Inside Higher Education

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Academic gadfly Robert Lopez gets pegged as 'antigay' no matter what he does

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I’ve said before that normally, I like what I read in Inside Higher Education except when they attempt to report on cultural wars issues, particularly religion. At which point, the snark gets a bit overwhelming.

Sadly, much of the commentary that’s appeared in GetReligion in the past year or two about Inside Higher Education has been negative. There’s this piece about the University of Iowa that ran earlier this year; this 2017 piece on Biola University that I also found fault with and tmatt’s critique of their Baylor coverage in September.

The latest piece is a he-got-what-was-coming-to-him piece about a conservative professor who was chased out of California State University of Northridge, only to run into similarly bad behavior at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.

If the name Robert Oscar Lopez sounds familiar, it might be because he clashed with his prior institution, too. In 2015, Lopez, then an associate professor of English at California State University at Northridge, said that institution was targeting him because he disagreed with letting gay parents adopt children. He faced a related complaint that a conference he’d organized and invited students to attend pushed antigay views (he denied this).

Lopez held other views outside the conservative mainstream, such as that homosexuality was inexorably linked to pederasty. Some called it hate speech. He said he based his insights on personal experience, and that being raised by a bisexual mother and her female partner made him socially awkward and led him to the “gay underworld” for a time.

Is the reporter sure that view is outside the conservative mainstream?

Eventually, Lopez left California and secular academe for Southwestern. The Texas institution doesn’t have tenure, but he thought he had found a permanent place among like-minded, socially conservative academics.

Things went well for Lopez for a while. But he couldn’t have predicted the events to come. In 2018, amid the Me Too movement, the seminary’s then president, Paige Patterson, was accused of covering up sexual abuse allegations within the Southern Baptist Convention. An earlier audio recording of Patterson counseling prayer to women with violent husbands also surfaced, as did reports that Patterson had gravely mishandled two rape cases involving woman at the seminary, in 2003 and in 2015.

The article explains all the complexities of the Patterson case and then links it to the fortunes of Liberty University, an evangelical institution several states away.


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Yes, Jerry Falwell, Jr., spiked an anti-Trump column (Dang it, publishers do things like that)

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Several times a year, either to students at journalism conferences or in a classroom at The King's College in New York City, I deliver a lecture that I call "Up Against the Wall: Getting along with administrators at private colleges."

The big idea of this talk is that private schools are difficult, but not impossible, places in which to do traditional journalism -- because in a private school the administration is both the publisher of the newspaper and the "local government" that student journalists need to cover.

The goal, I stress, is to do as much journalism as possible, with an emphasis on hard-news reporting. Thus, one of my guidelines -- while serving as newspaper advisor at two Christian private schools -- was to address campus controversies with real reporting, as opposed to taking the easy way out and writing splashy opinion columns.

This brings us, of course, to news reports about Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr., yanking an opinion column critical of Donald Trump out of the Liberty Champion. Here is the top of The Politico report on this development:

The president of Liberty University censored an article critical of Donald Trump, according to the sports editor of the school's official newspaper, the Liberty Champion.
The editor, Joel Schmieg, posted a statement on his Facebook account claiming it was Jerry Falwell Jr., the university's president and a Trump supporter, who spiked the column, which criticized Trump for lewd comments he made on a hot mic during a 2005 taping of "Access Hollywood."
"Yesterday I was told [Falwell] was not allowing me to express my personal opinion in an article I wrote for my weekly column in the Liberty Champion about Trump and his 'locker room talk,' " Schmieg wrote.
"I understand Joel's frustration regarding the situation," Cierra Carter, the opinion editor for the Liberty Champion, told POLITICO. "Our president has been very vocal with his opinions during this election season and we'd like that same privilege."


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Inside Higher Education takes lazy road on covering sex and theology at Biola University

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A short article in Inside Higher Education drew our attention this week, as it talks about Biola University going against the grain in contemporary American culture by strengthening its public opposition to sex outside of heterosexual marriage.

Once again, the key here is the school's statement of Christian doctrine -- as opposed to a set of legal "rules" -- that define it as a voluntary association of believers.

Biola is a private liberal arts Christian college in La Mirada, a suburb of Los Angeles that was described thusly by Inside Higher Education:

A few Christian colleges have moved in 2015 to change their rules to permit the hiring in some circumstances of gay and lesbian faculty members. Those colleges are in the distinct minority among evangelical colleges, most of which require faculty members, employees and students to abide by conduct codes that bar any sex except in heterosexual marriage.
At least one Christian institution in California, Biola University, has responded to shifts in public attitudes about sexuality and gender identity by twice in recent years making its rules more strict. While the university characterizes the changes as clarifications, some gay and lesbian employees have complained that the additions make it more difficult for them to sign a required statement that indicates their adherence to the college's rules.

 


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