Hope College Refuses to Change Policy on Homosexuality

@ Jffoster, your “hope” for the country while a cute play on words suggests that (1) this country is an amoral wasteland of deviant debauchery and that (2) discriminatory actions taken by this institution is a way to remedy the former sociocultural dilemma. I disagree with both. Dr. Martin Luther King once said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ” and that is as appropriate a statement one could make about this shameful, discriminatory act against LGBT students whose only mistake was to love someone other than what the dominant majority might deem appropriate.

Pannapacker? Comments?

I am not a spokesperson for Hope College, but my understanding is that Hope’s board and administration believe they must uphold the policies of the college’s parent denomination, the Reformed Church of America. Some faculty and students disagree with that position–and some don’t, and some have complex, conflicted perspectives. There is a lot of diversity of opinion at Hope, which makes it in interesting place to teach. Hope produces more than its share of activists on both sides of the spectrum; it is not the kind of place that imposes rigid views on its students.

Good for hope college – someone has to stand for what they believe in – let those who don’t share common values go elsewhere – there are thousands of colleges to choose from.

Let’s keep things in perspective. It’s a private institution, one of the few left in the country that has opted to preserve its own doctrinal integrity in what honestly has to be described as a climate of hostility. They aren’t doing this maliciously, but as an essential task of defining their religious heritage. You’d think advocates of multiculturalism would appreciate how difficult this is in an age where people are growing increasingly intolerant of these voluntary communities. In all irony, that kind of hostility speaks to a form of cultural imperialism we’d condemn if the roles had been reversed.

Tappat, at private institutions the trustees are also responsible for maintaining the mission of the institution and representing the sponsoring organizatin or body. This means they do considerably more than finding the resources to operate: they may determine the parameters within which the administration operates, for instance. Here’s the board of trustees responsibilities statement from the Hope College faculty handbook:By charter, the Board of Trustees is the legal custodian of the College and assumes ultimate responsibility for the total program of the College. It has direct responsibility for selecting and supporting a President, for long‑range planning, for obtaining the necessary financial resources and facilities needed for the educational program of the College, for establishing faculty personnel policies, for deciding the broad aims of the College program, and for reviewing and establishing policies needed to maintain and develop such a program. The Board of Trustees, in its bylaws, has delegated major responsibility to the administration, faculty and student body to determine and administer the specific policies of all phases of the intellectual, cultural, social, and religious programs of the College.

Pannapacker’s comments and the references in the article to alumni and student groups suggest that serious discussion of cultural/moral/religious issues is alive at Hope College. There is something to be said for an institutional commitment to values which permits, and by its existence precipitates this serious discussion. My father and uncle, who became Presbyterian ministers, and my aunt graduated from Calvin College in certainly less liberal times (and Calvin is still to the right of Hope in most respects). Yet they all became, in time, what my father called “theological conservatives, and therefore social liberals.” It was the hard thinking, especially about theology and moral issues, that he learned in college and (Westminster)seminary which led him to support female ministers and elders, civil rights, and other “liberal” causes on theological grounds. Institutions like Hope and Calvin are intellectual in their conservatism should not be confused with the likes of Bob Jones University. They do train students to think seriously about the most important issues, and this often leads to a more thoughtful moderation or even liberalism in later life–a nice contrast to the nasty thoughtlessness of some 60′s liberals like Horowitz who think they’ve fallen into a State of Grace.

And I shall not give up until I have the right to marry myself and get married tax status for it! To the barricades!

Moravian, just curious: let’s say some white students enrolled at an HBC wanted to show *Birth of a Nation* for academic purposes. Let’s say the administration forbade the screening. Would you support the students’ right to show a film that the administration believed ran counter to the HBC’s principles and core mission, and that seemed to celebrate values and ideology opposed by the college? Or is that different?

As an alumnus of Hope, I’d like to offer my perspective. I attended Hope as a generational student with no affiliation to the Reformed Church. While this Ticker post (and many of your opinions) does capture the school’s administration, my experience on campus was far from oppressive. With a B.A. in both English and Womens Studies, I was encouraged to think for myself and to not blindly accept the beliefs of any particular organization. We were taught to think for ourselves and very openly allowed to speak our opinions. This is not to say that I think Hope’s situation is ideal. When I heard about the banning of Milk’s screening, I wrote an impassioned email to the Dean (and received the canned response, you’d expect). However, speaking with other alumni on the subject proves to me that we are not all administrative clones of our institution.