Faith is weaponized to exploit faculty.
Pros
Many people at Calvin are very nice and very earnest about the school’s mission.
Cons
Calvin is in financially terrible shape (and faculty are told this frequently at meetings), so professors do not receive adequate resources to succeed (e.g. research budgets, book budgets, pre-tenure leave, first-semester course releases). There was a round of faculty layoffs (including tenured folks) in summer 2020, and more are expected. So, faculty do not feel valued and do not have the comfort of job security, which makes for a very depressing work environment. The administration constantly uses emotional and spiritual manipulation to get faculty to take on unfair burdens. When asked to do things that are outside their pay grade or expertise, faculty are told to embrace their calling from God, to show grace, and to be nimble. The administration doesn’t hesitate to shame faculty into complying with their demands, often appealing to faculty’s deeply felt religious convictions in order to coerce them. Dissenters and people who ask questions that expose the incompetence of the administration are not tolerated. The pay is not adequate for everything that is asked of faculty. On average, the students tend to be less mature and hardworking than students at other colleges and universities. Often, it feels more like teaching high school than teaching at the college level. Faculty have to sign onto three historical theological documents, some of which contain morally problematic implications that no faculty seem capable of fully defending.
