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Read more of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly news associate producer Janice D'Arcy's interview with Patrick Henry College president Michael Farris:
Q: The professors who resigned claim academic freedom at Patrick Henry College is inhibited by your interpretation of the college's biblical worldview. Is there academic freedom at Patrick Henry?
A: Absolutely there's academic freedom at Patrick Henry College, and the professors raising the critique don't appear to understand the meaning of academic freedom. It doesn't mean you can't be criticized. They wrote an article, the administration criticized it. We didn't fire them, we didn't officially reprimand them, we took no official action against them, we simply disagreed. If they can't understand that academic freedom means the give and take of ideas, they really don't understand the concept.
Q: One professor [Robert Stacey] was fired. He submitted his resignation, then spoke about the controversy in class and was fired. That could be considered an official reprimand, couldn't it?
A: He didn't speak about academic freedom. He'd already resigned for next year, and he told students that if they disagreed with him, they should leave his class. And because he forced students to choose sides this late in the semester and forced them to leave class if they didn't like what he was doing, we told him that it was unfair to make the students choose sides. We gave him a chance to relent on that and apologize to the students. He chose not to do that, and so we did fire him, but it was only because of his forcing students to choose sides.
Q: One of the articles written by two professors you criticized argued that the Bible is not the only source of truth. What's wrong with that argument?
A: The Bible is the ultimate source of truth. That's what the administration has been talking about. The idea that it's the only source of truth is patently ridiculous. I teach constitutional law. We read Roe v. Wade. We read the Federalist Papers. We read all kinds of things, the good, the bad and the ugly, and that's the same way we do it in all other courses in the curriculum. But what the professors wrote is that knowledge, man's knowledge in general, was the ultimate good, and that's just simply incompatible for what this college stands for. The Bible and loving God are the ultimate goods. And they frankly fell in love with their intellect just a little too much.
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Q: What impact has this episode had on the college?
A: Its' been very difficult. My biggest regret is that the students have been torn, and I wish that it hadn't have been done in the way that it was done. But in the long haul I think we're going to better for it, because we're going to have great professors here. We have great academic leadership coming for this next year, far more experienced than the people who are leaving, and higher scholastic levels of experience, and we simply are going to have good people who are clear on what they're doing and are not muddled in their thinking that man's knowledge is more important than the knowledge of God.
These professors wanted to read some of their favorite human authors as if they were devotional classics, that we should come in and venerate what these authors said. Our position is that every human author, whether Christian or non Christian, whether it's my favorite or their favorite, should be read with critical thinking skills, that we should come in and say, is this really true? And here the standard of truth is the Bible, ultimately. But we're going to read widely; we're going to read the classics; we're going to read new material; we're going to read things that we agree with; we're going to read things that we disagree with. But we're going to read them critically, not devotionally. But these professors just can't countenance anybody who disagrees with them. And so if we disagree with their favorites, somehow we've denied them academic freedom. It's the most perverse definition of academic freedom I've ever heard. I've been litigating constitutional academic cases for 30 years, and these guys haven't got a clue of what freedom apparently means.
Q: Would you have any of the professors who resigned come back?
A: There's no way in the world that they would want to come back, nor would the college want them back in view of the fact that they have a low view of both the Bible and freedom in terms as how it relates with human knowledge. Why is a little college of 300 in Virginia getting so much coverage because five professors got mad and quit? Well, the answer is Patrick Henry College is doing some pretty remarkable things and is worthy of all this national attention. And so we're going to keep doing remarkable things. Our students are going to keep winning national championships in debate and keep being trained to be leaders of both the nation and the culture.
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