Grove City College’s Supposed ‘Wokeness’

O n November 10, a petition emerged online alleging that Grove City College, a Christian and historically conservative institution in western Pennsylvania, was being threatened by critical race theory. The petition cites a 2020 presentation by author Jemar Tisby, a single elective course offered at the college, and questionable statements allegedly made by GCC’s director of multicultural initiatives as tantamount to “threatening the academic and spiritual foundations that make the school distinctly Christian.”

The petition gained hundreds of signatures, and the issue garnered coverage from American Reformer and The Daily Wire, as well as a plethora of articles and YouTube videos, all aimed at answering the question: Has Grove City “gone woke”? As a current Grove City student and a journalist who covers ideological trends on college campuses, I believe the question is well worth investigating. Any honest consideration, however, requires intellectual consistency that has in some cases been lacking.

It’s important to note at the outset that I do not write to defend CRT. As a student of political science and the liberal arts, I believe CRT to be a deeply flawed ideology. It makes several chronically unproven claims about human nature that many of its proponents have used to justify hyper-racialized rhetoric and support for ludicrous policies. I find much of the rhetoric and ideological gambits of thinkers like Tisby and Ibram X. Kendi to be intellectually and morally deficient.

That said, I write because conservatives have long defended the values of free speech and open inquiry on campus. We know the importance of defending such speech against leftist attempts at censorship. But we should also defend speech against any attempt to suppress it from our own side. In the skirmish over CRT on my college campus, there are three conservative principles that some of Grove City’s critics seem to have forgotten.

First, faculty are allowed to express their own opinions, particularly on private platforms. Petitioners raised concerns that a Grove City faculty member had, in a statement on his private, personal blog, issued a word of warning to overly zealous CRT critics: “If there is something wrong with evaluating CRT and using aspects of it when it is valuable,” wrote Warren Throckmorton, a Christian professor of psychology, “then there won’t be much of a social science curriculum left when CRT critics continue their work.”

The reaction to Throckmorton’s expressed opinions was oddly reminiscent of an incident in 2016 at another college. When conservative professor John McAdams was fired from Marquette University for statements on his blog and then sued his employer, the Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with McAdams, noting Marquette’s stance that, “when [a professor] speaks or writes as a citizen, he/she should be free from institutional censorship or discipline.”

The McAdams situation illustrates the importance of academic freedom on both sides. Faculty ought to be allowed to express their private opinions, even controversial ones that may challenge political orthodoxy or spark disagreement. If it is true for a conservative professor, it is true for every professor. The idea that all faculty of a given university should be in perfect agreement on the controversial issues of the day is preposterous: University faculty will disagree, often with each other, and often with the students they teach. In the case of Throckmorton, that he expressed views that some students strongly disagreed with does not make the college that employs him woke.

The second principle holds that hearing from the “other side” is an important part of education. The main controversy at Grove City College was a lecture delivered by Tisby (who only later went on to work for Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research) on a Christian view of racial reconciliation. While it was easy to find several of Tisby’s points objectionable, particularly his policy prescriptions, petitioners called the fact that Tisby even delivered the presentation “troubling.” A YouTube post on the issue questioned why Tisby was allowed to speak in person at all when “you could show a video.”

This logic, when the ideological sides are switched, should sound familiar to those on the political Right. Grove City has brought many well-known conservative speakers to campus, including Ben Carson, Matt Walsh, and Brit Hume, with William Barr soon to come. If a left-leaning member of the student body had asked why these speakers were invited to campus instead of being relegated to a video screen, their concerns would be met with skepticism, and rightly so. Shutting down opportunities to hear from and interact with our ideological opponents is a disservice to students seeking a liberal-arts education. That a professing Christian speaker delivered a controversial lecture in person is far from a sign that our Christian college has gone woke.

As for the comments that the petition claims were made by GCC’s director of multicultural initiatives (dedicated to helping students “experience the richness of cultural diversity”), on concepts such as “implicit racism” and “white privilege,” the claim is contested by the individuals involved; this is a matter for the institution to handle and on which I will not speculate.

As a student, I have never felt threatened by the presence of individuals who hold opinions with which I disagree — on the contrary, hearing only from people with whom I share views is an easy and direct path to intellectual shallowness. As a Christian attending a Christian college, I believe in the idea that “iron sharpens iron,” and I welcome robust disagreement.

Conservatives have historically stood up for providing alternative perspectives at left-wing universities, even in the face of backlash. Conservative colleges ought not become the same kind of echo chambers that we decry on the left.

The third principle holds that to counter ideas we disagree with requires that we understand them; and to understand them requires that we read the actual work of their proponents, not merely the criticism of their work. The petition voices the concern that a single elective class on the topic of cultural diversity uses material from CRT proponents, including Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist. According to one parent who signed the petition, “developing a class using that book as the text gives too much credibility and focus to the topic. . . . Let’s teach the students how to think critically, . . . not spend an entire semester on a socially divisive topic.” Should college students really be steered away from discussing contentious issues in society? How are they to understand what’s at stake if they’re not exposed to the arguments for and against a given issue? While the course would benefit from a more intellectually diverse reading list (it does not include CRT-critical texts and is open to institutional review), for students at a largely conservative college to grapple with pro-CRT texts is intellectually challenging. Thinking critically develops from reading source material, including provocative books, and obviously involves covering socially divisive topics.

In his resignation letter, philosophy professor Peter Boghossian, who faced a campus intimidation campaign over his adherence to free speech and free inquiry, explained why he left Portland State University. It was his regular practice to ask guest lecturers of various viewpoints to speak to his classes: “I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.”

Grove City’s Christian foundations do not exempt its students from confronting controversial ideas. We do not need hand-holding when confronting such viewpoints — this is supposed to be difficult. Bring it on, I say: The difficulty is vital to a liberal-arts education. For students, it is a calling. For Americans committed to free expression and the free exchange of ideas, it is a perennial imperative.

No college gets everything right, but it would be unreasonable to allow fallacious arguments about any college to pass as reasoned dialogue. Grove City College has not “gone woke” by any reasonable standard. A woke Grove City College would be a travesty, and I would be first in line to resist it. Yet a Grove City College that never effectively engaged with dissenting voices would also be a travesty. We must resist turning conservative colleges into institutions that mandate uniformity of thought based on loud consensus. We must resist irrationality, whichever direction it’s coming from.

Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone.