Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, joined Dan and Amy to talk about how conservative ideas are increasingly coming under attack on college campuses, in light of Christina Hoff Sommers recent appearance at Lewis and Clark Law School.
Watch the video of the interview below, or read the transcript that follows.
DAN: We’re pleased to be joined again by one of the most outspoken defenders of intellectual freedom and academic integrity in the humanities. He is Dr. Everett Piper. He’s the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, Amy, which is one of the accepted schools where your boys can attend.
AMY: Yes, and it’s a very short list of schools.
DAN: Well, you’ve got about three choices. He’s also the author of the book Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning the Truth. Dr. Piper, thanks for joining us again. We appreciate it.
DR. PIPER: Oh I’m always honored. Thanks for having me on.
DAN: So how did you react to what happened to Christina Hoff Sommers earlier in this week at Lewis and Clark Law School, and then what Miss Weiss is writing about that. You know basically she’s suggesting that it’s not just college campuses anymore she goes through a little bit of a geopolitical jog as well and suggests that we have a moral flattening of the earth happening where people are being accused of essentially fascism by fascists. They’re sort of projecting onto a free people fascism in the interest of advancing fascism not just on college campuses.
DR. PIPER: Well, in your word projection is perfect here. I mean the projection of the progressive left is a common tactic that we see every minute of every day and every conversation that they want to have. They say they can’t tolerate your intolerance. They project their intolerance upon you by calling you exactly what they are. They say they hate hateful people. They say they’re sure that nothing is sure. They say they believe they know that nothing can be known. They say they’re absolutely confident there are no absolutes. They project their negativity upon the person that they argue with, and then they turn around and call people fascist while they’re acting like fascists and behaving like fascist. They don’t even know what a fascist is. A fascist is named after a fascio, which was a Roman bundle of sticks bound together so tightly that it couldn’t be broken. It would crush you. You had to be part of the common bond you had to think like they thought they had to be like they were. You had to act like they acted. You had to be part of the group or the fascist would crush you. And it’s from that we get the word fascism. These people are actually saying if you don’t comply, if you don’t submit, if you don’t say what we say and think like we think, we will crush you. We will expel you. You are verboten. We will not listen to you and then they have the audacity to turn around and call somebody like Christina Hoff Sommers a fascist. This is pure and simple baloney. It’s nonsense because it makes no sense.
AMY: Well, how do you run things at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. How are your students?
DR. PIPER: Well, the irony here is we’re a conservative, Christian liberal arts institution, and proud of it. And the interesting thing here is Christina Hoff Sommers would have views that I disagree with. For example, she’s pro-gay marriage. She is a feminist. Now she identifies herself as an equity feminist rather than a victimization feminist. I actually agree with that part of her argument, but here’s the point — she would probably be left of center on some issues, if not many issues, from me and from my faculty. But at Oklahoma Wesleyan — a conservative Christian institution — she would be treated with more courtesy and with more civility as we have a debate and engage in a robust argument because we trust the truth to judge the debate. Not you. Not me. Not power. Not politics. Not the prancing preening kids at Lewis and Clark. We’re going to trust a referee to ref the game, and it’s called objectivity — self-evident truth, endowed to us by our Creator. It allows us to have a free exchange of ideas in a civil society. That’s how she would be treated here, as opposed to protests that would shut her down and call her names, malign her, use ad hominem attacks, and lampoon her as some sort of fascist and evil person.
DAN: I’ll tell you what. Amy if you don’t send your boys to Oklahoma Wesleyan, I think I’m going to go there to get another undergraduate degree. Dr. Piper, let me ask you this. This interesting story comes to us from some friends, including one friend up here on the North Shore of Chicago. Op-ed they wrote. Eli Steele, of course the son of Shelby Steele and the documentarian who produced the film “How Jack Became Black” about race identity politics, which is of course prevalent on college campuses, and Beth Fealy wrote this piece about an Evanston middle school, Nicjols middle school, to be specific, where their staff is being instructed to segregate themselves by race by their principal. White staff in one room. Staff of color to another room. The basis for these segregated staff meetings was a racial equita agenda calling for a, “courageous conversations in which staff members could discuss their racial awakenings.” Is that something you also do with the faculty at Oklahoma Wesleyan?
DR. PIPER: There’s so much wrong with that. First of all, I’m sick and tired of the word conversation. Conversation today implies capitulation, and it implies compromise. What about courage and conviction? What about confidence? I’ll have a debate with you or anybody else at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. Debate implies that we disagree, and we’re going to have a robust exchange of ideas. We’ll let truth judge the debate and we’ll treat each other with some degree of civility and respect as we go through the process. But this conversation today implies that there is moral neutrality, and there’s intellectual neutrality. It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as it works for you. But from the left, you better agree with me because it does matter what you believe because if it works for you, but not with my progressive agenda, we will silence you. You are verboten. And again it’s self-refuting at every turn. It is self-refuting at every turn. I mean look at Christina Hoff Sommers argument for feminism. She argues for equity feminism rather than victimization feminism. What does she mean? She knows that when you start preaching victimization, you get vengeance and vice. That’s the only reaction when you start segregating people rather than integrating people. I’m an integrationist. I’m not a segregationist. I integrate head and heart and fact and faith and belief and behavior. I want a unified whole — a person of integrity. Integration. I’m not going to separate things that should be unified. I’m the president of a university. I’m not the president of a diversity, and there’s a reason for that, because we teach the unity of veritas — of truth, of justice, of righteousness. And we don’t divide things things that should be united.
DAN: And just to follow up on this, too, because you would think that kind of common sense non- ideologically poisoned parents and other stakeholders in the education of young people would be interested in outcomes, as opposed to the kind of navel-gazing racial equity conversations like you’re describing. In this Evanston school district, the K through 8th schools, 30 percent of black students meet the college readiness benchmark, as opposed to 83 percent of white students. And all they want to talk about is race. And here’s what’s happening — black students are not performing at the same level as white students, but they’re super “woke” when it comes to race. So how do you square the circle?
DR. PIPER: Again. Because … C.S. Lewis told us there are first things and there are second things. First things and second things in life and morality, in philosophy and religion. First things and second things. And he said when you focus on the first things, you get them. But if you focus on the second, you get neither the second nor the first. And what we’re doing right now is we’re focusing on segregation rather than integration. Integration is the first thing. Segregation is the second thing. We’re focusing on diversity rather than unity. And diversity is a second thing. You need unity. It is the a first thing. And we find this in all of life today. We focus on our libido as our identity rather than our identity being found in Christ. I’ve got news for you. My inclinations, my libido, my gut, my appetite does not define me. My identity is more than what I I’m inclined to do. The first thing of my identity is my identity in Christ not my identity and my habits and my appetites and my inclinations, my passions, and my proclivities. I’m a human being. I’m the imago dei, I made in the image of God. I’m not imago dog. I’m not going to dumb down you or anybody else to basically an animal where you have to run around and follow every instinct and that’s going to be the definition of who you are. I’m going to focus on the first thing of your imago dei. I’m not going to dumb you down to second things as if you’re nothing but an animal.
DAN: What about discipline? And to this world of men without chests, that you’re describing. One of the conversations in Florida .. “conversation” … One of the things that happened …
AMY: Watch yourself.
DAN: Well, no I mean, sarcastically, one of the things that hasn’t been part of the conversation in Florida, I should say, is the disciplinary regime in those schools, in school districts, where you’re not really supposed to impose discipline because we don’t want to alienate, ostracize kids behaving badly.
DR. PIPER: Again, self-refuting. They say they don’t believe in discipline but they’ll discipline you if you disagree with them. Right? So if there’s a conservative view, a Judeo-Christian ethic, brought to the table, well we’re going to discipline the person for bringing that to the table because we find that to be hateful. So we’re going to show that we hate those hateful ideas. Self-refuting at every turn. But there’s another thing. It’s a false dichotomy. We’re told in Scripture that the Lord disciplines those he loves. So we’re told in Scripture that it’s not a segregated idea. It’s a unified idea. Discipline and love are one and the same. As any good parent knows that. Any good coach knows that. You cannot have somebody that knows how to play the game if they haven’t disciplined themselves to the rules of the game and to the boundaries, to listen to the coach, to go to practice and actually become an athlete. Same for a musician. If you don’t discipline yourself, or if somebody didn’t discipline you to the rhyme, the rhythm, the cadence, the rules of music you’re not playing a concerto. It’s chaos. Anybody knows in music or sport or any other area of life that discipline and love are synonymous. They’re not exclusive terms. They’re not a false dichotomy and this assumption and the argument that these people down there are presenting is that somehow discipline is antithetical to love rather than love actually being propped up and strengthened through proper discipline as we discipline those we love, just like the Lord disciplines us.
DAN: He is Dr. Everett Piper, president Oklahoma Wesleyan University. Check out his book Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning the Truth. Dr. Piper, thanks as always for joining us. Appreciate it.
DR. PIPER: Honored. Thank you so much. Blessings.