Cancel culture has claimed another victim. Wheaton College, a private liberal arts college in Wheaton, Illinois, has struck off from the library the name of its third president, James Oliver Buswell (1895-1977), a Presbyterian theologian. In an article in the October 18th issue of The College Fix, Mary Grabar comments on the decision.
During his tenure at Wheaton, according to official records, Dr. Buswell “received academic accreditation, upgraded library services, added a substantial number of Ph.D.s to the teaching staff, and launched its first graduate courses.” His crime in 1939, at a time of increasing enrollment at the college: He did not support the co-education of blacks at the institution.
In a letter to a trustee, Buswell said, “ ‘I have no race prejudice in my heart . . . .However, I have felt that for a small Christian school where the social contacts are so close, it would be better to avoid coeducation of the races. I have advised colored students to go to Lincoln Institute, Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky.’”
It reminds me, Dr. Grabar remarked, “of totalitarian efforts to ‘un-person’ those who do not conform all the way to the reigning ideology of the moment. In this case, sadly, the standard against which Oliver Buswell fails is a ‘woke’ version of Christianity.”
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