In a favorite photo of mine, I stand grinning with my arm around my college’s mascot, Rocky the Golden Eagle. The photo was taken in 2009 when I first arrived at Cornerstone University’s campus in Grand Rapids, Mich. Looking at the photo now, I can’t help but think how naïve I was about the school’s theology and politics. By the time I graduated in 2013, I was well-versed in the school’s theological and political commitments, and I determined that my politics and theology would develop in a different direction.
Since graduating, I’ve largely tried to ignore all things related to Cornerstone. Whenever I would hear news about the school — whether it involved limiting intellectual freedom, disassembling the humanities department, or dismissing employees deemed to be insufficiently conservative or supportive of the president — it only served to confirm my ignorance-is-bliss approach. For a long time, whenever I was confronted with the fact that Cornerstone had only become more restrictive since I graduated, what came to mind was the first half of a quote from the writer James Baldwin: “Not everything that is faced can be changed …”
In the autumn of 2023, I unexpectedly ran into a Cornerstone alumnus at a bar. I cursed myself in disbelief as we’d not seen one another since graduation. We sat down together, drank our beers, and jokingly debated whether it was more surprising that we reconnected or that here we were doing something that would’ve previously resulted in our suspension. Suddenly, he got serious.
“Emily died,” he said.
I was shocked. We’d both known Emily from Cornerstone. She studied English literature and poetry, and I’d always admired how self-possessed she was, especially considering the school’s emphasis on conservative gender roles. Before parting ways, I shared a story from my senior year about Emily inspiring me to write. We toasted to her life.
Lying in my bed that night, I realized I’d foolishly hoped that ignoring Cornerstone would eventually make it disappear. But neither Cornerstone nor the politics surrounding it had disappeared. In fact, since I’d graduated, the school, like American Christianity as a whole, had become deeply aligned with a political movement attempting to impose ideological conformity and snuff out dissent on both a local and national level, all in a bid to increase its access to power.
I returned to Baldwin’s quote about change from his 1962 essay, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” but remembered the quote in full: “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
To paraphrase Baldwin, my dungeon shook as the chiasmus rang through my head with more fury than the bell Cornerstone students would ring to announce they had gotten engaged. As a student, I remember feeling that the school’s leadership sought to encourage political uniformity by punishing dissent and limiting intellectual freedom. That night, lying in my bed, it seemed the situation at Cornerstone was largely unchanged and, worse still, I had a sinking feeling that the country was headed in a similar direction. It’s in times like these, when the injustices feel insurmountable, that we must do what is minimally required: We must face things as they are.
In that same essay, Baldwin says that writers “utilize the particular in order to reveal something much larger and heavier than any particular can be.”
After facing Cornerstone, I realized that the particular situation of my alma mater, although just one obscure Christian college, revealed larger issues the U.S. currently faces. The executive branch’s blitz on intellectual freedom and its punishment of those it labels as political enemies is not a novel strategy, but a blueprint that has often been utilized in churches, Christian organizations, and Christian colleges. Whether in these smaller contexts or the larger context of our national politics, this strategy seeks to outrightly silence dissent and instill a sinking feeling that even if you do speak out, nothing will change.
‘The school I always hoped it would be’
In May 2024, Richard Koole, chair of Cornerstone’s board of trustees, spoke to the graduating class of 2024. Koole, a 1970 alumnus who has served on the board since 2012, explained that Cornerstone’s founder, W. Wilbert Welch, had charged him to ensure Cornerstone remained a “Christ-honored, conservative college.”
“That was 56 years ago,” Koole remembered. “We have been so delighted with our new president as we look at how he is transforming the school, and we look to the future.”
Koole then clued the audience in on what he told the school’s president, Gerson Moreno-Riaño, the day prior: “Cornerstone is becoming the school I always hoped it would be, and I’m delighted.”
But not everyone shares Koole’s delight.
In May 2024, I spoke with former Cornerstone philosophy professor Matt Bonzo, who taught at the school for 26 years. Bonzo noted how Cornerstone’s previous president, Joseph M. Stowell, who led the school from 2008-2021, had still encouraged faculty to discuss and explore issues of justice and secular society, even as he remained committed to the school’s conservative policies and identity. (Stowell, it should be noted, possessed unimpeachable conservative bona fides, including degrees from Cedarville University and Dallas Theological Seminary, plus his previous role as president of Moody Bible Institute.)
During my time at Cornerstone, the school’s conservative identity was never in doubt. I remember speakers at our mandatory chapel saying that the United States was a Christian nation and professors naming marriage equality as an example of Christian persecution. Still, the school did allow for some intellectual leeway in certain areas, like believing in theistic evolution. Or if you held the belief that Christianity and social justice were compatible, you’d be looked at askance, but good faith engagement was still possible.
But when Moreno-Riaño became Cornerstone’s president in 2021, faculty immediately noticed a shift in campus culture.
In an interview published in October 2024 by the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, Moreno-Riaño spoke with Paul Davis, the president of the ABWE, about his tenure at Cornerstone thus far, telling Davis that in his first two months as president, he felt “some at the institution” wanted him to leave. “There was a vote of no confidence and really, frankly, a smear campaign in various places. It was just not pretty,” Moreno-Riaño told Davis.
As Kathryn Post reported for Religion News Service in October 2021, Cornerstone’s faculty issued a 42-6 vote of no confidence the day before Moreno-Riaño’s inauguration, with 14 abstaining. Faculty members said that Moreno-Riaño had criticized the previous administration for being financially incompetent and allowing Cornerstone to drift from its mission. According to documents shared with RNS, faculty alleged that shortly after Moreno-Riaño’s appointment in May 2021, he began firing employees without warning or explanation and worked to impose a strict ideology throughout campus: censoring racial justice language in the curriculum and thereby severely limiting free inquiry.
When faculty and staff raised these concerns with the board, the board responded by doubling down in its support of Moreno-Riaño. In December 2021, Post reported for RNS that Moreno-Riaño, who previously served as an executive at Regent University in Virginia, faced similar accusations and complaints from his former Regent colleagues.
Cornerstone declined to make representatives available to be interviewed for this story. Moreno-Riaño and Koole did not respond to requests for comment.
Loyalty oaths to the president
Julia Petersen arrived at Cornerstone in 2019 as the assistant professor of creativity and innovation but left her tenure track position in 2022. During a phone interview in February 2024, Petersen told me that she had come to this decision after feeling that the board was consistently ignoring faculty’s testimony about Moreno-Riaño’s character and his curtailment of intellectual freedom. “Giving up that job was a hard decision,” Petersen told me. “But I just realized I couldn’t be part of an institution where the board wouldn’t listen to its faculty and the concerns they were raising.”
In my conversations with two former Cornerstone faculty members, they alleged that they had been asked to sign an oath of loyalty to Moreno-Riaño and all his policies.
Evangelical institutions have often used loyalty oaths, and sometimes even statements of faith, to stymie diverging opinions or critical feedback and inquiry. These institutions have also been known to utilize non-disclosure agreements or intimidation tactics to prevent internal and external criticism regarding abuse or financial decisions.
Bonzo, the former philosophy professor, alleges that he was pushed out after refusing to sign the oath. Reflecting on what he sees happening at Cornerstone and within the broader evangelical movement, Bonzo told me that there seems to be a prevailing approach among evangelicals to rely on a “hierarchy of power” to police its theological and political borders. “Anybody outside that border has to be identified as an enemy.”
During a phone interview in May 2024, I spoke with Cam Lewis, a 2013 Cornerstone graduate who had been an assistant professor of film and video production at the school since 2020. Lewis resigned from his teaching position at the end of the spring 2024 semester and told me that a major factor in his resignation was the administration asking for oaths of loyalty to the president and all his policies during the 2023 fall semester. According to Lewis, resistance from faculty led the administration to retract the oath and claim via email the whole situation had been a misunderstanding. Months before he resigned, Lewis emailed the dean to suggest that the vice president of academics and Moreno-Riaño offer personal apologies to the faculty.
“I never got a response,” Lewis told me.
Christian colleges drift to the Right
Since Moreno-Riaño’s arrival in 2021, more than 150 employees have left Cornerstone, according to RNS. In June 2024, after Cornerstone made drastic cuts to its humanities department, current and former students voiced concern about the direction of the school.
In 2013, Cedarville University, which was already in the early stages of a strategic drift further toward the Right, decided to curtail the humanities department by eliminating its philosophy major. In 2020, while at Liberty University, then-president Jerry Falwell Jr. was criticized for dissolving the school’s philosophy department and using millions of dollars in school funds to promote Republican causes.
To better understand the general trend of Christian institutions shifting to the Right and the specific example of Cornerstone, I spoke with Rick Ostrander, who leads the Michigan Christian Study Center in Ann Arbor. His latest book, Academically Speaking, chronicles his more than 30 years of experience in Christian higher education both as a professor of history and an administrator. Six of those years were spent as the provost at Cornerstone.
When we spoke on the phone in May 2024, Ostrander explained that he arrived at Cornerstone during a tumultuous time. Although Cornerstone had recently appointed the charismatic Stowell as president in 2008, the faculty’s trust in the administration had been damaged by previous president Rex M. Rogers’ elimination of tenure. When Ostrander arrived in 2009, he resolved to restore this strained relationship by communicating with faculty, reinstating tenure, and establishing a culture of intellectual freedom where faculty could, to a degree, challenge conservative evangelical values like young earth creationism.
“I feel like we made some good progress on a number of fronts — both academically and also institutionally — by creating greater stability in terms of institutional culture and finances,” Ostrander told me.
Ostrander explained that for Christian colleges like Cornerstone, academic pursuits have typically paled in comparison to the preservation of evangelical values. In the early-to-mid-20th century, conservative evangelicals founded Cornerstone and similar Christian colleges as a reaction against the secularization of U.S. higher education, part of a larger trend of Protestant institution-building.
When I asked Ostrander what he thought the motivation was for hiring Moreno-Riaño, he granted that politics possibly played a role, but he also insisted that other factors were likely more significant. “At Regent, while Moreno-Riaño was [there], enrollment had supposedly doubled. Maybe there was a sense of, ‘Oh, he’s done great things at Regent in terms of building enrollment, and he’ll do that here.’ That makes for an attractive president.”
I think it is correct to say that a major motivation for Christian colleges is enrollment. But what also must be considered are the political pressures many of these schools face when they are accused of drifting away from “traditional” values, such as marriage being reserved for heterosexual relationships. When “mission drift” at Christian colleges occurs, conservative constituents often push back, warning against secularization or how such a drift might impact enrollment. Mirroring the Republican Party’s “war on woke,” many Christian colleges are seeking to prevent this drift by reasserting a singular commitment to traditional values, cracking down on intellectual freedom, and enforcing political dogmatism.
Repressing dissent and boosting enrollment
Even if you, like me, have legitimate criticisms of “wokeness,” popular opposition to “wokeness” is typically cynical and offers a clear example of how Christian colleges and conservative politics often work in tandem. It’s important to underline that this opposition isn’t just political or theological theater. Instead, there is a material motivation behind this opposition and, for many conservative Christian colleges, it has proven to be a major strategy for boosting enrollment and maintaining financial stability.
In a 2021 report for The Detroit Free Press, David Jesse noted how small, conservative Christian colleges were growing. Cedarville University, which has been moving further toward the Right for more than a decade, experienced a 25% increase in enrollment between 2010-2020, according to federal data. In fall 2024, Cedarville reported its largest freshman class in school history, welcoming 1,176 new students to its campus.
In February 2024, Moreno-Riaño told WOOD TV8 reporter Madalyn Buursma that after a decade of decline, Cornerstone was celebrating an 82% increase in new student enrollment over the previous spring and that during the 2023 fall semester, Cornerstone saw a 260% increase in its online program for new adult students. Moreno-Riaño attributed this enrollment boom to Cornerstone’s emphasis on its mission as a faith-based Christian university, its focus on student experience, and the growth of new programs such as nursing.
But another way Cornerstone is attempting to increase enrollment reveals the depth of its alliance with conservative politics. Cornerstone’s President’s Fellows program and scholarship awards $10,000 academic scholarships to students who are then paired with a university-approved mentor who is a “distinguished, recognized, and proven industry [leader].” One of these mentors is right-wing commentator and activist Tudor Dixon, who spread falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election before her defeat in Michigan’s 2022 gubernatorial race.
In May 2024, Moreno-Riaño appeared on Dixon’s podcast. During the conversation, Moreno-Riaño criticized college students throughout the U.S., including those who were protesting Israel’s violence against Palestinians, accusing them of creating a climate of political intolerance. Moreno-Riaño attributed the absence of any such dissent on Cornerstone’s campus to moral leadership. Of course, it may be a mistake to credit moral leadership for something that can more easily be explained by leadership creating a culture where dissent is impermissible.
Students, alumni, and current and former faculty’s concerns have not moved the board. In July 2024, the trustees wrote a letter to the school’s alumni, arguing that the school needed to maintain its conservative identity and grow enrollment as Christian colleges and universities continue to struggle financially and shutter around the country. (According to Cornerstone’s 990 forms, the university’s annual net income has declined since 2022, with the university reporting a net income of -$1.69 million in 2024.)
To date, neither Cornerstone’s board nor its senior leadership has publicly commented on the more existential threat endangering all of the nation’s universities as well as the nation itself: The Trump administration’s attempts to limit independent thought and political dissent by punishing people and institutions critical of President Donald Trump, the administration, or its policies.
Cornerstone’s foundation: vanquishing radicals and sophisticated skeptics
In March, Jason Stanley, who is a philosopher and expert on authoritarian politics, announced his intentions to leave his tenure position at Yale University and accept a position at the University of Toronto due to his growing concern over the United States’ descent into what he describes as a “fascist dictatorship.” Specifically, Stanley sees the Trump administration’s withholding of federal funds from universities as an effort to dictate what can or cannot be taught, and he sees its targeting of students and faculty who disagree with the administration’s ideology or policies as a direct attack on democracy.
From the perspective of Trump and the Right, radical activism and anti-conservative discrimination plague universities.
In May 2024, at a campaign rally in Waukesha, Wis., Trump decried campus demonstrators advocating for Palestinian human rights as “radical extremists and far-left agitators” who were “terrorizing” college campuses. Trump called on every university president to “vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students.”
The Trump administration has used a veneer of morality to explain its crusade against universities, justifying its repressive tactics as necessary in order to fight antisemitism and protect civil rights. While combating antisemitism and protecting civil rights are, undoubtedly, morally necessary actions, critics have observed that the administration appears to be exploiting the real issue of rising antisemitism to curtail freedom of speech and political dissent. Those individuals or institutions that question or criticize the administration for this approach are labeled as radical activists who must be vanquished.
Moreno-Riaño, too, has disparaged colleges and universities for “preparing students to be radical activists.” In a July 2024 opinion piece for Fox News, Moreno-Riaño said that “Students are duped into believing that radical activism adds value to their own life and to society when in fact it is the opposite. Such pursuits rob from students the exercise of their productive full potential, thus undermining their good as well as that of all society.”
In a podcast interview published in March by Main Street Matters, Moreno-Riaño reiterated this point to host Jordan Bruno, saying that in past decades, education “has become much more about either indoctrinating students, whether it’s K-12 or colleges, or pushing what I call skepticism, not the beautiful, the true, and the good. You have students graduating K-12 or colleges who, quite frankly, are what I call sophisticated skeptics.”
The American Right displays many hallmarks of authoritarianism: They oppose dissent, associate skepticism with radicalism, and suggest that activists undermine the good of society. Some Americans see this and are fearful of the repercussions for contradicting or critiquing a leader or the ruling party. Other Americans see this and determine that, even if they did speak out, they lack the agency to make any significant changes. As Stanley told journalist Chris Hedges during an interview in March, authoritarians “want to remove agency from people.” Either way, free speech is chilled.
I’ve noticed some of this chilling effect in the past year as I’ve reached out to folks to talk about what’s happening at Cornerstone. While it hasn’t been challenging to find people who have something to say about the university, its senior leadership, and the board, many people I’ve talked with don’t want to talk on the record because they fear if they speak out, Cornerstone will take action against them. Some declined to speak on the record because they believed what they had to say wouldn’t make a difference or that it was too late for anything to change.
I think that many people in the United States feel a similar disinclination to speak out — to turn and face our country. Some of us are afraid of what might happen if we do; others of us remain silent because we have accepted the lie that our agency can be taken away from us, that nothing changes.
The three former Cornerstone faculty members who spoke with me on the record for this story have retained their agency and the radical conviction that nothing can be changed until it is faced.
“Why do I want to speak up? I think it’s important that stories are told that are truthful,” Petersen told me last February. “I think what happened at Cornerstone is quite tragic. Because there was a lot of good happening at Cornerstone, and there probably still is.”
“In the better moments,” Lewis said, “my prayer and hope is that by speaking up change can happen, and that Cornerstone can return to the trajectory it seemed like it was on. One where it can be that beautiful vision of a Christian liberal arts community.”
Bonzo offered an Augustinian reflection: “As you look at history, God is always at work in history and his sovereignty has the ability to somehow pull all this brokenness together.”
***
Lately, when thinking about Cornerstone, I keep returning to a memory from my senior year.
I had one last paper I needed to submit and I knew that I could seek writing help from peers at the Miller Library. Emily offered her assistance.
I’m sure I reeked with all the desperation of a soon-to-graduate senior as I surrendered my draft to Emily for review. I don’t remember much of what I wrote, but I do remember telling her that it was in rough shape and all I needed was to receive a passing grade so that I could just leave.
She asked me why I was so eager to escape. While she edited my paper, I rattled off a litany of reasons that climaxed with my belief that Cornerstone would never change. I began explaining how I viewed my time at Cornerstone as a net negative. She cut in, “I never took you to be a pessimist. Was there nothing positive from the past four years?”
Of course there were positives. I told her that I’d always look fondly on certain Cornerstone memories: streaking around Crawford apartments at midnight during the Groundhog’s Day blizzard; that time a friend and I almost got expelled after it was discovered we’d created a fake social media page for Stowell; debates about theology and philosophy during a humanities class that made us feel like we were Paul at the Areopagus in Athens; the deep human intimacy that came when singing Timothy James Meaney’s “The Benediction” to close chapel while holding a neighbor’s hand and then lifting them in unison during an a cappella chorus.
She showed a slight smirk. “See, not all bad.” Then she placed my paper on the table, and I looked to see that it was red with corrections and edits in the margin. I raised my eyebrows toward it. Emily covered the paper with one hand and stared at me.
“Keep writing,” she commanded. “I hope that you’ll write about Cornerstone one day.”