Shake-Up at Patrick Henry

From an article by Molly Hennessy-Fiske in the LA Times:

Patrick Henry College, the small evangelical Christian school founded six years ago to train students for careers in public life, gained national prominence for placing many students in White House internships and other government positions. Now five of the school's 16 faculty members have left, saying the school's approach is too doctrinaire to prepare students for the realities of American politics. One faculty member was fired and four others resigned in protest, saying the administration prohibited free-ranging discussions at what has been called the "Evangelical Ivy League"... The specific issues that led to the firing and resignations are abstruse, but they revolve around the question of how the ideas and writings of nonevangelical thinkers such as Catholics or the ancient Greeks should be treated in the classroom... Clashes over principals are not uncommon among faculty at Catholic or evangelical schools, said professor John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. What is unusual, he said, is that the Patrick Henry professors spoke out. "At Patrick Henry, they have a political mission as well as a religious one: They want to train students to bring their religious view into public policy," Green said. Which makes the need for academic freedom all the more vital, he said.

I guess issues like this must be an endless headache for the administrators at institutions with religious affiliation. How to balance the atmosphere of openness, inquiry, learning, debate, and discussion that should be characteristic of an institution of higher learning with the perceived need for uniformity of belief that religious institutions tend to demand. The same thing happens at secular universities, but it's a balance of debate with political correctness. It seems like a university is the sort of place that should err on the side of tolerating debate.