Calvin College English professor, Dr. Edward E. Ericson, Jr. has over the years become something of an acknowledged expert on the illustrious modern Russian refugee writer, Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn and has been engaged in an abridgement of his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelego. The August, 1985, Reformed Journal (for which Dr. Ericson is a contributing editor) begins with his remarkably critical article on the leftish political stance that characterizes much of Calvin’s faculty . Dr. Ericson observes that as the once popular “tide of political radicalism” has receded, he has “been surprised to find that old new radicalism surfacing in bits and pieces in–of all places-Christian colleges, conspicuously including” his own. “More than a decade after this ideology has lost its appeal in the academy at large, here we Christians come to it as if it were a new viable intellectual alternative. Today the idea that we should politicize (read radicalize) the curriculum sounds new and daring to some Christian academics. Often I have had secular counterparts let me know, subtly or not, that they considered our Christian colleges to be consistently behind the times. Never did I expect that we would provide them with such clear evidence.”

Among the views which Ericson sees the old left leaders rejecting and Christian colleagues currently embracing , is especially a “self-aggrandizing romance with the corrupt Third World.” While he notes a conspicuous silence about the atrocities occurring in Ethiopia and Afghanistan, he sees campaigning in favor of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (to which, incidentally, the U.S. government had given more aid in 18 months than to Samoza in the previous 20 years). While there is talk of curriculum revision to promote “justice” and “peace,” no one is concerned about freedom. “Next year Calvin College will offer a course in which students are to be taken to Nicaragua. You can be sure that they will meet with persons who blame Central America’s troubles on the United States and justify the activities of Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas. You cannot be sure that they will hear good representatives of some other point of view, though I sincerely hope that they do.” He expresses his apprehensions about the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship‘s projected 1986–1987 study “Toward a Reformed Response to the Conflicts in Central America.” He sees similar potential for “Third Worldist” misrepresentation in a movement to “internationalize the curriculum.” While Dr. Ericson does not question the Christian commitment of his colleagues, he sees their effort to politicize the curriculum as “very damaging” to the mission of the school as a Christian college, as well as to other schools which it influences.

More recently these political sympathies were demonstrated when the September 4 Grand Rapids Press headlined the protest which more than 130 of Calvin’s 250-membcr faculty sent to the South African government against the arrest of Dr. Allan Bocsak because he had called for a march on the jail where convicted Communist terrorist Nelson Mandel a is held . Dr. Bocsak had taught for a time at Calvin College some years ago. (He was released after a brief imprisonment.)