Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Chapter 17: Christian or Conservative?
At King’s I have the challenge of being a crisis manager, dealing with questions of curriculum, staff, admissions, and scheduling, all in the shadow of looming financial disaster. My task is to attract good professors, recruit more students, and convince professors to make better use of the city, so as to justify the doubled cost of being in Manhattan, New York, rather than Manhattan, Kansas.
It’s exasperating and exhilarating. Some professors and students are still loyal to the previous provost and believe the president treated him badly. Some are suspicious of me because they know my work as a journalist and not a scholar. I unnecessarily make several opponents by saying we want professors who are good teachers and don’t care if they skip writing academic journal articles.
The typical King’s student takes five academic courses per semester, heavy on the reading; we push for four courses plus an internship, ideally. Professors should get their students out of the windowless classrooms and into Wall Street and Broadway, Madison Square Garden and Lincoln Center, the Tribeca Film Festival and the Bowery Mission—and television network headquarters.
We work fast with an awareness that King’s is in desperate shape and failure is likely. Since King’s has no prestige and doesn’t offer tenure, I take an idea from Michael Lewis’s Moneyball and search for good teachers willing to live cheaply in expensive New York City because they have not written journal articles or have some stain on their record and are thus undervalued in the academic market.
Here’s one example: we hire a lively business teacher who ran a big organization, went to prison for embezzlement, became a Christian there, and is just out and wanting to reestablish himself. The King’s public relations consultant hears about this several weeks into the term and is aghast: How can we hide this? I suggest that we feature it, and we eventually do. The appointment works out fine.
The biggest King’s major is in essence a Great Books program that could be taught anywhere. Fine, but to attract more students and avoid bankruptcy we start a new major—Media, Culture, and the Arts—that attracts students who want to be in Manhattan and gain internships. It works, although some
students come to the city for activities that aren’t career-oriented.
To build its reputation, King’s wants a high-profile event, and we produce one. Atheist Christopher Hitchens, whom I debated in Austin, wants a debate in New York. Conservative Dinesh D’Souza wants to promote his new book. A donor will pay the rental for an eight-hundred-seat auditorium across the
street from Central Park. C-SPAN will film it. The result is a standing-room-only event. Hitchens and D’Souza lob colorful soundbites at each other. Publicity for King’s, no harm done—or so I think at the time.
The 2008 spring semester is complicated. In Austin I’m teaching UT students, editing World, and serving as provost at King’s, which means lots of telephone time and flying to New York City once a month for meetings. In March, Susan and I attend a conference in Ethiopia and visit compassionate
programs. In April UT grants me leave for the 2008–2009 academic year, but at that point the choice is Texas with tenure or King’s without.
Heart health is a further complication. My weight is the same as it was in high school. Surprise: one standard test leads to another that shows blocked arteries requiring stents, but during that small operation it turns out I have an aneurysm in the descending aorta, which is also called “the widowmaker.” A week later comes a double bypass, followed by a touch of pneumonia.
And yet, during that week of waiting and weeks of recovery, the tug to King’s is greater than what first led me to say yes. In 2007, becoming provost is an opportunity for growth. In 2008, I feel God’s calling, and it’s irresistible. A month after the operation, Susan and I are back in Manhattan. In fall 2008, the national economy begins to fall apart in connection with the subprime housing crisis. We are unable to sell our Austin house and must rent it out instead. Even Manhattan’s Upper East Side displays empty storefronts. But, much like our time in Indianapolis three decades earlier, it’s a spiritually rich time.
Interacting with Christian professors and students at King’s is stimulating. Susan is in good Bible studies. We can walk on Sunday mornings from our apartment on 39th and Park to the Hunter College Auditorium at 68th and Lexington, where Redeemer Presbyterian Church meets. It’s encouraging to see the auditorium full of young professionals absorbing week after week what we are also taking in: Rev. Tim Keller’s gospel formulation that we are more sinful than we imagined and more loved than we dared hope.
Still, I don’t want to be rash in giving up UT lifetime tenure, a great gift from God and Texas. The King’s College board of trustees offers me a seven-year contract with half my salary paid if the college goes out of business or veers from its explicitly Christian mission. The contract does not list every possible contingency: I keep in mind the Elmer Fudd cartoon in which he buys insurance protecting his house in every eventuality except that of a herd of elephants rampaging through it on the Fourth of July. That of course is what happens.
The contract includes this good-faith clause: “This agreement has been established to provide certain protections for Dr. Olasky, occupationally and financially, in consideration of his decision to relinquish his tenured position at The University of Texas at Austin. The interpretation of this document should reflect that intention. With that in place, I retire from UT, holding on to retiree health insurance and (at my sons’ request) fifty-yard-line football tickets.
A couple of professors and some of their students don’t like the changes I’ve made at the college, but most are supportive: they give me a “Captain Action” award. The Manhattan location makes it easy to get noted authors, musicians, journalists, and others to come to the Empire State Building, where I interview them with students watching and then interacting with them —and the edited transcripts go into World.
But in 2010 it becomes clear that the King’s president, having survived his brain tumor and returned to his position, can’t handle it. Fundraising is particularly critical. The costs of running the college are going up as a new New York regulation allows only three students per unit in the apartments the college rents for students, rather than four. Housing costs immediately jump by 33 percent.
Members of the board of trustees are donating millions to keep the college doors open. They’re understandably tired of that and want King’s to have a “rainmaker.” The King’s board does everything in proper order. It establishes a search committee and attracts some solidly evangelical candidates. Then comes a surprise, as key search committee and board members, some of whom remember the 2007 Hitchens-D’Souza debate, pivot to Dinesh D’Souza.
It’s an odd choice for an evangelical college. Raised Catholic, D’Souza has little theological knowledge but has sometimes gone with his wife to an evangelical church. The important part of D’Souza’s candidacy is that he has support from the billionaire DeVos clan, headed by Amway founder Richard DeVos. One wealthy trustee tells me he doesn’t disagree with my theological concerns, but he asks, “What choice do we have?” I respond, “Trust God.” The trustee says, “That’s not enough.” He also insists nothing has changed about the school’s mission or values, so my contractual bailout doesn’t apply.
Determined to make King’s pay me, I leave for a long planned, week-long trip rafting down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The canyon seen from above impressed me two decades earlier, but this time, at river level, in the bosom of God’s creation, I look at the stars, think about his grandeur, and return to New York resolved not to make a fuss: God will take care of things. Yes, it looks like the choice of D’Souza is an attempt to serve both God and Mammon, but maybe God will be merciful and allow it to work.
When the D’Souza selection goes public, Christianity Today writer Andy Crouch is one of many who point out the implication of D’Souza’s selection: He tweets, “King’s is now firmly positioned as an ideologically conservative school, not as a Christian school.” Most of the King’s faculty members are
upset by the appointment. I stick to my resolution not to lead a civil war that will produce despair among students, some recruited by me, and havoc among the faculty. I have another job to go to, at World. Professors who incur D’Souza’s wrath will probably end up unemployed.
In September 2010, President D’Souza makes it clear to me that he will not just concentrate on fundraising. He wants power in faculty hiring and intends to bring in a group of conservative scholars who won’t have to sign the King’s statement of faith. In October, D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage comes out. The book says Obama is a semi-nutty would-be dictator who governs “according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman,” his Kenyan father. King’s gains publicity not as a Christian college in the heart of Manhattan but as the home of a right-wing crank.
Can King’s serve not only God and Mammon but the Republican Party as well? I tell board members they’ve made a mistake, but they did follow proper procedure and were acting out of financial desperation. I announce my resignation, do not try to hold King’s to the contract, and turn down press requests for interviews.
The King’s College stays open with DeVos dollars. My advice to professors is keep your chins up in the classroom and your heads down in relation to the new administration. Wait and see what God will do. As they say in Narnia, God is not safe, “but he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” King of kings and King of King’s.
Two providential developments in my life quickly occur. World’s CEO asks me to assume leadership of the World Journalism Institute, which puts on short courses for college journalists. Then Patrick Henry College hires me to continue my interview series by coming to its campus in Virginia four times a year, for a week at a time.
