(RNS) — A veteran English professor at a leading evangelical university has lost her job — in part because a school official deemed her writing classes too liberal on the issue of race.
Julie Moore, an associate professor of English and director of the Writing Center at Taylor University in Indiana, said she learned in a meeting with the school’s provost earlier this year that her contract was not renewed.
When pressed for details, Taylor Provost Jewerl Maxwell said there had been complaints about assigned readings on racial justice in Moore’s classes. Maxwell named one author as problematic in particular, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Religion News Service.
“Jemar Tisby is the main focus,” Maxwell told Moore.
Tisby, a historian, is the author of “Color of Compromise,” a New York Times bestselling book that details the way Christian faith and racism have been intertwined in American history. Once a popular speaker and writer about issues of race in evangelical circles, Tisby has become controversial with conservative Christians worried about “wokeness.”
Last year, the board of Grove City College, a conservative Christian school in Pennsylvania, issued a report that criticized diversity training and programs at the school as “woke” — which has become a catchall pejorative for all things liberal, especially regarding race. The report also said it had been a mistake for Tisby to speak at a Grove City chapel service.
During her meeting, Moore protested, pointing out that while she quoted from Tisby — whom she said she admires — in her syllabus, she’d not assigned any writings by him to students. Her protest went unheeded as Maxwell told her he did not want to debate specifics, according to the recording.
“I felt I was in the twilight zone,” said the 58-year-old Moore, who said she’d taught about racial justice during her composition classes since she first began teaching in the 1990s. Moore came to Taylor in 2017 after teaching at Cedarville University and the historically Black Wilberforce University, both private Christian schools in Ohio.
At Taylor, she assigned students readings such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Letter to My Son” and Claudia Rankine’s New York Times essay “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.” Moore’s hope was to help her students, most of them white, develop some racial literacy and to see how the issue of racial justice related to their faith.
That was particularly important, she said, because Taylor is in a part of the state with a history of racism, including the 1930 lynching of two Black teenagers in nearby Marion, Indiana, that drew a crowd of spectators. Many of her students, she said, knew little of that history.
Now she fears the school’s leadership would prefer not to talk about issues of race.
