I’ve said before that normally, I like what I read in Inside Higher Education except when they attempt to report on cultural wars issues, particularly religion. At which point, the snark gets a bit overwhelming.
Sadly, much of the commentary that’s appeared in GetReligion in the past year or two about Inside Higher Education has been negative. There’s this piece about the University of Iowa that ran earlier this year; this 2017 piece on Biola University that I also found fault with and tmatt’s critique of their Baylor coverage in September.
The latest piece is a he-got-what-was-coming-to-him piece about a conservative professor who was chased out of California State University of Northridge, only to run into similarly bad behavior at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.
If the name Robert Oscar Lopez sounds familiar, it might be because he clashed with his prior institution, too. In 2015, Lopez, then an associate professor of English at California State University at Northridge, said that institution was targeting him because he disagreed with letting gay parents adopt children. He faced a related complaint that a conference he’d organized and invited students to attend pushed antigay views (he denied this).
Lopez held other views outside the conservative mainstream, such as that homosexuality was inexorably linked to pederasty. Some called it hate speech. He said he based his insights on personal experience, and that being raised by a bisexual mother and her female partner made him socially awkward and led him to the “gay underworld” for a time.
Is the reporter sure that view is outside the conservative mainstream?
Eventually, Lopez left California and secular academe for Southwestern. The Texas institution doesn’t have tenure, but he thought he had found a permanent place among like-minded, socially conservative academics.
Things went well for Lopez for a while. But he couldn’t have predicted the events to come. In 2018, amid the Me Too movement, the seminary’s then president, Paige Patterson, was accused of covering up sexual abuse allegations within the Southern Baptist Convention. An earlier audio recording of Patterson counseling prayer to women with violent husbands also surfaced, as did reports that Patterson had gravely mishandled two rape cases involving woman at the seminary, in 2003 and in 2015.
The article explains all the complexities of the Patterson case and then links it to the fortunes of Liberty University, an evangelical institution several states away.
The Southern Baptist community faced a larger sexual abuse crisis around the same time, with the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News reporting that the church had seen 700 victims over 20 years. As Lopez watched how the church responded from his seat at Southwestern, he believed that victims of same-sex abuse were being left out of the discussions.
In April, he published a resolution for church consideration that included antigay language, including that some unnamed Southern Baptist groups had erred in mixing with Anglican groups who encouraged young Baptists “to explore homosexuality and even attend prurient homosexual events.”
Lopez wasn’t able to simply keep his mouth shut on controversial topics (as is wise for any new faculty member at any institution). So when Patterson’s successor, Adam Greenway, showed up, he dumped 26 professors, including Lopez.
In September, Lopez says, the seminary’s provost asked him to resign. In November, he saw that he didn’t have any classes assigned to him for the spring. And then he received a formal letter of notice, relieving him of his duties as of Dec. 31.
The letter says only that Lopez’s position is being eliminated. And it’s possible that’s true. It’s also possible that Lopez ruffled too many feathers fighting for the humanities program in the face of change.
But it’s more likely that his antigay comments caught up with him -- albeit in an unexpected place, at least to him.
Isn’t “antigay” an editorial comment that doesn’t below in a news article? Or doesn’t Inside Higher Education care about such standards anymore? “Comments about gay people” would have done just as well.
Judging by this unfavorable piece in Queerty, Lopez is kind of an odd duck. But he still deserves fair journalistic treatment.
What the article does right is illustrate that Lopez was a burr in the Southern Baptists’ saddles as well.
Considering his past, they asked him to put a lid on his homosexuality comments on social media for a time and to concentrate on teaching his students. Still, in the below paragraphs, the reporter goes way beyond what is on the record and serves as judge and jury on this guy.
Things, of course, are changing for Lopez, too. To many, his story will read as a just-deserts morality tale. Others may sympathize with his position -- voiced in a recent podcast -- that administrative doublespeak is worse in the seminary world than it is in secular academe. Some may put a finer point on it all: that homophobia is a professional liability just about anywhere in academe.
As Lopez wrote in his American Greatness essay, “Just like that, I went from tenure in California to joblessness in Texas.”
Seriously, folks at Inside Higher Education, why don't you just be honest and stick an "opinion" header onto this piece? Is disagreeing with the prevailing cultural zeitgeist always 'homophobia' in your pages? Obviously yes.
I did find a more favorable treatment of Lopez in LifeSiteNews that raises even more questions about the real reasons for Southwestern letting him go. It does appear that there’s a chance Lopez has a lot of dirt on the Southern Baptists toning down their stance on homosexuality.
This story is a tangled web. I wish Inside Higher Education’s reporter had set her opinions aside and done a better job unraveling it.