2012 Forbes Data (Part 3): More Comparisons

When the 2012 Forbes colleges rankings came out last month, we noted that OBU declined from #299 to #390.  Later, we compiled some data on state convention-affiliated colleges that OBU considers peer institutions.  OBU's decline stood in stark contrast to other Southern Baptist colleges that are holding steady and even increasing their reputations and profiles.

We want to make a few points.  First, OBU's decline was NOT inevitable.  Conscious decisions were made that adversely affected OBU's performance on the metrics that Forbes uses to compile its rankings.  Second, there is nothing about being distinctively Baptist that impedes our ability to stand out among Christian and secular institutions.  Some other Baptist schools are doing just fine.  Third, many intentionally Christ-centered (to use the CCCU's definition) institutions rank exceptionally well, as OBU did before the current administration came to power.  And fourth, it should come as no surprise that schools that have severed ties with Baptist state conventions excel in the rankings.  The charts below illustrate these latter two points.

As recently as 2009, OBU was undisputedly one of the finest Christian colleges in the United States.  A lot of our detractors try to argue, "Well, who cares about rankings? We're being faithful to the gospel."  There are so many things wrong with that argument.  First, fidelity to the gospel does not require unethical and unprecedented H.R. practices.  Were OBU Presidents Raley, Scales, Cothen, Tanner, Hall, Agee, and Brister and their academic officers being unfaithful to the gospel when they abided by Faculty Handbook provisions and sought and valued faculty search committee input in hiring decisions?  Of course not!  Are schools like Union and Ouachita, not to mention Wheaton, Gordon, and Calvin unfaithful to the gospel because they are not precipitously declining in national rankings?  There is no inherent conflict between Christian identity and excellence.  

With the formerly Baptist schools, the situation is more complicated.  On the one hand, there's absolutely no chance that Wake Forest, Furman, and Richmond would have become some of the best colleges in America if fundamentalists were still meddling in their affairs.  But you could argue that those schools' Christian (and Baptist) identities are less explicit now.  Still, I'd rather OBU take the path of William Jewell College or Stetson than end up like some of the Georgia Baptist Convention colleges that are on the brink of losing their accreditation.  For a long time (the Agee years), OBU was able to keep fundamentalists out, attain excellence, and survive without the OBU-BGCO relationship breaking down.

But those days are over.  The battle lines are clearly drawn.  Fundamentalists don't share power very well.  All they know is total control.  And they don't mind wrecking institutions along the way.  So as long as OBU has meddlers in Thurmond (or the Baptist Building), we need to be constantly vigilant.

Would I Still Choose OBU?

Hello, my dear friends! I am so glad to be back with you.

As Jacob already said, I left you for a while because I was getting married! In some ways (marrying a Baptist at age 22) I suppose I am very much a typical OBU girl. :) For those of you interested in pictures, some of the teasers are here.

I write this post for fairness (Jacob got to brag about his beautiful new daughter) and also because, believe it or not, my wedding reminded me about some of the things I love about OBU.

It has been asserted that I hate OBU or that I have turned my back on OBU. That may be true in some ways. But on my wedding day, I could not help but notice how much OBU has given me. OBU will always be a special place in my heart-- it is the place I met my husband. And not only that, it is the place I met the majority of my bridal party. Actually, now that I think about it, there was only one person in the wedding party who was not either family or a friend from OBU.

OBU really was a great place for me. I received an excellent education and met some of the best friends that anyone could ask for. Together, all of us questioned, discussed, learned, and grew. As I have said before, I wouldn't trade it for anything. I think that sometimes I forget the huge hand that OBU has played in who I am today. And for that, I am extremely grateful.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that students like me will not be going to OBU much longer. And the ones that do go are much less likely to have my same experience.

When I was a junior in high school, looking for a place to spend my college career, I was not the typical person who might generally be looking to OBU. I was not a Baptist and I was not an Oklahoman. But I was drawn to the school because I had a friend who loved it there and saw that it was recognized across the board for spectacular academics.

My parents, believe it or not, did not want me to go to a faith-based school. Outside of the "Bible Belt" it is not uncommon to hold the assumption that faith based schools do not have as good academics as their secular counterparts. When it came to choosing a college, my parents were far more concerned about academics. The point of paying for an education is to get an education-- not to become a better Christian.

I think that this is still a pretty fair argument. But I wanted to study religion, and my heart was set on OBU. In the end, my parents were convinced by OBU's excellent rankings and both of them really enjoyed the visit that the three of us made to campus. Believing that the educational investment would be worth the money, they happily sent me to Shawnee, where I believe none of us were disappointed in what I got.

Now, at OBU, I learned that perhaps getting an education and growing in your faith are more related than my parents were willing to believe during my college search. But, as I learned from Arthur Holmes during welcome week, a Christian college is not a church. The primary goal must still be education-- although one may be surprised to find that even in pursuit of that goal Christ is King. At OBU, I saw the beauty of joining a community honestly seeking both God and truth.

I am unsure that if I were looking for schools now if my parents would be convinced by OBU. If you haven't seen Jacob's post on OBU's falling rankings, the numbers are startling. When I chose OBU, my parents trusted that although they disagreed with the school ideologically, I would still get a fantastic education.

But is that still true today? Or has OBU lost sight of its vision? In an effort to protect its "Christian-ness," I fear that OBU has stopped being an excellent institution of higher learning. The problem is that its excellence is part of what made OBU Christian. Each of us was encouraged to study as a means of encountering God-- and to do so with excellence for that is the highest calling of Christ.

Now, I am afraid that OBU is trying to be safe. But encountering God has never been safe. And so instead of good, Christian education, OBU is offering pat answers and certainty.

My parents would never have been willing to pay for that-- and I'm sure I wouldn't have wanted it.

Those of us who are vested in OBU's future need to consider what kind of students we will be attracting with this new path the institution has taken. If we continue in this way, I fear that our story may be similar to the SBC seminaries-- which it seems many OBU grads are avoiding. We will no longer be able to attract the best students; they will find their education elsewhere.

Please continue to help us bring OBU back to the place that made me first fall in love with it. I know I am not the only one.

2012 Forbes Data (Part 2): OBU's Decline in Context

Earlier this week, I reported that OBU had fallen to #390 in the Forbes college rankings.  While Forbes (methodology here) has improved on U.S. News & World Report (which dominated the college rankings game for many years), I would be the first to admit that these rankings are imperfect and it is impossible to perfectly quantify the experience/quality/outcome these magazines are trying to rank.

Still, these rankings are enough to reveal all kinds of problems with the current direction of OBU and in Baptist higher education across the board.

First, the ugly picture:

The defenders of OBU's new fundamentalist regime really can't argue with this.  The best they can do is say, "Hey, the rankings go from 1 to 650!  By only showing 100 to 400 on the y axis, Jacob is making the slope of the line look worse than it actually is."

Fair enough.  But is this really any better?

When you consider that the 400s and 500s are populated by schools like Oral Roberts and Liberty, this shouldn't make you feel any better.  This is a stunning decline.

How are other Baptist schools faring?  I wondered the same thing.  The chart below shows OBU's decline in bold along with the rankings of several other state convention-affiliated schools.  Some of these peers are relatively fundamentalist, while others are relatively moderate.  But it's clear that OBU's decline is unique, even among Baptist peers:

Samford dipped but is doing alright and Baylor is on a clear upward trajectory.  Ouachita and Union are holding their own.  Southwest Baptist University has never been ranked.  (For what it's worth, Southwest Baptist is also the school from which David Whitlock came to OBU.  Coming to OBU was a huge professional leap and the opportunity of a lifetime for Whitlock, as I'm sure he would be the first to acknowledge.)

The picture above presents a different narrative about what was going on in 2008 and 2009 than what we usually hear.  We were in an enrollment crisis!  We had to make tough financial decisions!  Maybe so.  But for all the hand wringing, it turns out that OBU was actually in much better shape at the end of the Brister presidency and during the Parrish interim than it is today.  Remember, as opposed to U.S. News, Forbes is trying to measure quality and outcomes, not just reputation.  One can only wonder how much better off we'd be if Whitlock, Norman, and McClellan had never come to Bison Hill.  Or if President Whitlock had made it clear from the beginning that he would not abide a fundamentalist takeover instead of letting it happen with his blessing.

I don't know exactly how Whitlock can undo the damage his hatchet men have already done.  But I'm afraid it will take more than a capital campaign, a football team, and a few new degree programs.  He could start by apologizing for past missteps (why is that so hard for people to do?), urging his friend the provost (who long ago lost the faculty's confidence, if he ever actually had it) to find another job, and doing more to address faculty concerns about past and present problems than having an occasional lunch with a few faculty leaders.  Some search committees have been able to bring top-rate junior professors to OBU.  But in other departments (Theology and Ministry being the most egregious but perhaps not the only example), the process is a joke and the administrators bring in whoever they want without even consulting relevant faculty colleagues.  Speaking of jokes, the bookstore restricts access to all books not produced by Tree of Life's approved list of fundamentalist publishing houses.  The list of books you can't find in OBU's bookstore is mind-boggling.

Anyway, back to the rankings.

Later in the week, I'll speak specifically to how OBU is faring with respect to other evangelical colleges, as well as institutions that were formerly affiliated with Baptist state conventions.  Also, if I have time, I might build a data set that includes the Forbes rankings of every CCCU institution.  I have a feeling that doing so might provide a compelling visualization of the fact that maintaining a Christian identity does not have to mean sacrificing quality.  It might also help reveal the fact that Christian institutions that are controlled by fundamentalists are destined for mediocrity (if not outright ruin), while those run by moderates (or at least people who are sensitive to the importance of rigor, quality, and ethical/professional standards) can continue to achieve excellence.

More on all that later in the week.  Please keep your friends, classmates, and interested colleagues informed about the work we are doing here at Save OBU.

2012 Forbes Rankings (Part 1): OBU Falls off a Cliff

This is one post I definitely did not want to write.  But given the events of the past few years, no one will be surprised at the embarrassing news I am reporting.  The annual Forbes rankings of America's top colleges came out last week.  OBU's precipitous decline is not only continuing, it is accelerating.  As recently as 2009, Forbes ranked OBU #109 on its list of top colleges, just behind Wheaton, Duke, Cornell, and Georgetown and ahead of Carson-Newman (TN), Bates (ME), Wake Forest, and Southern Methodist, not to mention literally every other Southern Baptist-affiliated college in the United States.

In the Whitlock-Norman era, OBU has gone from elite to embarrassment, at least as far as these rankings are concerned.  In 2010, OBU slid to #233.  By 2011, we were down to #299.  This year, we're all the way down to #390.  At the rate we're going, we won't have to worry about the slide in another 2 or 3 years because -- like the other Baptist colleges the fundamentalists have destroyed -- we simply won't be ranked at all.

I waited until this week to draw attention to this disappointing news because I was curious how the OBU P.R. shop would try to spin it.  In past years, there were gleeful press releases gushing with pride and joy about OBU faring relatively well in the Forbes rankings, which emerged in 2008 as an alternative to U.S. News, which had been publishing college rankings for years that relied more on reputation than actual outcomes.  If you want to see a sampling of past OBU press releases boasting of our placement in the Forbes Top Colleges rankings, click here.

At this point, it looks like there will be no attempt to spin this embarrassing news.  As a good friend of mine often says, "You can't polish a turd."  And OBU's devastating decline is definitely a stinker.  So much for being the "top college in Oklahoma," or even the highest rated private college.  Now we have been eclipsed by the University of Tulsa, OU, and OSU.  We're barely ahead of crazy-ass Oral Roberts University.

In January, I wrote a short blog post about the rankings decline from 2009 to 2011.  My original fears ring even more true in light of the 2012 rankings:

Friends, sliding wholesale into fundamentalism has its costs in terms of academic respectability.  At this rate, we will soon struggle to attract the best and brightest students and faculty.  And once word gets out that professors are being fired for ideological reasons and that philosophy (a core discipline in the liberal arts) is being gutted in favor of Christian apologetics, the decline is only going to get worse.  In a few short years, OBU is devolving from one of the most desirable small liberal arts colleges in America (religious or otherwise) to just another fundamentalist Bible academy.

I hope OBU does not have to slide even further before people start to realize that the BGCO's fundamentalist stranglehold on OBU has grave consequences for students, faculty, and alumni.  Not only is the current trend robbing students of the balanced, moderate Christian liberal arts education that made OBU great.  It is also devaluing their expensive and hard-earned diplomas.  Unless we demand that OBU return to its proud liberal arts heritage, I'm afraid this trend will continue.

Later in the week, I'll be presenting some data showing that a robust commitment to a Christian identity does not have to involve an institution's descent into fundamentalism.  Other Christian colleges -- Baptist and otherwise -- including a number of CCCU members, have managed to maintain reputations for excellence and thwart state conventions' plans to strip their colleges of academic freedom, respectability, and integrity.  But in Oklahoma, this devastating decline is only gaining steam.

Until then, I think it's well past time for us to let OBU administrators and trustees know that we are concerned.  We've been saying that Rev. Dr. Whitlock and Rev. Dr. Norman owe apologies to the professors they wrongfully dismissed.  But now it's clear that the new fundamentalists are doing serious damage to OBU.  They owe everyone in Bison Nation an apology.  This fate could have easily been avoided.  The sad thing is, they're not sorry.  And I don't think they even care.

Vigilance is Necessary.

Yesterday, I explained a bit of my personal reasoning for blogging: it is currently for me the best way that I can see to do the right thing.

Today, I want to continue in explanation of my own motivation. We have said it many times on this blog, but I really don't think it goes without saying. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of our keeping vigilance over our dear school.

Something that has struck me in almost all of the stories we have seen/heard about schools and other institutions suffering fallout from the fundamentalist takeover is the swiftness with which the changes occur.

I never thought about it until I started reading about it in other schools, but the downward spiral is truly just that. Devastation can come to a great university seemingly overnight. And it does not take long for that devastation to spiral out of control.

If you have not read the account given by former Shorter University trustee Larry Burgess, I suggest you do. Jacob highlighted some of the main points, but the tale is truly awe-inspiring... in the worst way. Several times when reading it my jaw just dropped. Literally.

Here's what is still so surprising to me: a small number of people who are only mildly affiliated with a school can lie and threaten their way into driving that school past unaccreditation straight into the ground.

Larry Burgess was continually surprised at the dirty-handed tactics used by the convention, but frankly, I was too. It shouldn't be surprising. I have seen and heard of it too many times. It is the same story told in different places and voices about those looking to guard "orthodoxy" and the incredible means they will pursue in order to find it.

It happens so fast.

And if no one is watching, it will happen right before our eyes.

Changes already happened quickly at OBU! In my short time there I saw one president leave, the approximately one year interim presidency, and the beginning of the current administration-- but before I left, one person had already been fired. It took less than two years. The current BGCO-friendly administration has been there for only 3 and a half years and already we have had enough things to fill nearly six months of blog. AND, that is with extreme faculty and student resistance.

That has not been the only swift change. In 2009, OBU ranked #109 in Forbes best colleges. Now, we have dropped to #299. In those two years, OBU has been surpassed by nearly 200 schools. That is an almost 200% drop.

When students and faculty are no longer respected in favor of catering to the fundamentalist Baptist elites, the good ones start figuring out that it's time to leave.

That could happen soon. And then we would have nothing. And when you read someone's testimony about how it happened so quickly, it would surprise you. But it shouldn't.

But if we can keep up vigilance, hopefully, we can stop the cycle.

OBU Plummets in Forbes College Rankings

Beginning in 2008, Forbes magazine joined U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, and a few other national publications in the college ratings game.  Personally, I have never put a lot of stock in these ratings.  But these companies rake in hordes of cash every year when eager high school seniors and their parents stock up on the newly-published rankings guides.

To underscore just how important these publications are, let me share a brief personal story.  Being neither a Baptist nor an Oklahoman, I was an unlikely prospective student at Be a Bison Day.  But because I was young and in love, I was determined to follow my girlfriend to OBU.  My parents were concerned, to say the least.  After visiting the campus and hearing descriptions of the anti-social dorm visitation policy and compulsory chapel attendance, my parents thought OBU was pretty weird.  I'm pretty sure OBU's decent performance in the U.S. News rankings was the only thing that reassured them about my decision. Without those rankings, I doubt they would have let me go to OBU.

Even after my graduation in 2002, I would periodically glance at the rankings to see how OBU was doing.  U.S. News changed its categories a few times, from "Liberal Arts Colleges - West" to "Comprehensive Colleges - West" to the current category "Regional Colleges - West" (where we are currently #3 among some not very illustrious peer institutions).

I had not glanced at the Forbes rankings until today.  It was pretty depressing.

In 2009, we were #109.  In 2010, we fell to #233.  Last year, we fell to #299.

Friends, sliding wholesale into fundamentalism has its costs in terms of academic respectability.  At this rate, we will soon struggle to attract the best and brightest students and faculty.  And once word gets out that professors are being fired for ideological reasons and that philosophy (a core discipline in the liberal arts) is being gutted in favor of Christian apologetics, the decline is only going to get worse.  In a few short years, OBU is devolving from one of the most desirable small liberal arts colleges in America (religious or otherwise) to just another fundamentalist Bible academy.

I hope OBU does not have to slide even further before people start to realize that the BGCO's fundamentalist stranglehold on OBU has grave consequences for students, faculty, and alumni.  Not only is the current trend robbing students of the balanced, moderate Christian liberal arts education that made OBU great.  It is also devaluing their expensive and hard-earned diplomas.  Unless we demand that OBU return to its proud liberal arts heritage, I'm afraid this trend will continue.

Forbes's methodology is here.