Comment on WASC Team Recommends Formal Notice of Concern Regarding LSU by David Read.
“If they decide to hire and maintain only those professors who will uphold and promote the Adventist perspective on origins and other fundamental doctrinal positions of the church, LSU will probably lose WASC accreditation and government funding.”
I don’t think so. WASC has never said that La Sierra cannot teach creationism. WASC has said that the university must maintain certain standards of autonomy. The issue is autonomy not the substance of what is being taught. Now, of course we all know that WASC is pushing autonomy in order to shield La Sierra from church pressure to uphold the church’s doctrine on origins, but the fact remains that WASC’s letter of concern is about autonomy, not about what is being taught.
But the frightening thing is that every other Adventist college in the world has the same type of board composition–the union president is ex-officio chair of the board of trustees, and all affiliated conference presidents are also on the board–so WASC’s ruling that La Sierra must change the composition of its Board of Trustees potentially affects every other college in the denomination. A disaster for Adventist higher education is brewing, and the larger church seems to have no clue about it.
David Read Also Commented
WASC Team Recommends Formal Notice of Concern Regarding LSU
@Professor Kent: I think you and Richard are right to the extent that if La Sierra, its administration, its Board, and the Adventist Church had presented a united front, there’s no way that WASC would dare to try to micro-manage curricula or teaching. If creationism were being taught there (it hasn’t been for decades) and WASC came in and threatened to withhold accreditation for that reason, then I think they would be sued on First Amendment grounds and they’d either back down or lose the lawsuit.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t and isn’t the situation. La Sierra has been teaching straight Darwinism for decades and the church has finally begun to complain. WASC came into a situation in which La Sierra was adversarial to its sponsoring denomination, and WASC was able to frame the issue as one of institutional autonomy, which doesn’t have First Amendment freedom of religion overtones. Even so, as I’ve written over at Spectrum, there’s no way WASC would be demanding changes to the composition of the Board of Trustees if they had not received a strong signal from Wisbey that he was favorable to these changes. Clearly, Wisbey is using WASC to loosen church control over La Sierra. This is what the LSU-4 recorded themselves plotting to do, and this is what is now coming to fruition.
The lesson here is that, while secular accrediting bodies cannot wrest an institution away from a denomination, once an institution has effectively left a denomination–and is giving signals that it doesn’t want to go back–secular accrediting bodies may be able to effectively keep the sponsoring denomination from re-asserting control on the ground of “institutional autonomy.”
Recent Comments by David Read
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: I do not agree that science must be naturalistic, but if that is your bottom line, it will not trouble me much where it concerns most day-to-day science–the study of current, repeating phenomena. But a rigid naturalism applied to origins morphs into philosophical atheism. Hence, mainstream origins science is not science but atheistic apologetics. This is what should not be done at an Adventist school, but sadly what has been the rule at La Sierra.
Dr. Paul Cameron and the God of the Gaps
@Pauluc: The Adventist doctrine of creation is that God created the world in six days and rested on the Seventh day and hallowed it. (Gen. 2:2-3; Ex. 20:11) Do you believe that doctrine? It won’t do to say that you accept some vague “Christian doctrine of creation.” The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a very specific mission to call people back to the worship of the creator God, on the day that He hallowed at the creation.
You say you believe that the “core doctrine of Christianity is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ,” but what was Jesus Christ incarnated to do? Wasn’t his mission to redeem fallen humanity, to be the second Adam who succeeded where the first Adam failed? And doesn’t your view of origins make nonsense of a perfect creation, a literal Adam who fell, and the need for redemption because of Adam’s sin? You seem to want to gloss over all the very profound differences you have not only with Seventh-day Adventist dcotrine, but with the most basic reasons that Seventh-day Adventism exists.
The syncretistic hodgepodge religion you’ve created for yourself, combining elements of a biblical world view (the incarnation) and elements of a pagan worldview (a self-created creation) is not Adventism. It is anti-Seventh-day Adventism.
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Holly Pham: Holly, I will try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: Since no creationist could land a job as chairman of a biology department at a public university, it seems entirely appropriate that no Darwinist should be given the chairmanship of a biology department of a Seventh-day Adventist college.
The SDA educational system doesn’t exist to expensively duplicate the public university system. It exists to provide a uniquely biblical and Seventh-day Adventist education to interested young people. If mainstream origins science is correct in its assumptions and conclusions about our origins, the entire enterprise of Seventh-day Adventism is an utterly foolish waste of time. So at Adventist institutions, our professors should assume that Darwinistic science is false, and that creationistic science is true (just the reverse of how it is done at public universities), and proceed accordingly.
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@gene fortner: What I like about your list of topics, Gene, is that it points out that many disciplines are implicated in the necessary change of worldview. It isn’t just biology and geology, although those are the main ones. History, archeology, anthropology and other disciplines should also be approached from a biblical worldview. The biblical worldview should pervade the entire curriculum.
