What a bunch of dodos

The secularist fundamentalists are at it again. Charles Lewis reports:

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has issued a report that says B.C.-based Trinity Western University falls below the standard of proper academic freedom because it requires its faculty sign a statement of Christian faith before being hired.

It has also put the organization “on a list of institutions found to have imposed a requirement of a commitment to a particular ideology or statement as condition of employment.”

The statement of faith, available on the school’s web site, acknowledges, among other things, that there is one God, the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and that Christ is God incarnate.

The report by the teachers’ body also pointed to excerpts from the academic calendar, which in part said: “All teaching, learning, thinking, and scholarship take place under the direction of the Bible.”

Although Trinity Western is the first school to be put on the list, the organization said it will now investigate three other Christian universities — Crandall University in Moncton, Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, and Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ont. — all of which require faculty to sign faith statements.

“A school that requires its faculty to subscribe to a particular religious belief or ideology cannot be practicing academic freedom,” said James Turk, executive director of CAUT. “This is not about the school being Christian, but about faculty having to sign a statement of faith before being hired. A university is meant as a place to explore ideas, not to create disciples of Christ.”

A university is meant to be a place where students can find the truth and in the most meaningful sense of the word down to its Latin roots, to have an education that, as Augustine College dean Edward Tingley so brilliantly said in the 20006 commencement address, will lead to wisdom and virtue and enable the student to find the grace to cut the enslaving bonds of sin and death. It is to weep what we have done to our precious western civilization.

Disciples of Christ would be a good thing. Not this postmodern, namby-pamby politically correct exploration of ideas as if they were all of equal weight that this dodo seems to think is what academic freedom is all about. He can't even see the irony in this, how CAUT in its secularist zeal is interfering with the academic freedom of Christian communities to pursue their notion of academic freedom within the context of Christian orthodoxy. No, only one orthodoxy will prevail.

No, only the one-size-fits-all pantyhose version of secularist liberalism qualifies as academic freedom for these modern day inquisitors. What a truncated view of truth and of education.

How sad. Hmmmmm. Will any Catholic Universities come under any pressure?