Lack of Leadership Has Crippled Our Universities
Everett Piper /
Our university leaders and faculty need to grow a spine. Our times demand it.
We have too many learned cowards lining once-hallowed halls of learning. Fewer and fewer voices have the courage to stand and speak the truth and simply say “I disagree.”
Those who dare to do so are ignored or silenced by the “tolerant” who deem the rare voice of dissent as intolerable.
A professor at Wake Forest University admitted:
The problem is that whenever you are on the liberal left, to some degree, you don’t really see conservative ideas as even valid or worth the time and effort to allow because you have a sense that you know more and you know better. This arrogance creates an ‘ideological vacuum.’ In this vacuum, professors do not acknowledge counter-arguments on issues or challenge their own assumptions.
Vapid leadership allows this ignorance to be the norm. A vacuum will be filled by something. In today’s culture, it’s being filled by snowflake insanity, and our culture is paying a high price.
College and university presidents, board members, and faculty have let this travesty occur. Our schools are permeated with anti-Christian and nonsensical, dare I say suicidal, ideas.
Even worse, Judeo-Christian words have been stolen. Love, freedom, equality, justice, truth, and compassion are all changing before our very eyes.
Too many academic leaders stand idly by, content to drink the Kool-Aid of false compassion. We have bought the lie that confrontation and compassion are antithetical rather than complimentary. It’s nonsense.
Discipline and love are complementary, not antithetical. Our unwillingness to help students by confronting and disciplining them reveals our lack of love for them.
>>> Purchase Everett Piper’s new book, “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth”
We don’t coddle because we care about students. We coddle because we don’t care enough to bother. We care more about our own feelings of comfort or desire to be popular than their growth and readiness for the challenges of real life.
Confrontation is not synonymous with hate. Any decent parents know if we love our kids, we’ll confront them. Failing to confront will result in them compromising body, mind, and soul.
But, today we have parents who don’t know how to rear or confront their children properly. We have professors who don’t know how to confront their students with good ideas and challenge their bad ideas.
We have college presidents who get caught like deer in the headlights when there’s a cultural conflict. They don’t want to call a spade a spade because they’re afraid of being labeled a hater.
Search online for university presidents who will take a stand for truth, and you’ll find a very short list of those willing to stand tall in the face of the snowflake rebellion.
Sadly, even evangelical Christians, who are supposed to be the ones proclaiming the truth, either stand by and do nothing or actively attack those with the courage to stand.
Their criticism simply proved my point. Their solution was to criticize me for being too critical; to confront me for being too confrontational; to write a blog about tolerance while calling my blog intolerable.
They seemed to think the best rebuttal to my public critique was to write their own public critique rebutting public critiques. They seemed only too ready to argue that comfort is more important than repentance and support is more important than challenge.
Their solution was and is to coddle and enable more—to confront and challenge less .
I hardly even need to respond. Any schoolboy can see the self-refuting nature of their argument.
Even a self-described atheist from the psychology department at the University of Central Florida wrote, “I don’t agree with your religion, but thank you for saying what needs to be said … Please carry on!”
While much of the secular world recognizes the lunacy of safe spaces, the church condemns those who love young people enough to speak the truth and confront them. Sad. Shameful.
As you watch the snowflake rebellion play out on campuses across the nation, ask yourself this: Have university presidents indeed become essentially irrelevant? Do you see strength or weakness in their leadership?
Do they show any evidence that they have the convictions to stand in the face of this nonsense, or does your gut tell you that they are simply more concerned with keeping their job?
Or even worse, do they seem to actually believe that giving Play-Doh, bubbles, and coloring books to a bunch of 20-year-olds who don’t like the results of an election is a good idea?
This article was adapted with permission from Everett Piper’s new book, “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth.”
