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.

https://x.com/DavidDecosimo/status/1951008214482559216?s=20

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's lots to say about the lack of non-progressives in academia.
I began at BU in 2015. Theology has hired over a dozen faculty since. Despite repeatedly asking to serve, I've not only been kept off every search committee but even the committees that draft job descriptions.

https://twitter.com/Musa_alGharbi/status/1803836759421116859

Once, faculty were asked to email feedback on a job description for a New Testament position. To a long list of possible specializations (race, gender, decolonial) I suggested adding 'theological interpretation of scripture,' since most of our students are training for ministry.

If you are a university donor, this is a key moment. You're seeing the bad fruit of 2 related things:
1. Years of faculty searches that have been explicitly ideological & partisan, prizing & hiring for the illiberal radicalism on display in the Kendi debacle & Hamas-praise alike.





What you see from faculty exhilarated by murder or who require all teaching be antiracist & decolonial is a feature not a bug. It's the fruit of hiring in ideological fields that normalize & prize radicalism. They're outliers, but they're doing just what they've been paid to do.

If your only ethics are Foucault & Fanon, you’re wholly unequipped to make the distinctions necessary to recognize justice & uphold dignity in relation to political violence.
Just war theory, an ancient tradition of ethical inquiry, offers a better way. It is relevant just now.🧵 In its classic formulation, the theory claims that certain acts of killing are neither ‘necessary evils’ nor merely permissible but, under certain constraints, just & right. The theory sets criteria for *when* war is just (jus ad bellum) & *how* it must be fought (jus in bello).

We are seeing the utter ethical degeneracy of an ideology in which all that matters is finding the single most oppressed identity & then worshipping it, claiming anything done by it & on its behalf in the name of liberation, no matter how horrendous, is actually righteous & just.





For this ideology, the alleged liberative end justifies *any means whatsoever, no matter how evil.* Bearers of the oppressed identity can deploy evil & unjust means & are accountable to no one but themselves.
The job of the ally is to cheerlead, silence critique, & even join in.

The BU Center for Antiracist Research debacle is about far more than Kendi. It's about a university, caught in cultural hysteria, subordinating every norm of oversight, inquiry, & excellence to ideology. It was entirely predictable.

I said as much to BU's President in fall 2020.



In June, BU had hired Kendi, created the Center, & cancelled classes & work for a quasi-religious "Day of Collective Engagement" where Kendi & his now critics were treated like sages.

I was newly tenured, a member of BU Faculty Council, & Chair of the Academic Freedom Committee.

I’ve been off this platform almost entirely.

That’s because three months ago, I almost died.

I’ve wrestled with what to say or whether to say anything at all. But what happened has so profoundly impacted my family & me that silence would be false. In May, I went for a routine four mile run. A mile & a half in, I paused to stretch. Suddenly, I felt extremely lightheaded.

The next thing I knew I was waking up, flat on the sidewalk, with a woman kneeling over me.

Scholars have long created artificial silos with their own journals, conferences, book series, etc, where they simply publish one another’s work in total isolation from due scrutiny & criticism by other qualified scholars. Peer review stays within the group & is close to a sham. The group shares a set of unquestionable premises & commitments that they’re *unwilling & unable to defend.*
If challenged, they just appeal to their own authority. If someone tries to engage ‘their’ topic but questions or rejects their premises, they circle the wagons & attack.

Eliminating required DEI statements helps but the issue goes far deeper.

Such statements matter insofar as they institutionalize & lend cover to already serious viewpoint discrimination or constitute an initial foothold within otherwise healthy disciplines, as with much of STEM. But statements aside, I’ve seen DEI used in searches to eliminate outstanding candidates. It is *extremely* easy for a single member of a committee to eliminate an otherwise excellent candidate by acting as an ideologue & activist rather than as a scholar in a fiduciary capacity.

I strongly support Ukraine’s fight against Russia. But one criterion of just war is that of proportionality. Even with right authority, just cause, & just intention, which Ukraine has, you must also attend to an overall cost/benefit analysis, which @TimothyDSnyder here discards. It has to be asked, continuously, even given the just cause, does ongoing fighting actually conduce to the long term benefit & common good of Ukraine or is seeking settlement now better, even if some territory is lost. Failure to attend to that can make a just war become unjust.

To silence others in an academic context by heckling is to subordinate reason to power & truth to ideology.

It is to position yourself as lord and master over your fellow students & everyone else. *You* decide what *other* get to argue, consider, think, & hear.

https://twitter.com/aaronsibarium/status/1635633773143371779

Repeatedly heckled by the proslavery majority to prevent him from speaking, abolitionist Theodore Weld would say, “I thought I was speaking to FREE PEOPLE. Are these hecklers your masters?”

These Stanford students take themselves to be masters, deciding what adults get to hear.

The situation in Florida represents a special temptation for those who’ve been raising the alarm regarding rampant & systemic DEI-driven violations of academic freedom, a stance which is typically met with denial & ad hominem allegations of various pernicious -isms, new & old.

https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1633545583205158912

For some, the temptation is to downplay or ignore the particular policies that do violate academic freedom. The pseudo-leftist violations of academic freedom are so pervasive, systemic, & institutionalized that any effective corrective can seem welcome, even if it goes too far.

On this MLK day, don’t let anyone tell you that King didn’t really mean it when he said he dreamed of a day when his kids & our nation's people wouldn’t be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.
That was indeed his dream & he gave his life for it. There's much more to the story, of course. King wanted to eradicate poverty & militarism. He was sharply critical of capitalism. But such things were entirely of a piece with & inseparable from his dream of a world where character, not race, shaped a person's life & experience.

This is an essential article. The university's raison d'être is to create & teach knowledge. That's its sole claim to public support. These policies subordinate that mission to an ethically & intellectually bankrupt ideology & social-engineering program. tinyurl.com/yueeyx5v These policies are now deeply embedded in many universities. From top down, an army of admins is highly paid to push greater extremes & conformity. From bottom up, some faculty build their careers on the ideology & on demanding their university & discipline to enforce it.

How should we think about how to use Twitter?
My own thinking has been deeply shaped by @HSJSpeaks’s argument in ‘Why it’s OK to speak your mind.’
His basic claim is that we have an ethical duty to share our arguments, evidence, & views *the more there is social pressure not to.* Our views on reality & what’s true are deeply shaped by the views of those around us. We inevitably rely on others, commonly accessible knowledge, & experts for much of what we take as true. The health of our own views is bound up with the health of others’ & the broader public’s