By Noelle Worley, Former Co-Editor-in-Chief
Ten years ago, Larycia Hawkins logged on to her Facebook account, just like millions of Americans do every day.
She posted a photo with a lengthy caption. In the third paragraph, 5 words would change her life.
“We worship the same God.”
At the time, Hawkins was a beloved political science professor at Wheaton College and the first Black woman there to earn tenure. Two months after her Facebook post, she was no longer working there.
Donna Struthers is the office coordinator at Wheaton’s Department of Political Science and International Relations, where Hawkins once worked. Struthers and her husband, a professor of psychology, were some of the friends who helped Hawkins move out of her office in early 2016. Since that time, there is one summary phrase from a colleague that stuck with her.
“People at Wheaton felt like they were a family, and this felt like a divorce.”
Now, 10 years later, the Wheaton students, faculty and staff of the time still grapple with what happened and what it has meant for evangelicalism.
Karly Darland was in Hawkins’ senior seminar class in the fall of 2015 to capstone her political science degree at Wheaton. Just before Thanksgiving break, Darland sent Hawkins an email about a movement of non-Muslims in Australia who were choosing to wear a hijab in solidarity with Muslim women facing discrimination for their religious beliefs and apparel.
Darland proposed that she and others do the same. She hoped to see a movement of women, and especially college students, wearing headscarves on their flights home for winter break.
Similar protests took place across the United States in early December. One of the most notable of these expressions in Illinois happened at Vernon Hills High School, 33 miles north of Wheaton.
Around the same time, the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump first began advocating for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.,” in response to a shooting in San Bernardino, Calif.
Before publicly wearing a hijab, Hawkins reportedly called colleagues at the Council of American Muslim Relations (CAIR) in Chicago to ensure that her student’s proposal would communicate the intended message of support and solidarity. She was assured that the community at CAIR and beyond would largely welcome the gesture of solidarity with Muslims experiencing impacts of Islamophobia.
That call has stuck with Darland.
“Dr. Hawkins shared the gospel as a Black woman in solidarity with Muslim women, rather than sharing the gospel in a way that sounded like a white man, continues to reorient and disrupt my relationship with white evangelicalism,” she said.
On the evening of Thursday, Dec. 10, Hawkins took a few selfies in the purple headscarf that she planned to wear until Christmas and posted them alongside a few paragraphs that explained how wearing a hijab during Advent was a practice that reminded her of Christ’s embodied solidarity with human suffering through the incarnation.
“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”
The post quickly went viral, and the school began receiving calls and messages from alumni, parents and donors, who were concerned about the theological implications of Hawkins’ lengthy caption.
In a later press conference in Wheaton’s Wade Center on Dec. 16, Hawkins explained why she was standing before them, a professing Christian, hair wrapped in a purple scarf.
“This Advent, I’m standing with my Muslim neighbors out of my love for Jesus and the love I believe He has for the world,” she said. “Here in Illinois and throughout the U.S., other followers of Jesus have shown that the loud anti-muslim voices we hear in the media do not speak for all American Christians.”
The next day, Leah Anderson, chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations (PSIR), was asked about the post. While she thought that some might disagree with Hawkins, it was not clear to her that Hawkins’ statement had violated Wheaton’s statement of faith. Anderson said that, with some reassurance, the whole situation would “blow over.”
It did not. A few days later, Anderson and Hawkins met with Provost Stanton Jones and the faculty vice chair. The meeting was “very tense.”
“I felt like this was a trial,” Anderson said. “Immediately, she was being asked to defend herself.”
At the conclusion of the meeting, the provost informed Hawkins that she was to be placed on administrative leave, effective immediately. That news soon made it into the media.
Wheaton College later issued a press release that clarified, despite some public reports and speculations, that Hawkins’ race, gender or decision to wear a hijab during Advent did not play a role in the decision to place her on administrative leave.
“The freedom to wear a headscarf as a gesture of care and compassion for individuals in Muslim or other religious communities that may face discrimination or persecution is afforded to Dr. Hawkins as a faculty member of Wheaton College,” the press release read. “Yet her recently expressed views, including that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, appear to be in conflict with the College’s Statement of Faith.”
Max Planamenta was a sophomore studying history and English writing in December of 2015 and was also the Record’s opinion editor at the time. When the news broke that Hawkins had been placed on administrative leave, he walked into the Parmalee Room that overlooks the brick walkway outside Anderson Commons to discuss the issue with other editors on staff.
Kirkland An, the editor-in-chief at the time, remembers that there were at least three facets of the public discourse that day: the educational conversation, the administrative one and the racial, theological discourse. Reflecting on those charged discussions, 10 years later, An said:
“The ultimate loser here is really evangelical Christianity, at least how it looks in the eyes of the world.”
Hawkins submitted her response to the administration’s nine “Areas of Significant Concern” by the required deadline, two days after her initial meeting with the provost. After asking whether her theological statement had been acceptable, Jones said that her theological response was “well-crafted and thoughtful,” even something that would have passed the faculty application process with “little or no question,” had it been submitted as one of the essays.
Later meetings proved that any path forward for Hawkins would be complicated, possibly including the voluntary resignation of her tenure while the institution conducted ongoing conversations about whether she was still the right fit for the college.
The other options were for Hawkins to resign from her job, or for the provost to bring a recommendation of termination for cause to President Philip Ryken and the Faculty Personnel Committee. At the end of the meeting, the provost advised that Hawkins retain a lawyer. After doing so, Hawkins also began granting personal interview requests with media outlets, which she reportedly had refrained from doing up until that point.
On Jan. 4, after winter break, it was announced that the provost had issued the notice of recommendation of termination for cause. Later that month, the faculty council unanimously recommended that the notification of termination for cause be withdrawn, as well as the administrative leave, “due to grave concerns about the process.” On Feb. 6, Wheaton College released a joint statement from Ryken and Hawkins announcing a mutual decision to “part ways.”
“Wheaton College sincerely appreciates Dr. Hawkins’ contributions to this institution over the last nine years,” Ryken said in the statement. “We are grateful for her passionate teaching, scholarship, community service and mentorship of our students.”
Neither Hawkins nor Ryken has provided further comments for this article.
Wheaton would later establish the Larycia Hawkins Embodied Solidarity Scholarship in 2018 for one student each year who is interning with an organization that promotes peace and reconciliation in the community where they will be working. The annual recipient receives $2,500 to help offset the course credit costs and other expenses associated with for-credit summer internships.
“ It has made sure that finances are not a hindrance in doing that type of work,” said Michael McKoy, the current chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations, who had been teaching in the department for two years prior to Hawkins’ departure. “ I think the Peace and Conflict Studies Program is part of her legacy; people should know that she created this.”
By the end of the 2015-16 school year, burnt out and distraught over what had transpired, Anderson took a one-year leave of absence to consider her relationship with the College. By the end of that leave, she determined that returning to Wheaton was not something she could do with integrity. Today, she is the executive director of an academic program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Anderson was far from the only one who finished the year exhausted and discouraged. The workload of student body president and vice president, Joshua Fort and Morgan Jacobs, had increased to nearly 20 hours per week that spring — on top of classes, job applications and post-graduation plans. Fort said that, after Hawkins’ departure, he “questioned and re-questioned” the time and energy he spent.
“There was a hope that reconciliation would be the result of our labors,” Fort said. “Damage and disrepair within the Wheaton community at large, both on and off campus, were the unfortunate results.”
Later in 2016, a documentary team offered students An and Planamenta the opportunity to speak about Hawkins, the controversy surrounding her Facebook post and the broader culture of evangelicalism at the time. The documentary, titled “Same God,” aired for the first time in 2019 and is still available for purchase on Google Play and Amazon Prime Video.
Today, Planamenta regrets talking to the filmmakers and feels that his testimony contributed to an inaccurate portrayal of the situation.
“It wound up making us not look good, and that’s unfortunate,” he said. In later conversations, he added, “I think I took part in promoting an angle that wasn’t true.”
Since 2019, Planamenta has returned to Wheaton to complete his master’s degree in the history of Christianity. He currently works as a financial aid advisor at Wheaton’s Office of Student Financial Services.
While An still holds to the words of his undergraduate self and “looks back fondly” on his Wheaton experience as a whole, there are some regrets from early 2016.
He said that while not all of the reporting he and his staff did made the college look good, they kept reporting what they saw because they were invested in the idea that sharing the truth is foundational to community flourishing. In regard to how the community at large dealt with departure, An said:
“Time heals a lot of wounds, but in a lot of respects, this was just a negative experience.”
George Kalantzis was another familiar Wheaton voice on the documentary. Hawkins and Kalantzis came from Rice University and Northwestern University, respectively, but both arrived in 2007. They bonded over the foreignness of a new experience that also “felt like a homecoming.”
“I don’t know if I was her best friend,” Kalantzis told The Record earlier this year, “but she was my best friend.”
The process of Hawkins’ departure was a turning point in his career. He refers to it as when he “became old.” Not only because it was painful to watch his friend “being expelled from your house,” but because the public outcry and threats of violence Hawkins received that academic year made him realize that the meaning of the term ‘evangelical’ on the doorpost of his Wheaton College home had fundamentally changed. In 2016, he said: “What was happening is a crystallizing of a split in evangelicalism.”
For Kalantzis, the split that began during the controversy that followed Hawkins’ first post in the purple hijab has continued to widen. “Take Project 2025 and plop it next to the lexical term ‘evangelical,’ and tell me how those two can be part of the same thing,” he said in an interview earlier this year.
In the months and years immediately after Hawkins’ departure, Kalantzis kept coming back to the words another faculty member used to describe the faculty-administration relationship at Wheaton: “We stood at a deficit of trust.”
Kalantzis says that turnover of roles on both sides of that relationship has helped to heal the sense of broken trust.
“ The permanent community here has worked very hard for the last 10 years to reconcile and redeem,” he said. “Administration, staff, faculty, I think we’re actually in a good place.”
In the years since leaving Wheaton, Hawkins has taught in the politics and religious studies departments at the University of Virginia (UVA), where she also served in the Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab. She is still a faculty fellow at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, while teaching political science at Lincoln University, where she runs the Center for the Study of the Underground Railroad.
