The College Fix

Tennessee’s Bryan College has drawn scrutiny from mainstream media for the Christian institution’s recent affirmation of an “historical” Adam and Eve in its revised charter. But a conservative columnist is now accusing Bryan’s president of creating an “atmosphere of lawlessness” and “totalitarian arrogance,” and not just because of the Adam and Eve controversy.

Writing at Townhall.com, columnist Mike Adams says the conduct of President Stephen Livesay “has been so far outside the realm of normal professional conduct as to nearly defy description.”

Adams is no stranger to hostile administrations or the challenge of reconciling Christianity with the academic world. He just secured a promotion to full professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington – plus $50,000 in back pay and $615,000 to cover his legal fees – after winning a seven-year court battle against the school, alleging discrimination against him as a conservative Christian.

But Adams knows “corruption” when he sees it, whether secular or religious, he says in ticking off the sins of the Bryan administration helmed by Livesay. When a Bryan professor resigned after his arrest “in a sting operation for allegedly soliciting sex from a minor,” Adams says,

Bryan College concocted a cover story, which falsely claimed that the professor left to pursue “other opportunities.” Being charged with a felony sex crime isn’t an “opportunity.” It’s a lie and a very bad one at that. Arguably, Dr. Livesay should have been terminated for his role in the cover up.

When a student journalist – using public records – tried to report that story, Livesay “quashed” it citing accuracy:

Obviously, Dr. Livesay’s real concern was that it was accurate and exposed the school as having concocted a cover story that was inaccurate. …

The day Dr. Livesay decided to engage in prior restraint of free and accurate speech was the day Bryan lost its claim to be a serious institution of higher learning.

In changing the statement of faith to affirm an historical Adam and Eve, Bryan explicitly violated its own charter while requiring its faculty to “sign a specific rejection of macro-evolution” – right before “their annual contracts were to be renewed”:

This did not give dissenters a reasonable amount of time to look for employment elsewhere. These are Gestapo tactics.

Following a 30-2 faculty vote of no confidence in Livesay, the president “refuses to leave” and even demanded that unsupportive board members leave their positions, Adams said, citing “numerous credible sources within the Bryan community”:

In twelve years of writing (almost always critically) of higher education, I have never seen this kind of totalitarian arrogance on behalf of a college president. And that includes my coverage of those not claiming to be Christians.

It’s pretty shocking to me as well, as someone well-versed in the kind of intimidation cloaked in Christian rhetoric.

When I attended a more liberal evangelical school, Seattle Pacific University, our president – a literature professor turned real-estate tycoon – was known for his own hardball tactics among faculty. One of my professors, who sounds a lot like Mike Adams in retrospect, resigned after enduring years of strong-arming by the administration.

While investigating credible claims that the school was hemorrhaging money in an ill-conceived building campaign and piling on unsustainable debt, I found it nearly impossible to get faculty to talk, let alone off the record. On a small campus where privileged information is easy to trace back to its source, everyone was terrified of being outed as bad-mouthing the administration. I was even threatened with a lawsuit if I published certain information I had been given.

(SPU’s poorly conceived planning eventually caught up with it in 2011, when the campaign for a $72 million building complex was axed because of “the state of the economy,” as The Falcon reported. The school hadn’t even raised a quarter of the funds and was only months away from breaking ground, as The Falcon editorial board noted.)

It’s crucial that Christian colleges receive scrutiny for the right reasons. Bryan College is an easy punching bag – a literal Adam and Eve? Dismissive of “macro-evolution”? What a fundamentalist backwater is the standard response for journalists, and plenty of Christians too, without knowing anything more about the school.

But that’s a sideshow. Good governance, proper oversight and respect for the rule of law, which Adams highlights in his column, are far more important than a school’s precise doctrinal statement.

If President Lovesay and his administration show such open contempt for these building blocks of higher education, Bryan deserves the misdirected scorn it’s getting from the secular world.

Greg Piper is an assistant editor of The College Fix. (@GregPiper)

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