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{"id":29549,"date":"2015-04-15T12:31:26","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T16:31:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=29549"},"modified":"2015-04-15T12:31:26","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T16:31:26","slug":"tom-oord-fired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/04\/tom-oord-fired.html","title":{"rendered":"Tom Oord Fired"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

It has been almost a week since the news broke<\/a> that Thomas Jay\u00a0Oord<\/a> has been fired\u00a0from his tenured position at Northwest\u00a0Nazarene University. Ken Schenck<\/a> and Ryan Scott<\/a> have blogged about it. Christianity Today<\/em><\/a> is among those who\u2019ve suggested that Oord\u2019s acceptance of evolution is a key reason for his dismissal.\u00a0Tim Suttle<\/a> pointed out that the firing was apparently carried out via e-mail.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t comment on the details, since I am not privy to them. I understand that Oord is\u00a0not the only professor to be laid off, and it is certainly the case that a university may need to let even tenured faculty members go when budgetary\u00a0crises leave no alternative. Despite what we sometimes think, tenure does not guarantee lifetime employment. It is simply a protection against summary dismissal.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Ric Shewell<\/a> doesn\u2019t think that the financial explanation seems plausible, nor that appropriate procedures were followed. And given that Oord has been interrogated about his views and threatened with a heresy trial, it seems unlikely that those prior happenings can be unrelated to the most recent ones.<\/p>\n

One can see some of the disagreements over what happened and why reflected in recent edits to Oord\u2019s Wikipedia page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have said before<\/a> that \u201csectarian university\u201d<\/a> tends to be a contradiction in terms<\/a>. We have seen before<\/a> time and time again that scholars who do excellent work are punished for\u00a0teaching what the evidence strongly points to.<\/p>\n

And so, while I don\u2019t know the details of this case, the scholarly community\u00a0as a whole needs to look into it to the extent possible. And then, we need to think long and hard about whether our accrediting bodies will continue to offer the weight of the authority that words like \u201cuniversity\u201d and \u201cdegree\u201d carry to institutions whose ethos runs counter to what education is supposed to mean.<\/p>\n

$\"tom-oord\"$ <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"