What I like about the statement, in terms of Drew Hart\u2019s illustration, was that it seemed more interested in contributing something substantial than in\u00a0just piling on the condemnation of Paula Deen<\/a> as a means of proclaiming a personal or institutional exemption from the sins for which she was being punished. It\u2019s true that this statement barely moved beyond the \u201csophisticated cultural reflex\u201d of calling out what Hart calls \u201cold-school racism,\u201d but\u00a0it nods and points in that direction, following its least-one-can-do condemnation of the Klan and Nazism with a prompting to consider that there may also be implicit and systemic manifestations of the same white supremacist ideologies. It doesn\u2019t quite<\/em> cross the line \u2014 in terms of the old church joke \u2014 from \u201cpreaching\u201d to \u201cmeddling,\u201d but it says a bit more than just what it knows would get the easy \u201cAmen.\u201d<\/p>\n And that, I think, is commendable. But Wheaton Prof. Noah Toly suggests I\u2019ve misinterpreted some of that. He says, in short, that it\u2019s none of my beeswax<\/a>. Toly says we should all learn to be more reluctant to weigh in on other institutions\u2019 situations.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s just note that this is a very odd<\/em> take\u00a0just after releasing a public statement that was produced and publicized in the form of an open letter to the world. Particularly given that the public statement released to the public was about other institutions<\/em>.\u00a0Whatever else is true about \u201cUnite the Right\u201d and the Klan and such, they are \u201cother institutions,\u201d and it would seem odd to dismiss Wheaton\u2019s statement in response to them as overconfident in its ability to see their situation from the outside. I\u2019m glad Toly et. al. were not, in that case, timidly reluctant to weigh in.<\/p>\n In any case, my discussion about the faculty-lounge dynamic was apparently not as clear as I\u2019d hoped. I suspect this may be due partly to a drive-by reading that isn\u2019t up to speed on what I and others have written about the gap between the evangelical \u201cfaculty lounge\u201d and the broader white evangelical constituency<\/a>. But let that pass. I\u2019ll presume that the failure is mine and apologize for not being clearer in that one\u00a0post about the gatekeeping function that censors \u2014 or causes \u201cfaculty lounge\u201d evangelicals to self-censor \u2014 anything likely to provoke \u201ccontroversy.\u201d<\/p>\n This is occasionally (and infamously) an explicit process with public rebukes and censure and the like.\u00a0Gatekeeping administrators may require changes in lectures or cancel \u201ccontroversial\u201d talks that say too much<\/a>. Sometimes that explicit form of intervention even results in tenured faculty getting maligned and then fired (and then, sometimes, implicitly maligned again, perpetually \u2014 see below).<\/p>\n But that\u2019s not how it works most of the time. It doesn\u2019t need to. Occasional reminders of where the lines are drawn are sufficient. Most of the time, nothing needs to be said.<\/p>\n So I have no doubt that Dr. Toly\u2019s description of the process drafting the Wheaton faculty statement is accurate:<\/p>\n As the statement was drafted and revised, faculty had the advantage of counsel from administrators and staff who did not, as far as I know (I was involved in some, but not all, of those conversations), make any attempt whatsoever to stifle or soften the faculty voice. To the contrary, I believe that the statement is a better one because faculty were open to early conversation about the statement and because of the input that faculty received. Moreover, President Philip Ryken has taken the opportunity during orientation to bring the issue of racial justice before new students and parents. He has used his own platform to acknowledge, affirm, and amplify the voices of faculty who have spoken out about the issue, commending to our entire community statements and articles by Jamie Aten, Ed Stetzer, and Theon Hill, along with the statement signed by more than 150 faculty. The statement has been cited in The Atlantic,<\/em> which has, I think, an audience well beyond our classrooms and faculty lounges.* There have been no repercussions, and so it seems a stretch to say that there is any concerted effort to prevent faculty from speaking on potentially divisive issues. I cannot speak for all of my colleagues, but looking at it from my perspective on the inside, the process of drafting, revising, and disseminating the statement has been evidence of collaboration and mutual respect between the faculty and the administration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n His description is perfectly congruent with what I described.<\/p>\n The point is not that there would somehow be \u201crepercussions\u201d for the signatories of this statement, but that it was crafted in such a way as to avoid any possibility of such repercussions. I didn\u2019t expect Ryken or nervous white parents or even any wealthy donors (*cough* DeVos *cough*<\/em>) to balk at a condemnation of the \u00a0\u201cwhite supremacist ideologies\u201d advocated by \u201cneo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, the alt-right and other white nationalist movements.\u201d Condemning such groups emphatically and publicly is, to quote again from Hart, \u201cthe expected response within America\u2019s 21st-century context\u201d and part of \u201cthe sophisticated cultural reflex of a highly racialized society that doesn\u2019t want to own up to how racism works systemically.\u201d<\/p>\n It is not, as Hart says, \u201cparticularly spectacular or courageous.\u201d Which is to say it is not controversial.<\/p>\n Happily, though, the Wheaton statement offers some tantalizing hints of something more than such a ritual, pro-forma cultural reflex. That little bit about implicit and systemic realities of white supremacy seemed to urge readers to consider more than just the self-serving, exculpatory aspect of chastising Paula Deen and the Klan.<\/p>\n Alas, Toly\u2019s description suggests I may have been wrong in my original guess about the \u201congoing negotiation\u201d of how much truth could be expressed in the statement. I was assuming \u2014 maybe just hoping \u2014 that Wheaton\u2019s faculty was trying to push the envelope. I assumed that they said as much as they could short of potential controversy, but that they wished they could have said more \u2014 wished they could have said enough, perhaps, to provoke the sorely needed controversy that speaking the whole truth on this matter would entail.<\/p>\n But, no, Dr. Toly tells us, this is all<\/em> that they wanted to say. This was the entirety of what they had to say. They had no desire to communicate anything more than the sort of anodyne statements a white university administrator would make \u201cto bring the issue of racial justice before new students and parents.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s disappointing.<\/p>\n In any case, my understanding of Wheaton\u2019s blandly commendable statement is not what really prompted Toly to write about why he\u2019d prefer everyone be \u201creluctant to weigh in on other institutions\u2019 situations.\u201d The drafting and public release of that statement, after all, is not a \u201csituation.\u201d<\/p>\n But what happened at Wheaton with Dr. Larycia Hawkins sure was. This seems to be the actual sore point and the central preoccupation of Toly\u2019s post:<\/p>\n I know the how big the gap can be between insider experience of and outside perspective on these crises.<\/p>\n Nothing brought this home for me like a lunch with a Wheaton College alumnus last academic year. Our conversation eventually turned to Wheaton\u2019s recent painful episode of December 2015-February 2016. As it turns out, this alumnus holds a PhD in one of the social sciences, teaches at the intersection of social science, ethics, and religion, was teaching a course on the interfaith relations at the time that Wheaton was in the news, made research on our crisis one of the required case studies for that course, and read just about everything (maybe everything) published about what had gone wrong at the college.\u00a0Despite the earnestness, learnedness, experience, awareness, and investment of this alumnus, we spent most of our time discussing the\u00a0gaps\u00a0in their understanding of the situation.\u00a0Following this illuminating and convicting experience, I took to heart a reluctance to comment on other institutions\u2019 crises, because more often than not I\u2019d have no idea what I was talking about.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It\u2019s interesting, and a bit disturbing, that he never says her name.<\/p>\n The argument here is familiar:\u00a0\u201cYou don\u2019t know me!<\/em>\u201d Fair enough. But there\u2019s a problem with that \u2014 with insisting that \u201coutsiders\u201d must necessarily be misinformed even if they\u2019ve read everything publicly available about the [nameless] situation, and that therefore those outsiders should be reluctant to comment.<\/p>\n What can we outsiders learn\u00a0from this recent painful episode? What can it show us about the subtle ways the vile ideologies of white supremacy can be embedded implicitly and systemically in our best-intentioned institutions? Nothing. Certainly nothing we\u00a0should attempt to share aloud with others. We outsiders are mired in a cloud of epistemological uncertainty and must therefore accept our lot with humility, eschewing all opinion, conclusion, lesson, and example as beyond our ken.<\/p>\n Part of the problem here is that a\u00a0great deal of the public information accessible to \u201coutsiders\u201d came in the form of press releases and press statements from the institution itself. If that information was inaccurate, then the fault does not lie with the recipients of those press releases and official statements, but with those who produced them. We may have been misled, but they did the misleading.<\/p>\n And also too, you know, they were press releases<\/em>. That is, they were deliberate attempts to produce<\/em> public discussion by outsiders. It just won\u2019t do to release a series of statements to the press and then complain that the substance of them is being discussed in public. The whole business was conducted publicly \u2014 at first in an attempt to publicly reassure the white evangelical public that they didn\u2019t need to fear \u201ccontroversy,\u201d then in a public attempt at damage control when the school\u2019s\u00a0earlier public statements went sideways and turned out to be demonstrably uncharitable, misinforming, incorrect and incomplete.<\/p>\n Some of those public statements made to the public by Wheaton officials were apologies<\/em>. Are we really supposed to disregard those too?<\/p>\n So, no, you don\u2019t get to throw all of this before the public and then complain that \u201coutsiders\u201d from that public\u00a0have the temerity to \u201cweigh in.\u201d And you don\u2019t get to proclaim that all outsiders are \u201cincorrect\u201d while elaborately refusing to correct whatever it is they\u2019ve supposedly misunderstood.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a deeper problem with Toly\u2019s\u00a0non-description descriptions and non-denial denials about what he vaguely and euphemistically refers to as a \u201crecent painful episode.\u201d His argument seems insidious and, well, sleazy<\/em>.<\/p>\n Unintentionally so, I hope, but still.<\/p>\n Toly\u00a0suggests that we outsiders\u00a0think<\/em>\u00a0we\u2019ve heard the story about the woman unfairly criticized and dismissed, but says we\u00a0should just shut up about that because we\u00a0don\u2019t know the real<\/em> story.** All of which makes it sound like there was some other reason \u2014 something secret and distasteful \u2014 for what was done to Dr. Hawkins. Something that must be\u00a0her fault<\/em>. By insisting that everyone else\u2019s understanding of that RPE and the context that produced it is incorrect, yet refusing to say how, he winds up half-a-step from the ugly suggestion that \u201cShe had it coming.\u201d<\/p>\n Toly name-checks me in the title of his post, but the bulk of what he writes doesn\u2019t seem to be\u00a0directed at me. It\u2019s directed at a woman he can\u2019t even bring himself to name, and at anyone who thinks she was treated unfairly.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not a good look, and it doesn\u2019t fortify the moral authority claimed in Wheaton\u2019s recent statement. Quite the opposite, really.<\/p>\n \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013 \u2013<\/p>\n * Citing The Atlantic<\/em> as an example of mainstream popular culture is a very faculty lounge thing to do. Sure, it may be the most accessibly mainstream\u00a0title in Brother Mouzone\u2019s stack of magazines<\/a>, and it may be more geared to undergrads than to PhD\u2019s, but it ain\u2019t People<\/em> or Us Weekly.<\/em> Or Christian Living Today<\/em>.<\/p>\n **\u00a0Here\u2019s a sampling of the reporting on this Recent Painful Event involving She Who Must Not Be Named:<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u201cThe Professor Wore a Hijab in Solidarity \u2014 Then Lost Her Job.\u201d<\/a> Ruth Graham for The New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u201cHow a Facebook comment turned into a nightmare for \u2018the evangelical Harvard.'\u201d<\/a> Sarah Pulliam-Bailey for The Washington Post.<\/em><\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u201cWheaton College could face long-term fallout over professor controversy.\u201d<\/a> Manya Brashear Pashman for The Chicago Tribune<\/em>.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2017\/08\/12546200_10206990073168605_1712996472_o-199x300.jpg\")