, it follows that what Ganus did was not prevailing over any political leanings held by a majority, but rather finally conceding to join the majority. In fact, if anyone was dissenting, it would have been Benson. Not having known Benson or ever interviewed him, I don’t know whether his motivations included finance. Regardless of his motivations or moral failure, he was the dissenter in this case.
In your second item, you described a dichotomy between the concepts of ‘American’ freedom (free enterprise, free speech, etc.) and freedom for dissenting patterns of thought. While I agree that Harding’s stated commitment to freedom demands freedom to dissent, I don’t think Harding, as it were, can be fairly characterized as having stifled Elrod. You mentioned in your introduction that “Moreover, the administration informed Mark that his blog was drawing too much outraged attention from the donor community.” I would be interested to know the source from which that was taken. It may well be Mark’s own blog; I’m uncertain. Regardless, this is what Elrod has stated in other places:
“For the record, I was not “pressured” into changing my blog from “public” to “private” status. I made this decision on my own as the result of the general frustration I have with members of our fellowship who want to make a spiritual judgment about me based on my political views. In the last few days, much of that angst has been directed toward my employer and, as a result, toward me as well. I would much rather have a private conversation about things that are important to me than a public conversation that leads to additional complaints about me to the Harding University administration.”
I think we all would be very interested to know the exact wording and context through which these complaints were transmitted from Harding administration to Elrod. Those factors would determine how much blame Harding administration should share (if any) for this situation. In any case, you clarified the notion of antagonistic parties in your 3rd section, which I will address now.
I think you are precisely correct in your distinction between a “cabal” of right-wing donors and the true scenario Harding faces, financially. Compared to many private schools, Harding is not well-endowed, financially. However, we are not the smallest fish in the pond, either; professors are not left wondering where their next meal will come from, though they’re not being compensated as well as they might at other insitutions. I’m positive that there are some well-off donors who command more of a voice than others, and who may not even be as old as we might imagine.
I want to pause here and offer some loving responses to what I consider overly harsh statements. “…once the students graduate, it does not offer them much to be grateful for except for memories of Spring Sing, Harding swings, and marrying too young.” This is not altogether true. While Harding does not have a singular focus on academic competition, it does offer a rich education for those who wish to afford themselves of it. I’m no genius, but I found Fortner’s Hebrew readings, Neller’s Greek readings, and McCready’s French literature sufficiently challenging to meet my needs. Not all departments or professors are quite as demanding, but I think this is true of many undergraduate programs. I will elaborate more on this in my concluding remarks.
“when they give back to a school, it’s the grad school that rescued them from Bible Belt middle-class mediocrity.” I’m not sure this is a situation from which one must necessarily be rescued.
After leaving Harding, I worked for 4 years at a large credit union that services about 3 million members and manages roughly $35 billion in assets. Having dealt on a personal level with people who have no savings and large debt, and also those who are incredibly wealthy, I concluded two things regarding wealth. 1) Most people with few assets and large debt within the U.S. have chosen their condition and choose to remain in that condition. With the programs and jobs available here, most could escape this condition within 5 years maximum if they so chose. Lack of vision and/or motivation is what keeps these people in their situation. 2) Medium to great wealth is most often a product of choice and priority, and focus on great wealth is not a sufficient barometer for success. These principles can be applied easily to institutions.
“Harding has its own priorities, and it should be praised for sticking with them even at great cost.” I agree with that statement. I also believe strongly that if Harding is making godly moves, God will support Harding to the extent that is needed. I’m not necessarily of the school of thought that God’s support will manifest itself in huge endowments or the like. I think you are also correct that Harding tends to pander to its more generous givers, and I think it’s going to take a great amount of faith to do the right thing in face of losing even that money.
Regarding donors, “They have enough money to donate some of it, but not enough to have risen above their bitterness that taxes are keeping them from all the riches they feel they truly deserve but will never have.” I hesitate to make that kind of judgement about their inner motivations and thoughts without evidence. Have you talked to any who have made statements like these?
“Also, they’re businessmen, the kind that reduces tips in restaurants if their every whim isn’t served as quickly as they can come up with one and who then sneer at the waitress when she comes back to the table with her makeup smudged from crying in the kitchen, so they know money is leverage, especially with paupers.” While that is a poignant picture, I think it’s really unfair to judge so harshly and to put them in that kind of scenario. I’ve known many people I respect to do not tip as well as I think they should, but to place people into that scenario when it may or may not be correct is more than I can support.
While purchasing votes (if you’re a candidate) is certainly illegal, placing your financial support with an institution conditionally is neither immoral nor illegal. I don’t think donors can expect an institution to make sure that students vote a certain way, regardless of the teachers. It is not unreasonable for them to withhold their money if they think an institution is going against their fundamental values. While I don’t agree that Harding’s current situation should inspire someone to withhold money, I don’t think it is akin to buying votes or to withholding tips from an underpaid waitress.
Finally, I was inspired by your encouragement to write Harding about this incident. I think you are correct that alumni (and current students) have a lot of pull with the University, and voicing our concerns is the only way the Administration can know we have a problem. Furthermore, many donors may be surprised by the fact that others welcome discussion of this nature and may be swayed themselves when they see a motivated, active university instead of a slothful, downcast one. Harding can expect a pen and paper letter from me regarding this. Thanks for the rallying cry. Elrod has already received (and respectfully declined) my request to be on his readership list, but I hope that he gets many such e-mails and takes them as an encouragement.
As an epilogue, I’d like to reply to Bryan regarding why I chose to go to Harding as an undergraduate (and why I’m back for graduate school). During middle school and the beginning of high school, I lived in Japan. Though a life-long CoC person, I didn’t know that “we” had schools. I actually didn’t know about Harding until I started attending youth rallies as a junior and senior. In Florida, I had a full tuition scholarship to any state school I wanted. Most of my friends were going to UF and a few to FSU. I considered both. I graduated high school with an International Baccalaureate diploma and was interested in nuclear chemistry. During my senior year, I began to believe that I needed to be directly involved in ministry, and so looked at a few schools, including Faulkner, Freed Hardeman, and Harding. Harding offered me a full tuition scholarship and so I decided to come.
An education at Harding, like anywhere else, is what you make of it. You can choose to be lazy (I often did) and get whatever minimum GPA your standards allow you to achieve, or take whatever classes you think will be easiest. You can also organize your curriculum to study under professors you think can offer you quality classes (I often did this as well). The idea that Harding is academically inferior because they do not largely emphasize publishing or competition is not correct. Some professors were slack and they are doing no one favors in that arena. Others are high quality. In either situation, students have the opportunity to read and to dedicate their time towards higher learning if they wish.
My best memories of undergrad work at Harding include learning Hebrew with Fortner for 3 semesters, but they also include naps on the front lawn and close friends with whom I retain relationships to this day. `The environment for students to grow spiritually is encouraged here (not by the rules or the focus on marriage, mind you) and stands as one of Hardings unique and most valuable assets. What my best memories do not include is drunken revelries and orgies that sadly characterize (and detract from) many larger universities. Frankly, teachers and classes are not required for higher learning. Anyone with a brain and access to a library can read whatever the wish; but humans are not brains only, and the relationships are equally as valued in my own mind.
I’m chewing on this, Jonathan. You make a few good points. However, a few points of disagreements jump out at me.
1. Most alumni I talk to find themselves well-prepared and competitive. I have been very blessed by the preparation I received from Harding.
2. There are many large companies that give HU alum priorty because of their capabilities and trustworthiness. You may not have had the connections from the English department that you wanted, but other departments have done better than what you represent. Speak to the deans in the Sciences, Business, Psychology, Nursing and Education. I find them singing a different tune than you hear.
3. As a fellow former employee of Harding, I have been in on several big policy discussions and have never seen the administration wringing their hands over the opinions of donars. Decisions are made because they are what the board and administration believes is right. Disagree with them all you like, but please don’t accuse them of pandering.
4. Harding’s Endowment is $87mil. This is larger than Libscomb’s $70 mil, and Belmont’s $52mil, all three of which are ranked in the top 25 Universities in the South. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/brief/t1univmas_s_brief.php Harding, a relatively young, Private Christian University can hardly be compared to Harvard and Yale when it comes to their endowments. All other things concidered, Harding is doing very well in academic rankings, job placement, fund-raising and mission fulfillment. You have to compare apples to apples, not watermelons.
These are some things that rub me wrong upon my first reading of your blog. It is good to hear your voice, though. I hope you are being blessed.
Daniel! It’s so good to hear from you! How have you been? I’ll get back to you in just a sec…
Philip –
I hate to be this way because it’s just going to sound evasive to you, but while I certainly wasn’t in the room with Mark and David, let’s just say that if you went to either side today and ran what I wrote above by them, they would say it’s factual in terms of the gist of that exchange. I assure you I check my sources carefully, and I don’t work off rumors.
My portrait of donors was intentionally broad. As you probably noticed when you calmed down and re-read what I wrote, I went out of my way to make clear that this was a caricature. My main concern isn’t with the donors. My main concern is with disgruntled people who disagree with Harding and then invent a sort of boogie man who doesn’t exist so that they can sit back and take pot shots. As I pointed out, there is no smoke-filled room full of henchmen at Harding.
I make none of the dichotomous claims that you say I do. Like I said, the false assumptions are distilled from what I saw going on in the discussions about this situation on other blogs. For example, one of the most common criticisms of Mark has been that he knows that Harding is Republican and thus should not be surprised if he can’t express his Democrat sympathies. That kind of appeal to a Harding community that does not exist is what I am pointing out as false; Harding is much more diverse and much more willing to sustain dissent than that. That’s why this particular situation shocks me.
Finally, this isn’t a criticism of Harding as such. I love Harding. (And I don’t mean that in the sanctimonious way some people use to excuse bashing that comes afterwards.) If I didn’t truly care, then I wouldn’t have spent all this time on this post. My critique is of the apparent attitude with which some people appear to try to pressure the Harding administration into behavior that – at least in its results – is wrong at an academic institution – from either side of the discussion.
Lloyd –
Your point about desegregation is well taken. I was being unclear. Benson was acting on the input he was receiving from the wider Harding community, and because that input came from people he considered to be reasonable and representative, he felt obligated to squelch dissent among the students, who wanted change. My point is that he was doing this in good faith, but that he was confusing a wider social attitude of his time with a theological imperative. The Harding community overcame that confusion and moved on. Nor am I saying that’s what is going on now. What I’m saying is that sometimes the shrillest voices distort what leaders are hearing who are making their best efforts to do right by the community.
As to your other point, you may want to take into account that Mark has a job he wants to keep. Of course he isn’t going to say that he was being pressured. Perhaps he would say he was being strongly guided to rethink the impact his blog has on certain parts of the Harding community and what the consequences of that might be. The fact alone that a meeting took place asking him to consider whether openly supporting the candidate of his choice – and one of the two mainline candidates at that – is the best thing for Harding is an indication that this wasn’t just a friendly chat about the weather.
Nor do I think the administration was being unfair in how they dealt with Mark. Not at all. I just think the administration has caused it to appear, whether it wanted to or not, as if the people critical of Mark have the administration’s consent in asking for him to be silenced, or at least stifled, or at least made aware that his views are not welcome in a public forum if he wants to stay at Harding. And the administration has not told Mark what it should have told Mark as an academic institution committed to Christian values and to the American Way: That unless he does something criminal or morally outrageous, they have his back, whether they agree with him or not. That is the role of academic leadership. That is the bare minimum that the academic community at large expects from academic leadership. And it’s the bare minimum any academic, including myself, expects from an academic leadership that wants to be viewed and respected as such.
As to your very astute observations about Harding, money, and donors, I refer you to my response to Philip in regard to what I said about caricature.
Thanks for taking the time to take me seriously, though, brother. I hope all is well with you!
Daniel –
Oh my, it looks like I stepped on some toes. OK, let me be as clear as I can about this.
1. Harding provides an excellent education. What I am saying is that it is not yet good enough (and that’s meant in a motivational sense) in placing its alumni in such a way that they become filthy rich, and that those alumni who do become filthy rich by and large attribute that success to other institutions that are more aggressive about going after that money, in part with much more stringent networking. I think you would agree with that. I also think that while I may have overstated the difference between Harding and graduate schools and where alumni money goes respectively, there is a reason why Harding has not yet realized its potential in securing an affluent, loyal donor base like other schools have. It’s not a matter of dedication. Harding is nothing if not dedicated. It’s a matter of not being aggressive enough. Trust me. Nothing that goes on at Harding compares to the monumental effort the University of Chicago goes through to secure that kind of loyalty/networking dependency – and here I’m not even out the door yet.
2. I’m in graduate school at the best school in my field. I did extremely well out of the English department. But I know how I got here, and I see where 90% of my fellow classmates are. It’s impressive, it’s respectable, but they’re not on the fast track to becoming stars in their fields (nor am I, but that’s not my point). And while you might point out that’s because Harding is not a school for geniuses like Harvard, I would say that in real life those geniuses do as well as they do because of all the help they get, and not much because of their smarts. Sorry – that part of the American dream just ain’t so. If you don’t believe me, I’d love for you to come up here and let me introduce you to some of my neighbors at the GSB.
3. I have great respect for the administration, and I know they are not being frivolous in their decisions. But they do appear to pander. Obviously. That appearance is what we’re talking about here. Or else they have occasional policy hiccups that are hard to explain in any other way.
But perhaps they should explain them, and we’d all be proven wrong. I, for one, would really love to see a public statement from Dr. Burks saying Harding believes in academic freedom and in the basic democratic right for anyone to publicly support the candidate of their choice – even on campus (or else, that no candidate can be publicly supported on campus). I would love to see one that re-affirms that the administration takes its role as the protector and nurturer of an academic environment seriously enough to protect minority voices and voices of dissent, even if that rankles a lot of people who love to shout down any kind of disagreement. I would love to hear a statement that says that all these rumors about who influences what are crock and that in the future donors from any side of the aisle are free to voice their disagreements, but they are not free to assume that their disagreements have any consequences whatsoever for academic freedom or free speech on campus. I would love to see that kind of leadership. In fact, I demand that kind of leadership. I want these rumors to be wrong. If they are, show me. Please.
4. Precisely. That’s why the people I was primarily talking to here – those who pretend they have no influence – need to act and give and talk. The bigger the endowment, the better for Harding and for everyone.
Moreover, I didn’t say what I said about Harding’s funding to malign its fundraising. I said it to explain why alumni have the weight they seem to have around Harding, even those who are primarily being unpleasant and whom we would all be better able to ignore if their particular check mattered less.
Please, everyone donate to Harding! You can reach the advancement office at 501-279-4312 or by email at advancement@harding.edu.
Please, everyone also affirm Dr. Burks’ leadership and ask him to make the kind of public statement that lets us believe he takes academic freedom and freedom of speech seriously for everyone, whether they are part of the majority or of the minority, and that he will show the kind of strength and courage that is willing to protect those minority voices. You can reach him at president@harding.edu.
P.S. Daniel, I really do want to catch up with you. Are we friended on Facebook?
Daniel, honestly, that ranking system that you pulled up from News Week isn’t every effective since that ranking is for university that grant only masters degrees but do not grant Phd’s. No University that grants a Phd are generally on that list. None of those Universities are truly ranked in the top 25 in the south, or in fact probably in the top 100 in the South. No true its like comparing apples and oranges since Arkansas State University is a public school, but their endowment is actually only 33 million dollars. Of course the University of Arkansas is ridiculous as theirs is something silly like 900 million.
Regardless of all of these debates of whether Harding is a republican university or not there is one key to all of this. What is Harding first and foremost? It says it right in the name, its a University. To be an effective university and to prepare students for intensive graduate work the freedom to examine other viewpoints is a must. Harding is not so good at this. It does a poor job of preparing students for graduate work at schools that are not Christian affiliated. The first time a graduate student attends a seminar class with a class full of people attacking a subject that would be handled with kid gloves at Harding can be very daunting to say the least. On the whole some of the policies at Harding for the professors make it a less than ideal academic environment. First of all there is no tenure track, which really does cost them some valuable professors. Secondly, and this could partially be because of the first point, there is no real emphasis on publishing at Harding. A universities academic value is sometimes judged by the strength of the professors publications. Thirdly, unless something has changed that I am unaware of, Harding tends to only offer its professors one year contract signed yearly. This creates an environment where teachers are in a state of fear. They have no job security. There is no possible possible way that this does not effect the quality of education at Harding. Even the most devout of Christian academic can be swayed to other universities by such things as job security and twice as much pay or better at another university.
Oh and for the record, Rice Universities endowment is just sick. 4.7 billion dollars. 4,700,000,000. Thats a mighty big number.
Lloyd, as I previously reminded Jonathan, integration at Harding occurred WHILE Benson was president. Spring of 1964.
Shannon, I appreciate the information. I think on this blog, Jonathan has to approve comments before they’re posted and the only one that was up at the time was Bryan’s. I’m pretty ignorant about the time frames on the integration issue though; what exactly was going on back then? Did Benson finally change his mind, or was it even his call?
@JRC:
“The first time a graduate student attends a seminar class with a class full of people attacking a subject that would be handled with kid gloves at Harding can be very daunting to say the least.”
Amen.
For whatever reason, he opened the door in the Spring of 1964. Everything back then was his call. He said “jump”, the only question was “how high?”
Back then – pre 1964, there were no black players on the team of any “white” college in Arkansas. It was 1969 before the University Of Arkansas had a black athlete (Almer Lee). College of the Ozarks was the first “white” college to dress a black player in 64-65. It was 1966 before any black HS players in Central Arkansas played on the teams of “white” schools.
Benson was a product of his time – a mere mortal. His Harding existed in the midst of a sea of racial prejudice. I give him credit for making the change at Harding – “a Change we call all believe in” – good, right?
I will throw this out there, my Aunt is married to one of Benson’s first cousins. He is actually a pentecostal preacher, or was since he is quite advanced in age. What I know of his family, and that is quite substantial from hearing Claude talk about it for years, his family was a bit on the racist side.
Jonathan,
I’m not sure if you will remember me. We took American Novel and British Novel together at HU (You taught me how to say bildungsroman properly, and we had to read Sons and Lovers for Dr. Organ’s group project). I was a student who kept quiet in fear of sounding stupid, so you intimidated me because you always had such thought provoking comments in class. I enjoy reading your blog (my favorite post by far is “Wrigley Field”), and I enjoy hearing your voice again making funny and remarkably accurate caricatures of Americans. Thank you for your most recent post about the Dr. Elrod/Harding situation in the blog world. I am taking your challenge to heart, and I want my voice to be heard. I love and care about Harding, and I know that my words should be just as important to the administration as any other Harding graduate or donor. I am glad to hear you are doing well.
Thank you, Jonathan.
I want to first say something quickly about Lloyd’s concluding paragraph in comment #6 and your comment about Harding leaving you with little upon graduation. Lloyd, spot on. Harding has a HUGE amount to offer us upon graduation. If I wanted what some of the other “big name” universities offer, I would have gone there, I had great scores. I am confident I could have gotten into a more “accademically prestigious” school, but my goal was not to be a professional accademic. My goal was to be a minister; a servant and teacher in the Lord’s kingdom. I have never seen a university with a student body or faculty/staff that are more mission minded and service oriented than Harding University. I learned from professors who openly weep over the condition of lost humanity, who open their homes to their students, who have prayed with me countless times, who financially support their own students on mission trips, who still provide open lines of communication to help mentor me in my growth as a minister. I came away with a rich network of relationships with other ministers and brother’s and sisters throughout the world. Thank you HU!
On top of that, I eco what Loyd said about being challenged academically – I found myself well-prepared for my graduate work and an accademic world.
To JRC – The rankings from USNews have no way of measuring Harding’s biggest assets. And the point of referring to that list is because it actually does compare apples to apples. So, according to the factors in the study, Harding compares very well among hundreds of its peers – accademically and financially.
My faith and my brain were stretched and challenged. Thank you to the Harding Faculty for helping me reach the goals for which I went to Harding to pursue.
Well it compared well against 60 of its peers. Because there were only 60 schools in the category. I do believe that ranking in US News is a bit misleading.
Hello Jonathan. As a Harding Alumni (’91) and Chicagoan I appreciate the spirit and content of your post. I think you have a good perspective on things — you’ve actually motivated me to maybe take a bit more of an active interest in what goes on at The Old Girl. The administration certainly needs to hear from alumni and supporters who would like to see more dialogue and less pronouncement coming from Searcy.
Thanks.