Luke Ford

This is where I grew up and this is a place I love.

I know this will sound crass, but Seventh-Day Adventist girls are hot.

Seventh-Day Adventism is a feminine religion. Women account for about two-thirds of the church. The atmosphere is about healing and nurturing. The leading figure in church history was a woman — Ellen G. White.

From the Napa Valley Register:

Pacific Union College in Angwin won a national honor of a most curious sort over the weekend.

Newsweek and The Daily Beast ranked PUC as the “most beautiful college” in the nation, topping such other West Coast schools as Santa Clara University (No. 2), Chapman University (No. 3), UC Santa Barbara (No. 8) and the University of Southern California (No. 12).

The ranking reflected survey data on the attractiveness of students, the campus, the number of sunny days per year, and the area’s comfort index, which measures humidity and afternoon temperatures.

The male students at PUC scored 9.2 out of 10 for “male attractiveness,” while females got a rating of 9.1. The source of these measures of physical beauty: the College Prowler website.

Online comments questioned many of the “most beautiful” results. “What does education have to do with attractiveness???” said one. Another questioned how non-existent male students were rated at the all-female Scripps College.

PUC is a Seventh-day Adventist Christian liberal arts college located in the green hills east of St. Helena.

PUC President Heather J. Knight accepted the honor, saying, “In many ways, this is recognition for our collective goal to make the campus sparkle — and our landscape and facilities management teams in particular.”

Knight has led a campaign in recent years to enhance many areas of campus and emphasize its natural beauty.

Comments:

* There is a charm and a beauty about the whole area known as Angwin. The students tend toward being friendly and polite. The people are helpful, friendly and community-oriented. Much of the land is untouched and revered by all who walk the trails around this town.

Obviously, we all want this to remain just as it is and while we cannot have it all, we must struggle to preserve land would be over-developed and a community that would shatter. I will vote for Measure ‘U’ because I truly respect what has been created in Angwin.

Allow me to put this whole argument into context through the words of Theodore Roszak (Professor of History at CSU, Hayward; social thinker, writer and critic). “Suddenly it becomes a subversion of progress to assert the common sense principle that communities exist for the health of those who live in them, not for the convenience of those who exploit their real estate for profit.”

Every group has rules — written and unwritten — and if you violate them sufficiently, you get kicked out.

Seventh-Day Adventism is high intensity religion. If you take it seriously, it tends to take over your whole life. Because of this passion, Adventists argue a lot and push out those who don’t belong.

Australian author Bob Ellis nails it: “Being a Seventh-Day Adventist was hard but it was kinda fair. They quickly sorted out the ones they couldn’t trust and branded us with the mark of Cain and sent us wandering, fugitive sinners, through the Land of Nod for all our days.”

Here is some background on my family’s time at Pacific Union College (particularly the years 1977-1980).

From Getreligion:

Every week, yet another Christian college is in an uproar over clashes between doctrine and 21st century culture.

Thus, it’s no great surprise that one of North America’s 13 Seventh-day Adventist schools should be on stage now. The focus is on Pacific Union College, a Napa Valley institution ranked as America’s most beautiful college in 2012 by the Daily Beast and Newsweek. That is pretty amazing when you consider it was up against the University of California-Santa Barbara and Pepperdine.

However, its psychology department is in much disarray, according to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that tells of the department’s decision to invite Ryan Bell to speak. GR’s own Bobby Ross has written quite a bit about the publicity-seeking Mr. Bell who has gotten lots of favorable coverage for his recent decision to dump his Christian faith and become an atheist.

Even though Bell is a PUC alum, it’s not hard to imagine how inviting him onto campus would set the collective teeth of college administrators on edge.

 After forcing a psychology professor to disinvite a controversial speaker, Pacific Union College is, for the second time in less than three years, facing turmoil within and departures from its department of psychology and social work, along with renewed questions about its commitment to academic freedom.

The latest uproar at the institution, a small Seventh-day Adventist liberal-arts college in California, began when Aubyn S. Fulton, a professor of psychology, invited Ryan Bell, a former pastor in the Seventh-day Adventist Church who had become an atheist, to speak at a colloquium.

The invitation drew the ire of Pacific Union’s president, Heather J. Knight, who told Mr. Fulton to disinvite Mr. Bell. She also told him, Mr. Fulton asserted in a Facebook post, that he would be fired at the end of the term.

“The president transmitted to me previously that she would be firing me because of the events surrounding my decision to invite Ryan Bell,” Mr. Fulton wrote. “I believe I referred to that action as the most egregious violation of academic freedom I had ever encountered over my nearly three decades as a member of the PUC faculty. I stand by that judgment.”

In an interview with The Chronicle, Ms. Knight would not confirm whether Mr. Fulton’s social-media post was accurate, but said no decisions had been made to terminate anyone yet. She added that Mr. Fulton had reached out to the college to orchestrate an “amiable separation” from Pacific Union before the posting.

The Chronicle does a decent job of filling in the backstory about Fulton, including how he nearly lost his job three years ago because he openly challenged the church’s stance on premarital sex.

We hear how the head of the psych department stepped down then and now, with this latest contretemps, three more faculty are walking out. A story posted Wednesday by the Napa Valley Register says five professors in the psych and social work department have left since 2014, so the actual numbers are unclear. The Register also mentioned a contract that faculty sign pledging to support church doctrine and quoted directly from the college’s academic freedom statement about faculty not presenting as truth anything contrary to SDA beliefs.

The Chronicle should have mentioned those details. Also, the colloquium was last fall, a detail picked up by the Register but not mentioned by the Chronicle. The latter story made it sound as if this had all blown up in the past month whereas the debate has been simmering for more than six months. Another detail the Chronicle left out was that Fulton didn’t tell the college president of Bell’s impending visit until four days before the fact.

Blindsided by the invite and planning an out-of-town trip, Heather Knight had to make a quick decision, so she opted to cancel Bell’s appearance. These are all important details that a local paper, with its ear close to the ground, can get whereas a national publication, writing in sweeping terms about academic freedom, completely misses.

What the Chronicle got right was some good quotes from Knight defending her position plus the suggestion that some of the departing profs were planning to retire anyway. It also said:

The resigning professors pointed to the leadership’s interference in their classrooms. “We are limited because our handbook doesn’t allow us to speak critically,” Ms. Bainum said. “Individuals who have tried to challenge it have been called into the principal’s office, so to say.”

Folks at the Chronicle: Please quote from the handbook. What did faculty sign onto when they were hired? Is it right for teachers at a clearly conservative Christian school to expect they can give a platform to someone who opposes its teachings, especially Ryan Bell of all people?

Is the whole debate about academic freedom? The headline says it is, but Knight suggests near the end that it’s not and that no decisions have been made whether or not to terminate someone. Well — it’s May, way past the time when colleges hand out contracts to their professors for next year. Did the reporter ask Fulton whether he’s received a contract or not? That would tell us a lot.

It’s easy for a national publication to sweep in and tell a story along the lines of the familiar narrative of conservative-Christian-college-is-trampling-down-academic-freedom. But the reality is a bit messier and a lot of the ferment revolves around one professor. Who’s the real villain here? We need more details than the Chronicle delivered.

Many of my happiest memories are from my time at Pacific Union College (6th thru 12th grade). There would not be such intense conflict if people didn’t love so much.

It is a very good sign for Adventism’s future that Adventists fight so fiercely over what often looks silly to outsiders. If SDAs didn’t care so much about their church, they’d be in decline like the Anglicans and the other mainstream Protestant churches. Adventism is high-intensity religion, like Orthodox Judaism. It takes over your whole life.

REPORT:

Pacific Union College, a small Seventh-day Adventist school, is in the midst of a debate about academic freedom after a controversial psychology professor said he was going to be fired.

About 60 PUC students marched through the Angwin campus on May 4 in defense of the professor. Heather Knight, college president, met with the demonstrators outside her office, led them in prayer, and agreed to hold a town hall meeting the next day that was attended by about 250 students.

A professor at Loma Linda University writes: My perplexity and dismay about is happening at PUC increases with each day and every bit of news. I guess this is because my own experience has been so different.
I was once invited to speak somewhere only to have the one who invited me withdraw the invitation because his or her administrator did not approve. We both laughed about it and that was it.
Also, twice my administrators have asked me not to participate in major academic conferences where I thought I could make positive contributions because they thought that my doing so would intensely disturb one or more of our constituencies. Although I was disappointed, I did not feel abused. After all, they did have a better overview of the situation as a whole. My contributions were published anyway without administrative disapproval.
Time, place and circumstance matter in these things as in all.
I don’t know how many denominational committees and commissions on which I have not been invited to serve even though I was qualified because someone thought I was not sufficiently traditional. This gave me time to do other things.
On the other hand, my Dean defends me when I don’t even know it. His response when I once thanked him was: “I’ll let you know when I think the criticism has merit; otherwise, it is my job to protect you so that you can do your work and that’s what I’m doing.”
Once, when I was involved in a controversial publication, my Dean preempted criticism by first informing the Board of Trustess and inviting them to read it even though he knew, he said, that a number of them would disagree.
Also, I have been told by one of our university’s lawyers that protecting my tenure sometimes increases their workload. “No problem,” he responded when I thanked him. “Happy to do it!”
Courts are adversarial and rightly so. By definition, colleges are collegial. On such campuses, everyone gives and takes in hopes of serving the common good. Nobody always gets his or her own way. Not even the President!
I wish that from my great distance I could see more collegiality at PUC. Maybe I would if I were closer.