“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties”
John Milton, Areopagitica
The First Amendment was written to guarantee that the government would not interfere with our freedom of speech. The government in collusion with Big Tech has been violating our free speech regularly.
But what about freedom of speech at religious universities, such as the Concordias of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod?
Concordia University Wisconsin (CUW or CUWAA) has been attacking academic freedom for nearly 18 months now – in defiance of letters of official disagreement (censure) sent to them by the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA), the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), and a caucus of the Wisconsin State Legislature – not to mention letters, petitions, resolutions, and so on from tens of thousands of parish pastors and laity.
CUW’s attack on academic freedom, spanning an interim administration and now deliberately continued by a new president and his administration, has been to ban, suspend, threaten, and officially seek my termination for publishing the essay Woke Dysphoria at Concordia that called for the Board of Regents and university administrators to repent of their very public adulterous affair with Woke Marxism.
Here’s what you need to know about their failure (publicly and unequivocally) to repent of and to repudiate Woke Marxism. Not only is CUW failing to regain the trust of our church body as well as potential students and supporters evidenced in their mission drift from the Word of Christ to the Woke doctrines of DIE; they are apparently determined to destroy even the possibility of Lutheran disputation. Any institution of higher learning that curtails the freedom to question, to criticize, to argue publicly in pursuit of the Truth does not deserve to call itself a university.
Here for you to use – and to share with your pastor and brother pastors and with online friends, as you see fit – is a desktop presentation of my recent speech at the Lutheran Classical College Convention in Casper, Wyoming:
- Here too is a shareable written version of my speech … CUR VERBUM VERBA, The Word Reveals Himself in Words Or, The Lutheran Disputation Option (here)
- You may also be interested in my 2022 essay on the Constitution and Academic Freedom in our religious universities. Here is a short version of my piece on academic freedom published by The Federalist: Christian University Still Hasn’t Reinstated Professor It Kicked Out After He Criticized Identity Politics
- Here is the longer version of that Federalist article, published by Christian News: Dem Dry Bones: Can Academic Freedom Live Again at My Religious University?
Your caring and competent Lutheran Philosopher,
Greg Schulz
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