Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, has a message for his students — “I’m not here to make you feel comfortable. I’m not here to coddle you.”
The author of the newly published “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth,” told CBN News about his viral post that explained his philosophy that universities should not be safe places. The post then led to his book.
It all started in 2015 with an Oklahoma Wesleyan student complaining about a chapel message on the quintessential love passage in 1 Corinthians 13. The student said it made him feel uncomfortable and that the speaker should have given a “trigger warning” before his sermon.
Piper said that although the culture of offense is well established at many secular universities he was shocked to find such a student on his campus. He responded with an op-ed “This is not a Day Care, It’s a University!” that went viral and earned 3 million shares.
It called out the student saying “that feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience” and suggested that the student may want to consider leaving Oklahoma Wesleyan if he didn’t want that type of experience.
Surprisingly, Piper says that 97 percent of the responses he received to his post were positive and many came from the secular world.
Piper says he believes people appreciated that he called out the university system for its stifling culture and policies that encourage group think and suppression at the cost of personal liberties.
“The academy created this monster and it’s turning around to bite us,” Piper told CBN News, “when we stopped teaching objective truths then human freedom and academic liberty was lost at the same time,” he said.
Of course, not everyone appreciated Piper’s outlook. Dr. David Wheeler, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa, called Piper’s post an “opportunistic political stunt to bolster enrollment” and said it showed a “close-minded evangelical college pretending to be above the political fray.”
Piper told CBN News that the suppression of debate on college campuses has allowed transgender activists to trample on women’s rights.
It’s especially difficult, he said, when it comes to compliance with Title IX, the 1972 federal statute that prohibits sex discrimination in education.
“How can I comply with that law if I’m now being told by the Department of Education and the Office of Civil Rights that I must deny the biological fact of the female and give your rights, your shower, your bathroom, your sports, your scholarship to any dysphoric male that raises his hand on a given day and says ‘I’m going to pretend to be a woman,'” Piper said.
Piper said the academic world has capitulated to the transgender lobby and dumbed down the definition of a female.
“We’re pro-science,” he said, “We’re the ones who are saying, ‘we defend biology.'”
