[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Bring_Back_Shantz

I find it interesting that a few of you would completely reject a candidate outright based on going to Trinity Western.

Why is that exactly?
Does the school really have that bad of an acedemic record?
Is it simply because it's a "Christian" school?

If they have an accredited biology program, does that not mean it stands up to provincial standards, and thus the religious aspect of the school should be irrelevant?

Trinity Western mandates that every faculty member sign a "Statement of Faith" that effectively prohibits academic freedom at the institution. This is fundamentally at odds with the free discourse and exchange of ideas that should be encouraged at any place of higher learning. Accordingly, I don't take TWU (and its graduates, by extension) seriously.

According to a CAUT report, because TWU—which describes itself as “a faith-based institution, one inspired by Christ’s life and guided by his teachings”—submits its faculty to what CAUT calls a “faith test,” it is violating academic freedom.

The controversial faith test consists of a “Statement of Faith” that professors are required to sign annually and that outlines the “philosophical framework to which all faculty, staff and administration are committed without reservation.” It includes a list of convictions to which professors must assert to subscribe, including belief in the bible, in one infinitely perfect god, that Jesus Christ was a real man, and in “the bodily resurrection of the dead; of the believer to everlasting blessedness and joy with the Lord, of the unbeliever to judgment and everlasting conscious punishment.”

To CAUT, the Statement of Faith clearly demonstrates that TWU does not accept the standard definition of academic freedom. They consider universities to have violated academic freedom if they “seek to ensure an ideologically or religiously homogeneous academic staff,” which clearly includes TWU.

[...]

The academic calendar at TWU goes so far as to reject a definition of academic freedom that denies an established perspective: “Trinity Western University rejects as incompatible with human nature and relevational theism a definition of academic freedom which arbitrarily and exclusively requires pluralism without commitment, denies the existence of any fixed points of reference, maximizes the quest for truth to the extent of assuming it is never knowable, and implies an absolute freedom from moral and religious responsibility to its community.” In other words, the university rejects relativism, which many academics would say is incompatible with the primary role of a university.

[...]

The core issue, according to Turk, is not that Christian beliefs are part of the mission of the university, but that those beliefs appear to come before everything else. The report points to TWU’s own claims of being a “disciple-making academic community” and “an arm of the Church” where “all teaching, learning, thinking, and scholarship take place under the direction of the Bible, the wholly authoritative and truthful Word of God.”

“No university should be the arm of any institution,” Turk said. “A university shouldn’t be the arm of the Church or the arm of state or the arm of a special interest group. The very nature of a university should not be to make disciples.”

http://www.macleans.ca/education/uni...-universities/