As the New Deal Federal Government got involved in encouraging home ownership and guaranteeing home loans, as banks and savings & loan companies failed in the Great Depression, the government commissioned studies of the state of residential real estate in major cities. In recent years, the maps drawn up by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) have been characterized as "redlining maps," a reference to the practice of "redlining," variously defined as blocking the sales of homes to African-American buyers to certain designated neighborhoods or withholding mortgage loans from buyers in predominantly black neighborhoods. Hundreds of the HOLC maps are now available to view on the University of Richmond's Mapping Inequality website. The maps have been geotagged and overlaid on present-day interactive maps. There are nine maps online for Oklahoma: Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Miami, Muskogee, McAlester, Ada, Norman, Enid, Alva. The HOLC City Survey Files, 1935-1940, are mostly available online on the National Archives website. The second report for Tulsa, Report of a Survey in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for the Mortgage Rehabilitation Division, Home Owners' Loan Corporation, was submitted on November 26, 1935, by field agent R. L. Olson. Here is the 1935 HOLC map of Tulsa, superimposed on a modern interactive map. What I notice about the Tulsa map is that, although the black district is included in Zone D (Hazardous), so are all the white working-class neighborhoods to the northeast (Crutchfield, Springdale), immediately east of downtown (what we now call the Pearl District), Crosbie Heights west of downtown, and all the annexed towns west of the river (West Tulsa, Red Fork, Carbondale, Garden City), which were also almost exclusively white. The "Hazardous" classification appears to reflect proximity to industry and rail. Zone C (Definitely Declining) includes once desirable but aging neighborhoods like Owen Park, Brady Heights and the Near Northside, Riverview north of 15th, the western part of Kendall-Whittier (west of Columbia, north of Admiral), and Forest Orchard (between 11th & 13th, Peoria to Lewis). Contrast Tulsa's map with Omaha's, where only black neighborhoods were included in Zone D. Wichita marked most of its older section, 58% of the residiential area, as hazardous, including areas that had been prosperous and well-regarded 40-50 years earlier. (Wichita has much more specific descriptions of individual zones and subzones.) The entire 1935 Tulsa HOLC report is on the National Archives website, but it is arranged back-to-front -- the last page of the online file is the title page of the report. Olson describes the classifications on the Tulsa map as conservative.

Nine of the leading authorities in real estate in Tulsa gathered at the office of the real estate board and agreed upon the designations shown upon the map. Their names are attached to the map. All portions of the city were later visited by the interviewer making this report and it was noticeable that the grades of security designated by the real estate men were very conservative. Tulsa, being new, has a better class of homes throughout than other cities comparable in size. Grades B [Still Desirable] and C [Definitely Declining] shown upon the map could, without dispute, be considered A [Best] and B respectively.

The August 1936 issue of the Federal Home Loan Bank Review contains a three-page article, "Security Maps for Analysis of Mortgage Lending Areas," that explains the reasons for creating such maps and the characteristics of the four graded areas. The point was for a lender to have an idea of whether a mortgaged property was likely to increase in value, retain value, or decline in value over the term of the mortgage, and to take that into consideration when deciding how much to lend and what proportion of a home's value was safe to lend. The HOLC report is a fascinating snapshot of Tulsa's 1935 economy -- skilled labor rates, tax rates, unemployment, vacancies, construction costs, bank assets, population trends.

Tulsa has no slum areas. The city was considered for the location of a low cost housing or slum clearance project, as a political sop, but real estate men advised that this was discouraged because of absence of demand or a need for it.

1935 was near the end of Tulsa's streetcar system (although the Sand Springs Railway would continue to operate for another decade and a half). The report mentions a streetcar line north and south on Main Street, run by the United Service Company, with buses to other parts of the city, and that the Union Transportation Company (likely the successor to the Oklahoma Union Traction Company) was "operating only buses." "Only 12 minutes is consumed in the average ride to the outskirts, from the business district." A decade or so earlier, the Tulsa Street Railway had four streetcar lines, including service to Owen Park, Riverview, and the University of Tulsa, while Oklahoma Union Traction served the Fairgrounds and Owen Park, in addition to interurban service to Red Fork and Sapulpa. In 1935, Tulsa had four banks, all national banks: First National Bank, National Bank of Tulsa, National Bank of Commerce, and Fourth National Bank. National Bank of Tulsa was the successor to Exchange National Bank, Tulsa's only bank failure, which had been reorganized in 1933 with the financial support of local oilmen and no losses to depositors. Here is the page of the report containing Grades of Security map showing the four areas. The base map shows subdivisions, streets, schools, churches, parks, and civic buildings, which are indexed on the right side of the sheet. The discussion of neighborhood trends notes the desirability of Osage County near downtown Tulsa, but the legal difficulties in developing the area. The report had this to say about Greenwood and some of the other areas labeled D:

The negro section of Tulsa is very definitely defined upon Map No. 2. The section lies north of the Frisco railroad tracks, the eastern extremity being Peoria Avenue, the western boundary being Detroit Avenue on the southwest and Cincinnati Avenue on the west. North of the present restricted colored area is some room for expansion which will undoubtedly be required in the near future. To the north and east of the negro section are the homes occupied by wage earners and workers. Across the Arkansas River, in the southwest corner of the city, are two industrial residential sections, both in the vicinity of the refineries.

I never found a Map No. 2 in this file; Map No. 1 is the Grades of Security map. Appendices include statements of condition for banks and savings & loan companies, summaries of interviews with leading bankers and real estate men. Statistics in the main body of the report include numbers of homes built each year through the 1920s boom and numbers of foreclosures. 1928 was a peak year, with 1337 new homes built, but the numbers fell precipitously after Black Friday, and from 1932-1934 the numbers were only in double digits. Valuation shrinkage of Tulsa residential real estate was estimated to be between 30% and 50%, with the worst shrinkage at the top end of the market:

By 1930 the city had an unusually large number and percentage of homes, constructed in the boom days, at prices ranging from $25,000 and up to $100,000. When oil brokers and so called "gamblers" were forced to abandon such homes there was no sale for them whatever. Many were offered for 25% of their former value or cost. As a matter of fact the prices paid for these homes did not represent true or actual values because in the hey-day of Tulsa's oil boom there was a mad scramble for homes with very little regard to prices. Eliminating this class of property, which was very small in percentage as compared with the actual number of homes in the city, the shrinkage in value was probably about 40% as represented by sales during the depression.

- October 23, 2025 at 09:27PM
Tulsa HOLC redlining map
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From the Tulsa Police Department Facebook page:

INDECENT PUBLIC ACTIVITY On September 22nd, 2025, around 2:45 p.m., Officers responded to 300 S. Denver for a call about Outraging Public Decency. A witness called in saying a man and woman were engaging in intercourse under a blanket on the sidewalk. Officers responded and found the man and woman, identified as Klintel Betts and Notoshka Keene, still active under the blanket. Betts attempted to hide from the Officers under the blanket, but was unsuccessful. Betts and Keene put their clothing back on and were taken into custody without incident. Klintel Betts was arrested for Outraging Public Decency, and he has a non-extraditable felony warrant out of Kansas for Probation Violation. Notoshka Keene is a tribal member and falls under the McGirt ruling; therefore, detectives will turn this case over to the FBI and Tribal Authorities for further investigation. These are arrests, not convictions.

Note the next to last paragraph. These two people were allegedly engaged in the same criminal act of public conjugation (in the middle of the day, within view of the bus station, federal courthouse, and BOK Center main entrance), but one has a special ancestor and the other one doesn't, so he will be prosecuted in state court by our elected DA and she will be prosecuted in Muscogee Creek Nation court or maybe federal court or maybe not at all. We have one crime, committed in the same place at the same time by these two people (it takes two to tango), but two different justice processes, depending on ancestry. That's not equal justice under law, it's apartheid. District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler's office has already charged Klintel Dorian Betts with a criminal misdemeanor, a violation of Oklahoma state law. He has been arraigned in District Court by Special Judge Shannon Taylor. Betts has quite a large number of prior encounters with the law. Last summer Betts pled guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and threatening an act of violence; he was given a 10-year suspended sentence, the terms of which he violated this spring, testing positive for meth twice in a row and failing to return for a second retest. In February 2024, Betts was sentenced to court costs and time served for Improper Walking on Roadway and Obstructing and Officer. In 2013, Betts pled guilty to domestic assault and battery, possession of meth, The failure of a prosecution witness to appear spared Betts from conviction for burglary, kidnapping, indecent exposure, and robbery with a firearm in 2012, but his child's mother filed a protective order against him in the same year. Then there was the 2003 deferred sentence for possession of a stolen vehicle. As far as I have been able to determine, Notoshka Keene has yet to be charged with a crime in Muscogee Creek or federal court. Her name does not appear in a search on either platform, although it's now been 10 days since her arrest. I have emailed the Muscogee Creek Nation Attorney General, the chief prosecutor, the Lighthorse (police), and the U. S. Attorney for the Northern District of Oklahoma to ask whether they have or intend to charge Keene. No one has yet responded. (Someone named Natoshka Keene and Natoshka Kenne appears in OSCN dockets; that may or may not be the same person.) If you've been looking at the lawlessness of San Francisco and Chicago and thinking that could never happen here, because Tulsa County would never elect the kind of pro-criminal, pro-chaos, Soros-backed DAs like Chesa Boudin, George Gascón, and Kimberly Foxx that have allowed crime to run rampant in Democrat-run cities. But because of the McGirt ruling voters in the eastern half of Oklahoma don't have full control over who prosecutes crime in their counties. If the offender has a claim, however miniscule, to tribal citizenship, the prosecutor will be tribal or Federal. A Soros DA might not win an election for Tulsa County DA, but the likes of George Kaiser could spend enough money to dominate low-turnout tribal elections and put the tribes under the control of left-wing, pro-criminal and pro-chaos officials. At the Federal level, eastern Oklahoma has been and may be subjected to the appointees of a left-wing, pro-criminal president, while the appointees of a conservative president may be blocked by the Democrat minority in the U. S. Senate. Prosecuting Betts is the office of District 14 District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler, a conservative, tough-on-crime Republican. The District Attorney for District 14 is directly elected by the citizens of Tulsa County. Every American citizen living in Tulsa County is eligible to vote for DA, whether or not they also have tribal citizenship. Kunzweiler was first elected in 2014 and re-elected in 2018 and 2022. In 2018, Kunzweiler received 116,500 out of 198,842 votes cast. The population of Tulsa County in 2020 was 669,279, so Kunzweiler received the votes of 17.4% of the population affected by his decisions as a prosecutor. (There were no Democrats, Libertarians or Independents running in 2014 and 2022; Kunzweiler first won the position in the 2014 Republican runoff.) If the MCN prosecutes Keene, it will be under the authority of the office of Attorney General Geri Wisner, a Democrat who was appointed to the position in 2022 by the Principal Chief and confirmed by the National Council. On September 20, 2025, there was an election for MCN National Council. Under the rules in recent elections, all National Council seats are elected at-large, although members must live in the district they seek to represent, so everyone who went to the polls had all eight Class B National Council seats on the ballot, plus a referendum. 3,754 votes were cast in the referendum; the vote totals in the council races ranged from 3,631 to 3,754. In the previous general election, in 2023, 4,026 ballots were cast for Principal Chief, 3,996 voted for Second Chief, and slightly under 4,000 ballots were cast in each of the eight Class A National Council elections. Principal Chief David W. Hill won his 2019 election with 3,399 votes, and the councilors elected in 2019 and 2021, who were in office when Wisner was appointed in 2022 received a maximum just below that number. So the person who heads the office that prosecutes tribally-affiliated Americans (regardless of tribe) in the City of Tulsa south of Admiral Place and the rest of the former Creek Nation territory was made by people elected by (at most) 3,399 voters, who constitute 0.04% of the 813,184 people who lived in the Creek Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Area (OTSA) as of the 2020 Census. (Here's a link to the MCN election results page, where you'll find links to results containing the numbers above.) There are only 18,095 registered voters in the MCN. Based on voter registration stats by county from January 2025 and adjusting where historic tribal boundaries split counties, I estimate 450,000 to 500,000 registered Oklahoma voters in the Creek OTSA. If Keene is prosecuted by the Federal Government, it will be under the authority of the US Attorney for the Northern District of Oklahoma Clinton J. Johnson. Johnson was appointed to that role in 2021 by Joe Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland, the failed Supreme Court nominee. Johnson was appointed after newly-installed President Biden asked for the resignations of 55 U. S. Attorneys, including R. Trent Shores, Donald Trump's 2017 appointee to the Northern District job. In other words, depending on the ethnicity of the accused crook, the crime will either be prosecuted by a conservative Republican directly accountable to the voters of his jurisdiction or by someone appointed by the worst Democrat administration in history or by a Democrat tribal official appointed by people elected by a tiny number of voters. In every other part of the world, local authorities prosecute every crime committed within their boundaries, regardless of the citizenship of the offender. When cameras caught me going five miles over the speed limit in Queensland, the Queensland police sent a speeding ticket to my home in Oklahoma, and I paid it online. The Queensland police didn't refer it to Steve Kunzweiler for prosecution. Imagine a world in which you are governed not by the laws of wherever you happen to be at the moment but by the laws of your citizenship. The drinking age in Tulsa would be 21 for Tulsans, but 18-year-old visitors from the UK would be allowed to buy a pint at the White Lion. Dutch tourists would be allowed to open brothels in Bowlegs. A Sperry shoplifter in the Skiatook Dollar Tree would get a slap on the wrist, but a Saudi shoplifter would get a scimitar through his wrist. That's the kind of insanity that the previous Supreme Court majority put in place with McGirt. TPD cites the McGirt ruling as the reason referring Keene to Federal and tribal authorities, but the real reason is the Mayor, not McGirt. Before Monroe Nichols was mayor, the City of Tulsa had asserted its authority to prosecute any criminal activity within its boundaries. That dispute was working its way through federal courts, and with the change in the makeup of the Supreme Court since McGirt (Barrett replacing Ginsburg), the outcome likely would have been a limitation of McGirt or even a reversal, correcting the inaccurate historical claims that underpin Gorsuch's ruling. Nichols promised during the campaign that he would stop the City's legal defense of its authority and would surrender to the tribal cabal, and he did. It may take some other eastern Oklahoma mayor to push this issue through the courts, someone who can't be bought, someone with thick skin. There would need to be a non-profit public-interest legal organization helping out, but this issue isn't the sort of case that Institute for Justice, Alliance Defending Freedom, or ACLJ has historically taken on. Perhaps the NAACP would take an interest in a case where two people are involved in the same crime, but the black man (Betts) is prosecuted while the white woman (Keene) goes free.
- October 04, 2025 at 08:11PM
Monroe Nichols two-tier justice
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I have the rare privilege of a friendship that has lasted for 54 years and counting. We met in 3rd grade, bonded over maps, math, politics, and comedy, went through the rest of school together, stayed in touch through college and beyond, and we still meet up regularly over lunch to catch up and laugh. Before marriage and parenthood took priority, we had some travel adventures, many involving baseball, both major and minor league. Someday I may write about the 1987 Cardinals season, the Rust Belt and Dust Bowl Tours of 1988, getting thrown out of Comiskey Park, or walking up to the Driller Stadium press box in our high school graduation tuxedos. My friend reminded me that 40 years ago this weekend we made a single-day round-trip from Boston to Montreal to see the St. Louis Cardinals. It's about a six-hour drive each way. While I had seen my first major league game at Yankee Stadium in 1980 and had gone to several Red Sox games at Fenway Park during my college years, this was my first National League game ever. He had graduated that May and had moved to Boston to work for a consulting firm; I was working at Draper Lab full time and taking a single class that fall to resynchronize with the courses I needed after losing a semester to pericarditis, on track to graduate the following May. Although Tulsa had been the minor league home of the Texas Rangers for nearly a decade at this point, Tulsa was still St. Louis Cardinals country, and through the 1976 season the Tulsa Oilers were the Cardinals' AAA affiliate. Many of the Cardinals stars of the late 1970s and the 1982 World Series championship team had been Tulsa Oilers. We noticed on the schedule that the Cardinals would be in Montreal near the end of the regular season, likely to be an important series in determining the champion of the National League East division, so we made plans for a trip. We had planned to drive up to Montreal Friday afternoon, see the Friday night game, do some sightseeing Saturday morning, go to the Saturday day game, then drive back to Boston on Saturday. But nature intervened in the form of the first hurricane to reach New England in decades. Hurricane Gloria began near the Cape Verde Islands, and by the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 25, 1985, it was east of the Bahamas and had strengthened to Category 5 before dropping to 3. Some called it "the storm of the century." Forecasts showed it turning north and moving quickly. Landfall might be in the Carolinas, the Mid-Atlantic states, or possibly New England. Thursday, September 26, 1985, was a day of preparation and anticipation. If you couldn't get plywood to cover your windows, the next best thing was to tape Xes across your window panes. This was supposed to minimize the possibility that you'd be impaled by shards of glass as hundred-mile-an-hour winds drove tree limbs through the windows. There was a run on packing tape and masking tape. (I don't remember duct tape being commonly available back then.) The eye of Gloria brushed Cape Hatteras Friday morning, dumping heavy rain on eastern North Carolina. Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis declared a state of emergency. Classes were cancelled, businesses closed. Aircraft evacuated Logan Airport for Burlington, Vermont. The Expos postponed that night's game with the Cardinals. No one knew how soon or where Gloria would hit New England, how strong she would be when she arrived, or the path she'd take after landfall. Van Morrison's song got a lot of airplay on WBCN and WCOZ. Gloria made landfall in New England about midday and marched on north across Connecticut and into New Hampshire, where it weakened into a tropical storm. Cool water and low tide at landfall minimized the damage. High winds took down power lines around Boston. Adrenaline junkies went to the John Hancock Tower and let themselves be blown around by the strong wind currents. (The tallest building in New England, the glass-and-steel John Hancock Tower was infamous in its early days for a wind tunnel effect that caused glass panels to be be hoovered off the building by differential air pressure. The tower was called the Plywood Palace as missing windows were boarded up.) Winds peaked around 3 pm at 53 MPH sustained with gusts to 71 MPH. In Brookline, the wind uprooted a tree behind our building, destroying the fence. Leaves and small branches had fallen in our street. Power was out when I went to bed Friday night and still out Saturday morning when I woke up early for our drive to Montreal. He came by to pick me up, and before we left town we tried a couple of ATM machines. I had forgotten to get cash before the storm, but I needed it for our trip to Montreal. (I had an ATM card, but debit cards weren't a thing just yet, much less ones you could use internationally.) We drove to a couple of ATMs, found one that had power, but it had lost its link to the network. We started north on I-93 to I-89, bowed (as one must) as we passed Bow, New Hampshire, found a working ATM somewhere in Vermont, and then crossed into Quebec. Back then you only needed a driver's license to go between the US and Canada. The sun was shining and the leaves were beautiful, but we had to get to the ballgame. The postponed game from Friday night turned Saturday's day game into a double-header. Olympic Stadium was not designed for baseball. It was dim and gloomy inside. We sat in the right field bleachers. Youppi, one of the first major league baseball mascots, made an appearance on the field in his dune buggy. Going into Saturday, the Cardinals had a 4.5 game lead over the Mets in the NL East. The Cardinals lost the first game, 2-0. I don't recall when we left, but my friend says we didn't stick around through the second game, which the Cardinals won 4-2 in the 11th inning. Lunch and dinner were from the concession stands. It was late enough when we left that little was open, but we found a corner store near the stadium to buy pop and snacks for the drive back. This time we stayed on Autoroute 10 east toward Magog and Sherbrooke, before turning south to I-91 in Vermont. It was late enough that we couldn't find an open gas station as the tank dwindled to empty, but we came across a truck stop near St. Johnsbury just in time. We got back to Boston well after midnight. Years later I made a couple of trips to Montreal for business and discovered what we missed because Gloria cut our trip from two days to one. Here are photos and commentary from my 2004 visit to Montreal. I have to think a bit to remember how we managed to travel in the days before the World Wide Web, cell phones, and Google Maps. We would have learned about the game from pocket calendars that you could pick up at local stores (like The Sports Buff on 51st east of Harvard) or possibly a spring issue of The Sporting News with all the team schedules. We'd have coordinated plans by phone. I'm sure I brought along my trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas for navigation. Had we stayed the night as our original plan called for, we'd probably have looked for a line of motels along stretch of highway on the outskirts of town and picked one that looked somewhat OK. Sightseeing would have been driven by the points of interest marked on the city inset map in the road atlas. Any phone calls on the road -- we didn't make any -- would have involved a payphone and possibly a Sprint FON card (manually punching in the membership number) for long-distance calls. MORE:

• Michael Grammatico's summary of Hurricane Gloria
• NOAA summary of Gloria
• Connecticut History: Hurricane Gloria: "Storm of the Century"
• Yankee Magazine's list of worst hurricanes in New England history
• Weather Underground map of 1985 North Atlantic hurricanes
• Hurricaneville: Hurricane Gloria

- September 29, 2025 at 12:07AM
40 years ago: Hurricane Gloria hits New England and a baseball roadtrip to Montreal
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Dr. Voddie Baucham Jr., a Baptist pastor, academic, and Christian apologist, died this week at the too-young age of 56 after a medical emergency. Baucham is survived by his wife of 36 years, 7 sons, 2 daughters, and 3 grandchildren. Baucham served as a pastor in Houston before moving to Lusaka, Zambia, to become the founding Dean of the School of Theology at African Christian University. He spent 10 years in ministry there, returning to the US earlier this year. In June, Founders Ministries, an organization which promotes Reformed doctrine in the Southern Baptist Convention, announced Baucham as the founding president of Founders Seminary in Cape Coral, Florida. Baucham was well known and beloved in the broader Reformed (Calvinist) Christian community for his bold clarity whether teaching through a passage of scripture or applying God's Word to contemporary issues. As he would sometimes say, "If you can't say 'Amen!' say 'Ouch!'" The Bauchams homeschooled their children, and he summarized the case for Christian parents withdrawing their children from public schools: "We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans." In this July 2020 interview with Allie Beth Stuckey, Baucham spoke of his upbringing in Los Angeles by a single, Black, Buddhist mom, how he came to faith in Christ at Rice University, his call to ministry and the course of his theological studies and ministry. Baucham's post-graduate studies at Oxford led to an early understanding of the threat posed by critical theory, social justice, and post-modernism, and he connects that philosophical foundation to critical race theory, DEI, and the cultural reaction to the death of George Floyd and the riots of the summer of 2020. I have enjoyed and benefitted from Baucham's preaching, speaking, and writing. You'll find many of his sermons and lectures online, but, sad to say, I was never able to meet him. In April 2021, my wife, daughter, and I had been looking forward to hearing Baucham speak at the Credo Conference on Social Justice in Conway, Arkansas, not long after the release of Baucham's book Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe, but a near-death episode of heart failure, followed by quadruple bypass surgery, brought an early end to his speaking engagements that spring. Samuel Sey, a Ghanaian-Canadian-American Christian writer, describes Baucham as a mentor and encourager:

In 2020, six years after his article on Michael Brown and Ferguson made me realize that I wasn't alone and going crazy, after all, Voddie Baucham sent me an email that said: "I wanted to drop you a line and offer a word of encouragement. I know how hard it is to be a lone voice during these trying times. Just want you to know that you are not alone." I am not ashamed to say that it made me cry a lot. It still makes me cry. But, somehow, that isn't even the kindest thing he has done for me. To my shock, the following year, in 2021, when Fault Lines was close to its release, he asked me to write an endorsement for his book. However, I was going through a very painful process at the time. I didn't want that to hurt his ministry, so we talked on the phone, and I told him things that I thought would make him distance himself from me. Instead, my hero became a friend. He encouraged me with his wisdom, and I have followed his words ever since. He told me he still wanted me to write an endorsement for Fault Lines, and on top of that, he said he wanted me to join him on some of his speaking tours.

After his return from Zambia at the beginning of this year, Baucham continued a full schedule of speaking and preaching. At the 2025 Stand Firm Conferences in Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia, Baucham spoke on "Preaching the Word," "The Rise of LGBT & CRT in the Church," "Christian Nationalism," "The Doctrine of Regeneration," and "The Reformation." He then hopped the Tasman Sea and spoke at the Grace Conference in Auckland, New Zealand on the Mind of Christ in the Believer, in the Church, in the Family, and in the World. Tom Ascol of Founders Ministries has established a GiveSendGo to care for the needs of Baucham's widow and their seven children still at home. It's reasonable to guess that, following the cardiac episodes of 2021, he would have been unable to get life insurance. As a writer, I appreciate Baucham's refusal to join the "hot take" community, as expressed in this essay on the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri, riots, published three months after they happened:

My first response to Ferguson was to say nothing. I was on the outside looking in. I didn't know what happened. I didn't know the communities or the issues surrounding the tensions. Second, I chose to remain silent because people were demanding that I speak--even condemning me for my silence. In this age of "I sure would love to hear your thoughts on" I get tired of the sense of entitlement with which people approach those whom they deem to be popular or high-profile Christians. No one is "entitled" to my opinion. Nor is my faithfulness to God determined by how quickly I respond to "relevant" issues. As a pastor, I have a responsibility to my flock. If those for whose souls I care (Heb. 13:17) want help thinking through these issues, I am obligated to them. I have a duty to walk them through issues like these to the best of my ability, and with sensitivity to their particular needs. What worries me is that Christians in the age of social media care more what "popular" preachers have to say on issues like this (and whether or not they agree with other "popular" preachers) than they are about taking advantage of an opportunity to work through challenges in the context of Christian community. More importantly, it worries me that so many Christians view themselves primarily as members of this or that ethnic community more than they see themselves as members of the body of Christ.

- September 27, 2025 at 01:53PM
Voddie Baucham, RIP
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Governor Kevin Stitt has sent the Oklahoma Highway Patrol to Tulsa to clear campsites state-owned property, including highway underpasses and rights-of-way. Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols, echoing the complaints of Washington city officials who object to President Trump calling in the National Guard to deal with public safety in the nation's capital, issued a whiny rebuttal to the governor. Here's Stitt's press release:

Governor Kevin Stitt today announced the launch of Operation SAFE (Swift Action for Families Everywhere) to restore order and safety to Tulsa by clearing homeless encampments, trash, and criminal activity from state-owned property inside the city. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol (OHP) has the legal authority to target state-owned property including underpasses, highways, state buildings, and other state-controlled land. Governor Stitt made clear that while the state is stepping up to fulfill its duty, the long-term responsibility for city property rests with the City of Tulsa's elected leadership. Governor Stitt has had numerous conversations with Mayor Nichols in recent weeks urging the city to gain control of the situation, but progress has fallen short of Tulsa residents' expectations. "Tulsa is a beautiful city. I lived there for years. But today, everybody can see the disaster it's turning into-- homeless people on every corner, trash piling up, and Oklahoma families are being forced to live in fear," said Governor Stitt. "This is the city's job, but Mayor Nichols and Tulsa leadership haven't met the level of action needed to keep neighborhoods safe. Oklahoma is going to step in to do our part and clean it up. Once we've done so, it'll be on the City to keep Tulsa clean and safe. If they refuse, then we'll be forced to take further action to protect Tulsans." Within the last 24 hours, OHP began issuing warnings to homeless individuals and the Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT) began posting notices at encampments on state property to vacate and cease occupation, in accordance with 64 O.S. § 1097. These camps are often located along highway rights-of-way or beneath overpasses, creating severe hazard for the public and homeless individuals alike. ODOT will also lead remediation, clearing, and clean-up efforts. OHP and ODOT are working with various agencies who are committed to helping individuals transition to safer, alternative living arrangements. If OHP encounters illegal immigrants during the operation, they will be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation proceedings. Under the Governor's direction, State Troopers are offering homeless individuals two clear options:

• A ride to a treatment or housing facility.
• A ride to jail and face prosecution if they refuse help and continue breaking the law.

Chair of the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce, Bill Knight voiced support for the Governor's action: "Tulsa's business community supports leadership that prioritizes the safety of those who live and work within our city and region. We appreciate the governor's actions to enforce the laws and bolster Tulsa's pursuit to enhance quality of life. This initiative complements the ongoing efforts by various Tulsa entities, reinforcing our collective commitment to addressing complex issues like homelessness and public safety."

Interesting that the Chamber is backing Stitt on this. A friend notes that this may indicate the start of a fracture in the city establishment, here at the start of Kathy Taylor's fourth term as de facto mayor. Nichols's response came as an email from [email protected]:

Please attribute the following statement to Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols. "First of all, Kevin Stitt has shown himself again to be an unserious person. When I took office, I inherited a homelessness crisis largely unaddressed by anyone in public office, including our two-term governor, who disbanded the interagency council on homelessness, which had a crippling impact on service providers, leading to what we have today. Instead of spending my time engaging in activities that won't reduce homelessness, I have created the Safe Move Initiative, which aims to get hundreds of people off the streets for good, rather than simply shifting the problem elsewhere. We have a goal to end homelessness by 2030, and we're on the pathway to doing that. I'm going to continue doing the job I was elected to do, and I am not interested in being lectured by someone who has proven time and time again that he only cares to intervene to score political points. "As background on two separate areas, crime is down in all categories, and homelessness, which grew by over 20% the year before I took office, grew by only 4% this year. We have a long way to go, but we are making progress and will continue to do so. I will not be distracted or deterred from doing what we know is necessary to end this crisis in Tulsa."

So homelessness is still increasing in Tulsa, just at a slower rate than under the 2nd and 3rd Kathy Taylor terms (aka the GT Bynum administration). Just a month ago, the City of Tulsa engaged in its own right-of-way clearance effort, placing large boulders on level areas around the MTTA Tulsa Transit MetroLink bus station to discourage loitering and camping. The official City of Tulsa press release describes the boulders as the first phase of a "community art project," as well as a measure to prevent predators from "using the space to take advantage of individuals experiencing homelessness" (e.g. by selling them drugs). The prevention measure is to prevent the homeless from being there.

Several weeks ago, the City of Tulsa announced a new project near the sidewalk along 4th St. between S. Denver Ave. and S. Cheyenne, which is located near the Denver Avenue Bus Station. Boulders were placed at the site this week and the project will be progressing with an expected community art project in the coming weeks.... With public safety in mind and due to extreme heat, at the inception of this project, the City of Tulsa partnered with BeHeard, a nonprofit organization offering daytime shelter, shower facilities, and food accommodations. Shuttle services to and from BeHeard are offered to those who would like a safe space during the day and receive supportive services.

The BeHeard facility is at Admiral and 73rd East Avenue, in the parking lot of what used to be Calvary Baptist Church. (Calvary was taken over by First Baptist Owasso and turned into a satellite campus in 2017, then "relaunched" as Mesa Church in 2022.) This marks an ongoing effort by city agencies and the non-profit community, dating back at least to 2008's Building Tulsa Building Lives initiative, the closure of the downtown YMCA residence, and the controversy over the construction of the Yale Apartments, to encourage vagrants to leave downtown and disperse among low- to moderate-income neighborhoods around the city. I've heard anecdotal reports of increasing property crime in the vicinity of BeHeard. It's a bit rich for Nichols to authorize clearance of city right-of-way and then complain about the state doing the same thing but on a larger scale. We can't address the "homeless problem" until we can start being honest about the difference between vagrants, panhandlers, and hobos on the one hand and the economically displaced and temporarily alienated on the other. Compassionate measures intended to help the latter group can too easily become enabling of the chosen lifestyle of the former group. MORE: Griffin Media has quotes from Steve Whitaker of John 3:16 Mission, QuikTrip (which, as the biggest 24-hour convenience store chain in the region, is plagued with panhandlers, shoplifters, and vagrants), and the head of the Mental Health Association of Tulsa. Z. B. Reeves satirizes the "community art project" boulders for The Pickup.
- September 05, 2025 at 11:35PM
Stitt vs. Nichols on clearing vagrants from state-owned land in Tulsa
Click the headline to read the full story.

Tulsans were promised water in the river if we would only raise our taxes, but they neglected to tell us what would be in the water. Charles Pratt has been watching the City of Tulsa's water quality monitors and says that E. Coli levels at the end of August set a record. KTUL reported the story today.

When he crunched all the numbers from May to May, three out of four times, at least one gauge was in the red. "During that time period, if you took all of the data, it was unsafe 72% of the time," he said. At the time, the highest single test result was 6,100, but by the end of August, a new test result had taken the crown for the most E. coli. "29,000," he said.

There are four gauges on the city's water quality dashboard: the I-244 bridge, the west bank boat ramp, the pedestrian bridge, and the kayak gate. The unit of measure is Most Probable Number (MPN) of organisms per 100 ml. The green, yellow, and red sections of the gauges appear to correspond to the levels described on this Wisconsin State Hygiene Laboratory webpage:

Various tests are used to investigate recreational water, stream or lake pollution, and wastewater treatment systems. The following are tests available for surface water testing: E. coli: The only natural habitat of E. coli is the intestinal tract of warm-blooded animals.

• The recreational water guideline is less than 126 MPN/100 ml, averaged from 5 samples during a 30-day period.
• The single sample guideline is less than 235 MPN/100 mL.
• An advisory is recommended between and 235 MPN/100 mL and 1000 MPN/100 mL.
• A closure is recommended at greater than 1000 MPN/100 mL.

Enterococci: This refers to a subgroup of the fecal enterococci that includes Enterococcus faecalis, Enterococcus faecium, Enterococcus gallinarum and Enterococcus avium. The enterococci are used to indicate water quality.

• The recreational water guideline is 33 MPN/100 ml, averaged from 5 samples during a 30-day period.
• The single sample guideline is less than 61 MPN/100 mL.

Tulsa measures E. Coli but does not measure Enterococci. 100 mL is about 3 oz. That's the maximum size of a bottle of liquids you're allowed to carry on board an aircraft, so imagine 29,000 E. Coli bacteria floating around in a travel-sized bottle of shampoo. Pratt says that a web search revealed that levels in raw sewage can range from 1,000 to 100,000 MPN/100 mL, so 29,000 would be 29 times the low end of that range, but I haven't been able to find the source that Pratt found. 29,000 would be 100 times the safe single sample level. Page 20 of this EPA document has the Oklahoma water quality standards for Primary Body Contact Recreation, which correlate with the numbers shown above. As I write this, the levels are 236 (red zone) at the boat ramp, 308 (red zone) at the I-244 bridge, but 30.5 at the kayak gate and 26.9 at the pedestrian bridge. All of the 30-day geometric mean values are in the green zone. 96.4 at I-244, 105.4 at boat ramp, 58.8 at kayak gate, 26.9 at pedestrian bridge. E. Coli levels are measured twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The city does not appear to provide historical data tables, but Mr. Pratt has been compiling the numbers. A KTUL story from May 3, 2025, has a year's worth of E. Coli data tabulated by Pratt. Here is the PDF of that year's worth of measurements. 92% of the time during the primary recreational months (May 1 through September 30), at least one of the monitors was in the red. Quality was better in the winter months when the river isn't used for recreation. Interesting slide deck (PDF) on how E. Coli levels are measured and why E. Coli is used as an indicator species for the presence of fecal bacteria in water. Slide 8 states that it is "[i]mpossible to test for ALL pathogenic microorganisms, so test for easily detectable indicator organisms." Slide 10 states that "E. coli is the ideal indicator organism for testing water for fecal contamination" because of its "[a]bility to survive for extended period of time outside of the body ( especially in water: >120 days)," and it is a reliable indicator of fecal contamination, without other possible causes to rule out. E. Coli has both pathogenic and non-pathogenic strains, but "their presence indicates a pathway for human pathogens" such as giardia, cryptosporidium, hepatitis, and other waterborne viruses, bacteria, and protozoa. MORE: Molly Bullock has been covering pollution in the Arkansas River in an ongoing series of articles starting in August 2023 at her Substack site Watershed. One of Bullock's focuses has been on industrial pollution, the legacy of over a century of oil exploration and refining and other industrial activity along the Arkansas River. Take a look at this article on plumes of apparent hydrocarbon pollution emerging near containment caps, and this follow-up on the hostile, passive-aggressive response from city officials to questions from citizens. STILL MORE: Still bothered by statements made at the re-opening of Zink Lake last year that "Tulsans seeing water in Zink Lake for first time." Zink Lake was built in 1982, funded by Mayor Jim Inhofe's creative financing after voters rejected funding in the first attempt to pass a Third Penny sales tax for capital improvements in 1979. The dam was replaced, but the lake isn't new.
- September 03, 2025 at 11:43PM
Zink Lake fecal bacteria at "raw sewage" levels
Click the headline to read the full story.

I'm happy to report the publication of Cowboy Bethlehem: The Story of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey, written by my friend Theodore J. King with his late father T. Gavin King. Our Lady of the Assumption of Clear Creek Abbey is a Benedictine monastery in western Cherokee County, Oklahoma, north of Hulbert, west of Peggs, in the hills east of Fort Gibson Reservoir near Lost City. The abbey was founded in 1999 as a daughter house of the Abbey Notre Dame de Fontgombault in France. The book has been a long-term labor of love for the Kings, who started visiting the abbey from its beginnings and early on recognized the importance of capturing the memories of those who began the work and sharing them with the wider world. They collected interviews and stories over the years. Sadly, T. Gavin King, a retired Tulsa attorney, passed away in March 2024 at the age of 90, as this book was being prepared for publication. I was honored to write one of three endorsements that appear on the back cover of the book: In Cowboy Bethlehem, Ted and T. Gavin King capture the history and character of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey, a Roman Catholic redoubt in the midst of little country Baptist churches. The reader learns about the daily routine of the monks, the lay community growing on the farms and ranches around the abbey, and the lives and backgrounds of the monastery's leadership. The Kings trace the spiritual and intellectual lineage of Clear Creek Abbey back to John Senior and the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, a 1970s experiment in Great Books education that led some of its students to Fontgombault Abbey in France and ultimately to its daughter foundation in Oklahoma. Cowboy Bethlehem is food for thought for anyone pondering Christian formation and community in a world increasingly hostile to the faith. My endorsement follows that of two Tulsa Christian leaders on the back cover of the book. David Konderla, Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa:

A beautifully unique feature of Catholic life in the Diocese of Tulsa and Eastern Oklahoma is the presence of the sons of Saint Benedict at Clear Creek Monastery. How they came to be in our midst and what they do for us and with us is a very interesting story. Ted and T. Gavin King have done us a good service in collecting much of that story so we can read it and thank God for Clear Creek and the life of prayer they give us.

Deron Spoo, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Tulsa:

Clear Creek Monastery cannot be explained; it must be experienced to be understood. The Kings allow us to see the monastery and its history through their attentive eyes and Clear Creek's importance to our world. This book captures the beauty of an ancient community and its contemporary impact.

The chapters of Cowboy Bethlehem are a collection of stories and interviews that you can dip into at leisure and read a few at a time:

• Discovering Clear Creek: T. Gavin King remembers the challenge of finding the abbey on his first visit in 1999 (pre-Google Maps)
• Clear Creek Inaugural: An account of the inaugural mass celebrated at the abbey.
• Fontgombault: The setting and history of the French abbey that gave birth to Clear Creek, founded almost 1000 years ago in 1091, with a discussion of St. Benedict and his monastic Rule, and the connection between Fontgombault and John Senior's Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas.
• Dom Abbot Forgeot: A brief remembrance of the retired Abbot of Fontgombault.
• Lent: The additional austerity of the monks during the penitential season.
• Workday: An annual spring opportunity for outside supporters to help maintain the abbey and its grounds.
• Brother Nick: Interview with a lay brother of the monastery
• A Day in the Life of a Monk: The daily routine and daily times of prayer
• The Idea of a Village: An account of the inaugural 2016 conference near Clear Creek, hosted by Andrew Pudewa and the Institute for Excellence in Writing, featuring talks by Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option, and Baylor literature professor Ralph Wood. (I attended this conference and greatly enjoyed it.)
• Father Bethel: Interview with Clear Creek's prior
• Clear Creek and Environs: A visit with former Rogers County Assessor Fred T. Morgan, who grew up in the area
• Kansas Origins: The Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas in the late 1960s, its ongoing influence in higher education, and its connections with the monks of Clear Creek
• Father Abbot: An interview with Philip Watson Anderson and his surprising background
• Brother Vianney-Marie Graham and the Conversion of a Child-Killer: Monks as prayer warriors, seeking the conversion of death-row inmate
• The John Senior Colloquium: An account of a conference at Clear Creek remembering the Integrated Humanities Program at KU, including an interview with Oklahoma City's Archbishop Coakley who was a student in the program
• Building Clear Creek: The design and construction of the abbey's buildings
• Pilgrimage: A report on a 35-mile two-day pilgrimage from near Tahlequah to the abbey in 2020
• Villagers: The lay Roman Catholics who have moved to Cherokee County and formed a community in the vicinity of the abbey
• We Are Called to Be Faithful, Not Successful: Account of a brief attempt to establish Our Lady of the Angels convent near the monastery.
• Criticism of Clear Creek from a Former Monk: The monastery didn't live up to expectations of one traditionalist brother
• A Clear Creek Christmas Memory: Memories of 2005 Christmas mass in a converted horse barn with a visiting French family
• Epilogue: Eternal perspective and the monastic life

Ted King is also author of the 2009 book, The War on Smokers and the Rise of the Nanny State. Economics professor and syndicated columnist Walter Williams said of the book: "Theodore King has done a yeoman's job assembling evidence that the success of tobacco zealots has become a useful template for those who want to use health issues to control our lives. The War on Smokers and the Rise of the Nanny State is not only a story about the attack on tobacco users, but a story about how decent Americans can be frightened, perhaps duped, into accepting phony science, attacks on private property rights, and rule of law. One need not be a smoker to be alarmed by the underlying hideousness of the anti-tobacco movement." Cowboy Bethlehem is available directly from Dorrance Publishing in both hardcover and digital, through Barnes & Noble online, and in many Christian bookstores including Catholic Book and Gift Store on Yale south of 31st in Tulsa (near Livi Lee Donuts), Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Trinity House Catholic Books and Gifts in Overland Park, Kansas, De Sales Catholic Bookstore in Springfield, Missouri, and the Catholic Information Center Bookshop in Washington DC. Ted says that the Tulsa store is sold out at the moment but should be getting more in soon. You'll also be able to order the book from the soon-to-launch CowboyBethlehem.com website. I'll update this entry when the site is fully operational.
- August 31, 2025 at 05:17PM
Cowboy Bethlehem: The Story of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey
Click the headline to read the full story.

A follow-up to my previous post to capture reaction to ousted University of Tulsa Honors College dean Jennifer Frey's New York Times op-ed and her conversation on the Classic Learning Test's Anchored podcast, plus a few other notes of interest. Here are the X quote-tweets commenting on Frey's tweet announcing her op-ed. St. John's College tutor Zena Hitz, founder of the Catherine Project, writes:

Everyone in higher ed -- the higher the position the better-- should be asking themselves two questions: 1. Why did Tulsa eliminate a very successful program? 2. Why were such programs rare to begin with?

Hitz also writes:

Jennifer is not the first victim of powerful morons who wreck excellent programs of study. We are lucky she has the freedom to speak openly about it!

"Powerful morons" is an apt description of Tulsa's ruling class. Ollie Lash-Williams writes:

Hiring managers also want [students educated in the liberal arts]. In the age of GenAI and GPTs I need team members who have a training in logic, evidentiary analysis, and argumentative discourse.

Christopher Frey, chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Tulsa and husband of ousted dean Jennifer Frey, spells out in an X thread what TU administration has done to the Honors College (full thread, PDF):

1. Honors class sizes have already been increased by at least 33%. This vitiates the seminar format that was essential to these classes being successful. 2. It is not just the dean position that is gone. There is no longer an assistant dean, a service learning coordinator, a program officer, a director of admissions... The admins made these changes without a succession plan in place and now need to find a new director by the summer's end that will have to do the work of multiple full time employees. 3. The admins' choices led directly to the honors college losing access to major gifts and grants. These gifts and grants funded programs that will no longer be available to students. 4. At least 5 of the most experienced and beloved honors professors will not be teaching in the college next year. It is important--for students, parents, and the public at large--for the facts to be plainly stated.

A word about the seminar format, from our family's experience with St. John's College, the university that pioneered the seminar-based Great Books curriculum: Rather than a professor lecturing from the front of the class, a dozen-and-a-half students will sit around a table, having read the text before the seminar, with two faculty members, called tutors. One tutor will ask an opening question, and the students carry the conversation from there, with tutors intervening at times to keep the conversation on topic or to elicit a response from more reticent students. The conversation is required to stay within the "four corners" of the text, which is a primary source, a classic text of Western Civilization; that restriction excludes modern commentaries and critiques, attempts to dismiss the text entirely based on the author's race or sex or class. The conversation takes the author and the text at face value. The seminar format does not allow a student to hide behind test-taking or AI-prompting skills. Your preparation or lack thereof, your engagement with the text is exposed for all to see in seminar. Nearly all of a St. John's education is conducted in seminar form with great books as source material. For example, freshman math begins with Euclid's Elements, and students must come to class prepared to go to the chalkboard and work through and explain one of the proofs from that session's assignment. Students are evaluated on written work, and there's a major paper due annually, but at the end of each year, a student's tutors all meet and talk about her performance, with the student present. I tell people that I considered St. John's when I was in high school, but it seemed too intimidating (so I went to MIT instead). What TU Honors was offering was a four-course sequence (ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern) of Great Books seminars spanning "from Homer to Hannah Arendt," to be taken alongside a standard major, with a residential element (two floors of Hardesty Hall) and a community service requirement. Here's the description from the Honors College website at the beginning of the 2024-2025 academic year:

UTulsa's Honors Program invites students to join a centuries-old conversation about what makes for a meaningful and well-lived life. Through participation in our Socratic-style seminars, you will become exceptional in the arts of communication and dialectic, learn to respectfully challenge yourself and others, and become more discerning with respect to the most important intellectual and ethical issues that confront us as human beings and citizens today. Key Features

• Four classic text-based seminars engaging the greatest thinkers, writers, and artists who have contributed to the "great conversation."
• Disciplinary Honors courses that deepen your understanding of the foundations of that discipline, whether in STEM, health sciences, business, or the humanities.
• Honors electives that allow you to go deeper with a perennial question, genre, thinker, etc.
• A minimum of 80 hours of service, in which you put into practice what you have learned about human nature and community, contributing meaningfully to the common good.
• An Honors Senior Project that may complement your major, in which you explore the questions that have moved you most deeply as a student of classic texts.
• Rich study abroad experiences, in which you will walk in the very places where the people you read lived and created their works.
• Complements any major at The University of Tulsa.

It was also possible to take a full major in the Honors College, called Humane Letters, which added two more required seminars, "The Foundations of Natural Science" and "Aesthetic and Ethical Foundations of Music," which correspond to the classical quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, music), and a senior thesis "in which you explore the questions that have moved you most deeply during your time studying the classic texts." As an aside: In taking my three children on campus tours over the last decade, I'm struck by how common honors programs had become. It seems to me that American universities have tried to re-create a pre-World War II college experience with a smaller group of serious students in community, surrounded by what has become the typical American college experience where large numbers of students are there just because it was the next step or for the social life or for vocational training. They can't dismantle the larger institution that is no longer serious about learning or thinking, but they can use it to create and subsidize a small intellectual community, and in turn the small honors community lends academic respectability to the university as a whole, particularly in statistics like median test scores and National Merit scholars attending. What was the TU board's part in all this? In January, TU's Board of Trustees was one of five institutions that received the 2025 Nason Award for Board Leadership by Association of Governing Boards. The self-congratulatory press release cites the Honors College and the new president (Carson) as part of the foundation for a positive future.

Amid profound challenges, The University of Tulsa Board of Trustees redefined itself as a model of strategic leadership in higher education. Facing accreditation warnings, financial instability, and campus unrest, they conducted a self-assessment to create a smaller, more active body with diverse skills and a commitment to shared governance.... Bold decisions, such as appointing interim and permanent presidents aligned with the university's strategic goals, and fostering faculty collaboration, drove reforms, including revitalizing academic programs, launching an Honors College, and achieving record-breaking National Merit scholar enrollment. A unified strategic plan led to a clean accreditation report, stronger finances, and a boosted national reputation, ensuring a vibrant and sustainable future.

It would be interesting to compare the lists of board members from, say, April 2019, when "True Commitment" blew up, September 2023 when Jennifer Frey arrived, February 2024 to January 2025, when the board won its award, to the present, to see if there were any notable additions or deletions that might suggest an explanation to the board's pendulum swings between hating and loving the liberal arts. (Robert Thomas Jr. is listed as Chief Investment Officer, but his affiliation is not listed. He appears to be CIO of West River Group, a venture capital firm based in Seattle, but he was previously a portfolio manager for the Bill Gates Investment Office (10 years) and Chief Investment Officer for the George Kaiser Family Foundation (15 years).) MORE: Peter Biles, a Ph.D. student at Oklahoma State University, can't shed any light on what's happening at TU, but says that the liberal arts are worth pursuing even if you make your living in a different field:

Recently, as I was debating whether to pursue a PhD in creative writing, a friend told me about a man he knows who got his doctorate in the humanities and went on to be a firefighter. Did he regret it? To the contrary. He was grateful for the education. He learned, grew, and deepened his knowledge and character. And now he protects his community by fighting fires. My friend's anecdote encouraged me to pursue the PhD. If you attend a liberal arts college only to go back to your hometown and inherit your father's auto shop, does that make you a failure? Not by the liberal arts standards. If you came into contact with great books, grew in virtue and character, and experienced a vision of the good life, you can translate such intrinsic value into just about any life situation or career track.

Biles notes that assistant dean Matthew Post is listed as interim director of the Honors College, but Dr. Post will be leaving TU for a new opportunity later this year. RELATED: In September 2020, former TU philosophy Professor Jacob Howland, a leader of the revolt against the 2019 effort to dismantle the liberal arts, noted the coming demographic and financial tsunami threatening higher ed, and outlined the characteristics of new universities that should take the place of those that are closing. He was confident that a new university founded in this way would attract faculty, students, and donors:

Newman famously described the university as "an Alma Mater, knowing its children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill." The university that lives up to this forgotten standard, nourishing its children on knowledge painstakingly preserved, cultivated, and transmitted from generation to generation, will not fail to attract excellent faculty and students and to produce grateful and generous alumni. Indeed: any prestigious university that stuck entirely to sound education would be such an anomaly today that it would become a beacon for serious students and teachers. For higher education, as for the nation as a whole, no future good can grow without turning the rich soil of the past. We still have the tools to do what is necessary, and it would be supremely foolish to let them rust from disuse. Let's get to work.

- July 22, 2025 at 12:00AM
Reactions to Frey New York Times op-ed on dismantling of TU Honors College
Click the headline to read the full story.

UPDATE 2025/07/17: Fired Dean Jennifer Frey has published an op-ed in today's New York Times and is interviewed in today's episode of the Classic Learning Test's Anchored podcast. "Students voted with their feet, and no one cared." In the podcast, Frey mentions that the University released a statement falsely saying that she had resigned. She is "deeply skeptical" that the student experience would remain the same, as the University claimed in a response to the Times: "I hope that's true, but I'm deeply skeptical because, one, we don't have seminars anymore, so the student experience will not remain the same.... but also all the staff and structure that I built is gone. It's gone. All that's left of the 'Honors College' is an as-of-yet-unnamed director and two faculty, both of whom are on one year contracts. We don't have a full-time service learning coordinator, and that truly was a full-time job. We no longer have a program officer, which was a very demanding full-time job, running events. Putting on events for 500 students is a full-time job.... If you expect one person to do the work of an entire college, OK, but really, I think the main thing is the loss of the seminars, because everything grew out of that. And also, all the money I brought in is gone." The University of Tulsa is giving me whiplash. In 2019, they gut the liberal arts. In 2023, they trumpet the creation of a new Great Books-focused Honors College led by a philosopher who is a devout Christian. Now in 2025, the president who re-launched the Honors College and hired the dean has departed, the Dean of the Honors College has been demoted, and the program has been downsized. (A discussion of TU whiplash could go back to 2012 to the bizarrely brief tenure of President Geoffrey Orsak; my article on the topic prompted a nice letter from his mother-in-law on Mr. Orsak's character and the hardships induced by TU's inconstancy.) I was encouraged and amazed by TU's hiring of Jennifer Frey in 2023 to head the Honors College and to expand and deepen its offerings. It was unexpected after the "True Commitment" upheaval of 2019 (see below), and I had assumed that the 2021 hiring of Democrat former Congressman Brad Carson was a move to consolidate those changes and continue the transformation of TU into a glorified vo-tech. Instead we suddenly had a classical, Great Books, seminar-based education available in Tulsa, similar (if not as intense) to that offered by St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe, the University of Dallas, New Saint Andrews College, and Christendom College. A couple of the students we'd known through our Classical Conversations homeschool community chose TU because of the Honors College. Frey left behind a tenured, endowed faculty position at the University of South Carolina to launch the TU Honors College. She left put her intellectual projects on hold to become an administrator, a role she did not covet but took on to advance the return of the liberal arts to American higher education. I was wowed by the Honors College conference in February 2025 on the late Roman / early medieval philosopher Boethius and was hopeful for the role TU Honors might play in the flourishing of Tulsa as a center of classical education.

I enjoyed myself tremendously at the Boethius 1500 conference and had some great conversations. A large group of blazer-wearing students from Holy Family Classical School were present for some of Friday's sessions. I had a couple of brief conversations with Dean Jennifer Frey. The presence of the Honors College at TU under her leadership should produce great synergy with the city's growing number of classical schools. I imagine TU graduates becoming teachers in our classical schools, and graduates of the schools heading to TU's Honors College to study classics alongside their chosen majors.

An X thread by Dean Frey on June 30, 2025 (compiled thread here, PDF here) reviewed the successes of the two-year-old college:

We:

• grew enrollment by over 500%
• raised retention rates to 85%
• created a standardized great books curriculum from Homer to Hannah Arendt with small, Socratic seminars
• revitalized study of Greek and Latin
• centered character and civic education throughout the college
• created civic engagement requirement, with the cooperation of over 100 community partners
• created Humane Letters major
• brought in multiple major grants and gifts
• brought theatre back to TU with Greek tragedies
• created two summer programs for high school students
• created honors residential college with faculty in residence & program officer
• created study abroad programs in Rome, Greece, & Vienna
• raised endowment for study abroad
• created culture of viewpoint diversity through civil exchange of ideas
• created multiple leadership roles for our students
• assembled an academic advisory board to help with leading voices for liberal education like @McCormickProf [Robert P. George] @CornelWest @zenahitz @rooseveltmontas @JohnInazu @DavidDecosimo @AngelParham
• named a "Hidden Gem" by @goACTA

And then she announced an end to that dream.

Now for some personal news: today is my last day as Dean. I was stunned to be informed by our new provost there will no longer be a Dean of Honors, period. Nor an Assistant Dean. Rather, I was told there will be a "director" of honors--but that person will not be me. I was told my performance was exemplary but honors needed to "go in a different direction." So I have no idea what the future vision for it will be. I know the seminar format has been removed/class sizes increased. I know my wonderful Asst. Dean, Matt Post, has resigned.

Frey's X bio still lists her affiliation with TU as a philosopher. Her thread mentions a six-month research leave. I can't imagine anyone wanting to come to Tulsa to work for or study at TU, given all the sudden and drastic changes of direction. University of Tulsa already blew up their reputation once just a few years ago by sacking their humanities programs. Why would students, parents, professors entrust themselves to the inconsistent nincompoops running the university behind the scenes? Comments on Frey's dismissal as dean: Prof. Robert P. George, Princeton:

Even if I live to be 120 years old, I will never understand why academic leaders make the bad decisions they sometimes make. This one takes the cake. After the University of Tulsa succeeded in recruiting the excellent Jennifer Frey to lead and build its new Honors College, and after Dr. Frey built it into an intellectual mecca--indeed, one of the most exciting initiatives in American higher education--the leadership of the University dismissed her as Dean. You've heard of someone "shooting himself in the foot." This move could be characterized as "shooting yourself in the head." Tulsa had a great thing going. It was attracting outstanding students and receiving national attention--and accolades. Then ... it threw it all away. Spectacular, breathtaking foolishness. Another black eye for American higher education.

Jeremy Tate, CEO of the Classic Learning Test:

For those of you outside of academia, this would be like the Chiefs letting go of Mahomes after taking the team to the AFC Championship every year. If that sounds unbelievably brain dead, you haven't met the bureaucrats who run some of these universities.

Tate again:

It is simple to understand what went down here. The rest of the humanities at UTulsa were going to suffer because the students were flocking to Jenn's program. She was a threat because she was offering the genuine article instead of the woke nonsense.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat:

Truly bizarre arc for the University of Tulsa: From trashing its humanities program (https://city-journal.org/article/storm-clouds-over-tulsa) to embracing a revivalist program under @jennfrey to abandoning the new effort, all in just six years

Kevin Watson, Ph.D., scholar-in-residence at Tulsa's Asbury Church and Director of Academic Growth & Formation at Kentucky's Asbury Theological Seminary, represents many comments from the parents of prospective students here:

I am really sorry to hear this. We were seriously considering the University of Tulsa because of @jennfrey's leadership, Honors, and the National Merit scholarship. This eliminates TU from our consideration. I'll continue to root for TU. But this is a bad look.

Steve McGuire, a fellow of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a college reform organization illustrated his tweet with a GIF of a floating dumpster on fire, and his comments that suggest that wokesters within TU are behind this:

University of Tulsa:

• Name the co-director of the "Institute of Trauma, Adversity, and Injustice" to provost.
• Keep and rename DEI as the "Office for Resilience and Belonging."
• Fire @jennfrey as dean of the hugely successful honors college that offers a solid liberal education.

Prof. Jennifer Hooten Wilson, Pepperdine:

Dr. Jennifer Frey is one of the top educators in the country. Her vision for the Honors at Tulsa was INSPIRING! Exactly what education should look like.... We need to find a way for these goods to bloom where they are planted! [Prayer emoji]

Deacon Harrison Garlick, chancellor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa:

Absolutely unbelievable. Dr. Frey starts an incredibly successful great books Honors College rooted in what is true, good, and beautiful... and then she's terminated. Reminds me of John Senior.

That's a reference to the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, a wildly successful and influential Great Books program that was dismantled by the university administration after a nine-year run. Some of its graduates were instrumental in the establishment of Oklahoma's Clear Creek Abbey. Prof. Christian Miller, Wake Forest:

Shame on @utulsa and especially their new Provost Airey for terminating Jennifer Frey's position after she uprooted her family and has worked tirelessly and very successfully to build the honors college for the past two years. I hope philosophy departments and other honors colleges are already reaching out to Professor Frey. @jennfrey

Brennan VanderVeen, TU alumnus and Program Counsel, Public Advocacy, for the Federation for Independent Rights in Education wrote that he ceased giving to TU after the True Commitment upheaval but changed his mind:

Seeing what Frey was doing with the new Honors College helped convince me the university really was committed to liberal education. It was a big reason why I became a donor this year. I was happy, eager in fact, to support the types of programs that benefitted me as a student. Now, with the university removing Frey, abolishing the dean position entirely, and apparently wanting to "go in a different direction" (including, it seems, by removing the seminar format and increasing class sizes), I can't help but wonder if I made a mistake.

Prof. Joshua Hochschild, Mount St. Mary's University:

This is a major rug-pull for a lot of students. Jen's leadership of the Honors College recruited a lot of young people, gave confidence to a lot of families. The Provost and President are likely to be hearing from angry parents

John LePine, TU alumnus:

The creation of the Honors College under Jenn Frey's leadership was the most exciting academic development at @utulsa in my time as a student/alum. I have friends who have sent or planned to send their kids to TU specifically for Honors. This is an enormous disappointment.

Prof. Yuan Yi Zhu, Leiden University, University of British Columbia:

Remarkably enough, this will be the second time in a decade the University of Tulsa management decides to nuke a successful and unique humanities program for no good reason.

Matthew Loftus:

I hope @utulsa is ready to be famous because every thinkpiece about the decline of university education for the next two decades is going to mention this boneheaded move.

Here are direct links to quote-tweets on Frey's thread and on the tweet announcing her demotion. John Carney asks why:

I read this. What it didn't do was explain why the university had made this decision, which everyone in my feed (admittedly, full of right-of-center and great books types) regards as lamentable. I don't understand the university's position or what critics think really happened.

That this happened so soon after Brad Carson announced his departure does not seem coincidental. I have heard two conflicting explanations of Carson's resignation: (1) He is anxious to get back to Washington and public policy. (2) The board forced him out because he was better at spending money than raising it. A private X account pointed to the resume of recently appointed Provost Jennifer L. Airey, who wielded the axe: "editor of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature and co-director of The University of Tulsa Institute of Trauma, Adversity, and Injustice." So we have a provost representing the "studies" departments and the corruption of the liberal arts stifling a successful effort to restore the liberal arts. The Tulsa Institute of Trauma Adversity and iNjustice (TITAN) appears to be a classic example of a Grievance Studies program. The photo of Institute staff appears to be all-female, although it's hard to know for sure these days. A 2020 capture of TITAN's webpage announces the institute's mission: "TITAN promotes social justice and reduces trauma and adversity through interdisciplinary research, education and service." TITAN's Facebook page dates back to 2011. In 2012, TITAN got a classroom in Lorton Hall as office space. In 2021, TITAN copresented a 12-hour continuing education program for public school teachers, "From Trauma to Resilience":

This teacher institute facilitated by Gilcrease Museum in partnership with the Tri-City Collective and the University of Tulsa's Institute of Trauma, Adversity and Injustice is a 12-hour professional development opportunity for Tulsa Public Schools educators that will provide tools to support pedagogical experiences surrounding historical trauma and trauma-informed classroom practices focusing on empathy, equity, resilience and healing. Participants will work closely with Gilcrease collections related to the forced removal of Southeastern tribes, freedmen and Afro-Indigenous histories in Oklahoma, and the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hear talks by inspiring speakers, learn in cohorts, develop practical tools to support teaching difficult histories including self-care and arts integration activities for educators and students, and leave with useful curricular resources.

In 2023, TU used a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to launch a minor in Historical Trauma and Transformation: "Students will learn about the (white/colonial) historical assumptions that ground so much of society today, and when those assumptions are based on exploitation and harm, they will challenge them and work to make corrections." It makes sense that someone from the dominant "Western Civilization is evil and must be destroyed" wing of academia would want to destroy a successful program that celebrates Western Civilization. A look back: The old honors program An alumna pointed out that a highly regarded Honors Program existed before Jennifer Frey's arrival. In April 2019 in City Journal, Jacob Howland, then a professor of philosophy at TU, described the Honors Program that was in the process of being dismantled by then-Provost Janet Levit:

I arrived at TU in 1988, the same year Thomas Staley left to head the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. As TU's provost, Staley had aggressively recruited serious scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Programs in English, history, and politics were particularly robust; Harvard's Department of Government devoted a regular column in its newsletter to the activities of our political theorists. Professors critiqued their colleagues' work, audited one another's courses, and hosted informal lectures on subjects like pre-Raphaelite painting, medieval monasticism, and the economy of the Italian city-states. Faculty reading groups--some with 15 or more participants, including members of the wider Tulsa community--studied Heidegger's Being and Time, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, Montaigne's Essays, and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Undergraduates in our Honors Program studied literary, philosophical, religious, and historical classics from ancient Greece to the twentieth century and capped off their education with serious, substantial senior theses. My first decades at TU were a time of intellectual ferment and growth for faculty and students alike.... No program in the university is as central to the liberal arts as Honors, one of TU's greatest attractions for prospective students. (According to the dean of admissions, no program in the university has a higher yield of applicants.) Incoming Honors students, half of whom are enrolled in the engineering college, read the Iliad in the summer before they matriculate; in their first semester, they read the Odyssey along with Greek tragedy, comedy, history, and philosophy. They go on to study classic books from the medieval period to the present. Honors alumni do some remarkable things; most recently, Jennifer Croft (BA '01) won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her translation of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk's novel Flights. Enrollment in Honors has skyrocketed in recent years, thanks mostly to the extraordinary efforts of the program's director, Denise Dutton (herself an Honors graduate). Between 2012 and 2017, Dutton increased the size of the program fourfold, from 65 to 255 enrolled students--but the yearly budget for Honors decreased by 70 percent over the same period. This meant that the program could no longer host visiting speakers, support dinner or lunch conversations between students and faculty, or even pa

- July 15, 2025 at 11:30PM
University of Tulsa guts Honors College after successful opening year
Click the headline to read the full story.

The University of Tulsa is giving me whiplash. In 2019, they gut the liberal arts. In 2023, they trumpet the creation of a new Great Books-focused Honors College led by a philosopher who is a devout Christian. Now in 2025, the president who re-launched the Honors College and hired the dean has departed, the Dean of the Honors College has been demoted, and the program has been downsized. (A discussion of TU whiplash could go back to 2012 to the bizarrely brief tenure of President Geoffrey Orsak; my article on the topic prompted a nice letter from his mother-in-law on Mr. Orsak's character and the hardships induced by TU's inconstancy.) I was encouraged and amazed by TU's hiring of Jennifer Frey in 2023 to head the Honors College and to expand and deepen its offerings. It was unexpected after the "True Commitment" upheaval of 2019 (see below), and I had assumed that the 2021 hiring of Democrat former Congressman Brad Carson was a move to consolidate those changes and continue the transformation of TU into a glorified vo-tech. Instead we suddenly had a classical, Great Books, seminar-based education available in Tulsa, similar (if not as intense) to that offered by St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe, the University of Dallas, New Saint Andrews College, and Christendom College. A couple of the students we'd known through our Classical Conversations homeschool community chose TU because of the Honors College. I was wowed by the Honors College conference in February 2025 on the late Roman / early medieval philosopher Boethius and was hopeful for the role TU Honors might play in the flourishing of Tulsa as a center of classical education.

I enjoyed myself tremendously at the Boethius 1500 conference and had some great conversations. A large group of blazer-wearing students from Holy Family Classical School were present for some of Friday's sessions. I had a couple of brief conversations with Dean Jennifer Frey. The presence of the Honors College at TU under her leadership should produce great synergy with the city's growing number of classical schools. I imagine TU graduates becoming teachers in our classical schools, and graduates of the schools heading to TU's Honors College to study classics alongside their chosen majors.

An X thread by Dean Frey on June 30, 2025 (compiled thread here, PDF here) reviewed the successes of the two-year-old college:

We:

• grew enrollment by over 500%
• raised retention rates to 85%
• created a standardized great books curriculum from Homer to Hannah Arendt with small, Socratic seminars
• revitalized study of Greek and Latin
• centered character and civic education throughout the college
• created civic engagement requirement, with the cooperation of over 100 community partners
• created Humane Letters major
• brought in multiple major grants and gifts
• brought theatre back to TU with Greek tragedies
• created two summer programs for high school students
• created honors residential college with faculty in residence & program officer
• created study abroad programs in Rome, Greece, & Vienna
• raised endowment for study abroad
• created culture of viewpoint diversity through civil exchange of ideas
• created multiple leadership roles for our students
• assembled an academic advisory board to help with leading voices for liberal education like @McCormickProf [Robert P. George] @CornelWest @zenahitz @rooseveltmontas @JohnInazu @DavidDecosimo @AngelParham
• named a "Hidden Gem" by @goACTA

And then she announced an end to that dream.

Now for some personal news: today is my last day as Dean. I was stunned to be informed by our new provost there will no longer be a Dean of Honors, period. Nor an Assistant Dean. Rather, I was told there will be a "director" of honors--but that person will not be me. I was told my performance was exemplary but honors needed to "go in a different direction." So I have no idea what the future vision for it will be. I know the seminar format has been removed/class sizes increased. I know my wonderful Asst. Dean, Matt Post, has resigned.

Frey's X bio still lists her affiliation with TU as a philosopher. Her thread mentions a six-month research leave. I can't imagine anyone wanting to come to Tulsa to work for or study at TU, given all the sudden and drastic changes of direction. University of Tulsa already blew up their reputation once just a few years ago by sacking their humanities programs. Why would students, parents, professors entrust themselves to the inconsistent nincompoops running the university behind the scenes? Comments on Frey's dismissal as dean: Prof. Robert P. George, Princeton:

Even if I live to be 120 years old, I will never understand why academic leaders make the bad decisions they sometimes make. This one takes the cake. After the University of Tulsa succeeded in recruiting the excellent Jennifer Frey to lead and build its new Honors College, and after Dr. Frey built it into an intellectual mecca--indeed, one of the most exciting initiatives in American higher education--the leadership of the University dismissed her as Dean. You've heard of someone "shooting himself in the foot." This move could be characterized as "shooting yourself in the head." Tulsa had a great thing going. It was attracting outstanding students and receiving national attention--and accolades. Then ... it threw it all away. Spectacular, breathtaking foolishness. Another black eye for American higher education.

Jeremy Tate, CEO of the Classic Learning Test:

For those of you outside of academia, this would be like the Chiefs letting go of Mahomes after taking the team to the AFC Championship every year. If that sounds unbelievably brain dead, you haven't met the bureaucrats who run some of these universities.

Tate again:

It is simple to understand what went down here. The rest of the humanities at UTulsa were going to suffer because the students were flocking to Jenn's program. She was a threat because she was offering the genuine article instead of the woke nonsense.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat:

Truly bizarre arc for the University of Tulsa: From trashing its humanities program (https://city-journal.org/article/storm-clouds-over-tulsa) to embracing a revivalist program under @jennfrey to abandoning the new effort, all in just six years

Kevin Watson, Ph.D., scholar-in-residence at Tulsa's Asbury Church and Director of Academic Growth & Formation at Kentucky's Asbury Theological Seminary, represents many comments from the parents of prospective students here:

I am really sorry to hear this. We were seriously considering the University of Tulsa because of @jennfrey's leadership, Honors, and the National Merit scholarship. This eliminates TU from our consideration. I'll continue to root for TU. But this is a bad look.

Steve McGuire, a fellow of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a college reform organization illustrated his tweet with a GIF of a floating dumpster on fire, and his comments that suggest that wokesters within TU are behind this:

University of Tulsa:

• Name the co-director of the "Institute of Trauma, Adversity, and Injustice" to provost.
• Keep and rename DEI as the "Office for Resilience and Belonging."
• Fire @jennfrey as dean of the hugely successful honors college that offers a solid liberal education.

Prof. Jennifer Hooten Wilson, Pepperdine:

Dr. Jennifer Frey is one of the top educators in the country. Her vision for the Honors at Tulsa was INSPIRING! Exactly what education should look like.... We need to find a way for these goods to bloom where they are planted! [Prayer emoji]

Deacon Harrison Garlick, chancellor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa:

Absolutely unbelievable. Dr. Frey starts an incredibly successful great books Honors College rooted in what is true, good, and beautiful... and then she's terminated. Reminds me of John Senior.

That's a reference to the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, a wildly successful and influential Great Books program that was dismantled by the university administration after a nine-year run. Some of its graduates were instrumental in the establishment of Oklahoma's Clear Creek Abbey. Prof. Christian Miller, Wake Forest:

Shame on @utulsa and especially their new Provost Airey for terminating Jennifer Frey's position after she uprooted her family and has worked tirelessly and very successfully to build the honors college for the past two years. I hope philosophy departments and other honors colleges are already reaching out to Professor Frey. @jennfrey

Brennan VanderVeen, TU alumnus and Program Counsel, Public Advocacy, for the Federation for Independent Rights in Education wrote that he ceased giving to TU after the True Commitment upheaval but changed his mind:

Seeing what Frey was doing with the new Honors College helped convince me the university really was committed to liberal education. It was a big reason why I became a donor this year. I was happy, eager in fact, to support the types of programs that benefitted me as a student. Now, with the university removing Frey, abolishing the dean position entirely, and apparently wanting to "go in a different direction" (including, it seems, by removing the seminar format and increasing class sizes), I can't help but wonder if I made a mistake.

Prof. Joshua Hochschild, Mount St. Mary's University:

This is a major rug-pull for a lot of students. Jen's leadership of the Honors College recruited a lot of young people, gave confidence to a lot of families. The Provost and President are likely to be hearing from angry parents

John LePine, TU alumnus:

The creation of the Honors College under Jenn Frey's leadership was the most exciting academic development at @utulsa in my time as a student/alum. I have friends who have sent or planned to send their kids to TU specifically for Honors. This is an enormous disappointment.

Prof. Yuan Yi Zhu, Leiden University, University of British Columbia:

Remarkably enough, this will be the second time in a decade the University of Tulsa management decides to nuke a successful and unique humanities program for no good reason.

Matthew Loftus:

I hope @utulsa is ready to be famous because every thinkpiece about the decline of university education for the next two decades is going to mention this boneheaded move.

Here are direct links to quote-tweets on Frey's thread and on the tweet announcing her demotion. John Carney asks why:

I read this. What it didn't do was explain why the university had made this decision, which everyone in my feed (admittedly, full of right-of-center and great books types) regards as lamentable. I don't understand the university's position or what critics think really happened.

That this happened so soon after Brad Carson announced his departure does not seem coincidental. I have heard two conflicting explanations of Carson's resignation: (1) He is anxious to get back to Washington and public policy. (2) The board forced him out because he was better at spending money than raising it. A private X account pointed to the resume of recently appointed Provost Jennifer L. Airey, who wielded the axe: "editor of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature and co-director of The University of Tulsa Institute of Trauma, Adversity, and Injustice." So we have a provost representing the "studies" departments and the corruption of the liberal arts stifling a successful effort to restore the liberal arts. The Tulsa Institute of Trauma Adversity and iNjustice (TITAN) appears to be a classic example of a Grievance Studies program. The photo of Institute staff appears to be all-female, although it's hard to know for sure these days. A 2020 capture of TITAN's webpage announces the institute's mission: "TITAN promotes social justice and reduces trauma and adversity through interdisciplinary research, education and service." TITAN's Facebook page dates back to 2011. In 2012, TITAN got a classroom in Lorton Hall as office space. In 2021, TITAN copresented a 12-hour continuing education program for public school teachers, "From Trauma to Resilience":

This teacher institute facilitated by Gilcrease Museum in partnership with the Tri-City Collective and the University of Tulsa's Institute of Trauma, Adversity and Injustice is a 12-hour professional development opportunity for Tulsa Public Schools educators that will provide tools to support pedagogical experiences surrounding historical trauma and trauma-informed classroom practices focusing on empathy, equity, resilience and healing. Participants will work closely with Gilcrease collections related to the forced removal of Southeastern tribes, freedmen and Afro-Indigenous histories in Oklahoma, and the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hear talks by inspiring speakers, learn in cohorts, develop practical tools to support teaching difficult histories including self-care and arts integration activities for educators and students, and leave with useful curricular resources.

In 2023, TU used a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to launch a minor in Historical Trauma and Transformation: "Students will learn about the (white/colonial) historical assumptions that ground so much of society today, and when those assumptions are based on exploitation and harm, they will challenge them and work to make corrections." It makes sense that someone from the dominant "Western Civilization is evil and must be destroyed" wing of academia would want to destroy a successful program that celebrates Western Civilization. A look back: The old honors program An alumna pointed out that a highly regarded Honors Program existed before Jennifer Frey's arrival. In April 2019 in City Journal, Jacob Howland, then a professor of philosophy at TU, described the Honors Program that was in the process of being dismantled by then-Provost Janet Levit:

I arrived at TU in 1988, the same year Thomas Staley left to head the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. As TU's provost, Staley had aggressively recruited serious scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Programs in English, history, and politics were particularly robust; Harvard's Department of Government devoted a regular column in its newsletter to the activities of our political theorists. Professors critiqued their colleagues' work, audited one another's courses, and hosted informal lectures on subjects like pre-Raphaelite painting, medieval monasticism, and the economy of the Italian city-states. Faculty reading groups--some with 15 or more participants, including members of the wider Tulsa community--studied Heidegger's Being and Time, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, Montaigne's Essays, and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Undergraduates in our Honors Program studied literary, philosophical, religious, and historical classics from ancient Greece to the twentieth century and capped off their education with serious, substantial senior theses. My first decades at TU were a time of intellectual ferment and growth for faculty and students alike.... No program in the university is as central to the liberal arts as Honors, one of TU's greatest attractions for prospective students. (According to the dean of admissions, no program in the university has a higher yield of applicants.) Incoming Honors students, half of whom are enrolled in the engineering college, read the Iliad in the summer before they matriculate; in their first semester, they read the Odyssey along with Greek tragedy, comedy, history, and philosophy. They go on to study classic books from the medieval period to the present. Honors alumni do some remarkable things; most recently, Jennifer Croft (BA '01) won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her translation of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk's novel Flights. Enrollment in Honors has skyrocketed in recent years, thanks mostly to the extraordinary efforts of the program's director, Denise Dutton (herself an Honors graduate). Between 2012 and 2017, Dutton increased the size of the program fourfold, from 65 to 255 enrolled students--but the yearly budget for Honors decreased by 70 percent over the same period. This meant that the program could no longer host visiting speakers, support dinner or lunch conversations between students and faculty, or even pay for snacks at shared events; Dutton took to baking cookies and purchasing refreshments on her own dime. More than 400 students applied for admission to Honors this year. Levit nevertheless slashed its budget, effectively reducing the number of incoming Honors students in the fall of 2019 by 50 percent. Dutton was furthermore forbidden from seeking external funding on the grounds that the university was not prepared to guarantee the program's existence beyond the 2019-2020 academic year. And though she is herself an assistant provost, Dutton was told that she could no longer email Levit directly; petitions would have to go through her boss. Around this time, Dutton began removing books and personal possessions from her cozy eyrie in the library. Other TU employees had been escorted from their offices upon being fired, and she didn't want to leave anything behind when the same thing happened to her.

A look back: The 2019 True Commitment downsizing of Liberal Arts at TU: Six years ago in the spring of 2019 faculty, students, and community were up in arms over the gutting of the humanities at TU, in the "New Commitment" plan pushed by President Gerry Clancy and Provost Janet Levit and a board dominated by members affiliated with the Kaiser System. Here are several articles by then-TU philosophy professor Jacob Howland on the controversy:

• April 17, 2019, City Journal: Storm Clouds Over Tulsa: Inside the academic destruction of a proud private university
• - July 15, 2025 at 11:30PM
  University of Tulsa guts Honors College after one year
  Click the headline to read the full story.