With glowing performance reviews and above-average student evaluations, by most measures Matthew Warner’s first 12 months as a communications professor at Grace College was a triumph.
But he spent most of that first 12 months knowing it may very well be his last. After 4 months on the job, Warner was informed by the college’s president, Drew Flamm, that the board had “come to the conclusion that we don’t think it really works out to maneuver forward,” based on a recording obtained by Religion News Service.
Warner’s termination is the most recent in a string of professor terminations at Christian colleges seemingly tied to clashes over narrowing and sometimes unspoken political and theological criteria.
While Flamm didn’t specify the explanations for Warner’s dismissal, it was preceded by a web based termination campaign clear about its goals. Launched by conservative influencers and Grace College stakeholders, the campaign demanded Warner’s removal as a result of his social media posts about LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, and critiques of the GOP. Almost all of the posts predated Warner’s employment at the faculty.
Grace College declined to reply questions on Warner, saying it was a personnel matter. “Dr. Matt Warner fulfilled his agreement for the 12 months. Grace College wishes Dr. Warner well in his future endeavors,” Norm Bakhit, Grace College’s chief officer of human resources, told RNS in a press release. Flamm didn’t offer further comment.
Warner and his wife said they each left behind jobs and sold their home in metro Detroit to maneuver with their three kids to Warsaw, Indiana, for Warner’s job at Grace. It was his dream position, they said, and noted that they gave up 60 percent of their income for him to take it.
Warner was wanting to work with colleagues he described as “world class,” and quickly became known for his interactive teaching style and enthusiastic participation in department events, based on student evaluations and interviews with faculty. Early on, administrators tapped him to be a college mentor to first-year students.
Image: Facebook screengrab
Then, in October, Warner learned there was a bunch of local mothers calling for him to be fired. Warner traced the outcry back to a Facebook post by Evan Kilgore, a Grace alum and onetime worker who captured screenshots of Warner’s past tweets, which included such phrases as “I support gay marriage,” “My pronouns are he/they,” “Tucker Carlson is fascist,” and “When Christendom is conservative it ceases to be transformative.”
A former Turning Point USA ambassador and now faith-based political commentator, Kilgore told RNS he posted because “parents might want to concentrate on anyone who has influence over their child with these beliefs.”
Kilgore said he was originally tipped off about Warner’s posts by Monica Boyer, a Grace College parent and native political organizer. While Kilgore’s post clarified that he was not calling for Warner’s termination, Boyer took a special approach.
“I’m OFFICIALLY calling on Grace College to fireside this professor IMMEDIATELY,” Boyer wrote on Facebook. “The devil probably shouldn’t mess with mothers who fight for his or her kids,” she wrote the identical day, adding that mothers were driving around campus, praying.
Warner proactively met with supervisors as Boyer’s repeated demands gained traction amongst her nearly 8,000 Facebook followers. But initial conversations weren’t reassuring. Flamm and Bakhit, the chief human resources officer, told Warner he wasn’t yet a college member since the board hadn’t ratified him. Now, the board was considering voting against Warner’s ratification, a move that will end his employment.
Warner, who distinguishes between his support of individuals’s civil rights and his theological convictions, said he had no qualms with the college’s faith standards or lifestyle commitments. Affiliated with Charis Fellowship, a theologically conservative network of churches with roots in German pietism, Grace College requires all faculty to sign a lifestyle commitment that affirms marriage as between one man and one woman and bans homosexual behavior.
“They’ve created a caricature of me based on taking a really small variety of social media posts out of context,” Warner said. “I used to be treated from the start as a threat or liability. And no person at any time had a conversation with me about what I feel, or what I’m willing to do to support the faculty.”
The news that he wasn’t already a college member also got here as a shock.
“Most faculty here seemed very surprised to learn that two months after they moved here and began their jobs, they technically were still not employees,” one faculty member, who requested to not be named, told RNS.
In mid-October, Flamm offered Warner the choice to voluntarily resign, and, alternatively, outlined a “potential pathway forward” that involved meeting recurrently with Flamm and other administrators to revive trust before the board’s ratification vote.
But the “path forward” never materialized, based on Warner, who had emailed Bakhit asking for a breakdown of the method. Bakhit told him there have been no specific steps. Warner met with some administrators but not with Flamm.
Things got here to a head on December 7, when Flamm told Warner the board had voted to not ratify him. Bakhit offered Warner $60,000 for his voluntary resignation and a confidentiality agreement that included a nondisclosure agreement clause, a suggestion Warner eventually refused, partly so he could finish out the college 12 months. Though Flamm didn’t provide rationale for the board’s decision, Bakhit told Warner it was as a result of the “tone and tenor” of his social media posts.
“The fit isn’t due to your theology, the fit is more about … the way you’ve come across prior to now, and the priority, or the arrogance that it wouldn’t occur again in the longer term,” Bakhit said in a recording obtained by RNS.
Meanwhile, many Grace College employees said they felt at midnight about Warner’s departure.
“It looks like it’s only a matter of time before I or anyone else cross an invisible line we didn’t know was there, and are determined to not be ‘missionally aligned,’” one Grace College worker told RNS.
Cliff Staton, director of Grace College’s school of arts and sciences partnership programs, said he wondered, if Warner didn’t fit at Grace College, did he?
“In a low-trust culture, you begin considering, I have to be in danger too,” said Staton. “That was pervasive across faculty. Especially because there was no definitive language across the ‘why.’”
In the spring, students tried to prepare a petition and a protest vouching for Warner but were unable to secure the administration’s approval. Students are disenchanted in Grace for not saying anything publicly concerning the situation and “caving to outside pressure,” one student told RNS.
As Christian colleges vie for a dwindling variety of incoming students, many are struggling to navigate the chasm between the convictions of conservative stakeholders and people of their more theologically, politically, and racially diverse faculty and student bodies.
In many cases, precarious funds have led schools to prioritize the previous. Last 12 months, English professors at Taylor University and Palm Beach Atlantic University were dismissed after receiving alumni, donor, and parental criticism for his or her teachings on racial justice, though each had been teaching on that topic for over a decade.
Matthew Bonzo, who has taught philosophy at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for 26 years, told RNS he was pushed out after refusing to sign an oath of loyalty committing unwavering support to the president and his policies. Even after pushback led to the oath being dropped, Bonzo said he was notified that his position was being eliminated.
Bonzo told RNS he’s seeing many Christian colleges try to shield students from conversations about race and gender as a result of fear of undermining students’ faith.
“The thing that strikes me is the willingness of boards and administration to sort of alter the method to attain the tip that they need,” Bonzo told RNS. “At the very moment when Christian higher ed may very well be helping to navigate difficult cultural moments, we’ve been sidelined by these sorts of controversies.”
RNS independently confirmed that over 100 employees have departed Cornerstone for the reason that arrival of the present president in 2021. In an email to RNS, the vp for enrollment said the college has had a powerful retention rate of about 81 percent for faculty and staff and has seen a slight increase in enrollment since last 12 months.
At Grace College, those demanding Warner’s removal prevailed. In January, Warner filed a college grievance charging Flamm and Bakhit with alleged violations of faculty policy, but per the faculty bylaws, the president is the ultimate arbiter of college grievances, and Flamm didn’t find that he or Bakhit had misstepped. Warner also submitted a board appeal requesting that a 3rd party hear his case, but as a substitute, the board affirmed Flamm’s ruling on the grievance.
“Even in all of the complexity and hardship of this experience, in any respect points, he has been on team Grace,” Warner’s pastor, the Rev. Emily Cash, said of him. “His intention was never to indicate up at Grace to stir the pot, but to like students and interact them within the sort of learning he himself was delighted by. … He wanted, truly, to be at Grace, and for Grace to be a spot of grace.”
