Oklahoma College President - "This Is Not A Day Care. This Is A University."

NYDN – An Oklahoma university president has an incendiary message to politically correct students: Grow up or get out.

“This is not a day care,” Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, wrote in a fiery blog post on the school’s website last week.

“This is a university!”

Thanks to a new wave of political protests on college campuses — like the recent upheavals at the University of Missouri, Yale University and Ithaca University — many colleges are scrambling to provide safe spaces and broader discussions about cultural and racial tensions on campus.

Piper is having none of it.

Piper insists the school is “not a ‘safe space,’ but rather, a place to learn….This is a place where you quickly learned that you need to grow up!”

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Boom! Everett Piper (big time name) from the top rope with a Macho Man elbow drop to the throat of PC culture!

Ok, full disclosure, this guy’s past entries are like super anti-gay and anti-transgender and some long ass thing defending Kim Davis, so his blog isn’t exactly going at the top of my Bookmarks. Not really a dude I’d love to grab a drink with/support really anything he does or says – Presidents of private evangelical Christian universities aren’t people I really tend to align with on a lot of social issues.

BUT, I liked his blog post about colleges in 2015!

This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University!
Dr. Everett Piper, President

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love! In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic! Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims! Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience! An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad! It is supposed to make you feel guilty! The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization!

So here’s my advice:

If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking for. If you want to complain about a sermon that makes you feel less than loving for not showing love, this might be the wrong place.

If you’re more interested in playing the “hater” card than you are in confessing your own hate; if you want to arrogantly lecture, rather than humbly learn; if you don’t want to feel guilt in your soul when you are guilty of sin; if you want to be enabled rather than confronted, there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere) that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.

At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered. We are more interested in you practicing personal forgiveness than political revenge. We want you to model interpersonal reconciliation rather than foment personal conflict. We believe the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin. We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty and we don’t issue “trigger warnings” before altar calls.

Oklahoma Wesleyan is not a “safe place”, but rather, a place to learn: to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with you rather than blame others for everything that’s wrong with them. This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up!

This is not a day care. This is a university!

Substitute out all the religious stuff like sermons and verses and altar calls for just overall “free speech on college campuses” and you’ve got a fire rant I can get down with.