Julie Moore. Photo provided by Julie Moore
Taylor University writing professor Julie Moore publicly announced on May 1 the university’s decision not to renew her contract, saying the decision is because she uses writings about racial justice from diverse authors in her classes.
On January 27, Moore was called to meet with the provost, Jewerl Maxwell, where Maxwell informed her that the university would not be renewing her contract at the end of the year.
Moore said the news was shocking to her because all her preview performance reviews since she began working at Taylor University in 2017 had been positive. In fact, in a 2020 meeting with interim provost Tom Jones, Jones assured her that she would undergo the full review process on a seven-year cycle, rather than the typical three-year cycle.
“Thank you for the commitment you have made to teaching excellence, Julie,” Jones said in a summary of that 2020 meeting. “And, thank you for being so passionate about helping Taylor students think and write more clearly and with greater depth of thought and understanding.”
Moore had no reason to suspect her contract would not be renewed this year. When she pressed Maxwell for a reason behind her termination, he said that there had been some complaints about the themes of racial justice that she uses in her composition general education courses, including a quote on her syllabus from prominent historian Jemar Tisby, author of New York Times bestselling book “The Color of Compromise.”
Moore assigned works of creative nonfiction written by people of color such as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Letter to My Son.” She had a learning objective with each piece, such as teaching students the skill of close reading.
In “Mother Tongue”, an essay by Amy Tan, the author shares her mother’s experience having people categorize her English as “broken.”
“It’s just a really great essay about how do immigrants learn English and how does language get used?” Moore said. “You know, if you master it, how does it liberate you and if you don’t, how does it maybe serve to oppress you because people view you negatively because your English is ‘broken’?”
Moore received grants from Taylor University’s Bedi Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence (BCTLE) to research anti-racist pedagogies and linguistic justice. A condition of those grants, Moore said, is using the fruit of the grant-funded research in classes. She told the Chronicle-Tribune that using material from authors like Tan fulfilled the requirements of the grants she received from Taylor University.
“(Maxwell) told me my course curriculum was inappropriate for a composition course, despite all the support letters to the contrary, including my department’s unanimous vote, after my review in fall 2021,” Moore said in her May 1 letter posted on Tisby’s substack. “He made it clear he was ending my career at Taylor precisely because I used the very pedagogy the BCTLE had funded – and mandated I use – and the very pedagogy that I believed (and still believe) promotes Taylor’s Multicultural Philosophy Statement.”
The Multicultural Philosophy Statement, found on the university’s website, says in its concluding paragraph:
“We aspire to be a welcoming place where we show respect and love for all people. We want to honor one another and celebrate our diverse ethnic, racial, cultural, socio-economic, and national backgrounds in all dimensions of our life together. Through our relationships and programs, we actively strive to increase multicultural diversity in our community. We commit that Taylor University will emulate the beautiful, diverse multitude from every language, ethnicity, and nation who will gather in eternal praise to Christ in the Kingdom of Heaven (Rev. 7:9).”
Moore includes the entirety of the statement in her syllabus and also displayed it in the university writing center, which she oversaw.
“That statement is very clear about valuing diverse voices and celebrating all the gifts and contributions of people from across cultures and treating them with dignity because they’re created in the image of God,” Moore said.
Despite the ideals that the Multicultural Philosophy Statement professes, the only reason Moore says she received for the non-renewal of her contract was her attempt to foster those ideals in her classroom.
“I had so many students of color say ‘thank you for this class. I felt seen. I felt validated,’” Moore said. “I had white students saying ‘thank you for this class. Nobody’s ever taught me about these kinds of viewpoints or had me read these authors.’”
Moore recorded her January meeting with the provost, where she expressed to Maxwell her shock and confusion at the news.
“At any time, someone could have said, ‘Hey, Julie, change the theme of your class,’” Moore told Maxwell. “In composition and rhetoric, composition classes can be thematically organized and so that’s the direction I’ve gone in. But like … the review a year or so ago would have been the perfect place for the provost or the dean or the department to say, ‘Ok Julie, we understand what you’re doing, but we’re going to suggest you change the theme because of these problems.’ But no one said that.”
When Moore was unable to achieve a satisfactory resolution through legal negotiations, she decided to make her story public, through her letter on Tisby’s substack.
Taylor University’s student newspaper, The Echo, reported that President Michael Lindsay did share a brief statement on May 1 through an email to the Taylor community.
According to The Echo, the statement said:
“We understand and empathize with a faculty member’s disappointment when a contract decision does not go as they hoped,” Lindsay said. “Multiple personnel factors are considered when the University decides not to renew a contract, as was the case here.”
“We strongly disagree with what has been asserted,” the email read. “We recognize, though, that there have been questions raised for some about the university’s commitment to intercultural relations. Let me assure you that we remain fully dedicated to embracing and celebrating diversity as an intentional community striving to live out the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which transcends all ethnic, cultural, socio-economic and national divisions.”
The university held a student forum on Wednesday and a faculty forum on Thursday, though The Echo said the administrators emphasized they could not speak about Moore’s situation directly due to privacy and human resource policies.
Moore said that at this time, she is not sure if she will pursue legal action against the university and that she is praying about it.
“I really want to say that God does care about justice, because there are so many Bible verses about justice and caring for the poor, the oppressed,” Moore said. “And at the end of the day, my class was simply about listening to… those who have been oppressed in our society and listening to their voices. …And all I was doing was giving my students practice writing to diverse readers in various types of genres of writing.”
Despite Moore’s belief that her firing was due to what material she was teaching, she said she does not believe it is about her, at its core.
Copyright © 2025 Chronicle-Tribune