Education: Walkout

The problem had never come up before, in all the 103 years that Ohio’s little Baldwin-Wallace College has been going. Though run by Methodists, it welcomed students of all faiths: its chapel was compulsory but nonsectarian, and one of every ten of its students was a Roman Catholic. One day recently a Catholic coed paid a visit to neighboring St. John’s College. She was worried. Was it proper, she asked a Catholic professor, for her to take the compulsory philosophy of religion course at Baldwin-Wallace?

The professor examined her textbook, and decided that it was not. The Diocese of Cleveland agreed. The professor told Baldwin-Wallace’s 163 Catholic students that they must resign from the college. “If my doctor tells me to eat beef,” he explained, “and a waiter in a restaurant says he has only pork, I don’t stay and fight with him. I just walk out.” By week’s end 65 Catholic students had packed their bags and left.