Swan Song XXVI--faculty meetings

I suppose I will always remember them generically.  Basically, they're all alike, heavy laden with info, some of which is important, some of which is frivolous.  Faculty meetings happen, always, at appropriate times, I suppose--the beginning of a semester, the end of a semester; but most faculty members are distracted, in January by the scramble before the first day of classes, in May by sheer fatigue.  Few of us ever really want to go.

Administrators aren't dumb.  They understand, so they do what they can to make them sweet.  Donuts from Casey's Bakery.  Often, there's a pep talk, but then most faculty "get" sweet-talking. Admin will shake your hand sumptuously while peeing on your foot--that kind of thing.  Happens all the time.  Trust me, I've lived through more than a hundred faculty meetings in forty years of teaching.

When the institutional climate was poisonous, I remember them for rancor--mine, especially.  I wasn't always a good foot soldier, and I don't doubt I've inflicted my share of wounds.  But the issues are largely gone now, even though I'm sure they had to do with my perception of their (administrative) incompetence.

Only one stands forever in the faculty meeting Hall of Fame, and that one happened years ago at a date I can almost pinpoint--it had to be early to mid-80's.  South African apartheid hadn't failed yet.  The President of the college, Rev. B. J. Haan, had been offered an honorary doctorate from an Afrikaner university, a gracious gesture on their part. No one doubted Haan was worthy--that wasn't the question.  What was on the table that night was whether he should take it.  

The forces on either side were daunting.  On the left stood those who believed that his accepting the honorary doctorate would give the granting institution--and the apartheid system--a kind of "Christian" legitimacy that they did not deserve. To stand with those Afrikaners, in some ways the authors of apartheid, segregationist apartheid, would be to get into bed with the forces of Satan, argued faculty on the left. 

On the the right stood those who saw those Afrikaners as fellow children of the Lord, laborers in the vineyard, men and women with whom we could pray, people who needed our help finding their way, not the back of our hand.  You didn't have to stop hating apartheid to love them, to respect them.

Dr. James Skillen, a man who went on the devote his life to the interface of politics and the Christian faith, spoke for those who were asking Haan not to accept the doctorate.  Of the two spokesman, he was the less passionate, but most convincing.  Any dalliance with the Afrikaners was a dance of death, he argued, because those offering the President this honorary doctorate were only looking for political goodwill.  He told the President that, should he take the honor, he'd be a pawn in the terrible racial struggle being waged in South Africa.  Even little Dordt College would be scratched up on the wall of those who were fighting for apartheid.  

On the other side stood Rev. Dr. E. L. Hebden Taylor, an Englishman, an Anglican priest who was just about as foreign to Siouxland prairie as those first wooden-shoed, paleface pioneers from Pella.  He was an eccentric scholar no alum will ever forget. The son of South African missionaries, he'd grown up there and knew South Africans like no one else.  That familial relationship was the foundation for his argument--you don't slap confessional brothers and sisters in the face when they're offering respect and love.  The President simply had to go. Of the two, Taylor spoke most passionately.  South Africa was, to him, something of a homeland.

There was no rancor, despite the fact that the sides were deeply divided.  Both men laid out arguments plainly and powerfully, even personally; but neither condemned the other.  What went to war that night was two very plausible arguments, neither of which was evil, both of which had inherent righteousness.

When it was over, President Haan stood up, thanked Skillen and Taylor, acknowledged the difficulty of the question, even railed on the horrors of apartheid; but then said he'd made up his mind before the debate already.  He'd decided not to go to apartheid South Africa, that the possibility of being used at this particular moment in history was just too great.

But then he spoke sharply, to those who sided with Skillen.  To them--to us, I guess-- he said that in no way should his decision make them feel that he was desirous of dancing with a liberal or progressive agenda, that he didn't want the institution to veer left as he said so many once-Christian institutions had.  Neither did he want the college he established to veer right.  He wanted somehow a third way, a way he would have described as a "Reformed Christian way."

Yesterday, I walked out of my last faculty meeting at Dordt College into January temperatures that were almost sinful--low 60s--for January.  It was gorgeous.  I was already munching on the fattest long john I could find, jelly-filled, vanilla frosting.  I left early.  I'd had enough.  I'd gone only because my wife--sometimes my conscience--determined that I really should.  I'd heard enough reports, suffered enough cheerleading.  It was time to go, and I was happy.  I haven't had a frosted long john like that for years a decade--I was kicking out the jams Calvinistically.  

I walked up to my office and worked on my very last syllabus.  

Only one faculty meeting stays with me--that moving debate on a topic totally relevant to the world in which we lived, a topic to which some were very personally tied, a topic that, at that moment, could have easily gone either way.  In that debate, this young prof learned that sometimes the most heated arguments are not waged by fools--they're weighty because both sides have merit.  I came out smarter than I went in at that faculty meeting.  Maybe that's why it will always be part of my memory.

Nothing that happened before or since in a Dordt College faculty meeting comes anywhere near to what happened that night, early 80s, in S-101.  I don't think we had donuts.