Dean Cha is an example of the resumes that draw appointments and presentations in higher education. According to The College Fix, Cha’s 2023 dissertation at Azusa Pacific University was titled “Raging Waters of Whiteness: Addressing White Evangelical Racism in Higher Education.” His scholarship draws on critical pedagogy, incorporating “critical race theory, critical white studies, and evangelical postcolonial studies.”
Roughly three years later, he was made Dean of Students at PLNU.
As discussed in the USA Today column, the same pedagogy is evident in the crop of progressive proselytizing in the midterm elections. In Texas, Democrat James Talarico has declared that “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.” His church leaders at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church admit that most of its members are likely agnostic or atheist.
Other Democratic minister-candidates have similar far-left views of religion, including Iowa’s Lutheran minister-turned-candidate Sarah Trone Garriott, who is under attack for participating in a Satanic wedding.
They are part of a movement of “resistance preaching” to organize far-left ministers to use religious pitches to support a blue wave. Harvard actually selected an atheist as its head “chaplain” a few years ago.
Critics of Cha posted an Instagram post revealing the alleged statement to students as part of the fall leadership training.
Cha has long been an outspoken critic of what he views as “white privilege” in religion and the need to prioritize “racial justice,” including past presentations on “Whiteness as Witness: Re-conceptualizing Diversity in Christian Higher Education.”
Asked for a comment on the controversy, Lora Fleming, associate vice president of communications and public affairs at PLNU, defended the statement, noting that the university’s commitment to “confront racism, love our neighbors, and seek justice is not separate from our Christian discipleship. It flows from it.”
The school has been under fire over the shift to the far left in faculty appointments, a familiar story in higher education.
The university was previously under fire over reports that it has held such sessions as “decolonizing yoga” and refused to recognize a Turning Point USA chapter.
Critics also pointed to a prior controversy involving a poet brought to campus to share a view of Jesus as “agnostic and horny” and an “erotic lover.”
As will not come as much of a surprise to readers of this blog, I do not support calls to bar such views or to remove faculty who publish radical values. Higher education relies on academic freedom and free speech to maintain vibrant intellectual environments.
The problem is that, while claiming such protections for diverse viewpoints, today’s faculty have engaged in open bias and intolerance in hiring faculty. The faculty and administrators in control of higher education are the most intolerant and orthodox in generations. They have purged departments of conservatives and libertarians while creating an ideological echo chamber.
This is a private university, so it depends on donors and alumni to change the culture by withholding support.
At state schools, I have also opposed efforts to dictate curriculum and class content. I have encouraged state legislatures to tie further public subsidies to real, substantial changes that create intellectual diversity among faculty.
If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members still view citizens as a captive audience expected to keep funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.
If faculty members want to maintain echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.
Legislatures can demand evidence that schools maintain intellectually diverse faculty when determining the level of continued support from citizens. Otherwise, it is ridiculous to expect the public to subsidize their ideological echo chambers.
For a school established as “a simple Bible college,” it now seems determined to be something quite different. What that is remains a matter of faith best left to the faculty, the students, and the alumni.
As for Dean Cha, the faculty of Point Loma Nazarene University has every right to pick their leadership, and donors have every right to base their contributions on those choices.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”