Dr. James Koldenhoven--1932-2022

There's a telling line in his obituary. Goes like this: "He loved his grandchildren and would delight in visiting with them about school, careers, life, and faith." And then, "No subject was taboo."

I don't know Jim Koldenhoven's grandchildren. I know his daughters, one of them was a student of mine in the very first year of my employment at Dordt College; the other, was, for almost forty years, a colleague. His daughter's kids I don't know. What I do know is that whoever wrote the line in his obit had it right because with Grandpa Koldenhoven, like the professor, no subject was taboo.

And that's what separated him from the rest--there was no one around just like him "back in the day," in large part because with Dr. K "no subject was taboo." Here in Sioux County in the post-WWII era, believe me, there was a nest of taboos that could and did strike at any moment.

When, back then, former President John Hulst came to Dordt, dorm counselors would put heavy tape over the coin slots on Sundays to prevent students from buying a Coke. The Sabbath was holy after all. Even though no one believed people inside those machines were making change on Sunday, handling a dime or a quarter on the Sabbath was thought by some to be "unbiblical."

That's the milieu into which Jim Koldenhoven stepped when he took the teaching position the President B. J. Haan urged him to, a position in the English department that included doing the theater.

Theater, back then, among the almost thoroughbred CRC student body, still made some shiver. The CRC synodical warnings about worldly amusements were almost middle-aged back then, but still capable of overthrowing those who looked past them. Theater was, to some died-in-the-wool conservatives, shadowy and questionable, and still is among some now-fringe, then-stalwart constituencies of the college.

Running the theater at little Dordt College was going to be a job that required the the director bearing an armadillo's wardrobe. Even huge stage successes didn't mean there'd be no blowback. Students "acting"?--sounds sinful to me.

Jim Koldenhoven grew up in northwest Iowa and could not have been blind to the criticism his productions eventually created, for better or worse. But he did it, did them--directed theater at Dordt in those early years. As remarkable as it seems, his plays brought Shakespeare, Moliere, Beckett, even Thornton Wilder to the stage up high in the old gymnasium. 

He did so because he believed in theater, believed in art, believed in open expression--"no subject was taboo" with him, even though lots and lots of subjects were taboo with the constituency of the college. It was the Sixties, and confrontations ran through and around the the perfectly-straight row crops like the jackrabbits now long gone. Jim Koldenhoven was a Republican, even once ran for office; but he was never, by his own peculiarly good nature, a conservative. He was a classical liberal, a man of the world who believed good could arise from openness and honesty and faith.

During my senior year, I took a drama class with him--"Theory of Drama" or something similarly titled. Back then, I couldn't help but think he often came to class unprepared, simply sat up on the table in front and let it be known that questions were expected. And they came.

Like no other single course I took at Dordt College between 1966 and 1970, in Theory of Drama, Jim Koldenhoven created an atmosphere of good will, toleration, and acceptance because, impossible as it seemed then and even now, "no subject was taboo."

And I loved it. It was 1970, and I felt myself greatly at odds with students who carted along their parents' tired conservatism when they came to what might well have been the only institution of higher learning those parents would have approved of for their covenant children. In Koldenhoven's class that year, my last, I experienced something new--an openness spread before us by a classical liberal outlook of toleration. 

Today, we'll bury Dr. James Koldenhoven, my teacher, my boss, my friend. He's not, thank goodness, the last of the liberals in Sioux County, but by my reckoning, he had to have been one of the first.

A good man. A very good man with whom no subject was taboo.