The Lone Black Professor at Grove City College Speaks Out
A firsthand account about the anti-CRT crusade led by the Board of Trustees Sub-Committee
It’s been quite the week! Since news of the Grove City College report broke, I’ve been fielding responses and keeping up with breaking news nonstop. I am grateful I can spend time addressing urgent issues as they are happening. Your support makes this possible. Would you consider becoming a paid subscriber today?
During my trip to Grove City College I met a few people of color who had invited me and were excited about my visit. Cedric Lewis was one of them.
Lewis is the only Black person teaching at the college right now. He teaches a course called EDUC 290 or “Cultural Diversity and Advocacy.” His class is one that came under fire in the anti-CRT report published by a sub-committee of the Board of Trustees.
According to the sub-committee, the class was “ideologically one-sided and effectively promoted pop-CRT.” They cite as evidence readings assigned from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo.
Also according to the report, the course “represented 0.07% of all classes taught and 0.03% of all students taught at GCC during this academic year.” That’s just 15 students during the two times it was offered.
A few days after the report came out, Cedric Lewis boldly spoke about his experience and the report on social media.
He mentions the minuscule number of Black people working at the school which gives context for the experience of people of color there.
Lewis also critiques “the level of research, logic and conclusions” of report saying that they would “not be accepted by most of the faculty from their undergraduate students.”
It is incredibly costly for Black people who are already in a tiny minority to speak up at all, let alone to do so publicly. We should listen carefully to their perspectives and how people with power in their institutions respond.
Read the whole thread HERE.
It is okay to just talk about our past. Our nation's founders were not divinely endowed with special grace to avoid sin in their choices. They were for the most part ordinary Europeans bringing with them their European worldviews to colonize another land.
We can look at their choices, compare them to the values they asserted, see where they instantiated those values and where they deliberately and openly flouted them, and speak about them as if they were real people making real choices.
There is no need for anyone to look at our past and demand that it not exist. There is, I think, a special reason for followers of Jesus to look at our past with the gimlet eye of a truth-lover: we are said to be those who follow the Way (our earliest appellation of our beliefs and behaviors) and those who love the one who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
My understanding of the gospel is that it *frees* us. Frees us from our own sins, frees us from our brokenness, and frees us from shame and guilt. We can look at our collective past, see the good and the bad, be grateful for the good, mourn the bad, and work, right now, to make a better country because we, as followers of Jesus, are here on earth to be the hands, arms, legs, feet, and body of Christ.
It's puzzling that a "Christian" college would shrink from truth. Is not truth so powerful and so valuable that we'd do everything we can to understand it and embrace it?
Hi Dr. Tisby. I’ve been following along with your Substack posts about Grove City. Sorry you’re going through this, and your name being dragged through the mud. I am embarrassed on behalf of all Christian higher education institutions that Grove City is taking these careless, fruitless steps toward weeding out CRT - a bogeyman that’s obviously just a smokescreen to shut down conversations about how racism affects black people today. I’m an alum of a different Christian college, and while in my opinion they do better at making room for those wanting to discuss race, there was certainly some backlash there, too. I pray that some day soon your earnest and expert opinions on race and racism will find a listening ear in America’s white Christians, even in conservative spaces. You can at least know that I’m listening, and am grateful for the things you so vulnerably share. You’re in my prayers today.