Since 2015, the year they hired me, Boston University School of Theology has made sixteen tenure track faculty hires.
In over a decade, I am the only white American male they have hired. compactmag.com/article/the-lo…
My hiring was itself regarded as wholly aberrant - and eventually a system error. In the years that followed powerful colleagues would explicitly & repeatedly attack me for my identity - especially for inhabiting it in a non-servile, non-self-abasing way.
While far from the most serious incident, once on the T, in front of my 8 yr old son, a student saw me & began talking. She'd been admitted elsewhere for a PhD & started ranting on & on about how 'utterly disgusting' white men were & how she hated that they were on their faculty.
Of course, my son was regularly hearing the same noxious stuff in Brookline schools, so it was all familiar to him - but, still, seeing it in such a personal & direct way and implicating me was even more upsetting & left him imagining a future of being hated for his identity.
What was most striking was how incredibly unself-conscious & casual she was in speaking with such deep-seated contempt & hatred - all right in front of my son.
But that was BU School of Theology. And that view was held & enforced by faculty who wielded real power in the school.
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The attacks on @McCormickProf are directly related to the distance a person stands from any real power to impact secular institutions, lack of earned scholarly credibility, & degree of cozy insulation within & career dependence on culturally impotent RW & evangelical bubbles.
Robby's had a massive impact on Princeton simply by faithfully & boldly being who he is as a scholar, teacher, & man on faculty. Countless undergrads & grad students have been shaped by his teaching, not only conservatives but libs, whose prejudice & preconceptions he unsettles.
As a scholar, he's had more impact on national conversations on abortion & marriage than any conservative & it's not even close. He's been central to putting a version of natural law back on the map & did as much as almost anyone to challenge the hegemony of Rawlsian liberalism.
This is deeply wrong: ACNA Bishops knew alleged victims had repeatedly sought their help long before going to WaPo, yet promulgated the false, slanderous claim that they’d gone to @ianshapira first. Worse, they refused to give their help. This is confirmed by one of the Bishops.
So, at least 4 bishops: 1. Knew official ACNA communication, *including Wood’s own statement,* was false & defamatory 2. Not only repeated the slander but failed to retract & repent even when confronted 3. Refused to help the alleged victims or even read (!) their allegations.
This is such a betrayal & so deeply wrong. These Bishops need to publicly repent for failing to care for those who brought them claims of spiritual abuse & sexual harassment; lying & being complicity in lies about the complainants; & persisting even after being confronted.
It is unconscionable & an extraordinarily profound pastoral failure that someone could be made Bishop, let alone Archbishop, without the minimal vetting process of "interviewing & soliciting views from their staff & priests."
This holds whether the allegations prove true or not.
It's incompatible with a duty to care for God's people to fail to undertake the sort of due diligence that is standard in secular contexts, for jobs far less consequential & public.
This pattern of spiritualizing away common sense & mundane ethical responsibility has got to stop.
That the response from ACNA leadership is "We have a great disciplinary process & you should trust its outcome" indicates a total failure to grasp the issue: You raised someone to Archbishop about whom there were already multiple major concerns & without even minimal vetting.
I learned Charlie Kirk had been shot while I was at an event on renewing higher ed. While I didn't know a lot about him, I felt the weight & horror of his killing but couldn't put it into words. I can try now.
I think there were three murders in the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
First, there was the murder of a person, a man in the prime of his life, a human of innate & inestimable dignity and worth as a bearer of God's image. There was a beloved husband & a precious father brutally killed, his family & friends robbed of the joy & treasure of his life.
Second, there was the murder of a person for holding political beliefs shared by half the country & religious beliefs on sexuality, abortion, & gender shared by 2 billion Christians worldwide.
To celebrate his killing is to declare that such beliefs make people worthy of death.
On my first day at BU, a colleague took me to lunch & said: “Do you know what the real miracle of your hire is? You’re a white male. Do you know how much better than every other candidate you have to be to get hired here as a white man?" I couldn't believe he'd said it out loud.
At least 3 times, I've been *explicitly told by someone involved in a search* that my identity as a white male was disqualifying. In one BU search, student comments saying "Don't hire another white man!" were read aloud approvingly as part of the faculty hiring decision.
More recently, I was denied a key opportunity explicitly because it would upset the "gender balance." This sort of overt race & sex discrimination has been absolutely commonplace in academia for years now. But there is immense stigma & social pressure around not talking about it.
When I was at BU, I wanted to bring @CornelWest & @McCormickProf for a major event on their friendship & liberal arts. As a favor & to help them, I asked a department if they wanted to cosponsor by contributing a nominal amount. They'd get credit & it would cost almost nothing.
The chair wrote back:
"Too many of my colleagues are not keen on spending our scarce resources for this. They find George's views not just objectionable but 'beyond the pale.'"
I was floored. It was a department I had thought was serious & the PR would've helped them quite a lot.
I decided it was a case of 'pearls before swine' & moved on.
A week later, I asked them to publicize a different lecture as they always had in the past.
My emailed request didn't mention George/West once. It was unmistakably & patently clear that it was a totally different event.