GCU dean asked faculty to share video with prof’s Black Lives Matter remarks

After 2016 footage of a theology professor saying some Black Lives Matter members “should be hung” surfaced last month, Grand Canyon University said theology-school leaders had addressed the “reprehensible” language with the professor immediately after it occurred.

Yet 11 days after the Sept. 19 schoolsponsored forum, College of Theology Dean Jason Hiles encouraged more than 40 faculty members to distribute a video of the event without mentioning the controversial remarks, according to an email obtained this week by The Arizona Republic.

“Please share with your classes as appropriate,” Hiles wrote in the email, which one former and two current GCU faculty members verified as authentic. “I will watch Twitter closely to see if the #blacklivesmattertoo begins to trend. If not, I’ll know you haven’t promoted this video adequately. (Just joking :) ).”

The hashtag refers to the clarification, made at the forum, that black lives matter in addition to, not instead of, other lives.

Despite internal promotion of the video, top-level officials with the private Christian school said they were unaware of professor Toby Jennings’ “offensive” remarks until local NAACP and Black Lives Matter leaders contacted them two weeks ago.

They have placed Jennings on administrative leave and started an investigation into the incident.

GCU declined to comment on the email Friday.

Jennings was one of four professors who spoke at the Sept. 19, 2016, “Ministry Forum,” which explored how to apply justice from a biblical perspective in modern society. He’d started working at GCU about a month before the forum, the university said.

About an hour into the discussion, an audience member requested panelists’ thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement, according to footage of the forum. GCU said it left the video online “to be completely transparent.”

Jennings responded by stressing that the movement was “not a monolith,” deeming some Black Lives Matter members “very thoughtful” and “very gracious and discerning” before saying there are “people on the opposite extreme of that that, frankly, should be hung.”

“Yes, I did say that on video,” Jennings continued. “They are saying things that are not helpful to any way, shape or form of human dignity or flourishing. That is not helpful to any conversation. That kind of rhetoric is not helpful to any conversation.

“And that’s what I mean by (saying) they should be hung.”

A GCU News Bureau write-up of the forum, published the day after the panel discussion, glossed over Jennings’ comments.

“Jennings, who is African-American, also brought an interesting perspective to the topic that dominated the final 15 minutes of the forum: the Black Lives Matter movement,” the report said. “He emphasized that even people within a particular group can have widely different views, and his experience is that he never has been racially profiled.”

Hiles, in an apology issued Aug. 22, accepted full responsibility “for failing to adequately address comments which clearly have no place in civil public discourse.”

“These comments were entirely inappropriate, inexcusable, and out of line with the University’s views on racial issues and the Black Lives Matter movement,” he said.

“While I addressed the comments directly with the professor after the event,” he said, “in retrospect I believe that an immediate, public refutation of the comments would have provided greater clarity to the 85 faculty and students in attendance and the 199 or so who have viewed the video since.”

Jennings, on leave until at least the end of the semester, said he “deeply and sincerely” regretted using “such ill-motivated rhetoric — particularly in light of our nation’s present rhetoric-saturated distress.”

“While words, once spoken, can never be taken back, my hope is that my sincere apology for my own words can pave a more gracious path toward reconciliation,” he said in his public apology.

Black Lives Matter and other community leaders criticized GCU’s response to Jennings’ remarks as “flaccid,” demanding the school fire Jennings and make a “substantive change” to its campus culture.

They believe allowing Jennings to keep his position is another sign the university allows “anti-blackness to flourish.”

University President Brian Mueller pushed back on that claim at a GCU chapel service Monday, saying Jennings’ comments were “destructive,” but activists charging GCU with deep-seated racism were “wrong, too.”

“(Jennings’) comment was incredibly misplaced and wrong,” Mueller said, “given slavery and Jim Crow law and the lynchings of black men and women that took place in this country.”

Local Black Lives Matter members were justified in being “very angry” once the video emerged, he said.

Still, the racism charge “really hurts,” Mueller said, stressing the university’s dedication to its students and the surrounding community.

“We have thousands of students who have God in them, and God is using them in very powerful ways on this campus and in this neighborhood,” he told GCU staff and students at the chapel service. “This is a community of believers that God is working in, and as a result of that, there is nothing that God can’t do through us.”