It’s all there in “ Sunday Shaming” (January 10, 2018). Then, worse: the professor was an anti-Christian terrorist. But there’s obvious material there for that leftist, anti-religious religion professor story. “ Is God Funny?” (December 11, 2017) contains easy-to-caricature lines such as “Is God preposterous to you? He is to me.” Downie goes on to argue that it is not God she rejects, but certain “popular, preposterous” understandings of God. In their investigations of Downie, conservative media discovered certain blog posts that she had written. The police arrived at Professor Downie’s door late on a Saturday night. This is called “swatting,” and people have died in the resulting police raids. More ominously, Downie told me that someone called the police with a tip that she was planning to attack a church. A social media petition demanding her firing was circulated. Stories appeared in mainstream venues such as Fox News and the Daily Mail (UK), as well as various recyclings in Breitbart News, The Ralph Retort, Campus Reform, and further down the dark corners of the web. The student went to the conservative media, which climbed all over the story. Another student in the class offered a very different take on what happened, but the story the student told was that he was disciplined for saying there are only two genders. Downie sought to silence him for his conservative/unpopular/politically incorrect opinions, and when he would not be silenced, she excluded him from class as part of unfair disciplinary action against him. The conservative student’s version of the story is that, in a discussion on transgender issues, Dr. The nightmare engulfing Alison Downie began with a conflict in her “Self, Sin, and Salvation” class. (I tell her story with her express permission.) She thought that based on my own experience I might be able to advise her as to what she should do. Downie described herself as the subject of a right-wing social media harassment campaign initiated by an aggrieved student against whom she had taken a disciplinary action. Professor Alison Downie of Indiana University of Pennsylvania reached out to me. In late March, I received an email of a type that has become all too common in my experience. David Gushee, president of the American Academy of Religion, to reflect on her story and its implications for scholars of religion today. Alison Downie, an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, who earlier this year became a target of right-wing media and other attacks when a student publicly accused her of unfairly disciplining him for expressing his opinions (" How a Student Got Kicked Out of Class - and Became a Conservative Hero," May 31). Sightings invited Dr. Religion Professors Become Flashpoint in Campus Culture WarsĮditor's Note: Last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the story of Dr. Gushee tells her story and the story of the current climate. In this essay David Gushee, currently President of the American Academy of Religion tells the story of a professor who got caught up in the culture wars, brought on by a conservative student who took his beef to the alt-right media, causing her great mental and emotional harm. Anyway, it appears that the culture wars are making the educational experience increasingly fraught with danger. I did have my share of students who didn't like my theology or my teaching style, but this was before the advent of social media. After all, I had a PhD from an evangelical institution. I was on the left end, but I didn't think I was that far left. Having been asked to resign from my one and only full-time teaching position, due to the fact that I was perceived to be too liberal for the institution.
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