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.