The College Fix

You’ve probably heard of my alma mater, Seattle Pacific University, because of an on-campus shooting that killed a student in 2014.

Or you read our coverage of the university’s decision to cut the Pledge of Allegiance from its Veterans Day chapel service the following year (quickly reversed) because it made some people “uncomfortable.”

Like many SPU graduates I know, I have mixed feelings about this evangelical Christian school that leans heavily on social-justice rhetoric. It vacuums up donations from a conservative alumni population while employing professors and bureaucrats that sound and act the same as those on any secular leftist campus.

Precisely because SPU sounds so much like any other school that replaced God with diversity and inclusion, the administration has long struggled with how to handle its increasingly vocal LGBTQ student activists.

But it has something new in common with this restive campus population: changing its identity without changing anything objectively measurable.

The university announced a “rebrand” last week that will replace its distinctive torch logo with something that looks plagiarized from Hasbro’s Transformers.

More importantly, it will start peddling some alternative facts about its academic quality.

MORE: LGBTQ students demand SPU celebrate ‘panromantic’ identity

Let’s get one thing straight: SPU has many “distinctives,” but “rigorous academics” is not one of them.

It will let in just about any applicant, according to U.S. News rankings. Its tolerance for mediocrity is as deep and wide as God’s love.

I personally experienced this in multiple classes where students struggled mightily to comprehend content that was less challenging than my (public) high school offered.

I got a panicked call one night when I missed a study group: My peers didn’t know how to do it without me. The only challenging class of my time there was taught by a Chinese immigrant adjunct professor, who apparently never got the Jesus-loves-grade-inflation memo.

The lack of challenge from my classes was precisely why I took up writing for the school paper, which dominated most of my college career. I used my mighty pen at one point to encourage SPU to improve its conventional diversity by appealing to students of color with academic rigor.

Instead, it indulged in big-money identity politics.

MORE: SPU reinstates Pledge without admitting it was cut

It’s a bigger leap of faith to claim that SPU’s academics have improved in the past two decades than that a Jewish carpenter rose from the grave.

That’s not to say that SPU doesn’t have many intelligent and ambitious students, or worthwhile programs (for all I know, the STEM fields are great). “Rigorous academics” is simply not a reason anyone comes to SPU.

The administration surely knows this, but it also knows that in our post-truth society, where large chunks of self-professing Christians either worship the president or the Resistance, no one is going to call them out on this fiction. Everybody else is adopting identities in direct opposition to their objective selves, after all.

Men want to be treated as women, white women can “self-identify” as nonwhite (well, not all of them) … and now academically middling universities suddenly insist they are known for their “rigor.”

The truth will set you free, but as SPU has learned by now, it’s bad for marketing.

MORE: SPU caves to demands for microaggression reporting system

IMAGE: Seattle Pacific University

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