Houghton Going Green

April 22, 2008, 1:30 pm; posted by
Filed under Articles, Chloe, Featured  | 1 Comment

A new professor is coming to Houghton College — Dr. Matthew Sleeth, an environmentalist and the author of Serve God, Save the Planet. He\’s been hired to make the campus green.

I don\’t like the sound of that.

See, we all have our own opinions on how Houghton College spends its money. Personally, I\’ve been watching professors drop like flies. The sociology department\’s class offerings have dwindled to entry-level courses, and senior writing majors have been forced to coerce over-extended professors into doing independent studies, or else succumb to Intro to Creative Writing.

And instead of getting a few new sociology or writing professors, we hire some guy to make the campus green? Houghton doesn\’t care about being green! This is a marketing strategy.

This whole semester, every time I heard Sleeth\’s name, I went off on the poor souls who found themselves within a ten-yard radius of me. “Do you know they\’re requiring all the first-years to buy his book?,” I would cry. “He\’s rewriting the Scripture and calling it the first ”˜Green Bible!\’ It\’s going to be printed with recycled paper and soy ink. Soy ink!” Absolutely absurd.

Sleeth spoke in chapel yesterday. I would have boycotted, but I skipped too many chapels earlier in the year and had to go to meet the requirement. I decided I would go, but I wouldn\’t enjoy it.

Sleeth started off on the wrong foot, bragging about how his son was 19 and graduating from Asbury, and his daughter was 17, in her second year at Asbury, and looking forward to seeing her book, “It\’s Easy Being Green,” in bookstores soon. Well, whoopty-freakin-do.

But then he started talking about his life. He graduated third from the bottom of his high school class. Relatively Christian, he met a Jewish girl and got married, then together, they swore off religion. His wife announced soon after their wedding that she thought he should go to college, so he did, worked his butt off, and went to medical school just two years later.

Throughout his chapel talk, Sleeth spoke time and again of how someone — usually his wife, often God — challenged him, leading him to dedicate himself entirely to something: first emergency medicine, then Christianity, and finally environmentalism. When Sleeth chose to believe in something, he threw himself into the work of perfecting it. He loves what he does, he\’s passionate, and he wants others to be passionate with him.

I enjoyed his chapel, immensely. He\’s speaking again today, and I can\’t wait to hear him. Maybe the college isn\’t spending its money wisely, but that doesn\’t have anything to do with who and what Dr. Matthew Sleeth is. I can\’t wait to see what he will do for Houghton.


Comments

1 Comment to “Houghton Going Green”

  1. becca on May 5th, 2008 1:15 am

    chloe i am so glad you wrote about this! i have been really curious about this guy and thought it might be really amazing if he gave up a successful life of medicine to pursue something at a little western ny college. tell me more!

Leave a comment!