Chelsea Schilling ramped up the drama for an Oct. 15 WorldNetDaily article:
Imagine you’re a university administrator who has served an evangelical Christian college for two decades.
Your career is flourishing and your dedication apparent as you faithfully serve the university and climb the administration ranks.
One day, the university says you’re being considered for a prestigious position: vice president of student development. You’re delighted. After all, it’s the culmination of 20 years of hard work.
But there’s a catch. A few of them, in fact.
First, you have to enroll in a doctoral program. Check.
Next, you must endure a year-long review process to prove you’re the right fit for the position. Check.
Finally, for the sake of “diversity” at the evangelical Christian university, the powers that be have made it clear you must promote and hire only minorities – preferably women – and disregard better-qualified candidates because they’re white men.
Wait a minute!
I can’t discriminate against any highly qualified candidate based on their gender and the color of their skin, you say.
It’s not right. It’s not Christian. And it’s not even legal.
After you repeatedly decline to promote and hire less-qualified candidates for the sake of “diversity,” you learn the coveted VP position has been given to a black man in admissions who has: never worked in student development, has no training or experience in the field and never even applied for the slot. In fact, he thought he was actually being fired when the university president offered the job to him in a surprise meeting.
Oh, and you’ll lose your office, your current position, your assistant. It’s likely the end of any meaningful employment at the university you’ve served faithfully for nearly half your life.
This leads into a very lengthy summary of a lawsuit filed against Biola University, described by Schilling as “one of the most conservative, evangelical, four-year, liberal arts schools in the nation,” by former employee Daniel Parshall, who claims he was passed over for a top position at the school because he was a white male.
Interestingly, nobody involved in the case would talk to Schilling about it — nobody at Biola and not even Parshall’s lawyer. Which means that Schilling’s article is almost entirely derived from Parshall’s lawsuit and, thus, is devoted to telling only his side of the story.
And it’s not until the final paragraph that Schilling admits that Parshall’s lawsuit was filed in November 2016 — that is, nearly a year before Schilling’s article appeared. In other words, this is very old news.
This seems to be the latest in a series of attacks by WND on Biola for allegedly failing to be as right-wing Christian as WND wants them to be:
- In 2012, WND highlighted the existence of an “underground” pro-gay group at the college (though that same year columnist “Marisa Martin” touted Biola as “an exciting, cutting edge, contemporary art school”).
- In 2013, it republished an article about alleged mistreatment of a Biola student who displayed extremely graphic abortion photos at the college.
- In 2016, WND’s Leo Hohmann was outraged that a speaker at Biola “urged students to accept the views of Black Lives Matter and consider themselves as having benefited from white privilege while looking to the Palestinians for inspiration in how to get along with one’s adversaries,” declaring the message “so antithetical to the conservative mission statement of Biola University that some critics are calling out the university for sponsoring a ‘Bernie Sanders-like’ message of humanistic socialism.”
- WND editor Joseph Farah cited the speaker as an example of “the fall of Christian education in America.” He further criticized the school’s president for writing a poem about diversity, huffing, “One thing you won’t hear in the poem is ‘Christ crucified.'”
WND has never been interested in having any sort of discussion with people or institutions it hates — it only knows how to attack and not let them respond in a fair manner.