Here I document just one egregious episode in the administration’s long effort to rid itself of me. It is nothing short of a sexist smear. President Neal Plantinga, ignoring measurable results of my performance, drew on an old formula for ruining a woman’s career: accuse her of being hysterical. I had been called to a meeting with him and VP Duane Kelderman. According to him I was asked a straightforward question:
“What followed, without pause, was a tirade—a stream of accusations (of all the sexist tricks, to haul me in here and take me to the woodshed!”), expostulation, and sheer, incoherent rage. I’ve never in my ministry of thirty-one years witnessed anything like it. All entreaties with entreaty body language (“Ruth, we’re trying for a kinder, gentler, ethos. PLEASE help us!) were met with more venom, some of it vulgar (you know where you can shove that!”), and some of it derisive, and all of it motored by one of the single most explosive, out-of-control losses of Christian self-control that I’ve ever witnessed. This went on for thirty-five minutes.”
This paragraph is false in all respects and I have an email I wrote to Neal the following day proving that. But it is also absurd and contradictory. Why wouldn’t they get up and leave rather than listening to me explode for 35 minutes? It does not ring true, and it makes them both appear decidedly pathetic.
What is the meaning of “incoherent rage”? Screaming strings of monosyllables? Again, it doesn’t ring true. And, if it is incoherent why does he include very specific phrases—ones I’ve never used as husband John would attest. Had I done so, I would have been begging to be fired on the spot.
His notes are incorrectly dated, a fact proven by my email the following day. More significantly, these “incident notes” did not surface until more than three years after the actual meeting. A seminary board committee had finally agreed to look at my case. I insisted that Neal describe in writing his unspecified charges against me of “ungodly conduct.” Thus the fabricated notes.
It’s simply beyond belief that Neal would have sat on such notes for more than three years during which time he was trying to defend his firing of me with far less serious accusations: irregular chapel attendance, leaving a synod meeting early, petty statements against me by a staff member (who denied making them).
For me, the whole ordeal had begun in early January of 2003, less than 3 months after Neal was installed as the new president. I was told without warning, that I would be terminated and removed from tenure track. During the following three years I disputed the decision with dozens of documents. The administration, of course, had documents of its own. It is most telling, however, that none of these documents referenced an alleged tirade. In a long memo of January 28, 2003, less than ten months after the purported incident occurred, Neal noted 9 of my “deficits and lapses,” making no mention at all of a tirade or even of generalized anger issues. He also, in that memo, laid out strict “confidentiality” rules so as to “seal the environment.” I was effectively silenced only weeks after I had been hit with the career-ending assault.
But with the help of the head of the Christian Reformed Church—after the seminary board committee had called for redress for me—I was granted outside independent mediation. Over a period of several weeks two professional mediators read stacks of documents and interviewed me and the three administrators (including VPAA Henry DeMoor). They concluded that I should be given retroactive pay, that I should be appointed full professor, and that the charges against me were inflammatory and should be removed from the record—none of which happened since it was non-binding arbitration. I left the seminary in 2006, after my second terminal appointment ended.
Why bring this awful 3-year ordeal up after a dozen years? As is reported in so many #MeToo stories, my distress hasn’t simply gone away. There has never been an apology from those administrators or from the current administration. Yes, colleagues felt very bad and told me so, but they insisted they had done everything they could. They hadn’t. They just wanted it “over with.”
This ordeal was very different from that which transpired at the end of my 19-year marriage that I tell about in Black and White Bible, Black and Blue Wife. In that case a judge listened to my testimony and that of my son and granted me full custody, a legal separation from my husband, and placed a restraining order on him. I was free from his physical assaults. He was not free. He moved out of state and essentially went undercover and abandoned our son. Though a one-time minister, Bible professor, and editor, he’d been fired from his various positions and he would have no further Christian ministry.
In the case of Calvin Seminary, the three administrators continue to carry on today as though this excruciating ordeal I endured had never happened. These fabricated notes are just one example of how deplorably Neal Plantinga and the other two administrators treated me. None of my colleagues have defended me publicly. It’s time they do so.