Larycia Hawkins, a political science professor at Wheaton College, announced on Facebook last week that she would wear a hijab during the Christian Advent as an act of solidarity with Muslims. Now Hawkins, a tenured professor, has been suspended—not for wearing the veil, but for suggesting that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
According to Wheaton College, this was Hawkins’s offending statement (emphasis added):
I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.
And so Hawkins was put on administrative leave for raising “significant questions regarding the theological implications of statements that [Hawkins] has made about the relationship of Christianity to Islam.”
Wheaton College, which requires faculty to affirm a statement of faith, is a private institution, and so all of this is perfectly legal. But if you’re freaking out about campus censorship, this may be a better place to focus on than Yale.