Fired Rockhurst teacher told class of duty to stand up against mass deportation | Opinion
A longtime Catholic ethics teacher and football coach at Rockhurst High School was fired this month after telling his students that if Donald Trump follows through on his promise to carry out the mass deportation of migrants, well then they have a moral obligation to stand up against that.
The now unemployed 42-year-old theology teacher and Iraq war veteran’s own account of what he said in class was guaranteed to make the principal’s phone ring: “When you vote for a candidate promising mass deportation,” Jimbo Gillcrist told his students, “you become an accomplice in the violation of the human rights of the asylum seeker and the refugee.”
Rockhurst, which offers not only a gold-plated education but a serious moral formation, has a long list of well-known alums, including Sens. Tim Kaine and Josh Hawley. And Gillcrist, who had been at the school for seven years, acknowledges that the school was within its rights to fire him, or any other teacher, for any reason at all; while many Jesuit institutions have due process policies, Rockhurst does not.
He and three other Rockhurst teachers told me it’s against school policy to talk about politics in the classroom. Gillcrist not only did that, right after the election, on Nov. 6 and Nov. 7, but then said he would neither apologize nor promise that he wouldn’t speak out again. In his Nov. 8 termination letter, the school principal, the Rev. Vince Giacabazi, S.J., vehemently objected to Gillcrist’s assertion that he or anyone else was being asked to “remain silent.”
“For the most part, appropriate dialogue with students in classrooms has been a practice that other Rockhurst instructors have been able to do quite well. You, in stark contrast, allegedly took a vastly different approach.” So much hangs on those words “allegedly” and “appropriate.”
No school administrator longs to deal with irate parents, but sticking to “appropriate” political dialogue right now, in the classroom or anywhere else, is not the languid stroll that Giacabazi makes it out to be.
What Gillcrist said in class was in no way neutral. But then, neither are the Gospels.
And unless we just go ahead and admit that what Matthew 25 (and for that matter, Exodus and John Paul II) say about care for the stranger is no longer operative, I have no idea how you’d teach Catholic ethics right now without highlighting the daily news reports about preparation for mass deportations to be carried out by the military.
Fired by email
The emails and letter firing Gillcrist — there was never any human-to-human conversation between Gillcrist and Giacabazi about what happened in the classroom — list other perceived offenses.
First, his 2020 arrest at a Black Lives Matter protest. Also, his 2021 social media post after Rush Limbaugh’s death that while he hoped the conservative radio host’s soul was in heaven, he believed that this world was a better place without him. Then there was Gillcrist’s use of the word “f***” at a recent football game.
“I say f*** a lot,” Gillcrist said in his 26-page Nov. 17 apologia to the Rockhurst community. In our interview on his porch, yes, he did. But the proximate reasons for his firing, as the termination letter he forwarded to me makes clear, were “the concerns that were brought forth by counselors, students and parents about behavior that occurred earlier this week on Wednesday,” Nov. 6. In other words, his comments about mass deportation, which are never detailed in the letter.
The principal chose to see Gillcrist telling him by email to “do as you will” as a refusal to even discuss the matter, though Gillcrist says that’s not right. It was that refusal, Giacabazi said in the letter, that left him no choice but to terminate Gillcrist’s employment, effective immediately. Then he asked him to stay away from campus and from Rockhurst students.
“I’ve never refused to talk to them about anything,” Gillcrist told me. The rumor ricocheting around Rockhurst’s student body is that he called Trump Hitler and all of his voters Nazis, which Gillcrist called “absurd, because I’m careful about how I say things.”
School officials — Giacabazi, school president Dave Loughlin, and assistant principal Michael Wickenhauser — answered my request to speak to any parent or student who was upset by what Gillcrist said in class by forwarding my queries to a spokesman who responded by saying that the school wishes Gillcrist well.
Later, when those who thought that Rockhurst did the right thing in letting Gillcrist go complain that this is a one-sided column, I hope they will talk to me. If they do, I’ll add what they have to say.
Teachers concerned
Three other teachers at the school, all of whom said they’d without any question be fired if I printed their names, said Gillcrist’s departure has been demoralizing for faculty and confusing for students, especially since teachers don’t feel free to answer their questions.
That this teacher was fired by email reminds me of that time my sophomore year in high school when, in highly sophomoric fashion, I asked an intermediary to inform my boyfriend that I was breaking up with him instead of doing the right thing and telling him to his face.
But the much bigger and thornier question than how all of this went down is how not just Rockhurst but other Catholic schools, too, will respond, in keeping with their specific identity and mission, if mass deportations do happen. As the world’s most famous Jesuit, Pope Francis, has often said, “the devil enters through the pockets.”
I have belonged to wonderful Jesuit parishes most of my adult life, first in New York and then in Washington. But mission versus moolah is not a new tension for the Society of Jesus, aka the Jesuits, who in their long history of seeking to educate the next generation of leaders all over the world have often been allied with the wealthy and powerful.
A Rockhurst teacher who dropped off a care package for Gillcrist while I was sitting on his porch sees the situation this way: “Some of the school’s biggest donors lean right,” so those who don’t have to tread carefully. “But when you’re teaching ethics, there’s nowhere to hide. There aren’t many teachers at Rockhurst who genuinely care about their students as much as Jim does, and now their Ignatian formation will not be complete.”
(Ignatian theology comes from the founder of the Jesuit order, the 16th-century Spanish saint Ignatius of Loyola, a well-off soldier who after being wounded in battle started reading about the lives of the saints only because there was nothing jazzier available in the family castle where he was laid up. Later, he gave up both his wealth and his sword and shared the spiritual exercises that he’d found brought him closer to God. Everyone I know who has done the exercises has said they made them fall in love with Jesus, who asks his followers to sacrifice, for him and for others, in ways that are really hard.)
A second teacher at Rockhurst said that in the past, the response to pressure from parents with deep pockets was more along the lines of, “If these rules don’t work for you, tell us where to send the transcript.” Now, he said, it’s “Don’t leave! We’ll do whatever you want!”
A third said the administration is “trying to walk a tightrope of pleasing right- and left-wing parents,” but the former has more sway, “even though Ignatian values are inherently quite liberal. The faculty is pretty divided down the middle — people have sussed out who they can talk to — and the administration is not one you can go to and disagree without having it blow back on you.”
Teachers who high-fived after Trump’s victory, that person said, did not do that in front of students but did make those faculty members who already felt terrible feel even worse.
A teacher who the day after the election completely lost his temper in a back-and-forth with a student saying how glad he was that Trump’s victory had made the stock market surge did apologize to that student, and at least for now still has his job.
“I did not see this coming,” Gillcrist said of his firing. “I teach with my door open. I’ve said a lot more blunt things.”
What he said was very strong, and I get that, but young people are strong, too. And if the promised mass deportations do happen, then they and all of the rest of us are going to have to decide whether and how to push back.
Future for Gillcrist
Though Gillcrist doesn’t know exactly what he’s going to do now, he says he’s going to be fine, and I believe him. Because everything he believes, he says, is based on Catholic teaching, which does not leave anyone wondering which end is up.
This week, he’s rereading Hannah Arendt, thinking about what he might do to help migrants and hanging out with his cat George while his wife, who works for the global nonprofit Water.org, is in Azerbaijan for the U.N. climate summit.
Though passionate in his beliefs, he does not strike me as someone with a moral superiority complex. In his letter to the Rockhurst community, he talked about how much he still blames himself for eventually being worn down and giving in to pressure from superiors in the Army to leave true but inconvenient facts out of after-action reports in the Sunni Triangle. Over time, he also gave in and went along with including things that didn’t happen in those reports, which it was his job to consolidate for the battalion commander’s remarks for each week’s battle update brief. “Persons living or working in Iraq — men, women, children, as well as American soldiers — died as a result. Of that, I have no doubt.”
Whether you agree with him or not, this is a person of substance and principle. He finished his doctorate at the University of Kansas but abandoned his dissertation because his topic, combatants versus non-combatants according to just war theory — “How does representative democracy factor in? Are we all then combatants” when our government is at war? — led him to pacifism.
He showed me a bunch of the supportive emails he’s gotten from devastated current and former students who said he had made Rockhurst more loving and made them better Christians and better men.
Unfortunately, there will be a lot of stories like this one in the coming months and years, about sacrifices either made or avoided. But I’m going to say that there are not a lot of Jimbo Gillcrists in this world. And I hope there won’t be any more firings by email, without so much as a conversation, by those who are supposed to be setting an example.
This story was originally published November 21, 2024 at 5:06 AM.