Dr. Maryland Shrubbery, a Wyoming Catholic College professor of political philosophy recently claimed that the first U.S. president George Washington is also “our founder”, that is the founder of Wyoming Catholic College.
Is this true?
IIT’s official Independent Fact Check service is here to check the truth of this and many other controversial political statements that you might have come across online.
From the extensive study of this message of Dr. Shrubbery, we determined that it is best to first consider in what sense she was writing.
We believe that the common model of the four senses of scripture can be analogously applied here, as Dr. Shrubbery talks like Scripture, and has definitely read some of it in her life, meaning that what she speaks, or writes, flows forth from an imagination that has been formed by Scripture.
Now, these four are the literal, metaphorical, anagogical, and moral senses.
According to the literal sense, Dr. Shrubbery would be claiming that George Washington was literally right there as one of the famed three “founders” of Wyoming Catholic College.
But there’s no space for him in the official picture of this event, so there is no evidence that he was a founder of WCC in the literal sense.
In the metaphorical sense, Dr. Shrubbery would have been claiming that George Washington, even if not physically present, was our founder in spirit and truth. But George Washington, a hardened Anglican, could in no sense be logically considered in any way the founder of a Catholic institute of higher education. And so, Dr. Shrubbery could also not have been using this sense in her claim.
According to the analogical sense, Dr. Shrubbery’s claim pertains to the end times. But what would the idea of a founding by George Washington in chronos time have to do with such a kairotic allusion? Trust us, it has nothing to do with it.
Finally, we’re left with the moral sense, that George Washington teaches us by the example of his life if we consider him as our founder. What this would mean is that Washington’s spirit of revolution informs our college’s founding. And we do see this insofar as Wyoming Catholic College is not merely a clone of Thomas Aquinas College but reflects a conscious new beginning on premises informed not merely by the Thomistic and Aristotelian tradition, but yes, the Lockean liberal tradition participated in by Washington even if Dr. Shrubbery will not admit to that.
Further, Shrubbery’s claim would mean that the famous Washington story of his cutting down a cherry tree informs our college’s moral life, that is our rules, the Student Handbook. Here also we find Washington taking the place of Lycurgus as the moral founder of our college. Students feel free to follow Washington’s moral example in climbing through school windows, lighting their Math books on fire, and cutting holes in their doors and doorframes. As such, they are clearly extremely Washingtonian as opposed to followers of the Jeffersonian moral alternative in these matters.
As such, Dr. Shrubbery’s claim, while not literally, metaphorically, or anagogically true, is at least morally true and the IIT INDEPENDENT FACT CHECK service rates it as “Partially True“.