the bonds of community
I’m probably going to regret this, but over at the First Things blog I’ve posted some thoughts on the imminent departure from Wheaton College of my long-time colleague Kent Gramm. Apparently he refused to accept the marriage the college administration had arranged for him. (Read my post and you’ll get the joke.) (Kind of a sad joke.) I may have some further thoughts in this space on a few issues that spiral out from this lamentable situation, including (a) the meaning of the principle of voluntary association and (b) the vexed questions that arise when there is variation of role or function within a single community. But then I may just end up exhausted from the whole thing and fall silent.
Alan,
You wrote (I paraphrase) that a faculty member whose wife divorces him for verbal and physical abuse would be better able to serve as a moral exemplar to his students that one who leaves his wife for another woman.
Please excuse my intemperance, but What the Fuck?
I can understand why leaving his wife for a new love would compromise a Wheaton Faculty member’s ability to set a Christian example for his students. Of course, Wheaton would be justified in letting him go.
But abuse is a much greater breach of one’s moral duties, and it is a breach that should have consequences. (Including, perhaps, legal consequences) Even if the faculty member in question is genuinely repentant, he has still committed acts that do not deserve simple forgiveness. Moreover, spousal abuse is (in my understanding) a more serious violation of the sacrament of marriage than adultery. If dissolving one’s marriage for another woman is worthy of dismissal, surely dissolving it through violence ought to be as well.
— heedless · May 2, 05:16 PM · #
Maybe you should be a little more, um, heedful in your reading. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) I said that IF an abusive husband repented and grieved over his sin, he COULD eventually help and heal others. But, please notice, all that was in the “it depends” category: it would depend on the harshness of the abuse, the period of time over which it happened, the observers’ sense of the seriousness of the abuser’s repentance, the evident presence or absence of old habits of behavior, etc.
— Alan Jacobs · May 2, 05:28 PM · #
I should add — and all joking aside, heedless’s comment is helpful — that my scenario 2 was probably ill-chosen in that it almost certainly involves illegal as well as immoral activity; and I would also agree that such abuse is worse than infidelity. My point was just that Christian communities have, I think, to be open to the possibility that even those who sin grossly can be restored to full fellowship, in certain circumstances. But that leads to the question, which I hope to consider later, of whether such full restoration means that the repentant person is capable of exercising any and every role in that community. So I’ll get back to that point as soon as I can.
— Alan Jacobs · May 2, 05:38 PM · #
I guess I see what you meant with that example. However, I think it tells against your position in a way that’s actually more significant than the implausible possibility that you’re a secret spousal abuse sympathizer. The scenario you’re imagining requires the college authorities to make an impossibly fine distinction concerning the abuser’s state of mind. Part of what motivates claims of privacy is recognizing that we’re rather limited judges of each others’ inner lives. For your hypothetical spousal abuser, that means giving up the razor-thin possibility that he’d be found repentant. But it also tells against the college’s choice to scrutinize individuals’ divorces.
On a slightly different note, given how in your piece you suggest that the entire nature of the interview prompts the divorcee to slander their spouse, I’m really surprised that you’d be willing to defend the procedure. That is, you seem to recognize how bad that fact is, but then pull up short of drawing the conclusion.
— Justin · May 2, 07:14 PM · #
Alan,
Fair enough. I do believe that sincere repentance and forgiveness are possible, but given that you brought up forgiveness of abuse in the context of the immediate administrative reponse to a divorce, I think I can be excused for misinterpreting your point.
Separate question: Is that sort of repentance possible in the context of a remarriage? Say in a case such as John McCain, where he was unfaithful to his first wife and divorced her to be with another woman, but has been (by all acounts) a model husband to his second wife. At some point, does sincere comittment to the second marriage allow one to atone for the abandonment of the first?
— heedless · May 2, 07:21 PM · #
Justin: if you mean that from the premise “this procedure is flawed” I do not draw the conclusion “this policy should be abandoned,” you’re right. If the policy is valuable — which I know not everyone would grant in this case, but IF — then you try to improve the procedures for implementing it as best you can, knowing that it’ll never be perfect. After all, as you point out, we’re not mind-readers. But human beings make judgments like this all the time, right? — and in every walk of life. We decide whether to re-start relationships that have ended badly. We decide on lengths of sentences for criminals, and whether to parole them. We decide whether hanging out with our old drinking buddies will cause us to fall off the wagon. Privately, publicly, and communally, we make judgment calls about ourselves and others all the time, sometimes erring on the side of generosity, other times on the side of caution.
heedless: No doubt, I could have been more clear. Your question is interesting, and what I think it points to is a sad fact, that sometimes we do damage that we can repent of but not (fully) make right. If I’m a horrible husband but won’t admit it, and my wife divorces me, and only years later do I come to see what a jerk I was — well, she may be married to someone else, or I may be, or perhaps I cannot find her. I might be fully repentant but unable to make amends. (The most dramatic case of this is the repentant murderer, who would want above all the forgiveness of the very person whose life he’s taken.)
Thanks to both of you for your thoughtful responses.
— Alan Jacobs · May 2, 08:43 PM · #
That is a very good article — just right on all points. Thank you.
— The Reticulator · May 4, 02:10 AM · #
The main article is not clear whether he is the plaintiff or the defendant in this divorce action, which is the most salient detail in assessing his behavior.
THe man had been married for 34 years. Most marriages which end in divorce do so within six or seven years, and after but four or five years of actual cohabitation. Some years ago I saw some figures (derived from data from the late 1970s, I believe) on the probability of a future divorce action if your marriage had endured a specified length of time; that for a marriage which has endured for a year was 51%; that for a marriage which has endured for 35 years was under 1%. What this man or his wife are up to is very unusual. Charity may suggest one begin with the assumption that his refusal to discuss the matter with his supervisors per policies of which he was quite aware is in defense of his dignity, but one might also note that an honest discussion of the circumstances might conceivably have led to his termination. Which is to say that the posture he has adopted may actually come at scant cost to him materially, allow him to avoid the embarrassment of dismissal for cause, and allow him to score points against the institution whose policies have placed him in this position. As quoted in some of these articles, he is advocating the institution dispensing with standards and musing about it being coerced into doing so by extant Illinois labor law. Your going to have to excuse me, Dr. Jacobs, if I harbor the suspicion that this guy may be a far more dubious character than you are letting on.It would be agreeable for everyone concerned if the academic job market he is facing were not so sclerotic (which is to say agreeable for most concerned if labor law in Illinois and every other state blew up the tenure system).
— Art Deco · May 5, 01:34 AM · #
Art Deco, as I’m sure Dr. Jacobs will be quick to point out, it’s not particularly fair of you to speculate on the motives of a man you don’t really know, based on a few facts and a few news stories. And if you’ve read the piece over on First Things, you’ll know how seriously to take the news reports.
Your question of whether he is the plaintiff or defendant is irrelevant. Under no-fault divorce laws (the common American regime), whether one is the plaintiff or the defendant is no indicator of one’s guilt or innocence in whatever the causes of the divorce are. It is just as likely for (e.g) an adulterous spouse to sue his faithful partner than for the wronged party to sue over the same action.
This is not to say that your point about the length of marriages and the peculiar nature of this particular circumstance is invalid. However, I believe it is not appropriate to speculate about the professor’s motives merely based on the rarity of his case. The fact that this divorce ends a long marriage does not, it seems to me, imply even a statistical increase in the likelihood that he may be at fault.
I think your implication that Gramm (forgive me if I omit a proper honorific, as I don’t know whether he holds a doctorate or not) stands to lose little materially by his actions demonstrates that you have little sense of the current state of the job market for literature academics. If anything, Gramm’s choice diminishes his material prospects. Among the mainstream academy, there are few enough spaces for writing teachers at all, and even fewer for professing Christians. And among the Christian schools where Gramm’s Wheaton credentials would carry weight, the suspicion of moral fault, amplified by the lack of information, will increase his difficulty. And any school with a policy like Wheaton’s will automatically close its doors to him unless he submits to the same sort of scrutiny he has avoided.
From my admittedly limited understanding of the circumstances, I’m fully in agreement with Dr. Jacobs about both the propriety of the college’s action and the reasonableness of Kent Gramm’s response. I do not assert that Gramm has done the right or the best thing, but neither do I presume the opposite. During my time at Wheaton, I never had a class with Gramm and knew him only by his favorable reputation. I leave it only to those who know his character well to make presumptions, and only to those who know the intimate details of his case to make judgments.
Idle speculation as to Professor Gramm’s motives serves no purpose. While it may be useful to take this situation as an opportunity to contemplate the nature of divorce and of policies such as Wheaton’s, neither speculation nor judgment as to Gramm’s moral responsibility are appropriate from our distance. That would be the sort of judgment of our brothers which Christ condemns.
— Ethan C. · May 6, 02:11 AM · #
I’d like to specify that this comment doesn’t refer to Dr. Gramm’s case directly, since he hasn’t spoken publicly about the nature of his divorce:
Given that Wheaton College strives to create a very specific type of Christian/academic community, it does make sense that administrators would wish for faculty and staff to be good role models for students. However, is it really the place of a Christian college to discipline its faculty and staff when it determines that their divorces are not in accordance with Christian standards? Isn’t that kind of discipline reserved for the Church? It does seem to me that Wheaton may be reaching into an area that should rightly be left to the church governance.
— Katherine Philips · May 6, 04:09 PM · #
Katherine Philips:
Unless Wheaton College is affiliated with a specific corporate body which has a set of ecclesiastical tribunals to adjudicate these matters, he is disciplined by the college or his is not disciplined. If he is not disciplined, institutional standards on right living are effectively null and the college will likely be consumed by the surrounding culture. Were the matter to be referred to a church tribunal, it would merely remove adjudication from a subsidiary to a parent body. It is difficult to see how this makes a substantive difference. If a corporate body which functions as the proprietor of the college wishes to alter the disciplinary standards of the school, it can do so through ordinances issued by denominational governing bodies or the by the school’s board of trustees.
— Art Deco · May 6, 09:58 PM · #
I think you have a good theoretical point, Katherine, which would be a good practical point if there were many churches which practiced such discipline nowadays. It would be nice if all the administrators had to do was ask Gramm’s confessor whether he thought the man able to continue in his position. But that is not the situation in which Wheaton finds itself. There are scarcely even any Catholic colleges nowadays who could rely on such an arrangement, even though they have ecclesiological structures that could facilitate such a policy (which Wheaton, of course, lacks).
Wheaton, as a “confessional community,” but certainly not a church, is in a rather complicated position. It is, properly, a pastor’s job to assess and critique the spiritual state of his sheep. The college’s job is not to judge its faculty’s souls “per se,” in divorce or in any other area. But a confessional community like Wheaton should have a role in judging whether a member’s spiritual state affects his participation within that community. This is a separate question, and it is the one the college is trying to address in its policy. Again, the absence of rigorous and identifiable disciplinary structures within the churches that most Wheaton members attend complicates the issue. It’s rather difficult to draw a bright line between spiritual assessment and community standards when there isn’t an obvious counterpart to the college’s process on the other side of the line. But I know from personal experience that Wheaton’s administration does try to respect that line, whatever we may think of certain instances of their judgment in particular areas.
— Ethan C. · May 6, 10:06 PM · #
To be clear for those who may not know: Wheaton is not affiliated with any ecclesiastical body. It holds itself as “Evangelical,” but does not subscribe to either a particular denominational body or to an authoritative tradition.
— Ethan C. · May 6, 10:11 PM · #
Ethan: I have not been the least bit unfair to Dr. Gramm.
1. He has initiated a divorce suit against his wife after 34 years of marriage, or she is initiating one against him. Either way, what is being done is very unusual. I do not need to be acquainted with either individual to know this. It is a social fact.
2. What a judge presiding over a divorce case may or may not consider in his rulings per Illinois law is what is irrelevant to the college provost. Whether Dr. Gramm is suing his wife or whether she is suing him is the most salient datum for the provost to consider. The former is a willfull act. The latter is not. Unilateral divorce on demand is the law most everywhere in this country, and if his wife wants out, there is nothing ultimately Dr. Gramm can do about it, and it would be unfair, absent evidence that Dr. Gramm merits such treatment (and most defendants in divorce suits do not), to discharge him. If he is the defendant in the suit, the college can responsibly ask him if she has grounds as understood by the college’s own internal regulations and gather what information it ethically can from other sources. If he is the plaintiff in the suit, the college must insist he provide testimony of grounds, or its regulations are without force.
3. Dr. Gramm has done something incongruent with the college’s internal regulations, or he has not. Four possibilities suggest themselves:
a. He has not transgressed standards, but elects not to submit to an inquiry by the provost on principle; b. He has not transgressed standards, but submission to an inquiry would cause him an injury he does not wish to endure; c. He has transgressed standards, and can credibly lie to the provost, but elects not to do so; d. He has transgressed standards, and cannot credibly deceive the provost.Dr. Gramm wishes to leave the impression that the first (or is it the third?) is the case. You are quite vexed with me for suggesting that while the first may be the case, the others are a possiblity. Off hand, I cannot see how an acquaintance with Dr. Gramm would suggest a fifth or a sixth possibility.
4. I am perfectly aware of the condition of the academic job market. It is that circumstance which raises questions about Dr. Gramm’s story. Here is a man about 55 years of age about a dozen years from retirement. One might posit that he could acquit himself to the provost but is willing to sacrifice his career on principle. That seems willful to me, but others find it winsome. It is also possible he is resigning now in order to avoid being fired later. That is what I meant when I said his resignation may make no material difference.
5. Dr. Gramm wishes to embarrass the institution and change its policies and has enlisted the aid of the newspapers toward this end. He could have resigned quietly and (as did his wife) told the newspapers to go hang. He and they want you to conceive of him and conceive of Wheaton’s policies in a particular way. I am not in violation of my obligations as a Christian in pointing out that the explanation he offers of his behavior is not the most plausible one.
— Art Deco · May 6, 11:07 PM · #
Mr. Deco,
Excellent points well argued. But I still hold to my response.
1. I granted that it is unusual. However, I still fail to see how that fact affects the presumption of Gramm’s culpability one way or the other.
2. I see what you’re saying here. I may have misunderstood what you were getting at in your initial comment about this. I thought you were implying that Gramm’s status as either plaintiff or defendant constitute prima facie evidence of his culpability or innocence. While I agree that the part he takes in the case determines which set of questions the college would need him to answer, I don’t see that either scenario has any greater likelihood of implying his guilt than the other. It seems to me that it would affect the method of the college’s inquiry, but not the likelihood of the result. And because it does not affect the result, it is not a factor that we, outside the process, can look toward in drawing our own conclusions (should we choose to do so).
3. I’m not opposed to your list of possibilities. What I object to is imputing certain probabilities to those possibilities with very limited knowledge of the facts of the case.
Also, into which of your possibilities do you subsume the scenario that Gramm wishes to spare his culpable wife the pain of an inquiry? She, after all, was not a party to his commitment to Wheaton, so whether she has committed a guilty act is not strictly speaking their business.
Of course Gramm implies his innocence. But unlike you, apparently, I see no reason to presume that Gramm is not being truthful. An acquaintance with Gramm seems necessary if we are to make an educated guess as to his probable motives.
4. I don’t see how Gramm’s material dislocation militates toward his guilt. If it would make it more difficult to imagine your possibility #1, it would also seem to me to make possibility #3 less likely.
You’ve got a good point that if he’s sure he’ll be fired anyway, he loses nothing by resigning (unless there are contractual details of which we aren’t aware, but this seems unlikely to me). I misunderstood you on that. But that’s a big if. But Gramm’s refusal of the process deprives him of even the possibility of acquittal, and given the high stakes involved I can see rational reasons why even a guilty man would attempt to clear his name.
There are two different potential cost-benefit analyses that could be employed, even if we presume the man’s guilt: either there is little to be gained (because despite the potentially large reward, there is little likelihood of payoff), or there is much to be gained (because despite the little likelihood of payoff, the potential reward is large). Again, because I know nothing of Gramm’s character or the detils of the case I cannot judge which of these thought processes might predominate if he were making this decision on economic grounds. Furthermore, we have little evidence that he is considering things economically at all, except for the fact that he is conscious that he is certainly going to lose his job given the decision he has made.
For all these reasons, I cannot see how the economic aspect of the case could push us to presume Gramm’s guilt. All it can tell us is that there is something that he values more highly than whatever economic possibility he would gain by undergoing the process, but since we cannot know how highly he estimates that possibility, we cannot guess as to what that other something might be.
5. Do not judge the man by what has appeared in the newspapers. There are a huge variety of situations that can lead to the sorts of quotes that have appeared, and “enlist[ing] the aid of the newspapers” in a PR scheme is only one of them.
Given the press treatment of Wheaton that I’ve seen on other matters, I have no confidence that any story conveys either the true situation or the true opinions of those quoted. I don’t know if you followed the Hochschild story or the “dancing students” coverage, but they were both studies in reporter bias and deliberate misunderstanding. If one were to judge people based on their quotes, one would think Dr. Litfin a raging anti-Catholic, Dr. Hochschild a cringing victim, and the Wheaton student body both a pot of simmering resentment and a flock of mindless sheep (depending on the day of the week).
While I certainly grant that you’ve laid out the possibilities for Gramm’s guilt, I think the presumption that we know enough to presume his guilt (or his innocence) is unwarranted. It is against this that I invoked the biblical command not to judge, and I stand by it.
— Ethan C. · May 7, 10:28 PM · #
Ethan, I presumed nothing. I merely noted that one scenario is more plausible than another.
— Art Deco · May 7, 11:26 PM · #
Alan, a few thoughts come to mind after reading your article:
1) If what you say about the level of institutional involvement in one’s private life is true, then I would never want to teach at Wheaton.
2) As an alumnus of the college, I very much did appreciate the mentoring I received from my professors. However, if this is such a priority to the administration, then why do they continue to put increasing pressure on their faculty to both publish prolifically and maintain full course loads, not to mention pushing out profs who fail to keep up this intense pace precisely because they do spend a large amount of time mentoring? I’ve talked recently with one of my former professors, one of your colleagues, about this demand for both top-notch academics and top-notch teaching from its professors, and he described it as “the worst of both worlds”. I know nothing about the circumstances of Gramm’s divorce, but I will say that considering how much the college demands of its faculty, I’m surprise more professors’ marriages aren’t falling apart. If they’re really concerned about maintaining the quality of faculty mentors, perhaps they ought to first look at their own policies, not at their private lives.
3) I can’t blame Gramm for not trusting the administration with the details of his divorce. Given all the great profs that have been pushed out by that administration for one reason or another over the past decade or so, what reason does he have to believe that they are trustworthy with anything of this magnitude?
— Mike Clawson · May 12, 10:06 PM · #
Sorry to have been away from this thread for a few days.
1) I’m with Ethan and against Art Deco. None of us — even those of us who know Kent — have enough information to guess about the causes of his divorce. People get divorced for so many reasons that to speculate in this matter is simply gossip. More important, it’s not relevant to the case at hand, which raises a very different question: should a faculty member at a Christian college have to talk about such matters at all in order to keep his job?
2) Mike Clawson writes, “If what you say about the level of institutional involvement in one’s private life is true, then I would never want to teach at Wheaton.” Neither would many other people. I am pleased to say that no one is required to.
(And as for the supposed “increasing pressure on the faculty” to publish, why not take a look at the publishing records of the people who have been tenured at Wheaton over the past twenty years? The facts of this matter are publicly available for anyone who wants to know them. I didn’t have a book when I was tenured fifteen years ago, and several people were tenured last year with publishing records very similar to mine. Perhaps Mama Wheaton is not quite as cruel in this matter as she is rumored to be, especially if you factor in the extraordinary increases in available release time for faculty.)
— Alan Jacobs · May 13, 12:22 AM · #
“I’m with Ethan and against Art Deco. None of us — even those of us who know Kent — have enough information to guess about the causes of his divorce. People get divorced for so many reasons that to speculate in this matter is simply gossip. More important, it’s not relevant to the case at hand, which raises a very different question: should a faculty member at a Christian college have to talk about such matters at all in order to keep his job?”
Dr. Jacobs, I pointed out the limited number of possibilities concerning two binaries:
1. Whether or not he transgressed against standards;
2. Whether or not he could credibly deceive the provost.
That is it. The person who suggested some possible reasons behind the divorce was YOU in your post on “First Things”. I have no clue as to what he did or did not do and brought up nothing bar the possibility that he is the initiator of the divorce suit, which may well be public information in the State of Illinois.
Dr. Gramm agreed to answer questions for the newspapers (even as he refuses a private interview with the provost) and a selection of them offered a sympathetic portrayal of his situation, which is in turn dependent on his self-presentation. I am under no obligation to take his self-presentation at face value. I doubt it is true, but acknowledge it may be.
As for what the issue is, Dr. Gramm could have come clean to the provost in accordance with his institution’s work rules, rules that were apparently not imposed on him ex post facto. Dr. Gramm could also have departed the campus without making a fuss. He did neither of these things.
If it be your contention that the institution should be indifferent to character or that his character is not called into question by being named as the defendent or acting as a plaintiff in a divorce suit, then it is rather intrusive to ask him to defend his conduct to the provost. Neither contention seems congruent with the mission of a soi-disant Christian college. If the institution is concerned with the calibre of its faculty, there had better be procedures in place to make inquiries and impose sanctions. I cannot see that there are any dilemmas for the institution here if it is what it claims to be.
— Art Deco · May 13, 10:06 PM · #
The person who suggested some possible reasons behind the divorce was YOU in your post on “First Things”. I most certainly did not. If you think that, you’ve read very carelessly indeed.
I am under no obligation to take his self-presentation at face value. I doubt it is true, but acknowledge it may be. You have no information that would entitle you to an opinion on the subject, and the only proper word for public speculation about an issue you know nothing about is “gossip.” Gossip is something you’re free to do, of course, but it should be called by its proper name.
If it be your contention that the institution should be indifferent to character. . . That you would even raise this as a possibility is, I fear, conclusive evidence that you did not read my post at First Things. I would suggest that you do so, but modesty forbids. . . . But if you did choose to read it, you would learn that I have already said that there are “no dilemmas” for the college in this situation.
— Alan Jacobs · May 14, 12:42 AM · #
Dr. Jacobs, I read your post with rather more care than you have read my comments.
I have pointed out that his self-presentation is not particularly credible. That is not ‘gossip’. It is an assessment of what I read in the newspapers. If you fancy it is gossip, you have no business instructing the young on the use of words.
— Art Deco · May 14, 02:01 AM · #
A. D., I suggest, then, that you write the administration of Wheaton College and advise them to dismiss me. You can tell them that your “assessment” is based on what you read in the newspapers. I’m sure your opinion will receive the attention it deserves.
— Alan Jacobs · May 14, 02:27 AM · #