[Vision2020] Dear TRACS Officials:

[Nick Gier]

Greetings:

Thank you for posting my evaluation of New St. 
Andrews College.  The text did not come through 
very well on my e-mail, so I will simply post the 
URL: www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/nsaccred.htm.

You can also back off to my entire Doug Wilson 
page at 
www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/Wilson.htm.  And for 
more good stuff on the topic you can visit Tom 
Hansen's website at www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse.

Nick Gier, Proud Intolerista
Intolerance is a virtue if one is intolerant of 
biogtry, discrimination, dishonesty, deception, and bad manners.

:57 AM 1/26/2007, you wrote:

>Author's
>Note: NSA received
>accreditation from TRACS on November 29, 2005. 
>This text has been revised as new
>information has come to light. Even though I 
>clearly marked this letter "private
>and confidential," Dr. Russell Fitzgerald, 
>Executive Editor of TRACS, shared it
>with Roy Atwood, President of New St. Andrews College.
>
>
>
>February 17, 2004
>
>
>
>Transnational Association of
>
>Christian Colleges and Schools
>
>P.O. Box 328
>
>Forest, Virginia 24551
>
>
>
>Private and Confidential
>
>
>
>Dear TRACS Officials:
>
>
>
>I! am writing concerning the accreditation of 
>New St. Andrews College (NSA) in
>Moscow, Idaho. Let me first introduce myself. I just retired from 31 years of
>teaching at the University of Idaho in the Department of Philosophy. For 23
>years I was Coordinator of Religious Studies. In 
>2002-2003 I was President of the
>Pacific Northwest Region of the AAR/SBL/ASOR. My CV can be found at
>
>www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/vitanick.html.
>
>
>
>I have known the principals at NSA--Douglas Wilson, Douglas Jones, and Roy
>Atwood--for many years. Wilson was a philosophy 
>major and took an M.A. from our
>department in 1977. Both Wilson and Jones were lecturers for us for several
>years. I’ve known Atwood since he first came to the University of Idaho,
>where he was a well res! pected administrator and teacher/scholar. Because of
>these close a ssociations I have requested that 
>you keep this letter private and
>confidential.
>
>
>
>In a letter to the Moscow-Pullman Daily News (May 22, 2003),
>Atwood stated that his college was an accredited institution. He stated that
>“we'll inform our national accreditors 
>(<http://www.tracs.org/>www.tracs.org)
>that U. S. Department of Education and the Council for Higher Education
>Accreditation recognition does not constitute 
>'proper accreditation.’” Instead
>of explicitly stating who NSA’s accrediting agency was, he gave readers the
>impression that NSA was accredited by the 
>Department of Education and the CHEA.
>Later in the letter he did spell out the name of a prestigious liberal arts
>agency, one with which he presumably would rather be associated.
>
>
>
>I wrote to Atwood and asked him to clarify his 
>original letter with a follow-up
>letter in ! the newspaper. I also requested that 
>he also state that NSA was only a
>candidate for accreditation, not actually accredited. Atwood declined my
>invitation to set the record straight.
>
>
>
>It has now come to my attention that Greg 
>Dickison, attorney for Christ Church,
>claimed that NSA was accredited at Latah County 
>Board of Equalization hearing in
>April 2003. The result of that hearing was that Christ Church lost its tax
>exemption on two of three parcels of property in 
>downtown Moscow. You can hear
>Dickison's own voice at
>
>http://www.tomandrodna.com/temp/NSA_Accred.mp3.
>
>
>
>Atwood's rebuff led me to do more research about NSA, and if I were on any
>accrediting team, I would be concerned about the following:
>
>
>
>
>·73
>percent of NSA's faculty do not have PhDs. NSA 
>has the resources to hire PhDs.,
>but evidently chooses not to do so. Since the 
>first version of this letter, all
>NSA faculty, except one visiting lecturer, have the masters degree that is
>required by TRACS. However, TRACS does require that the degree be in the
>teaching area, but Ben Merkle's M.A. in English does not qualify him to teach
>Hebrew or theology as he regularly does at NSA.
>
>
>·Of
>special concern is Wilson’s statement that a 
>college degree is not necessary to
>teach in the K-12 schools that his own association accredits. Indeed,
>prospective teachers are warned that a degree 
>from a secular institution might
>place them at a disadvantage.  Until recently NSA was
>listed as an a! ccredited school by Wilson's own Association of Classical
>and Christian Schools.
>
>
>·While
>NSA was a candidate for accreditation, Roy 
>Atwood was giving lectures around the
>country on behalf of TRACS promoting "Trinitarian" accreditation.
>
>
>·Two
>of NSA’s senior fellows, presumably equivalent 
>to full professors, do not have
>PhDs. Generally, a PhD is required at the lowest rank of assistant professor.
>
>
>·Although
>full resumes are not available on NSA’s 
>website, it appears that a majority of
>the facultyâ€! ™s published books are from Canon 
>Press, Wilson’s own creation.
>Atwood has admitted that Wilson’s slavery 
>booklet is not a “scholarly work,” and
>yet it appeared in Canon's Monograph Series, 
>which usually showcases a press’s
>most scholarly work.
>
>
>·Of
>special concern is the fact that Wilson’s 
>brother, his son, and his son-in-law
>are on the NSA faculty.
>
>
>·Wilson
>wrote an article “Why Evangelical Colleges Are Not” in Chronicles
>(September, 1998), the journal of the far right Rockford Institute. The
>hostility displayed against reputable 
>evangelical colleges in this article not
>only shows blatant disrespect for these fine 
>schools, but it manifests shameful
>disregard for the entire academic enterpris! e. 
>Over the 30 plus years I’ve been
>active in the regional American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society for
>Biblical Literature (SBL), I’ve been impressed 
>with the academic progress that
>some regional evangelical schools have made. For our 2003 Moscow meeting 40
>percent of the papers presented came from these outstanding schools.
>
>
>·On
>April 1, 1999 NSA faculty and students were involved in an outrageous April
>Fool’s stunt, complete with stealing UI letterhead and using the English
>department’s FAX line, to announce an alleged UI sponsored lecture entitled
>“Topless and Proud.” Wilson tells us how 
>proud he was of his students' actions:
>“By the time you receive this, our local 
>police will probably have forgotten all
>ab! out it, so a little bragging is now safe, 
>and perhaps it is even in or der. But
>first some background. Our local city council, through a series of ridiculous
>circumstances, decided to quit restricting 
>female toplessness. The noble senior
>editor of this journal [Wilson’s son-in-law], encouraged by some winks and
>nudges from me, not that he needed any, made up a flyer which announced a
>topless and proud lecture series by topless 
>feminist scholars.” See the full
>text at
>
>http://www.credenda.org/issues/11-3meander.php
>and the police report at
>
>http://dougsplotch.com/looter.htm
>at the bottom of the page.
>
>
>·In
>the fall of 2002 I extended a special invitation 
>to NSA students and faculty to
>submit papers to the regional 2003 AAR/SBL 
>meeting in Moscow. Typically, there
>is a large turn out of students and faculty from 
>schools in the vicinity of 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" than to
>attend the meeting.
>
>
>·In
>October, 2003, the existence of Southern Slavery As It Was (Canon ! Press,
>1996) co-authored by Wilson and Steve Wilkins was made know n to the Moscow
>community. It was later discovered that 20 
>percent of text had been lifted from
>Engerman and Fogel's Time on the Cross.
>Wilson first said that proper citation was scrambled in the transmission of
>Wilkins' portions of the text, but Wilkins later admitted to the errors (see
>World magazine, May 1, 2005). A former member
>of Wilson's congregation has looked at two other 
>books written by Wilkins and he
>has found problems there as well. Typically what 
>he found was indented passages
>that are indeed cited, but when one reads the 
>books cited one discovers that, in
>one instance, over 200 words that precede the 
>indented passages are also copied
>from that text. For all the texts in question see
><http://www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/SPW.htm>www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/SPW.htm 
>and
>
>
>www.tomandrodna.com/notonthepalouse/Plagiarism.htm.
>
>
>·Among
>many arresting statements in the slavery booklet 
>is the following: “There has
>never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy
>and harmony in the history of the world" (p. 
>24). The booklet caused an uproar
>in the community, and two UI historians wrote a 
>strongly-worded response to the
>piece. Wilson defended the booklet in the Daily News, saying, among other
>things, that the real issue was gay marriage. 
>(He also reminde! d the community
>that he believed that homosexuals should be execut ed or at least banished.)
>Instead of facing their critics in proper 
>academic exchange, Wilson, Jones, and
>Atwood launched a full scale attack on them and the UI, even to the point of
>asking the Governor to censure the 
>administration and sanction the two history
>professors who wrote the response to the slavery booklet.
>
>·Regrettably,
>the debate over the slavery booklet may have led to vandalism against NSA
>property. Despite the fact that the culprits 
>were not identified, the NSA dean
>and faculty have continued to blame UI 
>administrators, faculty, and students for
>these unfortunate acts.
>
>
>
>
>
>·In
>response to a community petition drive with the title “Not in Our Town,”
>directed against Wilson and his slavery booklet, 
>Ben Merkle, Wilson’s son-in-law
>and NSA instructor, set up a website named 
>Hatesplotch (<http://www.hatesplotch.net/>www.hatesplotch.net)
>on which he and others have posted sarcastic and 
>denigrating remarks about the
>community response to his father-in-law’s 
>views. Ben Merkle and others from NSA
>also launched a rude attack on the UI Office of 
>Diversity and its [former] head
>officer, Raul Sanchez.
>
>
>·Since
>1994 Wilson has sponsored an annual 
>“history” conference held at the University
>of Idaho. The 1994 conference was on slavery and 
>the Wilson/Wilkins booklet was !
>one of the published results. UI faculty were 
>unaware of this conf erence until
>last fall, and now many are quite worried about the impression that their
>university is giving academic respectability to this event.
>
>
>·Steve
>Wilkins and George Grant are regular speakers at 
>Wilson’s annual conferences.
>Grant has a mail order doctorate and Wilkins is a conservative Calvinist
>minister from Louisiana. Grant and Wilkins are promoting the novel Heiland,
>whose hero leads a violent overthrow of a "godless" federal government.
>Heiland has been compared to the Turner Diaries, which inspired the
>bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building. Wilkins wrote a
>blurb on the backcover of book that reads: "Heiland takes us forward into
>the future so that we might remember what we have lost from the past.  It
>is a most urgent! tonic for our sick day."
>
>
>·Wilkins
>is a founding director of the League of the South, which has been declared a
>hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The League has had close ties
>with the 32,000-member Sons of Confederate Veterans, who in 2000 elected Kirk
>Lyons to its national executive board. An 
>outspoken racist, Lyons was married by
>neo-Nazi Richard Butler in 1990, when Butler still had his compound in Hayden
>Lake, Idaho. The League of the South and the Sons of Confederate Veterans
>organize public protests with the Council of 
>Conservative Citizens whose website
>decries "negroes, queers and other retrograde 
>species of humanity." One League
>leader said that we “need a new type of 
>Klan.” (These quotations are taken from
>Intelligence Report [Summer, 2000]).!
>
>
>< span style="font-family: Symbol;">·When
>journalists interviewed Wilson, Grant, and 
>Wilkins in February, 2004, they each
>disavowed any association with these organizations and their beliefs, even
>though Wilson’s school proudly hangs Robert E. 
>Lee's portrait in its classroom
>and has displayed the Confederate flag on social occasions. One conservative
>Christian minister wrote to the Daily News testifying that he saw the
>Confederate flag prominently displayed in 
>Wilson’s office. Wilson attended the
>Fourth Southern Heritage Conference and has written four articles for the
>neo-Confederate journal Chronicles, whose editors have boasted that they
>are all members of the League of the South. The 
>last article appeared together
>with an ad announcing a conference in which 
>Lincoln would be condemned and the
>right of secession would be defended. Wilson 
>also published an essay defendin! g
>the right of succession in his journal Credenda/Agenda. Finally, Wilson
>is contributing editor for The War Between the States: America's Uncivil War
>(Bluebonnet Press, 2005), John J. Dwyer, general editor. Historian Ed
>Sebesta claims that "this book seems to incorporate every 'Lost Cause' and
>modern Neo-Confederate idea."
>
>
>
>In an article in the Spokesman Review (Oct. 22, 
>2006), Wilson confessed that he was a "Paleo-Confederate," just after
>
>
>
>NSA President Roy Atwood said that any connection b!
>  etween NSA and the neo-Confederates was "laughably stupid."
>
>
>
>The distinction Wilson tries to draw between 
>neo- and paleo-confederate is one without a difference. Steve Wilkins,
>
>
>
>Founding Director of the neo-Confederate League 
>of the South, has been keynote speaker at Wilson's Moscow
>
>
>
>conferences for 12 years in a row. Wilson also 
>admitted that Robert E. Lee's portrait and the Confederate flag have
>
>
>
>been displayed in church and school functions, 
>in spite of Logos principal Tom Garfield's claims to the contrary.
>
>
>
>
>As I understand it, the principle of
>academic collegiality is not just an in-house 
>affair, but it should be practiced
>with all colleagues and all academic institutions. Especially disturbing is
>NSA’s decision to criticize the UI, upon which 
>it is dependent for library and
>lab science resources. This attack is especially ironic considering the fact
>that so many NSA faculty have or are finishing UI degrees.
>Nine of the 15 faculty have or expecting UI degrees.
>
>
>
>I trust t! hat you will agree that NSA’s 
>response to this controversy is a very
>disturbing trend for this young college, one 
>that started with so much promise
>and support from the community. In the past I have spoken at NSA’s weekly
>colloquium, and I spent upwards of sixty hours with one NSA student and his
>senior thesis on Buddhism. I personally regret very much this loss of
>collegiality and mutual respect.
>
>
>
>If your policies require that I release this 
>letter for wider validation, I will
>certainly consider that option. But for now please consider these remarks
>private and confidential.
>
>
>
>
>
>  Sincerely,
>
>
>
>  Nicholas F. Gier
>
>  Professor Emeritus
>
>  Department of Philosophy
>
>  University of Idaho
>
>
>
>
>
>
>Juanita Flores
>Advocate for the Truth from Jesus
>
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"Truth is the summit of being; justice is the 
application of it to human affairs."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates 
in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it."
  --Mohandas Gandhi

"Modern physics has taught us that the nature of 
any system cannot be discovered by dividing it 
into its component parts and studying each part 
by itself. . . .We must keep our attention fixed 
on the whole and on the interconnection between 
the parts. The same is true of our intellectual 
life. It is impossible to make a clear cut 
between science, religion, and art. The whole is 
never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." --Max Planck

Nicholas F. Gier
Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Idaho
1037 Colt Rd., Moscow, ID 83843
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/home.htm
208-882-9212/FAX 885-8950
President, Idaho Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO
http://users.adelphia.net/~nickgier/ift.htm

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