Discussion on non-discrimination policy and freedom of clubs at Whitworth

Last Thursday, vice president of academic affairs Michael Le Roy, vice president of student life Kathy Storm and executive assistant to the president Dale Soden along with senior Thomas Ruble and Miles Hewitson discussed several issues surrounding the 8th of May event. These included the non-discrimination policy decision, the freedom of clubs on campus and the board of trustees in general.

The following are excerpts form the discussion on KWRS:

Non-discrimination discussion

JESSICA DAVIS: What does this decision actually mean for homosexual students?

KATHY STORM: … What that means, I would say for all students, is that the college is trying very much to continue the same ethos of exchange of ideas and freedom of conscious on this issue. So it isn’t that the recent decision reflects a change in policy, it really is an attempt to continue an ethos that we’ve had. Again it’s an ethos where free exchange of ideas is possible where freedom of conscious is allowed on this issues, where this issue is not been a litmus test on hiring. So in some ways its an attempt for all student to continue that same ethos. It allows for a range of ideas to be held and articulated.

JESSICA DAVIS: Does anyone have anything to add on that?

MICHAEL LE ROY: There is quite a bit more that can be said. That the decision, I think it’s important to point out too that the decision didn’t really come out of a vaccum that the board didn’t just decide to do this, but the administration had been asked by the board to study this issue and over the past year we have studied all the various approaches and implications. There was a legal seminar put on by a law firm in Seattle as well as the Human Rights Commission itself. They made it very clear that non-profit religious institutions are exempt but they also ran through check lists of things we would have to do as an institution if we were to adopt the legislation. Those include a wide range of things. …

The sexual orientation definition includes gay, lesbian, heterosexual, bisexual, transgender. It includes all those groups. And so even somebody, if we adopted this policy, we would have to take into account the transgender student for example and it has a huge effect on what bath rooms and shower rooms students can use. And so a transgender student who declares themselves to be a gender different from their biological gender, if they self identify as a male and they are a female, they have right access to male restrooms and male shower rooms and so on. So it’s a real challenge for all of higher education where there is housing and so on. And That’s something we would have to have a policy on or we would have to have accommodations for we would have to changes for.

We would also have to probably restrict the freedom of speech in our community. We have members of our community and our faculty, staff, students who believe that homosexual behavior is sinful. It was made clear to me from the Human Rights Commission if people were allowed to say that, that then creates conditions for what would be called a hostile work place or a hostile environment and probably we would have to limit freedom of speech in that area because we wouldn’t want to be in violation of the law if we adopted that provision. And of course, we’d never want in our community, we would never want people to express views in a way that is hostile and we have to work really hard to differential between issues of conscious where people are expressing opinion and behaviors that are in fact discriminatory, harmful threatening. We don’t want those kinds of behaviors that are discriminatory, harmful or threatening behaviors. But we do want to be a place where faculty, staff, students can freely express differences of opinion on theological issues like homosexuality or abortion, or women’s rights, women’s ordination, you name the wide range of issues. And it was our feeling after talking with the Human Rights Commission and the law firm that to adopt this provision would unnecessarily restrict the free exchange of ideas in our community on one hand.

We could have gone the other way and said we want the exemption because as an institution we believe doctrinally that homosexuality is a sin. But we’ve never taken positions on those kinds of issues before. And we’ve kept it limited to the view of trinity, and the view of the authority of scriptures being the primary issues. And we’ve wanted to keep that consistent.

Now lot’s of other Christian schools have doctrinal requirements, in fact most do, that you believe that homosexuality is a sin if you work in that place. We don’t have that. And again we don’t have that because we want the free exchange of ideas. And so this position we feel, keeping the exemption, but not because we believe it’s a sin, but because we believe that part of the free exchange of ideas is part of what it means to express our faith freely in this context. That’s what we want. That is recommendation that administration made and that is the recommendation that the board ratified.

…

JESSICA DAVIS: The other question I have, and then I will open it to Thomas and Miles is would this decision mean Whitworth can refuse to hire an employee based on sexual orientation alone?

KATHY STORM: Well I guess it could because we are automatically classified as exempt, but to do that would be to be taking a position and that’s again something we don’t want to do. So I’ve not known that to happen and again that would seem inconsistent with this desire to not take a position.

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THOMAS RUBLE: I just wanted to know specifically whether or not faculty or prospective faculty could raise a lawsuit against the school. I hope that never would happen. If the school is in this privileged exempt status, to not have to be challenge or consider themselves in danger of any lawsuits.

DALE SODEN: I think we have discussed all year the reality of lawsuits and I think we are all aware no position we would take makes us invulnerable to lawsuits. That anyone could file a suit, and we probably expect in the future. It would be naïve to think we could avoid a lawsuit at some point. There is nothing that prevents anyone from challenging the practices we employ.

Freedom of clubs on campus

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JESSICA DAVIS: What can’t all student all organizations become chartered and officially recognized as a campus club?

KATHY STORM: Well if we’re talking specifically about the GLBT, I can tell you how we have proceeded and to some extent on how I’ve thought about it. In this area on this issue, again the hope has been to maintain consistently as consistently as we can throughout the institution this value of not taking a formal position because of all the risks associated with that and all the limitation of conversation and freedom of conscious. So part of what has been behind the decision not to charter a position which would be an advocacy position on either point of view has been again this hope we could maintain throughout the institution a consistent stance on this.

And I suppose in theory there would be two ways to approach not taking an institutional position one would be to charter clubs on both sides of the issue and the other is not to charter clubs on this particular issue. In my own mind what has made most sense about taking the approach that we’ve taken which has been not to charter clubs on this issue has been we’re trying to balance two things. One is not taking a position. And the other concern or value is trying to make sure that the way that we think and talk about this issue and other issues like this takes into the account some of the reality of our culture and church and so forth. And that has to do with how divisive an issue this has been for reasons sometimes personally puzzling to me and certainly of great concern.

So, if we were to have chartered organizations, programming from both points of view and sort of competing on this, it’s just hard to imagine that it couldn’t ultimately be divisive or difficult for the institution and again while we want to acknowledge differences of opinion, we want to protect those differences. Again, whatever we can do to keep this from being a source of division and more difficulty and more pain for people across the institution is something that has concerned me, has concerned us. I would say at the same time, that thought we have taken an approach of not chartering clubs on either side of this that we’ve tried, some of us have met and asked ourselves, and we need to keep doing this, asked ourselves, okay given this is the approach we are taking what is the most we can do still to provide support. And so, we’ve tried to find ways of doing that and I’m sure none of them are perfect.

We’ve hoped that some of the groups or the clubs that have taken on diversity issues in general would feel the freedom to take on this as one of their issues. But the major risk to us is having a specific group advocating as a stand alone group on this issue because that put us in the greatest risk of being seen as taking an institutional stance on this. Does that make sense? Those are the values we’ve been trying to balance in all of this.

If you listened to this show and would like other parts of the conversation transcripted send and e-mail to jdavis08@gmail.com or post a comment. I will do my best.