\n<\/p>\n
Wheaton College embraced racist attitudes that \u201ccreated an inhospitable and sometimes hostile campus environment for persons of color,\u201d according to a 121-page review of the school\u2019s history released by trustees today.<\/p>\n
Though the flagship evangelical institution was founded by abolitionists, over the next century and a half it turned away from concerns about racial equality. Even when the school\u2019s leadership knew what was right, they frequently lacked the courage to \u201ctake a more vocal role in opposing widespread forms of racism and white supremacy,\u201d the report says, and too often \u201cchose to stay silent, equivocate, or do nothing\u201d about racial injustice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe cannot be healed and cannot be reconciled unless and until we repent,\u201d the task force concluded at the end of an 18-month study. \u201cThese sins constituted a failure of Christian love; denied the dignity of people made in the image of God; created deep and painful barriers between Christian brothers and sisters; tarnished our witness to the gospel; and prevented us from displaying more fully the beautiful diversity of God\u2019s kingdom.\u201d<\/p>\n
President Philip Ryken told CT he believes the report is important and he\u2019s glad the college will be making it publicly available.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe record of the people of God, in so many ways, is a record of their failures as well as their successes,\u201d he said. \u201cI think we can be more effective in living for Jesus Christ today if we\u2019re aware of the challenges that our brothers and sisters have faced in the past and how they have responded to the challenges and opportunities of their day.\u201d<\/p>\n
The historical review was conducted by a 15-member task force of trustees, faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Led by trustee Dale Wong and archivist Katherine Graber, they reconstructed the history of race relations from Wheaton\u2019s founding in 1853 up to the year 2000. The school was started by abolitionist John Cross and then reorganized and renamed by Jonathan Blanchard, who was one of the first ministers to urge president Abraham Lincoln to \u201clet the oppressed go free.\u201d<\/p>\n
After that, though, the record was not always stellar. Wheaton leadership showed little concern for Black people in the years after the Civil War, hired no nonwhite faculty, and enrolled only a few nonwhite students, the report found. Minority students who did attend faced overt racism, including students refusing to live or eat alongside them and school-sanctioned blackface performances.<\/p>\n
By the 1920s, Wheaton had surrendered any claim to a countercultural position on race, according to the task force report. A new president, J. Oliver Buswell, stopped admitting Black students altogether in 1926. Privately, Buswell said he didn\u2019t think integration was immoral, but he was concerned about too much \u201csocial contact\u201d between races.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have been trying to dodge this issue,\u201d he wrote to a friend toward the end of his presidency. \u201cI am inclined to think that it would be better in a practical way if colored people would go to their own colored schools.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thirty states had laws against interracial relationships at the time, and the US considered amending the constitution<\/a> to make what was then called \u201cmiscegenation\u201d a federal crime. The Wheaton task force noted, however, that Christians should not accept arguments that Buswell and others were just \u201cmen of their time.\u201d Historical context is not an excuse for failing to stand up for biblical ideals of equality and human dignity, it said.<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal,\u201d the task force wrote, \u201cis to remind our readers\u2014and ourselves\u2014of how easily our fallen world can shape each of us into its mold.\u201d<\/p>\n Dale Wong, one of the chairs of the task force, said the deep dive into the historical record was sobering.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are proud of our history at Wheaton,\u201d he said, \u201cand it\u2019s difficult to understand how that original vision, from that founding by abolitionists, was lost, and how we fell into going along with the culture. That\u2019s something I think we have to deal with.\u201d<\/p>\n The task force found some positive episodes in Wheaton\u2019s history of race relations as well. On several occasions, harkening back to its abolitionist founding, the school sharply broke from culturally accepted racism. During World War II, for example, Wheaton agreed to enroll Japanese and Japanese American students who were facing internment. By 1944, there were more than 20 Japanese students taking classes at the evangelical institution.<\/p>\n President V. Raymond Edman, who took the helm in 1940, also started admitting Black students again around that time and asked the anthropology and sociology department to study race relations on campus. The faculty commission wrote a five-page report in 1960. It strongly rejected any scientific basis for racial hierarchies and called on the college and evangelicals more generally to reject racial discrimination. The anthropology and sociology professors specifically wanted the school to hire Black faculty, recruit minority students, and accept interracial marriages among students.<\/p>\n If implemented, the proposals \u201cwould have made Wheaton College a leader among Christian institutions in its rejection of racial prejudice and pursuit of kingdom diversity,\u201d the task force said. Instead, Edman and other Wheaton leaders decided to suppress the report. It was not released.<\/p>\n The school did not hire its first Black full-time professor until the 1980s. It would not make student body diversity a priority until the 1990s.<\/p>\n \u201cBased on the careful research in this historical review, tested against the perfect standard of the Word of God and the high moral calling of a Christ-centered community, we also see specific areas where we need to repent as an institution,\u201d the task force said.<\/p>\n The report cites the Bible\u2019s calls to corporate repentance and lamentation over sin and injustice, including the failures of past generations, citing Isaiah 59:12, Jeremiah 14:7, and Daniel 9:16. It also recommends concrete actions.<\/p>\n The trustees have agreed to some immediate practical steps, starting with a change to the name of the school\u2019s library, which currently honors Buswell. The trustees have instructed the administration to remove his name from all signs and set up a permanent display explaining the history of the school\u2019s discriminatory enrollment practices.<\/p>\n The trustees have also pledged to remain \u201calert for unjust situations from our history and to pursue relationships where a more complete reconciliation and mutual blessing through repentance may be realized.\u201d<\/p>\n That will involve ongoing assessment of the resources provided to minority students, as well as dialogue with the Lakota Sioux over the college\u2019s ownership of the Black Hills Science Station in South Dakota, which sits on land the Lakota say was stolen. The trustees have advised the administration to \u201cconsider biblical approaches to this sensitive and complex issue\u201d and \u201cseek to understand Lakota views of a just remedy.\u201d<\/p>\n The school will also encourage continued collaboration and reconciliation with the Potawatomi, who were forcibly removed from their homes after the federal government under Andrew Jackson declared the land that would later become Wheaton College to be terra nullius<\/em>, or \u201cnobody\u2019s land.\u201d<\/p>\n Wheaton\u2019s review, which was commissioned in October 2021 and released to trustees in March of this year, follows similar self-interrogations taking place at secular and Christian schools across the country. Many older institutions have recently worked on public acknowledgements of the ways they benefitted from slavery.<\/p>\n Brown University put out a self-critical historical study<\/a> in 2006, followed<\/a> by similar efforts at Emory University, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Harvard<\/a> University. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville issued a report<\/a> in 2018 chronicling its historic ties to slavery and defenses of white superiority. Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey released a historical audit<\/a> in 2019. Georgetown University, founded by Jesuits, established a \u201creconciliation fund<\/a>\u201d giving $400,000 annually to help the descendants of the people enslaved by the Catholic brothers in Maryland.<\/p>\n