Baylor 2012: Universal Vision in a Particular Place

by Andy Black

n Language and Love, William Mallard introduces the main features of Augustine’s theology through a recounting of the Confessions. Mallard frames Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage as the attempt to find a vocabulary able to unify and encompass the two “worlds” he had known since birth: the religious world of his mother with its talk of sin, salvation, and Jesus; and the world of everything else: business, culture, and philosophy. From this perspective, the conflict between the divided internal and external worlds we inhabit creates the “restless heart” that draws us toward rest in the transcendent yet graciously available God of Christianity.

Solid Foundation by Jim Janknegt

I am reminded of this interpretation of Augustine as my alma mater, Baylor University, is currently in the midst of a heated controversy over the attempt to transform itself–the world’s largest Baptist university–from a primarily regional school with respectable but not quite prestigious academics into the world’s premier protestant research university. There is much talk on campus in Waco, Texas these days (at least by some) of rejoining what was torn asunder by the Enlightenment; of integrating faith and learning across academic disciplines; of Baylor bravely pointing the way toward peace for the restless hearts of contemporary academe, culture, and Christianity.

Officially launched in 2001, the “Baylor 2012” plan calls for a decade of major building projects, graduate program expansion, increased emphasis on faculty research, lower student-faculty ratios, and the hiring of “world-class” scholars. (This is the point at with writers are tempted to use the cliché “Texas-sized” when describing Baylor’s ambitions.)

The Baylor envisioned in the 2012 vision will become a magnet for Christian intellectual muscle, a place for innovative interdisciplinary programs, a model for the integration of vigorous faith and serious learning and a Christian intellectual community giving students the resources and guidance to develop a sense of vocation and a commitment to service.

Entertaining the prospect of my alma mater achieving or even trying to attain these lofty goals has often been intoxicating. This has partly to do with school pride and the temptation to have it all: to succeed on the world’s terms (U.S. News and World Report’s coveted “Tier One” status!) while retaining enough religious character to feel superior to other religious schools who decisively chose the path of secularism in their quest for academic greatness.

But I have also been deeply attracted to the “vision” of Baylor’s current administration because it holds out the prospect of overcoming the “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” that Mark Noll so famously analyzed and mourned in 1994. My first reading of Noll’s book affected me like few books have before or since.

As I read Noll’s analysis of evangelical anti-intellectualism, I gained a sense of solidarity: I grasped that I was one of many who had nearly concluded, with heartache, that “at least in the United States, it is simply impossible to be, with integrity, both evangelical and intellectual.” Noll offered keen historical insights into evangelical Christianity’s mistrust or disregard for disciplined reflection about God, human beings, and the world. More importantly, he provided a formidable theological argument for why evangelicals and all Christians should consider this a scandal.

As a Baylor undergraduate during the mid-1990s, I received a rigorous and enjoyable education. Opportunities existed for students so desiring to gain an outstanding academic experience. Baylor’s best graduates have historically been able to hold their own and more at the highest levels of academia and the learned professions. But Baylor has never seriously been considered a bookish place, notable exceptions notwithstanding. I spent my undergraduate years straddling the intellectually stimulating world of my academic peers in the honors program (the majority of whom had no use for the broadly evangelical ethos of campus religious life) and the world of my closest friends, whose sincere and admirable evangelical piety I both shared and struggled to maintain.

Campus worship events and informal spiritual gatherings urged students to be “passionate” for God and the gospel and to settle for no less than the experience of deep personal intimacy with the divine. This highly-charged spiritual atmosphere tended to be extremely inhospitable and off-putting for any inclined to acknowledge complexity, mystery, or doubt. My growing concerns about the appropriateness of sharply dividing the world into distinct “saved” and “unsaved” (or “reached” and “unreached”) segments caused me to question my own Christian devotion. I turned away from considering a ministerial vocation during those years, despite sensing a “call to ministry” (in Baptist terminology) as a child.

I left Baylor immensely grateful for the opportunity to learn in an environment that respected students’ faith. But I hated that so many fellow students could skillfully grasp advanced concepts in their disciplines or receive a rigorous professional preparation yet retain a faith overwhelmingly defined by the fads of pop-evangelical culture. An atmosphere of religious trendiness generally shaped Baylor’s extracurricular student life, while classroom content retained formal autonomy from religious influences. Apart from personal initiative by students or professors, there was no clear incentive or method for these two worlds to be brought into serious conversation with each other.

I decided there was something wrong when students who tried to engage their faith with the best Baylor had to offer academically found themselves at odds with or at least no longer at home within the religious community that nourished and shaped them. A community which included classmates and social peers–not simply the church back home.

This story is largely a familiar one. I have taken the time to tell it in order to emphasize why Baylor’s attempt to beat the odds by integrating high-powered academics with serious Christian commitment casts such a powerful spell over so many–including many with no previous incentive for following the fortunes of a Baptist school in Texas.

Baylor’s ten-year vision has attracted notable and surprising academics to Waco. This is no small feat, and a sure sign that something significant is happening. The most recent hiring coup is probably the arrival of acclaimed sociologist of religion Rodney Stark. (A serious, and reportedly almost successful, run was made at renowned British biblical scholar N.T. Wright). The new Dean of the recently-formed Honors College, Thomas Hibbs, is a distinguished Roman Catholic philosopher and former chair of Boston College’s department.

Among other figures from the “integration of faith and learning” corner of academia now at Baylor are literary critic David Lyle Jeffrey and Kierkegaard scholar Stephen Evans. Both became finalists for the job of Baylor’s Provost shortly after arriving on campus. Jeffrey, a Wheaton and Princeton-educated Canadian with no significant Texas or Baptist ties, was eventually given the academic responsibility of transforming Baylor into a Christian university “in the fullest sense of the word.”

Despite real reasons for excitement and anticipation, this is a painful time for all who love Baylor. Now into its second year, the ten-year vision is bitterly dividing the university. In September 2003, the Faculty Senate passed a lopsided vote of no-confidence in the leadership of President Robert Sloan. Not long afterward, Baylor’s Board of Regents responded by reaffirming Sloan’s leadership in a similarly decisive vote. Faculty members regularly square-off with dueling op-ed pieces in the Waco paper. Rival alumni groups have funded extensive and expensive media campaigns to attack or defend the Baylor administration and the 2012 vision. Feelings run deep, and both sides’ tactics show signs of desperation.

The “loyal opposition” fears that all that was good and unique about Baylor is being destroyed by zealous ideologues unqualified to wield such enormous power over the destiny of a major university. They charge the Sloan administration with doing violence to a venerable institution and its traditions by imposing a trajectory neither shared nor wanted nor fully understood by major swathes of Baylor’s constituencies.

In July 2003, several thousand alumni attended a “Baylor family dialogue” over the Baylor 2012 plan held in the basketball arena that was moderated like a presidential debate. The daughter of a former Baylor president and leader of the opposition provided a headline moment when she compared Sloan–a former pastor and biblical scholar–to infamous fundamentalists who founded their own colleges (e.g. Bob Jones, Jerry Falwell.). She implored Sloan to follow their lead, establish his “vision” somewhere else–“and let us have Baylor back!”

Critics point to reckless financial strategies and academic and curricular overhauls imposed by administrative fiat. Numerous faculty members protest an atmosphere of mistrust and intimidation in which dissent is demonized and doubt-raisers are bullied into submission. Many lament that the new requirements for faculty research will erode Baylor’s historic commitment to quality undergraduate teaching. They note that many beloved long-time professors–universally acknowledged to epitomize Baylor at its best–would not be hired under current publication standards and perhaps even under recent efforts to use interest in and capacity for theological reflection as hiring criteria. (These criteria lead many to ask: “What on earth does theological reflection have to do with being a good calculus or accounting professor?”).

The Sloan administration has scored some rhetorical points by exposing and refuting the most hyperbolic accusations and sinister rumors of the naysayers. But Baylor 2012 supporters’ primary reaction has been to define the protest as simply the typical anxiousness provoked by institutional change and to shift focus onto the rightness and boldness of Baylor’s ambitions.

The sheer grandiosity of these ambitions makes it almost inevitable that they will be used to justify morally ambiguous tactics. This is cause for great concern among Baylor alumni–like myself–with great sympathy for the administration’s goals yet with enough respect and admiration for Baylor’s heritage and those who built it to take the critics seriously.

Donald Schmeltekopf is the recently retired Baylor Provost. He was a central force behind Baylor’s shift toward and eventual adoption of the Baylor 2012 goals in the 1990s. In an interview with a university publication in 2003, he admitted that implementing this kind of institutional change is not for the weak of heart.

“There is a tension within myself about the degree to which you really assert and press the agenda of the university–being serious as a Christian university, increasing the expectations for research and scholarship, higher standards for tenure and hiring,” he confessed.

“There is a tension among all of that … and on the other hand of not wanting to ignore or leave anybody out of the life of the University. But the fact is, at a university of this complexity and magnitude, if you’re really going to move forward, inevitably–and this might be overstating it–some people might be hurt. They’re not going to be as happy in their work as I wish they could be and I’m sure as they wish they were themselves.”

Lives and careers have been disrupted and it appears that many alumni have withheld financial support and no longer recommend Baylor to younger friends and family because they do not trust or recognize their alma mater. Whether this damage is merely part of the inevitable growing pains of progress or is an early sign of disintegration is the question at the heart of the matter.

For years, Baylor enjoyed a reputation for solid undergraduate education (with an emphasis on quality teaching) and excellence in selected graduate and professional programs–all at an affordable price, by private school standards. But Baylor has never been a major research university and U.S. News and World Report continues to place Baylor in the “second tier” of national universities (although near the top of that group).

Then, heady optimism fueled by a strong economy coincided with an identity-shaping moment for the school. In 1996, Baylor entered as a charter member of one of college athletics’ most powerful conferences–the “Big Twelve”. Baylor is the only private school in the Big Twelve, which includes three Texas public universities and other major state schools of the southern and western heartland (Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, etc.).

Even more significant for its internal and external perception, Baylor joined a fairly prestigious group of private universities in the elite athletic conferences that included Stanford and Southern California (PAC-10); Northwestern (Big 10); Vanderbilt (SEC); Duke and Wake Forest (ACC). The longing to achieve recognition as a legitimate academic peer of these institutions while enjoying the money, exposure, and fan support (especially in this part of the country) that big-time college sports bring exerts an understandably strong pull on many alumni.

Baylor would make a unique addition to the “tier-one” academic club. Undergraduates are still required to attend two semesters of chapel and to take two religion courses. Vestiges of in loco parentis policies still regulate campus life. Visiting hours (although lenient) still remain in place in gender-segregated campus housing. In 1996, Baylor drew international media attention by permitting the first on-campus student dance. (This was a savvy PR move: a policy relic was abandoned without controversy, while giving Baylor positive press as a quaint, yet relatively progressive place).

The only religiously-affiliated major research university resembling Baylor’s aspiration is of course Notre Dame. (Notre Dame is not included in the above list since Notre Dame, as an “independent”, does not play football as part of an athletic conference, and football is clearly the reference point). Baylor as the “Protestant Notre Dame” is a goal most alumni could support enthusiastically, in theory.

By the late 1990s, it was easy to see Baylor as poised for something significant. In addition to the prestige of major conference athletics, Baylor enjoyed a legacy of sound financial and academic management, a committed base of loyal alumni (making it possible for serious people to refer to the “Baylor family” with a straight face), and had managed to maintain meaningful connection to its religious roots.

But even given this shared recent history, the strategists and administrators behind Baylor 2012 are motivated by a sense of crisis their critics do not generally share: a crisis of integrity for religiously affiliated universities with serious academic aspirations. The simple fact that some in the Baylor community are motivated by an urgency not felt by all has created an identity crisis which has steered Baylor into the chaos of contemporary American Protestant Christianity. And this identity crisis at Baylor is only a part of the broader identity crisis currently gripping the whole of Baptist life in the South.

In the last decades of the 20th century, a well-organized fundamentalist movement began seizing control of Southern Baptist institutions. Its leaders publicly declared their intentions to gain control of Baylor, the “crown jewel” of Baptist institutions, and purge it of a perceived liberalism. Many Baylor loyalists and Baptist moderates feared that this fundamentalist juggernaut would capture the Texas state convention, as it had the other major state conventions, enabling new leadership to add trustees to Baylor’s board with fundamentalist marching orders. Those orders focused primarily on mandating an institutional commitment to biblical inerrancy and requiring the same commitment from all faculty. In a shrewd and unexpected move, Baylor officials responded by changing the school’s legal charter in 1990 to establish a self-perpetuating Board of Regents and to reduce the role of the Baptist General Convention of Texas in university governance.

Fundamentalist predictions that Baylor would soon follow in the footsteps of so many other formerly religious universities were likely one reason Baylor regents tapped Sloan, then dean of Baylor’s Truett seminary, as a compromise President in 1995. Since then, the Sloan administration has aggressively moved to guard Baylor against secularization. During the same time, Texas Baptists have repeatedly elected moderate leaders who have resisted attempts by leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention to require conservative religious and political conformity from their churches.

Once Baylor severed its formal denominational ties, the Baylor community, simply consisting of all who ‘love Baylor’, became solely responsible for the religious identity of the university. Such a vague principle can provide considerable unity, particularly when the football program is doing well. Most of the time it makes for a fragile consensus among multiple constituencies with various reasons for giving their support. In a time like the present, when football victories are as scarce as 80 degree August days in Waco, and the hits of bad press keep on coming, the focus has shifted from loving Baylor because it is “Baylor” to loving one’s particular vision of what it was, can or should be.

The push towards the top tier and toward an infusion of “vigorous faith” has also pushed the historic detente to its limit. The process of “moving forward” requires one side or the other to give way. And as Schmeltekopf noted, when that happens, people get hurt.

To oversimplify: Baylor’s current controversy pits long-time faculty (often with deep Baylor, Baptist and Texas ties) against the faculty and administrative newcomers (essentially seen as carpetbaggers) who are attracted to Baylor because of the “vision.” The controversy aligns the moderate Texas Baptist gentry protective of Baylor’s fragile status quo against grassroots believers, academics and others energized by this proposed attempt to rescue Christian higher education from secularism and/or irrelevance. Yet despite all the fascinating denominational, philosophical, theological, and social issues with broader implications in play, this is primarily a family feud combined with some intense academic turf wars. It seems the fate of “Baylor 2012” will ultimately be decided by financial realities and leadership skills.

One of the most striking aspects of this whole affair is the difficulty and confusion caused by pigeonholing either side of the controversy as either “liberal” or “conservative.” For example, the same woman who so sensationally compared Sloan to fundamentalist empire-builders warned the Baylor faithful that Baylor was trading in its Baptist birthright and moving in the direction of “northern Evangelicalism” and institutions like Calvin College and Wheaton College.

Baylor-type Baptists have mixed feelings about the label “evangelical.” Some call it a “yankee word” with troubling connotations. Others insist, with justification, that Baptist faith and practice has always been “evangelical” in its biblicism, conversionistic piety, and evangelistic missions-oriented activism. Many of the people recently drawn to or brought to Baylor by the Sloan administration and its goals do not carry battle scars from the recent Southern Baptist civil wars. A good number are not Baptists, and they are puzzled when the Baylor administration’s attempt to ensure a big-tent orthodoxy among faculty is denounced as insidious “creedalism.”

These circumstances explain why attempts to stick Sloan and the architects of Baylor 2012 with the “fundamentalist” label are so incendiary–and effective. “Moderate” (i.e. non-fundamentalist) Baptists across the United States have primarily avoided meeting their fundamentalist accusers on the doctrinal ground of the fundamentalists’ choosing, instead emphasizing the unity-in-diversity of traditional Baptist communities and Baptist concepts like “soul competency” and the “priesthood of the believer.” These concepts stress the rights and responsibilities of individual believers to work out their salvation through personal encounters with Christ and scripture without the sanction of church, council, or creed. Such notions can be traced to their origins in the radical wing of the Reformation and its emphasis on the “gospel freedom” of the local congregation and of all believers but have since shaped and been shaped by modern liberal theories of autonomy.

For the most part, “moderate” Baptists do not fear and loathe fundamentalists because of their theology, but because of their insistence that everyone share it. In other words, the moderate Baptists representing the Baylor traditionalists are less threatened by formal theories of biblical inerrancy per se (since most Baptists tend to be “simple biblicists” in their reading of scripture) than they are by creedalism in any and all forms. These Baylor loyalists see the recent emphasis on faculty who are “vigorous in the life of faith” (many ask, “By what criteria?”) and increased concern for theological orthodoxy as signs that Baylor is becoming the narrowly religious institution they sought to prohibit over a decade ago.

I fall somewhere in between. There is much to applaud in the Baptist insistence on the centrality of gospel freedom. I have my own qualms about claiming the label “evangelical” for myself. If it comes to choosing sides in the recent Southern Baptist battles, I am firmly in the moderate camp. But like many young Baptists, I have come of age in an era when denominational affiliation rarely forms a key part of one’s religious identity. The era of a relatively homogenous Southern Baptist culture stretching from Richmond to El Paso with shared traditions and institutions is over. Unlike older generations of moderate Baptists still mourning the loss of the old Southern Baptist Convention, I have not retained a strong sense that Baptist fundamentalists are my estranged siblings in the faith–at least not any more so than, say, Russian Orthodox Christians.

I am frustrated with the formally anti-intellectual bent of Baptist experiential piety and the anti-ecumenical, ahistorical, and anti-traditional tendencies of much Baptist faith and practice across the spectrum. Yet I remain Baptist out of a sense of loyalty to my roots and because of minority voices in Baptist life emphasizing the Anabaptist stream of the “free church” tradition and its resources for sustaining countercultural communities. I cannot claim to speak for a generation of younger Baptists or Baylor graduates, but I believe many others share these concerns.

Given all of this, I sympathize with those who would choose to preserve a somewhat provincial Baylor that provides a meaningful community with healthy traditions rather than a Baylor that reaches out to a far-flung constituency drawn to Baylor because of abstract ideals like the “integration of faith and learning.” I wonder, though, how much longer Baylor can remain that kind of community. The distinctive culture and traditions (both Baptist and Texan) that historically grounded it are rapidly losing ground to generic American consumerist culture and generic American evangelical Christianity.

The goal of Baylor 2012 is to transform this respected but not quite prestigious institution into an elite research university–and to do all this while “reaffirming and deepening” Baylor’s “distinctive Christian mission.”

The first part of this goal alone would require ungodly sums of cash. The second part would require significant theological consensus from an institution whose religious tradition is not exactly known for caring about theology or consensus. While Baylor has avoided the Scylla of secularization and the Charybdis of retreat into a religious, cultural and intellectual ghetto, the danger has always been that this via media is merely a tepid compromise in which the least desirable dimensions of the American higher education system and the American church remain comfortably present.

A horrible scandal in the basketball program (the apparent murder of one teammate by another and the disclosure of major NCAA rules violations by coaches) is just a recent and highly-publicized example of the ways in which Baylor can lose its soul by joining the high-stakes world of big-time higher education. Becoming a tier-one research university means Baylor will likely risk mimicking the dark side of powerhouse universities: exorbitant tuition, placing non-scholarship students in overwhelming debt; and a cutthroat work environment and rankings-driven culture making a genuine intellectual community impossible.

In his book Quality with Soul: How Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions, Robert Benne argues that Baylor is hindered in reaching its goals by its officially pietist ethos that limits religious faith to the intensely personal. Benne also points to the presence of established professional programs (with loyal and powerful alumni) mostly uninterested in the philosophy and theology behind the “vision” and threatened by the radical implications of the proposed shift. These programs make Baylor more like a major state school than a liberal arts college where such an overarching academic vision might have a better shot at successful implementation.

In a 2002 Christianity Today article, Columbia professor Randall Ballmer identified what may ultimately be the fatal weakness of Baylor 2012. Ballmer observed that “such an enterprise [as Baylor 2012] places a great deal of confidence in institutions as the guardians and the guarantors of faith.”

This seems to me a fair characterization of the motives and tactics of the supporters and leaders of Baylor’s ambitions. Baylor may yet become a notable center for serious intellectual inquiry within an academic community shaped by basic Christian convictions. But it needs a relationship with a healthy, well-defined Christian community to ground and sustain its character–giving Baylor’s leadership the space to act in a much less authoritarian matter. If that community no longer primarily consists of southern or Texas Baptists: who will it be? who can it be?