Students, alumni take stand against Christian university promoting wokeism
The petition seeks to remove the university president and his immediate staff for failing to uphold its Christian values and mission.
This is the second petition regarding CRT curricula .
At Grove City College (GCC) in Pennsylvania, hundreds of students, alumni, and parents signed a petition calling for leadership change due to the university’s perpetuation of woke education and Critical Race Theory (CRT) on campus.
“Over the last several years, many of us began to note worrisome signs of mission drift and critical race theory (CRT) encroachment within the College,” the petition states. “We made our concerns known privately to faculty and administrators at the school, but our concerns were met with lip service at best and, in most cases, silence.”
This is the second petition targeting wokeness and CRT at Grove City College. In November of 2021, a public petition with similar aims was launched, called “Save GCC from CRT.”
This prompted action from the university’s Board of Trustees—who issued a report on Apr. 13, acknowledging the existence of CRT on campus and its “incompatab[iliy]” with the mission of GCC.
“CRT evaluates people on the basis of race, alleged racial traits…CRT condemns people according to their alleged complicity (conscious or otherwise) with racism or racist policies and institutions…CRT uncharitably detects aggression where none is intended…CRT is inseparable from its political activism,” and finally, “CRT’s worldview is impervious to rational argument and lacks analytical rigor,” the report states.
It also cites EDUC 290— a cultural diversity and advocacy class—as an example where CRT is present in current curricula.
An anonymous GCC donor and petition signee told Campus Reform that while the report “reaffirmed the college’s commitment to its long tradition of principled, conservative, Christian values,” the current university president Paul McNulty “has basically ignored the Board of Trustees report and not taken any of its recommended remedial actions.”
The new petition announced that EDUC 290 instructor and disbarred lawyer Cedric Lewis would be promoted to a full-time assistant professor after publicly criticizing the Board’s conclusion.
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“The new petition is intended to convince the Board of Trustees to fire the president, Paul McNulty, as soon as possible along with his closest staff that support him,” the anonymous signee told Campus Reform.
He also stated that as of the morning of Nov. 19, the petition has garnered just over 600 of the desired 1,000 signatures and that “the current number of signatures for the current petition has already far surpassed the number of signatures from last year’s petition”—which is happening despite the left’s attempt to spam the signature process.
Josh Abbotoy, an advisor for the group who started the petition, told Campus Reform that all signatures are being verified.
“We received anonymous tips that progressives were submitting fake signatures as a ‘gotcha’ to prove that signatures posted on the petition website were not legitimate,” he said. “As a result, the folks running the petition are verifying every single signature that is publicly displayed.”
Furthermore, according to the petition’s timeline, the university’s English department plans to hold a conference between Mar. 30 - Apr. 1 of 2023 asserting that “Christianity is not inherently more compatible with Western culture than it is with any of the cultures of the East or the Global South.”
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This violates Grove City College’s mission and values as outlined in the university’s official 2022-2023 bulletin and highlighted by the Board of Trustees’ previous report.
Campus Reform contacted every university, organization, and individual mentioned. This article will be updated accordingly.
Follow @BiaginiWilliam on Twitter.
