On the week before Independence Day 2023, a brief update from your caring and competent Lutheran Philosopher:
More than a year and one-half after being suspended and threatened with termination because of my published essay "Woke Dysphoria at Concordia" I am still banned from campus and classroom at Concordia University Wisconsin and Ann Arbor (CUWAA).
I am trying to negotiate, but it's an uphill business making a case for academic freedom with university administrators. They hate free speech, unless it's entirely under their control [Insert emojis for irony and sarcasm here].
In the U.S. during these Woke times, it seems there is nothing unusual about institutions of higher learning threatening their professors because their administrators don't like what they are saying or how they say it.
But this same behavior from religious and Lutheran administrators and regents is especially deplorable.
You have to wonder how a university can claim with a straight face to be "confessional" when it silences and disciplines a professor who confesses in print and in public what Lutherans believe and teach and what they must therefore reject as false teaching.
So, what are your thoughts on the status quo:
Do you think it is right for an interim president at any of our Concordia universities to demand that a Lutheran pastor-professor "recant or face discipline, including termination", for calling for repentance regarding the Lutheran university's adulterous affair with Woke Marxism?
Is it right for a president and provost to demand that a professor, among other things, agree in writing that his employment will continue only with "the written permission of the CUWAA President and Provost and at their sole discretion"?
As the Epoch Times reports about another professor and his Woke administration,
"Attachment to freedom of speech is very loose or inexistent in many institutions nowadays, strangely enough in institutions of the highly educated, in which one might have expected attachment to freedom to be the strongest.
"But the granting of freedom to those with whom we disagree doesn’t come naturally: It requires self-control, for the inclination to suppress the opinion of others exists within most of us. It’s this inclination that must itself be suppressed if freedom is to survive, and unfortunately, it’s the well-educated who can, and now do, best rationalize arguments for not suppressing their own inclination to censor and suppress."
I would add that the declaration of our Declaration is that freedom of speech is not something granted by any institution (although it obviously is something that can be denied by universities such as CUWAA). Freedom of speech is an unalienable, God-given right.
It also happens to be a necessary condition for higher education.
Likely, we have already stepped over the line from higher education into the realm of expensive indoctrination relabeled as "education" in our religious and secular universities. The college bubble is bursting right now, as we all can see for ourselves.
Repentance is urgently needed at our religious institutions of higher learning -- biblical repentance and unequivocal public repudiation of Wokeism in all its forms by administrators and regents alike.
More to come on the necessity of true academic freedom at our Lutheran universities as we approach Independence Day 2023. Stay tuned!
Meanwhile, please feel use your freedom of speech (!) to weigh in.
Epoch Times article:
https://www.theepochtimes.com/we-dont-like-what-you-say-or-how-you-say-it_5350441.html
Latest update at The Federalist:
Personal Invitation