Asbury University confronts student anger, pain over dismissal of LGBTQ-affirming professors
On Friday, Kevin Brown will be inaugurated as the 18th president of Asbury University in Wilmore, topping off a week of anger, shame and sadness on the conservative private Christian campus.
Two popular and beloved faculty—Jon Roller and Jill Campbell— were recently told their contracts would not be renewed. According to numerous accounts, it’s because they were supportive of Asbury’s LGBTQ students. Roller, who got his undergraduate degree at Asbury, founded and teaches in the Worship Arts program and Campbell is an assistant professor in music education and voice.
“Jon was told in his tenure meeting, ‘you do not belong here.’ said a Feb. 26 tweet by Derek Chilton, a worship leader in the Asbury community. “There was no thank you. No appreciation. And no reason for the non-renewal other than Jon being LGBTQ affirming. His contract was not breached, and there was no budget cut.”
On Tuesday, several hundred students gathered with administrators, and according to a audio recording of the event, numerous students expressed anger, frustration and confusion over the firings. Several cried as they recounted how much the two professors had helped them through their time at Asbury, and others asked why their compassion and caring would be punished in this way.
Most of the students I contacted directly declined to comment because they were scared the school would kick them out for publicly criticizing Asbury. The editor of the student paper forwarded my email to the president’s office. Brown declined to comment on the situation directly.
“As an intentional intellectual and Christ-centered community, Asbury University pledges to extend compassion and care to ALL of our students,” he wrote in an email. He also referred to the Asbury University Statement on Human Sexuality which clearly states that “sexual immorality,” e.g. premarital sex, adultery, and all forms of “same-sex practice,” would result in disciplinary action.
Neither Roller nor Campbell responded to my requests for comment.
David Wheeler is a former Asbury journalism professor who left for a job in Florida, in part due to attitudes toward LGBTQ issues. Wheeler taught with Roller and described him as an amazing professor who had “the universal respect of everyone within the Asbury community.
“It is a tragedy for an institution of higher education to be so closed-minded that they would deny someone tenure for being LGBTQ-affirming,” he said. “But that is clearly the direction Asbury is going. No room for nuanced views. Only anti-LGBTQ hysteria.”
‘You know where they stand’
Asbury University has about 1,900 students, most of them undergraduates. It is completely separate from the Asbury Seminary, although both are considered to be in the Wesleyan tradition of the Methodist Church, which in May will decide whether to split over LGBTQ issues.
In 2015, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage, Asbury asked for and received an exemption from federal Title IX rules, which require fair treatment over matters of gender. The U.S. Department of Education gave the exemption on the basis of a religious exception. That allows the school and students to receive federal loans in spite of discrimination against LGBTQ students.
Bill Mefford, director of the Festival Center in Washington, D.C., received his masters and doctorate from the seminary, and said it was well understood that the university was the more conservative of the two institutions. He remembers LGBTQ seminary students being forced into psychiatric care over their sexual orientation. “So I always thought if this is happening at the seminary, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be LGBTQ or LGBTQ-affirming at the university.
Adam Bedel knows. He went to Asbury for one semester as a freshman in 2018. He knew at the time he was gay, but had to sign papers adhering to Asbury’s community standards.
“I left because the administration and general student body created such a toxic community,” Bedel said. “I felt very uncomfortable signing that, but they told us they had to.”
Bedel is now out. But many students are not, they may be confused, they may be hurting. As a private school, Asbury has a legal right to discriminate against them and their allies, but not a moral one, despite their use of the “Clobber Verses,” the roughly six Biblical verses from Genesis, Leviticus and Deuteronomy used to justify religious opposition to homosexuality.
The Bible was also used by conservative Christians to uphold both slavery and segregation in the United States. “As social norms changed, the religious justifications for this bigotry became legally untenable,” Yale Divinity School professor Tisa Wenger wrote in the Washington Post. “Preachers, politicians and pundits developed a segregationist folk theology that defended the reconstituted Southern racial order as divinely ordained: God had created the races separate and did not intend for them to mix.”
Everyone, even Asbury administrators, would surely reject this racial discrimination now. But LGBTQ rights appear to be the last frontier, and as we’ve seen in the General Assembly this session, conservatives won’t accept them without a fight.
But as Asbury administrators are learning this week, young people don’t adhere to such narrow perspectives any more, thinking rightly that someone’s sexuality has little to do with their worth as a human.
Bill Mefford pointed out that if you go to Asbury University, “you know where they stand. And if you go, you are affirming they are a discriminatory institution that is intent on repression and marginalization. If you’re interested in the liberation of the Gospel, you might need to rethink where you stand.
“For those there now, my prayers are with them.”
This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 11:57 AM.
