(NAME-MCE) When Identity Trumps Diversity

[Anselmo Villanueva]

When Identity Trumps Diversity

When a professor asked for an exemption to a Calvin College policy so
she could join a black church — while remaining a tenure-track faculty
member — the board said no.

Conplete story below.  For better format and related articles, surf to:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/04/calvin

January 4, 2008

When Identity Trumps Diversity

"You have a white church and you have a Negro church. You have allowed
segregation to creep into the doors of the church. How can such a
division exist in the true Body of Christ? You must face the tragic
fact that when you stand at 11:00 on Sunday morning to sing 'All Hail
the Power of Jesus Name' and 'Dear Lord and Father of all Mankind,'
you stand in the most segregated hour of Christian America."  —Martin
Luther King Jr.

King's words, delivered in 1956, ring true today. Just ask Denise
Isom. Isom is an African-American education professor at Michigan's
Calvin College who asked this fall for an exemption to the evangelical
college's requirement that all faculty join a Christian Reformed
Church (or one in another denomination in "ecclesiastical fellowship"
with the Dutch-rooted church, known as the CRC).

"Each day, in formal and informal ways, I must address the issues of
race and culture, often engaging in ways that carry a psychological,
emotional, social, and physical cost," Isom wrote in a letter
requesting an exemption so that she could join a black Baptist church
instead. "Though there are CRC churches and communities that are
striving to reflect a multicultural vision in the church's make-up and
worship content, they are not 'there' yet. As a person who has long
worked towards those ends in predominately white settings, I find
myself at a place where, for emotional, social, and spiritual health,
I need a place of worship that is already consistent with my culture
and able to grapple with issues of race in ways which make it a
respite, a re-charging and growing place for me, as opposed to another
location where I must 'work' and where I am 'other.'"

Furthermore, she wrote, "As someone for whom research, scholarship,
and service are centered around issues of social justice, race,
culture, and gender, I need to be intimately tied to populations of
people of color." She added that she plans to conduct research on
racialized gender identity among African-American children in a church
setting.

Calvin's Board of Trustees rejected Isom's request in October. The
board's decision to decline the exemption request meant that, unless
she joined a church in accordance with Calvin's requirement (one of
three faith-based requirements Calvin faculty must meet), her
tenure-track appointment would be reverted to a term appointment that
would expire at the end of 2008-9. Isom did not return requests for
comment. Others contacted described the ball as now being in her
court.

Beyond Isom's particular professional future, the board's action set
the stage for some soul-searching at the liberal arts college — where
officials stressed that to maintain Calvin's identity, they could not
bend the rules (a spokesman said that while he did not know the number
of exemptions to the church membership requirement in recent years,
the college has in the past granted a few requests, generally to
faculty ordained in a different denomination). "For more than 130
years Calvin has been affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church,
and we believe that Reformed theology and a Reformed world and life
view and heritage have served the college well," Calvin's provost,
Claudia Beversluis, said in a written statement. "The history of
Christian institutions of higher education in this country justifies
caution in this area. Nearly all Christian colleges and universities
that distanced themselves from their founding denominations and
theological traditions eventually also drifted away from being
Christian in any meaningful way."

Beversluis continued: "This has been a difficult case for many at the
college especially because we are committed to diversity in our
students, staff and faculty…. But we also are committed to remaining a
Reformed community. We believe that there is room in higher education
for a wide variety of colleges, including secular and Christian, and
that within the realm of Christian colleges there needs to be room for
distinctively Catholic institutions, distinctively Baptist
institutions, distinctively Reformed institutions and many others."

The conflict at Calvin highlights the challenge of recruiting and
maintaining a diverse faculty, staff and student body at Christian
institutions rooted in particular churches – that tend to
predominantly attract members from one race over any other. As such,
in recent years, Christian colleges across the country have
increasingly described a need to enhance ethnic diversity on their
campuses.

But Calvin does face particular challenges relative even to its
evangelical peers. Many Christian colleges require faculty to sign on
to a statement of faith, but Calvin goes further to add on the church
membership requirement and a requirement that faculty send their
children to Christian schools as well.

And, given the Dutch roots of the Christian Reformed Church, "Calvin's
in somewhat of a unique tradition because its faith test is
essentially both religious and ethnic," pointed out Alan Wolfe, a
professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for
Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "Imagine a
national search trying to find an African-American Calvinist. It's
going to be difficult."

"I would think that in terms of any real, genuine attempt to be
successful in a faculty diversity effort, to have that limitation
[relative to church membership] is certainly one that's not going to
help you," said Nelvia Brady-Hampton, a professor of business and
director of ethnic diversity at Trinity Christian College in Illinois.
Trinity is also a college in the Reformed tradition, but
Brady-Hampton, an African-American, said it doesn't have a restrictive
church membership requirement like Calvin's ("Frankly," she said, "if
that were the requirement at Trinity, I wouldn't be there."
Brady-Hampton is a member of the United Church of Christ).

"If your church is non-diverse, and you limit your faculty to members
of the church, how can you ever expect to get there?" she asked,
relative to the ideal of a diverse campus.

Officials at the Christian Reformed Church did not respond to requests
for comment Thursday relative to their own efforts to expand the
ethnic diversity within the church. As for Calvin, the college
released From Every Nation, a much-trumpeted "comprehensive plan for
racial justice, reconciliation, and cross-cultural engagement" in
2004, along with related guidelines for faculty and staff hiring. Isom
herself was recruited to Calvin through a fellowship program
specifically for prospective minority faculty members (as explained in
this profile in Mosaic, a Calvin newsletter focusing on diversity).
Calvin has a number of programs in place to recruit minority students
(6.3 percent of Calvin's 4,224 students are students of color). In
2001, Calvin, along with New York's Nyack College, received the
Council for Christian Colleges and Universities' Robert and Susan
Andringa Award for Advancing Racial Harmony.

Calvin "strongly seeks to be diverse, but has such deep theological
and ethnic roots that it's a challenge for them," said Richard Gathro,
senior fellow at the council. He emphasized that it's not the fairly
common requirement that faculty sign on to a particular statement or
subscription of faith that limits Calvin's recruiting pool so much as
its restriction on specific church membership or worship style.
"There's a certain style of doing church that's more ethnically
connected," Gathro said.

Just 23, or 7.1 percent, of Calvin's 322 full-time faculty members are
minorities. Isom is the only full-time minority faculty member in the
education department, said its chair, Robert Keeley, who endorsed
Isom's exemption request. As did the department as a whole.

"I was disappointed," Keeley said of the board's decision. "I
understood their reasons but I'd hoped that they would see things
differently than they did."

"It's been a challenge for us, because we felt that we might now, if
Professor Isom does indeed leave, lose a friend and a colleague and a
valued member of our department. We also thought that this was a good
opportunity for Calvin to take a step in making it easier for people
of color to join our community. Both of those things disappointed,"
Keeley said.

"I respect that Calvin College wants to be intentional in trying to
establish itself as an important theological voice among its peer
institutions around the country. The fact is denominational colleges
such as Calvin have shrunk in American higher education," Randal Jelks
wrote in an e-mail. An associate professor of history who recruited
Isom to Calvin, Jelks is resigning from Calvin as of May to focus on
research to a greater extent than he could at a teaching-oriented
institution. He's currently on a leave of absence from Calvin as a
visiting professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas.

"Where I disagree," Jelks said, "is that the college administration
and trustees have tried to carry out the notion of having highly
trained scholars who think in sophisticated ways about theology so
narrowly. They insist on using parameters that make a mockery of the
rich intellectual diversity which the Calvin faculty members represent
and their religious understandings."

— Elizabeth Redden