[Vision2020] Response to Eric E.

[Nick Gier]

Dear Eric,

       Forgive for being informal, but typing your surname is a lot of 
work.  Before I address your points, I want to remind Wayne and others that 
New St. Andrews College (NSA) is still a "candidate" for accreditation; it 
is not yet accredited by the Transnational Association for Christian 
Colleges and Schools (TRACS).  Presumably, the faculty with Bas/BSs will 
have to get higher degrees before NSA can move to full accreditation, and 
then only with the least prestigious of all accrediting agencies, unless 
you count Wilson's own Association of Classical and Christian Schools.

       Eric, you might have seen a letter to the "Daily News" over a year 
ago in which I compared Logos and NSA students with students in Castro's 
Cuba.  Both students are bright, committed, and well prepared but both are 
also bound by strict ideological guidelines.

       Let me take one NSA student as an example.  He wrote a very 
impressive thesis on Buddhism.  I'm sure that he did not learn any Buddhism 
from his teachers.  (I'm not allowed to release the grade that Doug Wilson 
got in my Buddhism class, but I can say that it was not one of the higher 
ones.)  His knowledge of advanced logic was received from a course at WSU 
or he taught this material himself.  But the crucial point to make is that 
after I wrote a page by page critique of the thesis, the student did not 
make any major changes.  The student later sent me an expanded version of 
the thesis which he submitted as a Master's thesis at Jerry Falwell's 
Liberty University. Assuming that Falwell's faculty would not check the 
thesis very closely, I, once again, went through the text repeating many of 
the same criticisms and mistakes, but once again no concessions, or, 
actually at this point, no response at all.

       This is a familiar pattern and, for Doug Wilson, it started very 
early.  Doug presented a clever paper on the seventh chord in my philosophy 
of arts class in the middle 70s.  A music student offered a substantial 
critique and I expected Doug to respond to the critique in the final draft 
of his paper, but, surprising to me at the time, he did not.  Fast forward 
to Fall, 2003: two UI historians respond to Doug's slavery booklet, and all 
that he does is name call and run to Governor Kempthrone.  I see a rule in 
operation here: once the Holy Spirit has inspired a true Christian essay 
then it stands as whole, complete, and inerrant.

       I have been very active in the Pacific Northwest American Academy of 
Religion and Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL) for 20 years, and I 
was elected president of the region last year.  I have seen increased 
participation on the part of conservative evangelical colleges.  From 
talking to some of their faculty I have learned that their governing boards 
committed themselves to increasing their academic respectability and 
gaining accreditation with reputable associations.  They sent their faculty 
to graduate schools to get their PhDs and over the years most of them 
achieved their goals. For 2003 Moscow AAR/SBL meeting 40 percent of the 
papers presented came from these outstanding schools.

       In the fall of 2002 I extended a special invitation to NSA students 
and faculty to submit papers to this meeting. Typically, there is a large 
turn out of students and faculty from schools that neighbor the sponsoring 
institution.  In a letter to the Moscow Pullman Daily News, I expressed my 
disappointment that not a single NSA student or faculty attended the 
conference.  The accreditation issue then arose in Atwood's response to 
that letter, in which he told the community that NSA had better things to 
do.  In that letter of May 23 Atwood also misled Moscow community by 
disguising his accrediting agency, failing to mention that NSA was only a 
candidate, and implying that NSA was accredited by the Council of Higher 
Education Accreditation and the U. S. Department of Education.

       Eric, I agree with you that many creative and competent people have 
gone far without a degree or a proper credential, but let me offer a 
parallel for you.  Did Bill Gates hire members of his family and other 
uncredentialed people to run MicroSoft?  Of course not.  He has hired the 
best computer programmers and MBAs that he could find on the market.  Yes, 
Jesus did not have any official credentials, but where would Christianity 
be today without credentialed Greek Christian philosophers, ordained 
priests such as Augustine, thoroughly trained theologians such as Aquinas, 
Calvin, and Luther?  We can't turn back Christian history and see how it 
would have turned out without these experts, but I would wager that 
Christianity would not have survived, at least as a world religion.

       The board and faculty of NSA have a clear choice.  It can follow 
time honored procedures of academic collegiality (read: don't diss the UI) 
and academic standards (read: fewer Canon Press publications and more 
PhDs).  Eric, you are right when you say that by hiring "his own entire 
family" brings "more power to him," but an academic institution is not 
about personal power; rather, it's about learning in a open and free 
atmosphere free of religious and political ideology.  I am stunned that you 
think it is OK for Wilson to hire his own family.

       Finally, Eric, your reference to Einstein is not very helpful to 
your case, and ludicrous, if you are implying that Doug Wilson is another 
Einstein.  All of Einstein's work was tested in the open and free arena of 
science.  (Will NSA scientists be doing that soon with regard to 
intelligent design?) What would you think of Einstein starting an institute 
of theoretical physics hiring his own family members and other unqualified 
faculty? He was hired at Princeton because of the fact that his great 
achievements were verified at the highest levels of coherent theory and 
empirical confirmation.  Those who published for Canon Press have not 
passed any of these critical academic tests.

       For my full letter to TRACS see 
www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/nsaccred.htm.  For more on my personal history 
with Doug Wilson see www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/WilsonStory.htm. For more 
on my contributions to the slavery booklet debate see 
www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/slavepage.htm.