God and Country on Campus

God and country are not having an easy time of it on American college campuses these days. So what else is new? Well…

Studies and polls show that professors are less likely to attend religious services that their students and the parents and taxpayers who pay their salaries. But the divergence does not end with mere passivity, as religiously observant professors find.

History professor Phil Mitchell was fired from his teaching post at the University of Colorado (CU) for assigning as a text the Christian book, In His Steps by Charles Sheldon. Professor Mitchell’s place of (un)employment is the same university that keeps Ward Churchill on the payroll despite his comparison of the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States to the movers and shakers in the Nazi regime in World War II Germany.

“In my view the hostility toward the Christian faith on college campuses is the result of hostile faculty who see Christianity as a threat to leftist influence,” Professor Wright told the American Family Association. “They are right about this.”

“My students are almost universally tolerant, but the hostility [from faculty] is enormous, widespread and mostly unchecked.” Freed from his pedagogical duties at CU, Professor Mitchell is contemplating a career move to another, more tolerant, university.

America’s troops are barely tolerated on college and university campuses, that is, when they can get past the gate. The latest official count shows that less than a quarter of U. S. colleges and universities offer the U. S. military’s Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program.

If tenured faculty and entrenched administrators have anything to say about it, and they do, that proportion is not likely to rise anytime soon. And, the discrimination by school administrators against the military is starting early.

“You know what military recruiters are—the people who go to high schools and colleges and tell young people about the opportunities to served their country in the military?,” author Michael Medved asked the crowd at a Hillsdale College seminar early this year. “Well, now there are also ‘counter-recruiters’ who go to these schools and tell young people why they shouldn’t serve in the military.” In Los Angeles, the teachers unions are so enamored with these counter recruiters that the alternative pitch now gets equal time with the military presentation in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

In Seattle, if activists have their way, military recruiters get no face time with students, according to an article in Education Week by John Gehring. “The 46,000-student Seattle district is gathering information about how its schools deal with recruiters after a parent-teacher-student association passed a resolution in May stating that military recruiters were not welcome at the school,” Gehring wrote on June 22.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.