Samantha Watkins
Reporter
The College Fix
Articles I have written and published.
Catholic college faculty can't unionize in surprise ruling by National Labor Relations Board
Samantha Watkins February 2016
Religion based punishment means the college is exempt
The National Labor Relations Board is sending mixed signals to religious colleges as to whether they must allow faculty members to unionize.
A year after its Seattle office told Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) that its full-time contingent faculty can unionize because they perform no “religious function” and are not “managerial,” the same office has shot down union-minded faculty at Montana’s Carroll College.
The difference at the Catholic college? The role of faculty and the religion-based discipline that Carroll can impose on them, according to the decision and order written by Regional Director Ronald Hooks.
“We understood that our case raised a number of challenging issues, and we hoped that the PLU decision would open the door for a faculty union at Carroll,” Kay Satre, who chairs the Department of Languages and Literature and spokesperson for union backers, told The College Fix in an email.
University forces students to wear Fitbits and punishes them for not exercising enough
Samantha Watkins January 2016
Big Brother is watching you. In this case, your footsteps – and the “brother” is a religious authority.
Oral Roberts University, a Christian school in Oklahoma, is taking health to a new level by requiring incoming freshmen and transfer students to walk about five miles per day as measured by Fitbit fitness trackers that they must purchase.
The tech-enabled mandate is an update to a previous policy that required all students to manually log aerobic points in a fitness journal.
The charismatic evangelical university’s Whole Person Education approach dates to its founding in 1965 by evangelist Oral Roberts, but ORU doesn’t appear to have touted the Fitbit mandate until months after it started last fall.
“The marriage of new technology with our physical fitness requirements is something that sets ORU apart” from every other university in the world, President William Wilson said in apress release earlier this month.
Lesbian Professor's Fall to Grace
Samantha Watkins March 2014
As a tenured lesbian professor at Syracuse University, Dr. Rosario Champagne Butterfield set out to study and ultimately expose the “Religious Right” as fanatical bigots, but a funny thing happened on her proverbial road to Damascus.
She accepted Jesus Christ into her heart, stopped having sex with women, and is now in the midst of telling her conversion story to the masses, including at colleges nationwide.
The story of Dr. Butterfield is chronicled in her book The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith. And as some might have guessed by now, she is no longer a tenured professor of English at Syracuse University.
