Patrick Henry Students Look to Future

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Patrick Henry students look to future

By Shannon Sollinger, Loudoun Times-Mirror (Loudoun, Virginia), June 6, 2006

Most of Adrienne Cumbus' classes at Patrick Henry College next fall will be taught by TBD - To Be Determined.

The Purcellville college has filled two of the positions left vacant by the abrupt resignations of five professors in March, and has applicants for the others, said Patrick Henry spokesman David Halbrook.

But the college is advertising for four more full-time positions, three adjuncts and four distance learning teachers - a big challenge for a college with a student body of just more than 300, and a full-time faculty of 16.

The five resigned - one was fired after he had resigned - in a dispute over what they perceived as encroachments on academic freedom and their objections to micromanaging by school founder and president Michael Farris.

Farris, who will step aside as president and become chancellor July 1, said in a college publication that none of the five was asked to resign. Students report that rehiring contracts were withheld. No faculty at Patrick Henry is tenured.

Academic freedom is alive and well, Farris said, but must be interpreted and exercised within the framework of the school's Christian mission.

An article in the campus newspaper by two professors who resigned suggested that the Bible is not the only source of truth. Christians, they argued, should not hesitate to learn from pagan and pre-Christian thinkers, such as Plato.

Cumbus will start her senior year in the fall, but the faculty upheaval this spring, and its implications for Patrick Henry's future, have her worried. Like most of her classmates, she is taking a wait-and-see attitude and hoping for the best.

"So much of the faculty is going to be new," Cumbus said, "I'll feel like a freshman."

Patrick Henry welcomed its first students in 2000 and graduated its second four-year class in May. Its stated mission is to train "Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture. ..."

To do that, the college promised to deliver a first-class liberal arts education, grounded in the classics - its students call it the Christian Ivy League.

Cumbus chose Patrick Henry, after 12 years of home schooling, because it is a Christian school, but also because it "focuses on rigorous academics. I get Bible school at church. In college, I want to read Plato and Nietzsche and the founding fathers. I am proud of the fact that I have read all the Federalist Papers."

Some returning students fear, she said, that what appears to be a power struggle between faculty and Farris will push the college away from "rigorous academics."

Bible v. academics is a "false dichotomy," Farris said. "The question is not whether we will read from the full range of human knowledge, but whether we will critique from the Bible or not. Those who want to read Nietzsche or Aristotle or Marx or Plato devotionally have come to the wrong place."

Farris said Patrick Henry will continue to teach critical reasoning skills, but "the basis of the critique is the truth of the word of God."

Leeann Walker, one of the few public school graduates at Patrick Henry, hasn't lived on campus since 2004, but even then, she said, there were signs of strain.

The worst that can come, she said, is damage to the image of the school, to be seen as "the Christian school that imploded on itself. Christianity can be positive and proactive. It doesn't have to end in fighting."

Caleb Jones will be back as a junior government major. He is willing to "wait and see. You wouldn't want to leave unless things got absolutely terrible."

From what he's heard, he said, the issue was a clash between academic freedom and who would run the college. "From what I've seen, there were some reasonable questions about academic freedom and they were dire enough for [the professors] to leave.

"But all hope is not lost, even if there was something that went wrong."

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