Students at Wheaton College (Ill.) protested the suspension of Larycia Hawkins, a political-science professor who wore a hijab in solidarity with Muslims. Stacey Wescott, Chicago Tribune
Wheaton College’s move last month to fire one of its tenured professors, after questioning her beliefs on Islam and Christianity, raised new concerns about academic freedom at evangelical colleges. The incident on the Illinois campus also poses another, less publicly discussed, question: Do evangelical Christian colleges have a diversity problem?
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Students at Wheaton College (Ill.) protested the suspension of Larycia Hawkins, a political-science professor who wore a hijab in solidarity with Muslims. Stacey Wescott, Chicago Tribune
Wheaton College’s move last month to fire one of its tenured professors, after questioning her beliefs on Islam and Christianity, raised new concerns about academic freedom at evangelical colleges. The incident on the Illinois campus also poses another, less publicly discussed, question: Do evangelical Christian colleges have a diversity problem?
Larycia A. Hawkins, a black associate professor of political science at Wheaton, says she is being held to a different standard. Other professors at the predominantly white college hold views similar to hers, she notes, yet since she arrived in 2007 Ms. Hawkins, the campus’s only black female tenured professor, has been called on to defend her views on a host of topics, including diversity, sexuality, and liberation theology.
That sense of difference, of not fitting in or feeling like they’re not the right kind of Christian, has dogged many minorities at the nation’s 100-plus evangelical Christian colleges, which are distinguished by their commitment to hiring only Christians, and in some cases requiring them to abide by detailed faith statements and lifestyle covenants. To get along, many minority professors say, they must assimilate rather than stand out.
To be sure, evangelical colleges have ramped up efforts over the past decade to diversify their campuses. The proportion of undergraduates who identify as nonwhite within the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, in which most evangelical colleges are members, rose to 28 percent from 18 percent in the decade after 2004. (Among all private nonprofit four-year institutions, minority students make up about 33 percent of undergraduate enrollments.) At a handful of institutions — in places like Texas, New Mexico, and California — minority students make up nearly half the campus.
American higher education as a whole, of course, has a diversity problem. Black and Latino students are underrepresented on many campuses, particularly at elite liberal-arts colleges like Wheaton, and they drop out at higher rates than do white students. The Black Lives Matter movement has spurred campus conversations and demonstrations about discrimination, marginalization, and isolation among black students and professors at all kinds of campuses, public and private, across the country.
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Still, Ms. Hawkins’s case has renewed concern that there is something about evangelical colleges that heightens the challenges facing minority students and professors.
How do you preserve a Christian subculture formed out of a white understanding of Christianity, while embracing diversity?
One study showed that black students graduate at a significantly lower rate from these institutions than elsewhere. Researchers who study evangelicalism say racial tension on the campuses sometimes stems from differences in expressions of faith, including in styles of worship, where the predominantly white way is seen as the norm.
Perhaps more significant, say scholars of religion and race, white and black evangelicals often diagnose racism in starkly different ways. Black evangelicals are more inclined to see discrimination as a systemic issue, while whites tend to see it as a problem of individual behavior. That leads to very different conversations about race, justice, and society, studies show. Black evangelicals also find that when white evangelicals talk in terms of racial unity — or in religious parlance, of being “all God’s children” or “one in Christ” — it stifles important discussions about their different experiences.
“These problems are American problems, but it’s more exacerbated within the evangelical community in part because of the fact that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America,” says Michael C. Smith, an associate professor of media production at Pepperdine University and a Wheaton graduate.
For his doctoral dissertation, on black graduation rates at evangelical colleges, he studied 95 members of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, as well as other Protestant and private, secular institutions. He found that graduation rates for black students at the council’s colleges were on average 15 percent lower than at other private institutions. A significant gap remained even after accounting for differences like size and selectivity. Mr. Smith says that when he was doing his study, which looked at data from 2004 to 2007, many people expected him to find that black students would perform better at Christian colleges, which focus on students’ spiritual as well as intellectual development.
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Instead, attending a Christian college is actually harder for black students, he thinks. “If you don’t conform,” he says, “your faith is called into question. Perhaps you are just a bad Christian. This adds another level of anxiety and oppression to the equation.”
Shirley V. Hoogstra, president of the Christian-college council, says that most of the challenges her members face in diversifying are common to resource-strapped colleges, particularly ones located in predominantly white areas, as Wheaton is, in an affluent Chicago suburb. Yet she and other leaders acknowledge that their colleges’ emphasis on the spiritual dimensions of people’s lives means that students, staff, and professors are bound to one another in ways unlike at many secular campuses. They may feel pressure to attend the same churches, for example, or join the same Bible-study groups. If colleges don’t offer an array of options for black, Latino, Asian-American, and international students, the message they send may default to: To be part of this community, you need to adapt to our ways. “You don’t just invite people in,” she says. “You have to get your campus ready.”
At the same time, Christian colleges that emphasize social justice and other relevant Biblical teachings may be better positioned than many secular ones to make diversity central to their missions, college officials say.
Students at Wheaton College (Ill.) staged a sit-in outside the president’s office in December, protesting the administration’s treatment of Professor Hawkins.Stacey Wescott, Chicago Tribune
The opposing forces of a desire to maintain tradition and the drive to be more inclusive are rooted in the early days of American evangelicalism, which flourished in the 1800s. Biblical Scripture provided both the theological justification for slavery and a source of strength for those who opposed it. Wheaton itself was founded by an abolitionist, Jonathan Blanchard, and the first African-American in Illinois to receive a college degree went to Wheaton.
Yet some 76 percent of Americans who identify as evangelical Christian are white, according to a recent Pew poll. Add to that a conservative political orientation, in which many evangelicals express suspicion of anything that smacks of liberalism, and diversity efforts can be stalled by fears that a campus is sacrificing its religious heritage to the whims of political correctness, diversity experts say.
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“The big challenge has been: How do you preserve a subculture that is Christian but formed out of a white understanding of Christianity, while embracing diversity?” says Michael O. Emerson, a sociologist who studies race and religion, and provost of North Park University, one of the few evangelical colleges where the number of minority students now equals white students. “That’s where the rub is, and that’s what’s happened at university after university.”
Some experts say that evangelical colleges have run into trouble by conflating faith and culture. Social activism around issues of racial equality and justice, for example, which has a long tradition in the black church, is not central to the lives of many white evangelicals.
Michael S. Hamilton, an associate professor of history at Seattle Pacific University, finds symbolic significance in the way Ms. Hawkins responded to the news that she was in the process of being fired. She held a news conference in a Methodist church in Chicago, surrounded by religious leaders and other supporters of different races, ethnicities, and faiths.
“In the black church tradition, she squared her shoulders and said, You told me to be quiet, and I’m not going to be quiet,” says Mr. Hamilton, who has studied Wheaton and other evangelical colleges. “In the Yankee evangelical world, you’re typically very deferential to authority. She just sort of blew that apart right away.”
Ms. Hawkins’s case is not the first time Wheaton has publicly dealt with controversy around race. In 2012 a group of students leading a “rhythm and praise” chapel service in the African-American tradition of song and dance were mocked on Twitter by several white students in the audience. “I’m glad the 20 black kids that go here get one chapel and they enforce every stereotype imaginable,” tweeted one student.
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#Chapeltweets, as the scandal was dubbed, accelerated efforts already underway to improve diversity on campus, including the expansion of the multicultural center and the creation of two campus residences for students interested in race and diversity.
“In more recent years there’s a greater understanding that institutional diversity means that not everyone is going to think the exact same way,” says Rodney Sisco, who leads the Office of Multicultural Development at Wheaton and was one of the few black undergraduates on campus in the 1980s. Today just under 3 percent of Wheaton undergraduates are black, about 6 percent are Latino, 9 percent are Asian, and 5 percent are of two or more races.
When the #chapeltweets incident occurred, he says, senior administrators immediately got involved, rather than delegating it to his office. But there’s still plenty of work to be done, he says, for the campus to truly embrace diverse perspectives. “It’s a hard thing to wrestle with. How do we get to the point that we believe the same things but you express the theological reality differently than I do?”
Part of that is a numbers game, one in which Wheaton is still struggling to make a good showing. Black undergraduate enrollment, for example, places it 87th out of 100 Christian colleges, according to its own figures. The administration has agreed to bring in an outside reviewer to help figure out how to do better, says Mr. Sisco, including increasing the number of tenured faculty of color. Ms. Hawkins is one of just seven tenured- or tenure-track black professors there out of about 200 full-time faculty members, or about 3 percent of the total. Among all private, nonprofit four-year institutions, about 5 percent of full-time faculty members are black.
‘We believe that this is how God intended humankind to be organized. He didn’t intend to have everybody in separate little pockets.’
Some Wheaton professors and students describe a campus in which most white students don’t seem interested in thinking deeply about systemic racism, even as professors and the staff are trying to add diversity to the curriculum and campus activities.
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“Wheaton has long struggled with significant numbers of students who think the problem of race is talking about it, and when we don’t talk about it everything is fine,” says Brian Howell, an anthropology professor who blogged about the #chapeltweets incident and has spoken out in defense of Ms. Hawkins.
Aseye Agamah, a senior at Wheaton, agrees. Ms. Agamah, who is black, says she and many of her black friends have found the campus climate chilly at times. Conversations about race are quickly shut down by white students, and chapel services featuring black or other styles of worship are considered special, not standard.
She credits Mr. Sisco for creating multicultural spaces for students, and notes Wheaton’s historic commitment to diversity, but she says that high-level commitment hasn’t trickled down to her peers. “We’re supposed to be working here in an intentional community, but for people to say, ‘Oh, this race thing is not my issue,’ that breaks it down completely.”
Wheaton wants diversity, says Ms. Hawkins, but doesn’t know what to do with it when it arrives on campus. When students and faculty of color “cry out about oppression built into the system, that’s when we’re rebuffed,” she says.
The professor, who has received support from the college’s Faculty Council as her employment status is reviewed, describes getting resistance throughout her nine years at Wheaton. Her former department chair, she says, told her that a class she proposed on race and the Obama presidency probably wouldn’t interest students. She got a similarly negative reaction from the then-chair of the political-science department to a proposed class on race and the politics of welfare. The college added both classes, and they proved popular, with the latter class full or overenrolled most of the time, she says.
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In 2012 the Board of Trustees invited Ms. Hawkins to make her case that Wheaton needed a vigorous curriculum on diversity. “The thing I proffered to them was Wheaton College will be an anachronism in the future if it does not take seriously theoretical and theological diversity,” she says.
Larycia Hawkins, an associate professor of political science at Wheaton College, was suspended after asserting that Christians and Muslims worship the same god. Alyssa Schukar for The Chronicle
The response, she says, was indicative of the depth of the challenge. “‘But Larycia,’” she remembers one trustee telling her, “‘it’s so divisive to have diversity in the curriculum.’”
“That’s the kind of pushback I’ve received since I’ve been at Wheaton College,” she says.
The climate for diversity varies across evangelical colleges, with some, through deliberate focus and some benefits of geography, having found ways to create multicultural campuses. North Park University, where Mr. Emerson is provost, is one evangelical college that has transitioned from all white over the decades. Today about half of the students are minorities, as are 33 percent of the faculty and staff.
David L. Parkyn, the college’s president, attributes that success to several things, including a historic commitment to diversity, which he talks about frequently, and being located in a diverse city like Chicago, where it’s easier to recruit and provide cultural support for students from many ethnicities and religions. When recruiting faculty and administrators, the college also requires at least one finalist for every tenure and non-tenure-track position be a minority applicant.
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Having few written requirements as to how people should worship or behave is also helpful, Mr. Parkyn adds. North Park “has a very narrow concept of its mission: ‘For God’s glory and neighbor’s good,’” he says. “We don’t have anything for anyone to sign. We don’t do that. But we do know what the center is.”
Many evangelical colleges, he notes, are quite different theologically, in that they may have more-detailed faith statements for employees to sign, and geographically, since they are located in predominantly white areas. Both factors make it tougher for them to diversify. And for institutions that have other requirements, such as which type of church professors must attend, the challenges are even greater.
Calvin College, for example, ran into a conflict several years ago with a black professor who asked if she could switch from a Christian Reformed Church to a predominantly African-American one. The administration said no, and she left.
Michelle R. Loyd-Paige, executive associate to the president for diversity and inclusion at Calvin, says she faced a similar dilemma when she came up for tenure. Because she was an ordained associate pastor in her historically African-American church, which she chose in part because it allows woman leaders, the college granted her an exemption. It did so, however, because the church allowed female leaders like her, not because of race. But race and culture are two issues that Calvin and other traditionally white colleges need to better embrace to truly make minority faculty feel welcome, she says.
“Where can I be refilled, where can I be refreshed? It’s not in education mode. It’s in my black church,” she says, noting that her predominantly African-American community and church naturally place a greater emphasis on black issues than even some mixed congregations do.
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Ms. Loyd-Paige says diversity is of concern to all employees of evangelical colleges. A white employee once quit Calvin after the administration denied his request to allow his children to attend the local public school in their predominantly minority urban neighborhood, instead of a Christian day school, as required of tenure-track faculty. His family was invested in the urban community he was living in, involved in social-justice issues, and wanted their children to go to public school in their neighborhood to reflect those commitments, she says.
“There have to be ways in 2016 that we can guard the heritage and identity without the strict litmus test of where do you go to church,” she says. The key, she says, is not to see change as a loss of identity but as an embrace of an evolving church and a diverse world.
She and others note that the Christian community both within the United States and worldwide is increasingly diverse. If American colleges want to keep up with changing demographics, they need to adapt as well.
Alexander Jun, a professor of higher education at Azusa Pacific University, whose student body is nearly 50 percent minority, says that his college has taken steps to include diversity in the general-education curriculum and has created an office that focuses on diversity and inclusion. But like other evangelical colleges, says Mr. Jun, who studies access and equity in higher education, a continuing challenge there is to “embrace diversity as a Biblical mandate as opposed to seeing it as separate from what the Bible talks about.”
This add-on approach to diversity, he says, ties back to how white and minority evangelicals may see these issues differently. When he hears a white student or administrator talk about race and theology in terms of kind thoughts and deeds, that’s still very individualistic, says Mr. Jun, who speaks frequently to colleges on these issues. “But for Christians of color, like myself, my ethnic identity is intertwined with my theological beliefs.” And that needs to be discussed in a way that moves beyond checking a box on diversity requirements.
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The Council for Christian Colleges & Universities last year created a commission on diversity and inclusion to accelerate such conversations across campuses and share best practices.
“The demographics speak for themselves,” says Ms. Hoogstra, the council’s president.
Ms. Hoogstra, the former vice president for student life at Calvin College, says she was heartened by the frankness of conversations she heard among chief diversity officers and others at a conference the commission put on last fall: “Look, we’ve tried this, it didn’t work as well as we thought. We have to get better at this, we have to figure out why there are two steps forward, one step back.”
And she is hopeful that their faith orientation will be a motivator to change, not an impediment. “In faith-based colleges, the reason why diversity should matter and diversity is propelled to matter is because we believe that this is how God intended humankind to be organized. He didn’t intend to have everybody in separate little pockets.
“If he did create race and ethnicity,” she continues, “he intended to have something of value in it.”
Beth McMurtrie is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where she focuses on the future of learning and technology’s influence on teaching. In addition to her reported stories, she is a co-author of the weekly Teaching newsletter about what works in and around the classroom. Email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and follow her on LinkedIn.