Mike Pence's invitation to an evangelical college has sparked an uproar on campus
Last edited Fri Apr 12, 2019, 08:32 PM - Edit history (1)
Source: Salon
written by Rachel Leah / Salon April 12, 2019
Taylor University, a private evangelical Christian college in rural Indiana, has selected Vice President Mike Pence as its featured commencement speaker this May, and many from the Taylor community are deeply upset and alarmed. For those on the outside, the news that a largely white evangelical Christian school in Pence’s home state of Indiana would invite him as its graduation speaker seems hardly surprising, considering that for decades white evangelical Christians have constituted the largest religious bloc in the Republican Party, according to the Washington Post. But as Taylor alumni, faculty and students have told Salon — some of whom asked not to be named — the invitation has been met with substantial dissent and backlash.
“I was taken aback, I felt blindsided,” a tenured associate professor who has taught at Taylor for nearly a decade told Salon. “I immediately became angry and cynical, thinking that our dear seniors were being sold out, that the administration was hedging its bets that they could turn graduation into a political statement and, furthermore, a revenue stream — that this move would please people with deep pockets with whom the administration would like to partner — and that that outcome was more desirable to them than whatever the faculty and student body wanted.”
“I’m not surprised that President Haines has decided to publicly align the university with the Trump/Pence administration, but I am disheartened at this very clear institutional endorsement of that agenda,” Taylor alumna Liz Boltz Ranfeld (and one-time Salon contributor) told Salon. “Taylor was not a progressive or liberal environment when I was a student there, and yet the faculty modeled a lot of traits and values that should be non-partisan: hospitality, generosity, collaboration, compromise, humility, and curiosity. . . We were encouraged to voice dissent when we opposed actions taken by the Bush administration, and we were also encouraged to reject nationalism. Clearly that kind of discourse is no longer valued by the current TU administration.”
The news was announced by the university on Thursday morning and shortly afterwards an online petition started by alumni called for Taylor to rescind the invitation.
Read more: https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/mike-pences-invitation-to-an-evangelical-college-has-sparked-an-uproar-on-campus/?utm_source=push_notifications
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