Just Curious

Underlying conflicts in values between Friends schools and their Yearly Meetings

From a very early period, Friends have been very careful in providing a "guarded" education for their youths. They achieved this mainly through the setting up of special schools for Quakers. These schools include many famous colleges in N. America like Swarthmore, Haverford and Earlham, as well as high schools like Sidwell Friends in D.C..

In recent years, many of these schools have faced charges from the Quaker Yearly Meeting they are affiliated to for being too secular and un-Christian. There is not one Quaker theologian at Swarthmore and Haverford, for instance. The conflict is more pronounced in mid-western colleges like Earlham, where the Yearly Meetings are substantially more orthodoxly Christian and conservative than their east-coast counterparts.

It has been many years since the Indiana and Western Yearly Meetings, to which Earlham is "under the care of" (Quaker term for "affiliated to") first started to accuse the College for being a bastion of radical secularism and a breeding ground of young liberals. This is understandable: Among the 10-12% of Quaker students present at Earlham, only 1% are from Indiana or Illinois, with the majority from liberal east-coast Quaker families. And when these east-coasters started to protest about gay-rights, it is only natural that your God-fearing mid-western Quaker elders shall quake in disgust and anger.

Finally, a joint commission was appointed by the two Yearly Meetings to inspect the College and to submit a report to the two august bodies. Before they do so, the commission first drafted a list of core values they believe the College should uphold. Similarly a committee was appointed by Earlham to identify its own concerns. By a glimpse at the list one immediately sense the culture wars at work:

http://www.fum.org/QL/issues/9811/values.htm

The net result? Earlham eventually hired a number of high-profile Friends from the evangelical tradition to serve in its key positions. For the time being, the fury of the Meetings are quenched, for miraculously no one in the Meetings complain about "liberalism" anymore by 2000.

posted by James Chang @ 7:59 PM