Last weekend, “concerned alumni” wrote a public letter addressed to the members of the Wheaton College Board of Trustees titled “For Wheaton” (FW). Any students, alumni or their family and friends can sign. Their main complaint: “That Wheaton has repeatedly capitulated to the spirit of our age — placating bad actors while sidelining those who bear a more faithful witness.”
At the time of this publication, there are over 1,700 signatures.
“Alumni have noticed drift, and we feel a moral duty on behalf of parents and prospective students to speak out,” Daniel Davis ‘14 told the Record in an interview. Davis recently wrote a controversial article in the First Things Magazine about Wheaton’s Facebook post regarding Russell Vought’s appointment to the White House Office of Budget and Management.
Signees are committing to do one or more of the following actions: cease supporting the college financially, decline to recommend Wheaton to prospective students and their parents and share examples of institutional drift both publicly and privately. They have promised to do this until “significant changes” have been made according to the five priorities that they outline in their letter. Their requests include a change in college leadership, “an end to the current DEI regime” and audits on faculty and staff’s commitment to the Wheaton College Community Covenant, among other calls to action.
Mason Laney ’23, a former student body vice president, characterized the document as an attempt by hundreds of Wheaton alumni to love the school well.
“When I was at Wheaton, I learned that loving someone meant trying, even if you might fail, to persuade them of the good. We often do that imperfectly, but it’s unloving to not try,” he said.
Laney, like many others, signed the letter “because we all agree that Wheaton College is worth fighting for and because, in the truest sense, we love Wheaton.”
Others talked about feeling underrepresented in expressing more conservative views or “villainized” for doing so. “I signed this because in my own time at Wheaton,” Olivia Issakainen ’24 said, “I had always felt as though there was an unfair balance of power of speech amongst those who shared leftist views on campus.”
The document starts with a rhetorical question by a former philosophy professor, Arthur Holmes, at a school chapel service. “What kind of person are you becoming?” he asked. The letter then continues to cite the Statement of Faith, expressing that their concern is not with the formal beliefs of the college but rather its practice of them.
The letter concludes with a request for alumni to meet with members of the current administration and a promise for a signatory to schedule time to speak.
Faith Hollister, a junior political science major, said that signers of the “For Wheaton” letter are “attempting to strong-arm the college to bow to donor pressure rather than to biblical convictions.” In interviews with student signees, this was the most frequent critique. Many also said they find it “shocking” that the document did not include any biblical citations.
Joe Moore, chief marketing communications officer, and President Philip Ryken could not be reached for comment.
A public satirical response to the letter, titled “Faux Wheaton,” debuted recently, and it is also receiving signatures. “Faux Wheaton” responds to several specific points made by the “For Wheaton” letter, including arguments about DEI. “Diversity, equity and inclusion have absolutely no place in a school founded by abolitionists,” writes the anonymous author of “Faux Wheaton.” It also contains a data page about the signatories of the “For Wheaton” letter.
“For Wheaton” comes just one week after an open letter, now signed by more than 1,500 alumni at the time of this publication, was published to oppose Wheaton’s Facebook post congratulating Russell Vought, co-author of Project 2025, on his appointment to the White House Office of Budget and Management. Following the publication of the “For Wheaton” letter, the authors of the first open letter have changed their document to allow current students to sign.
