Over on the home page, my good friend David French has a terribly illuminating article, “The Persecution of Gordon College.”
Gordon is a small college near Boston which has a Christian tradition and would merely like to maintain it. Last July, the school’s president, Michael Lindsay, signed a letter to Obama seeking an exemption for religious colleges from the president’s impending executive order banning federal contractors from anything that might be construed as discrimination based on sexual orientation. Naturally, it wasn’t long before “liberals” who cannot tolerate any deviation from their purifying regulations started firing howitzer shells at Gordon. Read the piece for all the ugly details.
My favorite is the way the school’s federal accreditor went ballistic. French writes, “Gordon’s accreditor, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges announced that it had met to consider whether ‘Gordon College’s traditional inclusion of ‘homosexual practice’ as a forbidden activity’ violated the association’s standards for accreditation. The Association gave Gordon one year to ‘ensure that the College’s policies and procedures are non-discriminatory.’”
Bravo to the New England Association for giving America a fantastic example of how accreditation has morphed into the enforcement arm of PC in higher education. Whether a school’s educational offerings are excellent or pathetic, what gets the attention of accreditors is any failure to abide by the shibboleths of modern liberalism. If Jonah Goldberg is looking for material for an updating of his book Liberal Fascism, this is great stuff.