Director named for Center for Religious Freedom
by Veni Fields

An “idea and an opportunity have crossed paths” in a move that is hoped will focus the national spotlight on Virginia Wesleyan College, according to college president William T. Greer, Jr.

At a press conference September 26th in Boyd Dining Center, Greer announced the appointment of Gordon K. Davies, former director of the State Council of Higher Education, as director of the Center for the Study of Religious Freedom at Virginia Wesleyan College.

“If ever a college deserved attention,” Greer told the assemblage of students, staff, faculty and local media, “this’ll do it. . . You, as students, are in for a terrific treat in the future.”

With Davies’ national prominence at the center’s helm, Greer believes VWC will gain attention it “wouldn’t otherwise get.”

“In the actual day-to-day reality,” Greer said, the center’s activities are aimed to impact “Wesleyan, Hampton Roads, the community, maybe even the nation and the world.”

Greer’s brainchild, the center’s development was announced September 5, 1996 to an audience of diverse religious affiliations from both on- and off-campus. The center’s mission statement asserts that participants in center functions and classes will have “abundant opportunity to learn the founding principle of religious liberty, that every person, protected by disinterested government vigilance, has the right to believe and practice any religion, or to refrain from belief and practice. This principle is fundamental to human freedom and essential to the foundation of human rights throughout the world.”

Davies is viewed as the individual who, as director, can support and carry out those objectives.

“In this country today,” Davies said, “there is a rising tide of intolerance. It is my hope that a center of this sort will provide an antidote to that phenomenon in our society.”

Currently the visiting professor of higher education at the Teachers College of Columbia University in New York, Davies joins the center after leaving a 20-year post as director of Virginia’s Council of Higher Education. Over the coming year, Davies plans to visit VWC on Fridays as he feels he is needed. He will assume his duties as director of the center and full-time professor of humanities n the 1998-99 academic year.

Davies brings with him a list of professional credits, including participation in the founding of Stockton State College in New Jersey, teaching at Yale and directing the Harvard-Yale-Columbia Intensive Summer Studies Program, which provides access to graduate schools for minority students. As director of the Virginia Council, Davies was part of a coordinating body for 19 public and 42 private colleges and universities with enrollment approaching 300,000 students and an annual budget of over $1.5 billion.

The center is currently headed by a 27-member advisory board comprised of religious, educational, legal and political representatives from Virginia to Illinois. Davies, with degrees in English and religion from Yale University will oversee the board and the center’s proposed activities, which are slated to include conferences, symposia, panel discussions, guest speakers, classes, internships and a scholarship program for religious studies.

The center is viewed by school and local religious officials as a potential national “think tank” geared toward religious tolerance and education. With plans to invite local and world religious leaders to future forums, proponents of the center’s mission regard the project, and Davies’ appointment, with optimism.

“I don’t know the answers” to the question of intolerance, Greer said. “But I know the best way is to think them out together with people of good will. . .We look forward very much to [Davies’] involvement in an already vibrant academic community and family.”

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