Wheaton College prof fired for converting
A former Wheaton College professor who was fired because he converted to Catholicism found himself this week at the center of a debate about diversity and theological perspectives in private, faith-based schools.
Faculty members at the west suburban evangelical Protestant college must sign a faith statement that the Bible is the final authority. Catholics follow the authority of Scripture and the pope.
Joshua Hochschild, an assistant professor of philosophy at Wheaton College for four years, became a Catholic on Easter 2004. He was dismissed last spring.
"I was sad to be leaving my colleagues and students and an institution I valued very highly," said Hochschild, 33. "But I support in principle the right of the institution to have exclusive hiring policies. Not every institution is a liberal democracy. We both agreed that Wheaton has a right to exclude Catholics if it wants to. We both agree there are significant differences between what a Catholic believes and what a Protestant believes. Our significant difference was over whether the statement of faith was an effective way of implementing a policy of excluding Catholics."
Hochschild now teaches at Mount St. Mary's, a small Catholic college in Emmitsburg, Md., where he lives with his wife and three small children.
Not 'exclusionary'
"Should Wheaton be open to non-Protestant voices? That's a question I find it very difficult to weigh in on," Hochschild said. "The most interesting thing to me is in what sense Protestantism differs from Catholicism, and how hard that is to answer, and also the question of how religious colleges can best maintain their religious identity."
Wheaton College President Duane Litfin described the school as "a voluntary community of people who share a set of convictions, living, working and teaching out of those convictions."
"There is nothing exclusionary about this," Litfin said. "We understand the nature of this kind of institution and what it requires to retain this kind of institution over the longer term."
Litfin, whose 2004 book Conceiving the Christian College details his philosophy, said Wheaton follows a "systemic model where the entire institution, root to branch to leaf, is about that sponsoring religious tradition. If you are going to be that kind of institution, you have to have people there who embody that tradition. The whole institution is a voluntary community that gathers around this core set of values and say, 'This is us. We stand together on these issues.' Our hiring policy says you embody what you stand for. This institution cannot exist without that."
'Umbrella model'
Litfin cited the University of Notre Dame as an example of an "umbrella model." Under the umbrella of a school-sponsored religious tradition are "a variety of voices, a critical mass of people representing the sponsored religious tradition and other voices."
Hochschild, who received his Ph.D. in medieval philosophy from Notre Dame, said he did not consider converting to Catholicism while there. But looking back, he says he was influenced by "seeing in friends their scholarly interests connected to their spiritual lives. At least for certain individuals, their academic work, their scholarly work, was linked with not just theological commitments but a spiritual life."
