A Wisconsin professor was abruptly suspended after he criticized his Christian university’s “woke” criteria for selecting its new president, The Federalist reports.
The Rev. Dr. Greg Schulz was immediately and indefinitely suspended from his classes at Concordia University Wisconsin and banned from campus by interim college President William Cario on Feb. 18, however, he was not formally notified until Feb. 22, when his lawyer Dan Lennington, of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, obtained the suspension letter.
“They told him to ‘recant’ in a memo that they never gave him,” Lennington told The Federalist.
Lennington said his public interest law firm has never heard of a professor being booted from campus for publicly expressing his opinions.
After he couldn’t log into his campus email over the weekend, Schulz was informed of his suspension and campus ban from colleagues, his department chair Dr. Angus Menuge told The Federalist.
“I have since contacted the president and asked him to reconsider and I have received no response whatsoever,” Menuge said. Menuge called the suspension “extraordinarily draconian” and “Kafka-esque” not only for the reasons Schulz was suspended but also how it was managed.
“Are we being told that you have to mute your Christianity so that it conforms to these ideologies of niceness and all of it? If so, that has a chilling effect on not only academic freedom but also on the Christian conscience,” Menuge said.
The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which has authority over Concordia Wisconsin, gave the university a candidate’s list from which to select a new president; Schulz was one of 11 candidates on the list, according to The Federalist. The university’s Board of Regents, however, decided to disregard the synod’s candidate list and begin a new search, looking for a candidate with a commitment to social justice.
In his article that was published in Christian News four days before his suspension and was cited in his suspension letter, Schulz criticized the university’s Board of Regents for “publicly announcing their determination to have a president who exhibits a ‘demonstrated belief in and commitment to equity and inclusion’ and who promotes racialized ‘diversity in all its myriad forms.'”
“While there is no systemic racism at Concordia because we are committed to Christ incarnate and His universal justification of all human beings without exception, there certainly is systemic Woke-ism,” Schulz wrote.
In the suspension letter, Cario accuses Schulz of “Insubordination; lying to administration about actions taken,” “Conduct unbecoming a Christian,” and “Not following faculty grievance or dispute process.” The letter also mentions “several complaints from students and at least one from a faculty member.”
According to The Federalist, the university has a $107 million annual budget and receives substantial income from federal student loans. Accreditation, which is needed to accept those federal loans, mandates racial policies that conflict with Christian teachings, the Federalist says.
Rev. Dr. Peter Scaer, a seminary professor who attended a Feb. 25 “reconciliation” meeting between Schulz and Cario as the professor’s witness, told The Federalist that the meeting “clarified things for me.”
“It became patently obvious that the charges against Schulz are ridiculous,” Scaer said. “And by the end of the meeting I said, ‘Is this all you guys got? I’m not angry about these things, but when the church sees this, nobody’s going to take this seriously.'”
The next steps for resolving Schulz’s suspension were not immediately clear, but The Federalist reports that a lawsuit has not yet been filed.
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