Alan Jacobs

When I was visiting Wheaton College last week I happened to hear a story on NPR about Intel’s attempts to create a more diverse workforce, with more women and minorities. Apparently Intel is putting a lot of energy behind this endeavor, and having some success, though retention continues to be a problem.

I was especially taken by one moment in the report:

Freada Kapor Klein is an investor who funds diversity-focused startups like Jopwell, which connects job candidates who are underrepresented minorities to tech companies. Klein says culture is key.

Tech companies don’t just make new engineers pass a coding test. They have to pass a “culture fit” test. That’s where a huge amount of bias creeps in, she says, as existing teams only want a unicorn. “They are looking for the one-in-a-million person who comes from a different racial, ethnic, cultural, gender background, but in every other respect is identical to the white and Asian men who work there,” Klein says. “That’s not diversity.”

It seems to me that this is a story that the leadership of Wheaton College should meditate on as the college tries to move on from its difficult relationship with Larycia Hawkins. I believe — I have good reason to believe — that Wheaton really, truly, seriously wants to have a faculty and student body that is more reflective of the ethnic and cultural range of worldwide evangelical Christianity. But I also saw, during my twenty-nine years on the Wheaton faculty and several years as director of the Faculty Faith and Learning program, far too many situations in which non-white faculty members were treated, if not with outright suspicion, then at least with bemusement and puzzlement, because they did not express themselves in ways that matched the cultural practices of white midwestern evangelicalism.

Minority faculty were of course not the only ones to have this kind of experience; it happened also to white faculty from charismatic or Pentecostal traditions, and to some others as well. But minority faculty — who not incidentally tend also to be charismatic or Pentecostal — always seemed to be under deeper and more lasting scrutiny.

I remember one black colleague who devoted two weeks to studying a book and then, at the end of that time, said to his class, “I don’t think that went as well as it should have. Let’s do it again. We’ll have to leave out the next book or two on the syllabus.” Some students — I don’t know how many — went ballistic over this. That’s not what the syllabus says! I’ve already bought those other books and now we’re not even going to read them! Some faculty and administrators became concerned over this “lack of professionalism”; they wondered whether Wheaton could afford to have faculty “the students don’t really respect.” Me, I just wished I had the courage to go off-script that far; though I guess the deep-seated reluctance to go off-script is a trait I shared with white midwestern evangelicalism, one that helped make me comfortable at Wheaton, even though I am not midwestern. But I also believe that if I had gone off-script in precisely that way it would not have created the same degree of consternation. I am convinced that my colleague’s race made students, faculty, and administrators wonder what else he might do that deviated from the script.

To my lasting regret, that colleague left Wheaton, under less than ideal circumstances, and I believe he was allowed to leave simply because he wasn’t a unicorn. He was not someone who had dark skin but was “every other respect … identical” to the overwhelmingly white world he worked in. He didn’t “fit the culture” — and note that in this case the lack of fit was not even theological, or spiritual, but (supposedly) professional.

But what if the narrow scope of “the culture” is a bug, not a feature? What if a more ethnically diverse faculty, even if it contained people who made some of the existing faculty and administration and alumni and donors uncomfortable, helped the college to achieve its mission? I made a similar argument some years ago in suggesting that Wheaton should be open to hiring Roman Catholics — my logic here is fundamentally the same. What if an institution’s existing culture, and its concern to hire people who “fit” its existing culture, actually inhibit its ability to fulfill its mission?

Wheaton has a detailed and quite specific Statement of Faith, but again and again over the past few decades faculty who can enthusiastically sign that Statement have been deemed not quite right, not comme il faut, not “one of us.” The (often inchoate) sense of institutional culture and “fit” has too often trumped the college’s explicit statements of what it’s all about. Here’s my proposal: What if Wheaton were to trust its own Statement of Faith? What if it were to open its doors to people who don’t look or speak or think like the typical Wheaton person — but who share the same convictions? Might the college not, ultimately, be greatly invigorated by all that new blood? Might it not come closer to the vision granted to John the Revelator? “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:

Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.

The fact that LeGrier’s actions had forced Officer Rialmo to end LeGrier’s life, and to accidently take the innocent life of Bettie Jones, has caused, and will continue to cause, Officer Rialmo to suffer extreme emotional trauma.

Officer Rialmo wants ten million bucks from the family of the man he killed. More on the story here.

1. Anything good that happens to me happens because of my hard work.
2. Anything bad that happens to me happens because of unforeseeable circumstances and general bad luck.
3. Anything good that happens to you happens because you are the undeserving beneficiary of positive circumstances.
4. Anything bad that happens to you happens because you are lazy and/or thoughtless.

Isn’t it time to start imagining a remake of Lord of the Rings? Not time to have one just yet, mind you, but time to consider what it ought to be like. I don’t think there’s any question that, whenever it gets made, it’s going to be a post-Game of Thrones version, bleaker, darker, muted in its colors, more violent. I don’t think those are necessarily bad things, though it could be.

I’m thinking Alfonso Cuarón should direct and music should be by Eno. That’s what I’m thinking.

Now that the crisis at Wheaton College has been more or less sorted out — though the repercussions will continue to be felt for years, and the lawyerly curse of “confidential agreements” means that we’ll never know exactly how it all went down — what should happen is the beginning of a long period of reflection by all involved.

But that’s not the tone of what I’m hearing — though I can only hope that what I’m hearing is not representative. Because it seems that many of the supporters of Prof. Hawkins are in no mood to forgive members of Wheaton’s administration. In a widely leaked email to the college community, Provost Stan Jones wrote, “I asked Dr. Hawkins for her forgiveness for the ways I contributed to the fracture of our relationship, and to the fracture of Dr. Hawkins’ relationship with the College…. I apologized for my lack of wisdom and collegiality as I initially approached Dr. Hawkins, and for imposing an administrative leave more precipitously than was necessary.” And so on. It’s a very full apology. But I have already read a number of comments from Christians that this apology is problematic because it does not acknowledge Wheaton’s history (and present) of structural racism and sexism.

This kind of response strikes me as uncharitable, unproductive, and shortsighted. And I say this as someone who believes that Wheaton really does have serious problems in knowing how to deal with faculty and students who are not white males.

What if, when a brother in Christ apologizes and asks for forgiveness, one were to grant that forgiveness — instead of immediately criticizing him for not having provided a fully adequate account of the reasons he went astray? What about that as a strategy? It has some advantages:

• It’s a matter of obedience to a commandment: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” And if the response is, “Well of course I forgive him” — no. Forgiveness is never a matter of course. It is too important, and too hard, mere to assume. When asked for and granted, forgiveness should, for a time, be the only air we breathe, we who have been at odds with one another.
• To grant forgiveness to one who has offended against us is to open ourselves to the possibility of our sins against them. We may need to ask for the very benefit we have just granted; if so, it is good for us to know we have that need.
• It is on the basis of forgiveness requested and received that we can then go on to explore, together, the deeper structural causes of our sins against each other. Those who have been reconciled in Christ can be bold in exploring these deeper causes; knowing the peace of reconciliation, we need not fear even the darkest truths.
• To think in this way is to accept that reconciliation that lasts, reconciliation that bears spiritual and moral fruit, is an ongoing process. There is a sense in which the exchange of forgiveness instantly reconciles us to one another; but there is a deeper reconciliation that happens only over a long period of living in one another’s presence (and the presence of the living Christ within us).

So to those who say that Provost Jones’ apology is inadequate, my answer would be: of course it is inadequate. Every act of penitence, including yours and mine, is inadequate. We know ourselves in part, as if through a glass darkly, and in this world will make limited progress in understanding why we act as we act. But every act of penitence is also a beautiful thing, especially when it comes from those who have to do so in public, exposing their shortcomings and sins to the whole mocking social-media world. (Some of those who are currently lambasting or smh-ing at Jones should perhaps do better to be on their knees in gratitude that their own sins and shortcomings have not played out on so well-lit a stage.)

So why not see an apology such as this not as the conclusion to something, but rather the beginning of something? President Ryken has asked Wheaton’s Board of Trustees to begin an inquiry into this whole mess, to try to understand how it became such a mess. I think that process is more likely to bear good fruit if those who feel, and especially those who have genuinely been, most wounded by Wheaton are willing to be patient and hopeful and generous-spirited as the inquiry proceeds, not least because God has been patient and hopeful and generous-spirited with all of us.

— As Flint Fought to Be Heard, Virginia Tech Team Sounded Alarm. I think every college and university should be asking itself, What are we doing that resembles what Virginia Tech did for Flint? What are we doing to serve people who are neglected or abused by our political regime?

That’s one of my favorite images of Robert Fripp. Lately I’ve been listening rather obsessively to a relatively neglected track from Eno’s masterful Another Green World, “St. Elmo’s Fire.” Eno had asked Fripp to come up with an aural equivalent of the dance of St. Elmo’s fire among the masts of a ship — and I’ll be rubbished if he didn’t do exactly that. Technically brilliant, yes, but, more, so wonderfully imaginative.

The present age is demented. It is possessed by a sense of dislocation, a loss of personal identity, an alternating sentimentality and rage which, in an individual patient, could be characterized as dementia.

As the century draws to a close, it does not yet have a name, but it can be described.

It is the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history.

I will give it a name which at least describes what it does. I would call it the age of the theorist-consumer. All denizens of the age tend to be one or the other or both….

In the old Christendom, everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it. But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony; which is to say, open to signs.

— Walker Percy, "Why Are You a Catholic?" (1990)

I had to get to my iPad in order to read Walt Mossberg and John Gruber’s articles about poorly performing Apple software because my brand-new MacBook with the newest version of El Capitan still can’t reliably connect to the internet.

In adulthood, many prodigies become experts in their fields and leaders in their organizations. Yet “only a fraction of gifted children eventually become revolutionary adult creators,” laments the psychologist Ellen Winner. “Those who do must make a painful transition” to an adult who “ultimately remakes a domain.”

— Adam Grant. You're not thinking this through. "Revolutionary adult creators" are by definition fantastically rare. It is not possible to create a world in which artistic and scientific revolutions are happening every day. By all means let's get the elites rethinking the absurd ways they raise their children, but in the process let's not kid ourselves. The fact of the matter is that nothing — nothing — can be done to increase the world's proportion of radically generative minds. If that's your goal you're pipe-dreaming.