Did evangelical Taylor University just fire a professor for being too Woke?
Jemar Tisby’s account of the firing of Associate Professor Julie L. Moore certainly would lead one to believe so.
I have no judgments to make on the specific case; it would be foolish to judge a case like this on either Internet accounts or isolated student reviews, and if it comes out that she’s a witch who eats her students in Satanic ceremonies by the light of the full moon, I will not be surprised, still less surprised if she is the Virgin Martyr of Education.
Taylor University is in Indiana, after all. I’ve seen Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Children of the Corn. I know how crazy all that farmland can make a person.
But a couple of things: her lengthy account of her firing on Tisby’s Substack includes a fairly detailed layout of her classroom methodology. As a college English teacher with more than 20 years’ experience, I have to say her approach seems exemplary. She cites as one of her inspirations Dr. Willie J. Jennings and his lecture at Taylor. I studied under Jennings, and I have a pretty good idea of the kind of ideas he put in Taylor’s head, and it’s pretty good stuff.
Then too, I’ve had experience of college administrators. Her account of her firing, and the woeful, demonstrative (she has the tapes) unpreparedness of the provost involved, makes me suspect that she’s probably more reliable than Taylor at this point. Again, I’m open to being proven wrong.
And that leads me to the believable part (even if I reserve the right of disbelief) in Tisby’s narrative:
Her curriculum deals frankly with race in Indiana. And that’s a strong incentive for counter-Woke forces to do their mischief. The example of Florida’s anti-Woke agenda reveals the degree to which anti-Woke politics, like Woke politics, travels inside its own head.
And it’s always been thus.
Consider these words from the 1860 sermon of Benjamin Palmer that brought much of the South into the Confederacy [emphasis and clarifications added]:
It cannot be disguised that almost to a man [Northerners] are anti-slavery where they are not abolition[ist]. A whole generation has been educated to look upon the system with abhorrence as a national blot. They hope, and look, and pray for its extinction within a reasonable time, and cannot be satisfied unless things are seen drawing to that conclusion. We, on the contrary, as its constituted guardians, can demand nothing less than that it should be left open to expansion, subject to no limitations save those imposed by God and nature.
Golly, man. He preached that from the majestic First Presbyterian Church pulpit in New Orleans, then located on Lafayette Square and now still going strong uptown on South Claiborne Avenue.
Notice that all the way back in 1860, it was already about education, which is where the Woke battles are going to be won and lost.
It was about education for Socrates and his detractors, too: remember the charges against him included corrupting the youth of Athens.
I’m currently re-reading C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man in preparation for a podcast discussion of it, and his opening salvo is precisely this: that education actually shapes young people, and it can do it in ways that become set in one’s thinking.
Lewis and Palmer would agree about the root problem, though perhaps they might not about slavery.
There’s an enormous anxiety in human culture (and it’s gone septic in the United States right now) about this question of how Education is a corrupting influence.
And of course it is, if you want to look at it that way; education disconnected from change is just catechism, and not in any good or productive or soul-enlarging sense. It’s a great thing that we argue about what education ought to be about, because Lewis and Palmer are both right that it does matter. I wish I had ten dollars for every time a student sat in my office, wondering why her church didn’t tell her the things she was learning in college.
It is, however, a really tiresome thing when we have to endure deep reactionary silliness about it.
Palmer’s investiture of honor in the guardianship of slavery is so striking, so misguided, so morally flimsy, and yet so zealous because “a whole generation has been educated” to think differently. And as for Palmer, as you read his sermons it becomes clear that the specific problem is that he believes God has inaugurated and ordained slavery as the natural order and some liberal professor has been teaching kids differently in the North.
Sound familiar?
But at least Palmer has some specific object in mind, some specific tenet that, however misguided, he holds to be essential to right thinking. He is free to argue (and lose the argument) about why chattel slavery is ordained by God. The fact that he was intractable was, in part, a reason why hundreds of thousands of Americans died in the Civil War.
And this leads to my problem with both “Woke” and “anti-Woke” rhetoric:
I really have no idea what either of you mean, but I’m well aware that you both think it’s worth fighting to the death over.
And the longer I watch these “culture wars,” the more I’m sure that it’s not about what you say it is, and, at the moment of going to press, especially so on the Right.
I’ve written here about conservatism’s strange relationship with the idea of language as politics. And let’s tag a couple of major points here before we go further.
There is, in every society, some measure of control of speech. We tell ourselves we value free speech, but we rigorously exclude some speech. Whether it’s a mother refusing to tolerate bad language at the table; or a church refusing to tolerate blasphemy during its rituals, or modern political parties instructing one another endlessly on which descriptions of our life and history are out of bounds, or a sensitive person outraged at criticism of his person, we all do it, and we do it for a reason.
But not all speech controls are the same.
