Accreditation: What Fundamentalism Eventually Costs You

Lots of bad things happen at universities when fundamentalism is pervasive.  Quality faculty members are dismissed.  Core curriculum areas are gutted.  Mainstream books are censored.  All these things and more have happened at OBU just in the past few years.  But take the long view.  Imagine what OBU will look like in 10 or 20 years if these radical changes continue at their current pace.  Since fundamentalists took over Southern Baptist institutional life in the 1980s, more than a few Baptist colleges have struggled to maintain their accreditation.  (Though technically secular in nature, the accrediting bodies are exceedingly tolerant of the religious nature of Christian schools' mission.)

Accrediting bodies exist to establish and uphold some basic threshold of financial integrity, academic quality, managerial competence, and physical plant maintenance and repair.  At good schools, these issues are never problems: there is significant institutional coordination to ensure that all these basic standards are met.  At crumbling institutions, however, these standards are never a given.  And fundamentalists are often so obsessed with making their institutions "pure" that they forget how to make them run smoothly and properly.

Take, for example, Louisiana College.  For decades, Louisiana College was a fine Baptist liberal arts university.  Former OBU Interim President Robert L. Lynn served as president from the mid-70s to the mid-90s.  As recently as a decade ago, it was dreaming of one day building a medical school.  Like so many others, though, it was hijacked by fundamentalists.  I don't presume to know the whole history, but the death knell came in 2005 over a dispute about presidential selection.  A president had recently retired and trustees had enacted fundamentalist policies restricting academic freedom.  The search committee's first choice, an administrator at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, withdrew his name from consideration because the governance situation was so awful.  The committee's second choice, Stan Norman, did not even get a chance because a reconstituted committee usurped the original committee's authority and elected Joe Aguillard, one of the school's most conservative professors, as president.  (But let the record show that as early as 2005, Stan Norman wanted to be the president of a nominally accredited fundamentalist college.)  The faculty voted overwhelmingly to oppose Aguillard's nomination, but he was installed anyway.  Due to the disastrous governance problems, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools put Louisiana College on probation.

What has happened at LC in the meantime?  Nothing good.  Dozens of faculty have resigned in protest.  Academic freedom is nonexistent.  One former professor laments, "Education has been replaced by indoctrination.  They've made it clear that you will do nothing but advocate the fundamentalist position, or you're not welcome here."  Even a former president of the stridently conservative Council for Christian Colleges and Universities said, "The state conventions in the Southern Baptist world own the colleges, and there's a sense of wanting them to adhere to the theological positions of the Baptist Church and not always understanding the meaning of liberal education."

Finally, in 2011, one professor courageously spoke out and sued the college over his termination.  (OBU is lucky it has avoided such lawsuits -- not so much for substantive reasons but because of the tremendous amount of bad press it would have generated.)  The wrongfully terminated Louisiana College professor's case is typical: under fundamentalist leadership, speaking out against restrictive academic policies will not be tolerated.  Now, Louisiana College is once again in trouble with its accrediting body, as this letter details.

Their "Save Our LC" movement is a bit more in-your-face than Save OBU, but who can blame them?  Their situation is even more dire.

I don't mean to sound alarmist.  OBU is in no immediate danger of losing its accreditation.  We're on relatively solid ground financially (even without the BGCO's subsidy, I'd argue).  But I hope you can see the parallels with Louisiana College's story, which began with fundamentalists taking control of the Louisiana Baptist Convention and stacking the college's Board of Trustees with loyalists.  If nothing changes, this is the road we're on, friends.  Look around you -- some of the telltale signs are already evident: fundamentalism is now a litmus test in personnel decisions; academic freedom is being squelched; dissent among faculty is not tolerated; state convention elites drive the agenda.  OBU is a long way from a Louisiana College-like implosion.  But make no mistake: it's where we are headed, and it's happening faster than many people realize.

Sometimes when you create master's programs, add athletic teams, and launch capital campaigns, you forget the basics: a solid, balanced, moderate liberal arts education.  From the outside, it looks like progress.  But when appeasing fundamentalist power brokers is a constant duty of administrators, students and faculty suffer.  At least now we have a presumably independent-minded Board of Trustees.  But if they ever started exerting that independence, Anthony Jordan would just replace them with sworn fundamentalist loyalists.  It's a difficult balancing act, but we simply must fight for an OBU free from BGCO governance.  The OBU/BGCO partnership has long outlived its usefulness, and will eventually destroy the former and be a huge financial burden on the latter.

The Downward Spiral: Louisiana College Forcibly Taken Over

This series began with a victory for academic freedom at OBU.  Though this should go without saying, we now project that OBU will not carry out any ideologically-motivated dismissals this summer.  In addition, we are hopeful that the faculty will be able to fill vacancies in the usual manner, rather than having a Stan Norman-led doctrinal inquisition designed to bring more fundamentalists to OBU.

As it turns out, this is no small feat.  We need only look at other SBC-related colleges where fundamentalists wield even more control to see how bad things can get.  On Saturday, we examined the case of Truett-McConnell College in Georgia, which recently purged all faculty who did not agree with every word of the Baptist Faith and Message (edited in 2000 to be explicitly sexist and to remove Christ as the lens through which the Bible should be interpreted).  The Georgia Baptist Convention now boasts on its website that TMC has eroded academic freedom (not to mention Baptist freedoms like liberty of the conscience and soul competency).

Not to be outdone, Brewton-Parker College (also in Georgia) no longer even pretends to be a legitimate academic institution.  Even in the face of devastating financial problems and likely loss of accreditation, BPC has elevated adherence to fundamentalist doctrines over responsibility to students and faculty.

We'll return to Georgia tomorrow.  But first let us consider the case of Louisiana College in Pineville, LA -- yet another state convention-run college whose descent into fundamentalism and irrelevance is much more advanced than OBU's.

Louisiana College
LC is a little closer to OBU geographically, with more OBU faculty and administrators having cycled through LC over the years than any of the Georgia Baptist institutions.  Like Oklahoma, Georgia, and every state except Texas and Virginia, fundamentalists have taken control of the Louisiana Baptist Convention over the past 20 years.  LC was doing quite well under the presidential leadership of former OBU Interim President Robert G. Lynn.  But things have deteriorated badly.  We've already profiled Louisiana College in a blog post about the specter of schools choosing adherence to fundamentalist policies even when it may eventually lead to loss of accreditation.

In spite of having its application for reaccreditation rejected and being placed on warning by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, LC has buried its head in the sand, waging bizarre political and cultural battles rather than making sure the school does not lose its accreditation.  LC has found time to cozy up to political activists within and beyond Baptist life, as well as sue the federal government over a requirement that certain religious schools offer contraceptive coverage in their employee health insurance plans.  Right now, LC is basking in the glow of a favorable court ruling that it can be as fundamentalist as it wants.  (Just because you can does not mean you should.)

In addition to massive physical plant and financial problems, LC has had a great deal of trouble attracting and retaining quality faculty and administrators.  Even one avowedly conservative professor has said that LC has gone off the reservation.

Yet, in spite of the specter of losing its accreditation, it is difficult to find any evidence at all that Louisiana College cares anything at all about academic freedom, integrity, or respectability.

Louisiana College clearly belongs in our Downward Spiral series.  As with the Georgia schools, OBU is in much better shape than LC.  But just as we are tempted to say "This could never happen here," there was a time when Southern Baptists in Louisiana and elsewhere never would have believed this coud happen at LC.  Yet here we are.  This is the byproduct of a runaway fundamentalist state convention, trustees who care more about convention politics than the school's interest, administrators who badly overstep their bounds (sadly, that part is familiar to OBU), and students, faculty, and alumni who wait just a little too long to unite and raise their voices in protest.  Let's learn from these disastrous situations and make sure we stand ready to defend academic freedom, integrity, and respectability against encroachment from the convention and administrators tempted to take our school over the cliff in order to stay in the convention's good graces.

Save OBU Outreach: Other Baptist Colleges

This week, we are focusing on outreach to friends and supporters outside our main constituency of students, parents, faculty, and alumni.  We looked at what OBU means to the Shawnee area and what its likely decline under fundamentalism would mean for the community.  Realizing that OBU is not a unique victim of SBC fundamentalists' aggressive lust for power and control over institutions, we want to reach out to other Baptist colleges to see if we find parallels or can offer solidarity.

Formerly Southern Baptist Colleges
When I first started the blog, I began studying formerly SBC colleges, believing that their battles for independence from fundamentalist-controlled state conventions might offer insights as to how to proceed. We looked at William Jewell College, Stetson, and Furman.  We will eventually examine the situation at the University of Richmond, Mercer, and Wake Forest.  As difficult as those schools' battles for independence were, we found out that OBU is at a distinct disadvantage because the BGCO's legal stranglehold over OBU is so all-encompassing.  (Not only does the convention elect all of the trustees, it literally owns the buildings and grounds.)

Along with their newfound independence, expanding constituencies, and broadening missions, these schools have become less exclusively and intentionally Baptist in character.  To fundamentalists, this change reinforces their fear that without strict convention control, Baptist universities will inevitably drift away from their explicitly religious founding.  While we do not believe that is necessarily the case, we have certainly maintained that we do not envision a future for OBU that is secular or less Baptist.  In fact, we have argued emphatically that the very changes we are protesting represent a radical and disappointing departure from the Baptist freedoms we hold near and dear.  If anything, we believe that an OBU free from BGCO control could be more authentically Baptist than it has been under the Norman-Whitlock administration's disappointing policy and personnel changes which, let's not kid ourselves, BGCO elites have noticed and applauded.  It is we, not they, who have held fast to Baptist distinctives.  They are the ones who have embraced authoritarianism, creedalism, and worldly politics and abandoned liberty of the conscience, local church autonomy, and the separation of church and state.

Currently Southern Baptist Colleges
The SBC maintains a list of nearly 60 colleges that are related to Baptist state conventions.  We have already heard from alumni and staff at Shorter University in Rome, GA.  Like OBU and the BGCO, Shorter's ever more fundamentalist state convention is attempting to impose its narrow agenda on the university.  If you think things have gotten ugly at OBU, take a look at Shorter's situation.  At the current rate, this appears to be the direction the BGCO wants to take OBU.  We hope it's not too late for Shorter's students, faculty, and alumni to be heard.  We've also looked at Louisiana College in Pineville, LA, which fundamentalists have taken over.

Now, we turn to the several dozen other Southern Baptist colleges in the U.S.  While they have all lurched toward fundamentalism since the 1980s and there are undoubtedly demoralized moderates at all these institutions, we believe that Save OBU is one of the largest and most comprehensive efforts to defend academic freedom and protect against fundamentalist encroachment at a Baptist college.  Even as we hope to inspire simliar efforts at these sister schools, we are seeking information we can use for our own battle.

Please forward this post to friends, colleagues, and potential supporters who are students, faculty, or alumni of these institutions.  We want to know about the relationship between the school and the state convention, whether the convention owns the university, how the trustees are elected and by whom, and what violations of academic freedom or basic ethics have taken place since fundamentalist (or fundamentalist-appeasing) leaders took over.

Colleges and Universities Affiliated with Baptist State Conventions

Alabama
Judson College
Samford University
University of Mobile

Arkansas
Ouachita Baptist University
Williams Baptist College

California
California Baptist University

Florida
The Baptist College of Florida

Georgia
Brewton-Parker College
Shorter University
Truett-McConnell College

Kentucky
Campbellsville University
Clear Creek Baptist Bible College
Georgetown College
Mid-Continent University
University of the Cumberlands

Louisiana
Louisiana College

Mississippi
Blue Mountain College
Mississippi College
William Carey University

Missouri
Haniibal-LaGrange College
Southwest Baptist University

Montana
Yellowstone Baptist College

North Carolina
Campbell University
Chowan University
Fruitland Baptist Bible Institute
Gardner-Webb University
Mars Hill College
Wingate University

Ohio
Cedarville University

South Carolina
Anderson University
Charleston Southern University
North Greenville University

Tennessee
Carson-Newman College
Union University

Texas
Baptist University of the Americas
Baylor University
Dallas Baptist University
East Texas Baptist University
Hardin-Simmons University
Houston Baptist University
Howard Payne University
University of Mary Hardin-Baylor
Wayland Baptist University

Virignia
Bluefield College
Virginia Intermont College

Alright, Save OBU supporters!  It's time to get active.  We are NOT alone in our fight.  It's true that some of these schools are avowedly fundamentalist and almost all faculty and students would be hostile (and are irrelevant) to our mission.  But many of these places were once bastions of Christian liberal arts education in the best of the Baptist tradition.  Like OBU, recent (or not-so-recent) fundamentalist-inspired changes have threatened their proud heritage.  Tap into your networks and let's use this opportunity not only to reach out in solidarity to Baptists in exile in our own denomination and schools, but to glean information that can help us as we pave the path toward OBU independence from the BGCO.

Remember, here is what we need to know:
1. What is the relationship between the school and the convention like?
2. Does the convention own the school?
3. Who elects the trustees?
4. What abuses of academic freedom have taken place? How has the school become less a place of learning and inquiry and more a place of indoctrination?

Please post responses to our Facebook page or email SaveOBU@gmail.com

Where is the CCCU!?

Before I begin, let me extend a warm welcome to our hundreds of new readers this week.  Please look around the site and get to know us a bit.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  And please excuse this hastily composed stream-of-consciousness post.

I hate to interrupt guest contributor Sarah Jones's excellent series on Cedarville University.  But as fundamentalist encroachment proceeds apace at a number of evangelical colleges with no sign of letting up, I have to ask, Where is the CCCU?

For the uninitiated, the Council for Conservative Christian Colleges & Universities is a Washington, D.C.-based lobby for a very small subset of Christian colleges.  We've written about the CCCU here before.  Last March, we quoted Gordon College Professor Karl Giberson, who rightly said that some CCCU schools' "lingering attachment to some of the more dubious certainties and habits derived from Fundamentalism" badly hurt their credibility as legitimate academic institutions.  In April, Save OBU Contributing Editor Veronica Risinger  wrote a series on women at OBU.  She prefaced it by looking at women in CCCU schools, which the CCCU strongly implies are the only schools that are "intentionally Christ-centered."  On this score, Veronica noted that only 6% of CCCU institutions have female presidents: "For women who want to lead, the odds are a lot better if your school isn't intentionally Christian."  Finally, in July, I congratulated outgoing CCCU President Paul Corts and welcomed the newly-elected president, Ed Blews.

My interest in academic freedom and ethical administration in Christian higher education began when I heard about failings in those areas at my alma mater (Oklahoma Baptist University) from 2009 to 2011.  But I have been saddened (though not surprised) to learn that the situation is worse -- much worse -- at peer institutions like Shorter, Cedarville, and Louisiana College.  This is without even mentioning other Baptist schools who have apparently made their peace with the new, fundamentalist direction of the post-Takeover SBC such as Union University, Southwest Baptist, and North Greenville University.  And we constituents of institutions related to Baptist state conventions are just beginning to learn about goings-on at colleges related to other, smaller evangelical and pentecostal denominations that comprise a majority of the CCCU's membership.

Now, I suppose the CCCU does not want to meddle in its member institutions' internal affairs.  But unlike accrediting bodies, which must verify colleges' independent governance, the CCCU seems either unconcerned about or uninterested in stopping problematic threats to academic freedom and lapses in ethical administration that occur when fundamentalists take control.

Thank God moderates at OBU still had enough clout to prevent, or at least delay, the new administration from turning it into a fundamentalist Bible academy.  But if we OBU constituents are losing the battle slowly, constituents of Louisiana College, Cedarville, and Shorter are losing the battle swiftly and forcefully.  Will no one in the CCCU stand up for them?

I would think the tide of embarrassing press (Cedarville, Shorter), threats to accreditation (Shorter, Louisiana College) and dramatic declines in national rankings (OBU, maybe others) would get the CCCU's attention.  But I know of no evidence that this is the case.  CCCU President Ed Blews wants to focus on protecting scholarship and loan programs (which is good, I guess, though the wisdom of borrowing heavily to finance a private undergraduate education is debatable).  Blews also wants to protect "religious freedom" (i.e., challenge the so-called HHS Mandate, which is a little strange since the CCCU excludes all Catholic universities as insufficiently Christ-centered).  Of course it's vital for the CCCU to advocate on issues relevant to all its member institutions and I am as confident as anyone that under Blews's leadership, the council will continue to do so very effectively.

But the CCCU needs to realize something.  All is not well.  Sure, there are a handful of mainline-affiliated (literally no more than 15) and a few unaffiliated CCCU schools where academic freedom is secure and denominational politics cannot or will not interfere.  But at many member institutions, faithful Christian scholars and students are suffering.

I know it's a fine line for the CCCU to walk.  After all, the CCCU is a big tent considering its rather precise definition of what constitutes "intentionally Christ-centered."  Its membership includes some very reputable, academically rigorous institutions and some pretty wacky, nominally accredited, and avowedly fundamentalist degree mills.  But at this point, the CCCU's silence is deafening.  One prominent evangelical blogger, noting problems at several institutions (CCCU and otherwise) more eloquently characterized the current collective problem as an "Evangelical Inquisition."

It's well and good that Ed Blews was smiling and joking around with Messiah College President and CCCU Board Chair Kim Phipps at his inauguration last month in Washington.  But it's time to get serious about fundamentalist encroachment and oppose this inquisition.  It recently hit close to home for Dr. Phipps (incidentally one of the handful of female CCCU college presidents), as one of Messiah's professors is under fire for a blog post that challenged unthinking, literal interpretations of Scripture.  The CCCU requires its members to "be supportive of other Christian colleges."  Well, we at OBU, Cedarville, Shorter, Louisiana College and a host of other member institutions need to feel that support.

We need it now more than ever.

P.S. I live in Washington, so I am willing to meet with senior CCCU staff to strategize about how we can all work together to protect academic freedom and ensure ethical administration at our beloved Christian colleges.

P.P.S. The hymn "Forward Through the Ages" was sung at Mr. Blews's inauguration service.  It's one of his favorites and it's one of mine, too.  I hope it calls to mind the unity and determination we need to protect and preserve the traditions and values we hold dear.

1. Forward through the ages, in unbroken line, 
 move the faithful spirits at the call divine; 
 gifts in differing measure, hearts of one accord, 
 manifold the service, one the sure reward. 

Refrain:
 Forward through the ages, in unbroken line, 
 move the faithful spirits at the call divine. 

2. Wider grows the kingdom, reign of love and light; 
 for it we must labor, till our faith is sight. 
 Prophets have proclaimed it, martyrs testified, 
 poets sung its glory, heroes for it died.
 (Refrain) 

3. Not alone we conquer, not alone we fall; 
 in each loss or triumph lose or triumph all. 
 Bound by God's far purpose in one living whole,
 move we on together to the shining goal. 
 (Refrain) 

Save OBU Outreach: Shawnee Community

After 3+ months of almost daily blogging, Save OBU decided to join OBU students, faculty, and staff in taking Spring Break off last week.  We're back with gusto and have a packed schedule for the rest of March and beyond.

We have talked at length about how the dramatic and unprecedented changes at OBU in recent years have impacted students and faculty.  We've heard from concerned alumni and friends who oppose the extremism and fundamentalism of today's SBC and BGCO.  We've even talked about what prospective students and parents are doing in light of OBU's alarming new direction.

Save OBU will spend a few days focusing on some other stakeholders we want to invite into our coalition.

Town and Gown: A Delicate Dance
It's in everyone's best interests when the relationship between a university and its wider community is mutually reinforcing.  This is especially true in small towns where the university (or universities) is a significant driver of economic and cultural activity.  Fortunately, Shawnee and OBU have enjoyed a very good relationship over the years, all things considered.  Not everyone in town stays current on OBU news and happenings, of course.  Most people drive up and down Kickapoo Street, see a construction project every few years, and assume all is well.  A lot of townies, aware of the university's conservative and traditional ethos, think of OBU as a throwback to an earlier time.  But in general, the community supports the university and OBU's presence has a positive impact on the community.

Could it be that OBU administrators' dramatic and unprecedented turn away from a liberal arts college and toward a Bible academy ethos might ultimately change the town-gown dynamic and harm the community?  I think so, and I invite Shawnee residents to learn about the negative changes over the past two years and join our growing coalition.

When Colleges Fail, College Towns Decline
OBU is a long way from failing, of course.  We've already studied other colleges that are a lot further down the ugly path toward irrelevance, financial problems, and losing accreditation.  But the seeds have already been planted, and if the current leaders continue to nurture them and have a deleterious effect on OBU's reputation, curriculum, and overall success, things could get ugly in a few years.  Already, there is reason to fear that our next re-accreditation process will have to address concerns about some of the disastrous personnel and policy changes that have been unilaterally forced on OBU by senior administrators.

Since fundamentalists seized control of Louisiana College, a SBC school in Pineville, LA, in 2005 and began running it into the ground, the community of 13,000 has struggled.  Like OBU, LC has dabbled in adding programs while neglecting its core mission of Christian liberal arts education.  Its results are not promising, and offer a warning for where we may be headed if the president and provost get their way.  Likewise, Shorter University in Rome, GA, is also in the throes of a fundamenatlist purge.  The president has required all staff to sign a fundamentalist "lifestyle statement" and is prepared to fire everyone who doesn't sign it by next month.  Shorter may offer a better parallel for OBU because its community is closer to Shawnee's size and it has two colleges.  (The other, Berry College, is a highly-rated non-denominational Christian college that has sustained its commitment to liberal arts education.)  So with one stable college and one very unstable one, the Rome community is dealing with the new reality of what a fundamentalist takeover can do to a once-great college.

Shawnee, America: Help Save OBU!
In addition to the faculty-specific abuses described in this post, here are some specific issues Save OBU is concerned about:

• While the president, Rev. Dr. David Whitlock, has done a great job of getting involved in the community (an area where President Agee had great success and President Brister struggled), he certainly has made decisions aimed at pleasing the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma rather than protecting the interests of students and faculty.
• The current provost, Rev. Dr. Stan Norman (who luckily avoided being thrust into the Louisiana College disaster in 2005), was passed over for the religion/ministry department deanship in favor of one of BGCO Executive Director Anthony Jordan's friends.  Soon after, President Whitlock created the provost position for Norman (thereby issuing a de facto demotion of the woman who had served very capably as chief academic officer) and turned him loose to begin undermining academic freedom, interfering in curriculum decisions, and making OBU look more like a fundamentalist Bible academy than a respected Christian liberal arts university.  Though many of our supporters would like to see both leaders leave OBU and the senior faculty very nearly held a no confidence vote last fall, Save OBU has not called for anyone's ouster.  We hold fast to the hope that the provost, realizing he is a bad fit for OBU, will leave of his own accord and the president will be convinced that it is better to stand for students' and professors' interests than to be a BGCO lackey.
• Clearly, however, the BGCO enjoys unprecedented influence over OBU affairs even as its financial investment (especially as a percentage of OBU's budget) plummets.
• Sadly, the 33-member Board of Trustees includes only two Shawnee residents (that we know of).
• Whereas OBU until very recently welcomed new faculty from a variety of denominational families, senior leadership has now institutionalized a very clear hierarchy of Shawnee-area churches.  Immanuel (where the minister has said that the truth of the gospel "depends on" a literal six day creation) and other fundamentalist Baptist churches stand alone at the top.  Moderate Baptist congregations are tolerable but suspect.  Judging by recent job postings, OBU's message to Christians who worship in mainline Protestant congregations (United Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Lutheran) is, quite simply: Don't bother.  So far, we have not seen anyone fired for being a Presbyterian.  But the provost has suggested that mainline Protestant faculty ought to defend or explain why they have remained in mainline Protestant denominations.  This is a radical departure from precdent at OBU, where professors have for decades enriched the worship lives and leadership of a variety of local Protestant congregations.
• A few local educators who are aware of OBU's new direction have already reached out to us with concerns that they can no longer recommend OBU to their best students.  This does not bode well for a community that prides itself on having a first-rate university.

We want to thank Shawnee-area residents for taking time to learn about some of the recent, dramatic, and negative changes on Bison Hill.  We invite you to join our growing coalition of facutly, students, parents, and alumni.  We love OBU dearly and are hopeful that through collective action and advocacy, we can prevail over those who would turn OBU into an unaccredited fundamentalist Bible academy.  Since fundamentalists siezed control of the SBC in the 1980s and state conventions in the 1990s, SBC-affiliated colleges like OBU have struggled with the issues we've described.  Nondenominational Christian colleges have plowed ahead with excellence in Christian liberal arts education as Baptist schools have endured tiresome, distracting battles.  Bob Agee and Mark Brister (not to mention Joe Ingram and Bill Tanner at the BGCO) shielded OBU from those battles for many years.  But with the Norman-Whitlock administraion, the battle has come to Bison Hill.  We ask for your prayers and support as we stand together for the proud Christian liberal arts tradition that made OBU great and a centerpiece of the Shawnee community.

Georgetown College (KY) President to Retire

Over the weekend, Associated Baptist Press reported that Georgetown College President Bill Crouch is retiring after 21 years.  Among Dr. Crouch's many accomplishments at Georgetown are the fact that he never wavered in standing strong for academic freedom and he avoided a painful, fruitless war with the Kentucky Baptist Convention.

We've blogged extensively about Stetson, Furman, William Jewell, Louisiana College, Shorter, Truett-McConnell, Brewton-Parker, Yellowstone, among other evangelical colleges.  But we haven't talked about Georgetown at Save OBU, and it's a shame.  In fact, Georgetown has a lot more in common with OBU than some of the schools we ordinarily consider peers due to geographic proximity.  Like OBU, Georgetown has exemplified the best of the moderate Baptist liberal arts tradition even as it existed in the shadow of a large SBC seminary that has become avowedly fundamentalist since the early 1990s.  Also, Georgetown's path to independence, sustainability, and a bright future as a legitimate institution of Baptist higher education is one we would do well to follow.  Like many evangelical colleges, Georgetown has maintained excellence while upholding its Christian identity even as OBU has fallen in the national rankings.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

For decades, the state convention trusted and proudly supported the college, a beacon of intellectually honest and academically rigorous Christian higher education.  The nearby SBC seminary served as a natural pipeline for religion faculty and administrators.  Though many state churches were fundamentalist, moderates had a place at the table when it came to college, state convention, and SBC life.  After the Fundamentalist Takeover of the SBC, the college kept on excelling even as the nearby seminary and the state convention moved sharply in the direction of fundamentalism and authoritarianism.  The tenuous partnership continued until the state convention began demanding changes at the college that its faculty, students, and alumni could not in good conscience abide.

Yeah, I've heard that one before.  We've all lived it.  The people at Georgetown lived it, too.  But they fought back in ways we've been yet unwilling to do.

Wisely, Georgetown and the KBC negotiated an exit strategy.  Georgetown would be allowed to elect its own trustees, and the KBC would phase out its annual subsidy to the college.  Rather than downplay its Baptist heritage, Georgetown has continued in its tradition of unashamedly Baptist Christian higher education.  For the KBC's part, it has been able to allocate funds to a variety of critical mission and ministry priorities rather than add a drop in the bucket to an institution that raises almost all its money on its own.  Students who want a fundamentalist Bible college experience can attend any of the KBC's five colleges, including Boyce College, the undergraduate arm of Louisville's Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  Students flock to Georgetown if they want a serious, rigorous Christian liberal arts education with professors who are free to teach and do not seek to indoctrinate their students.  For a while, the KBC listed Georgetown as a "ministry partner," but today's Baptists don't like to be affiliated with anything they can't control, so even that relationship is about to end, though neither entity really cares anymore.  Both realize they are infinitely better off without the other, just as OBU and the BGCO will immediately realize once they, mercifully, finally sever ties.

If it weren't for the very unfortunate fact that the BGCO literally owns OBU's buildings and grounds, the path of Georgetown's exit from KBC control would be the most ideal path for us to follow.  President Whitlock would cement his place in OBU history as one of our greatest presidents and would have the unending gratitude of generations of faculty, students, and alumni.

Instead, we will continue our awkward little dance with the BGCO, which next month will elect another slate of 8 Anthony Jordan-approved trustees.  Eventually, more professors will be fired, more fundamentalists will be hired, and the quality of our academic programs will gradually erode.  This is not just speculation.  It's exactly what will happen if nothing changes, just as it happened to literally dozens of other state convention-controlled colleges.  Maybe if we boost enrollment, build athletic teams, and add master's programs, few people will notice.  Instead of fully funding ministry, missions, and evangelism, the BGCO will chip in a pittance toward our annual budget, in exchange for controlling the trustee board, dominating presidential selection, and the presumption of control of the institution's direction, mission, and ethos.

Georgetown offers a path forward for us, and Dr. William Crouch deserves credit for leading the college toward a future not only of prosperity and excellence, but also integrity and the very best of the Baptist tradition.  We wish him and his wife, Jan, all the best in their retirement.

The Downward Spiral: Brewton-Parker College - A Race to the Bottom in GA

When I conceived of this series, I planned to focus on three colleges that are spiraling downward as a result of fundamentalist takeovers: Truett-McConnell College (yesterday's post), Louisiana College (tomorrow's post), and Shorter University (forthcoming Tuesday).  But in examining the deteriorating state of Baptist "higher education" in Georgia, I came across yet another tale of woe: Brewton-Parker College.

I hesitate to even tell B-P's story because it's really not OBU's peer in any meaningful way.  But it sure helps to illustrate how grateful we should be that the BGCO only has one college, rather than three (like Georgia) that are constantly working out-crazy the others.

Brewton-Parker began as a Baptist institute in an under-served, rural part of the state.  It became a junior college and eventually was able to award bachelor's degrees.  For a combination of reasons, not least of which were the proliferation of public community colleges and the strength of other Baptist colleges in Georgia, Brewton-Parker has struggled over the years.

In the 1990s, a scandal involving the misappropriation of federal student aid caused serious damage to the school's reputation and financial standing.  After a series of less-than-competent administrators, Truett-McConnell loaned Brewton-Parker one of their own, Rev. Dr. Mike Simoneaux, who had been interim president of TMC before Emir Caner arrived.  Talk about a labor of love.  B-PC has had serious financial, management, enrollment, and academic problems for many years.  In 2009, citing a bad economy, the college restructured and dramatically scaled back its academic offerings.

Not content to struggle only with financial and organizational challenges, B-PC quickly joined the fundamentalist fray and joined its sister schools Truett-McConnell and Shorter in a race to the bottom.  And, as bad as things are at TMC and Shorter, it looks like B-PC is actually going to win and be the first of the three downward-spiraling GBC-affiliated colleges to close its doors for good.

It's unclear to me whether B-PC's jabs at TMC and Shorter are supposed to convince the GBC to dump even more money down this pit or whether they actually thought they could attract quality students and faculty by being avowedly fundamentalist, but as this April 2010 press clipping shows, B-PC's posture has been pretty bizarre:

The trustees responded to the challenge by voting unanimously on a number of significant issues including four action items that clearly define Brewton-Parker as a Baptist, Christian institution of higher education.

The first action item pertained to a resolution on the college’s Mission Centered Curriculum. Shep Johnson, BPC trustee and pastor of First Baptist Church in Douglas, presented the resolution and explained that the faculty has thoughtfully and strategically looked at each course taught at the school to see how it can be taught from a Christian worldview.

Gerald Harris/Index

Tony Romans, BPC trustee and pastor of North Peachtree Baptist Church in Atlanta, delivers a devotional message to the college’s Board of Trustees.

BPC President David Smith explained that the Christian worldview is to be infused into all of the courses taught at Brewton-Parker and that the purpose of the resolution is to tie each course to that same Christian worldview.

The second action item unanimously adopted by the trustees underscored a Statement of Faith and Learning. The central confession of the statement reads: “As a Georgia Baptist institution of higher learning, Brewton-Parker College is firmly and unequivocally rooted in the Christian faith, adopting the central confession for its statement of faith and learning from the New Testament – ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ (Rom. 10:9).

“As a consequence, to say that ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ is to nurture a learning environment in which academic challenge, authentic spirituality, and the practice of integrity can flourish.”

The third action item heartily approved by the trustees pertained to a statement of Doctrine and Theology including the following words: “Brewton-Parker College focuses its Christian mission on the twin concepts of providing an unapologetically Christian and proudly Baptist tradition of higher education. In matters of theology and doctrine, Brewton-Parker College’s administration and trustees endorse the tenets of faith generally accepted by Southern Baptists and specifically expressed in The Baptist Faith and Message, the denomination’s doctrinal statement approved by the Southern Baptist Convention in 1963 and revised in 2000.”

The fourth action item focused on a resolution of Support for the Cooperative Program. The resolution stated: “The trustees of Brewton-Parker College affirm their historic commitment to the Cooperative Program of the Southern Baptist Convention. They endorse the continuation of the Cooperative Program as the primary funding mechanism for mission ministries within the Georgia Baptist Convention. The Brewton-Parker College Board of Trustees appreciates the tireless efforts of GBC Executive Director Dr. J. Robert White in advocating for the Cooperative Program, and stand with him in affirming the Cooperative Program’s dynamic success in Georgia Baptist ministries.”

Gerald Harris/Index

Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy Jerry Ray, left, presents the framed documents of the resolutions that define Brewton-Parker as a Baptist, Christian institution of higher education to board chairman Cliff Morris, pastor of First Baptist Dublin. Morris accepted the presentation on behalf of J. Robert White, Georgia Baptist Convention executive director.

When President Smith addressed the trustees later he stated, “Since 1998, the GBC has provided Brewton-Parker, through scholarships, grants, direct monthly stipends, and other subsidies a total of $18 million.”

The trustees enthusiastically adopted all four action items to boldly herald the college as being “unapologetically Christian and proudly Baptist.”

Smith stated, “Some years ago the vocalist of a country and western hit sang, ‘I was country before country was cool.’ Well, Brewton-Parker College was thoroughly Baptist before being Baptist was cool in GBC higher education.

“When our sister institution’s president in Macon was writing books proclaiming a Universalist theology, BPC was purging its Bible department of CBF influence.

“When our sister institution in Rome was building strategies to disassociate with the GBC, BPC stood steadfastly in the camp of Georgia Baptists.

“When our sister institution in Cleveland was unsure of its denominational affections in the early days of this century and experienced difficult financial times,” Smith continued, “BPC offered to bring some of its programs to Cleveland to assist that institution by allowing students to remain on that campus, paying room and board and remaining there until they could accredit similar programs to serve their students.”

Smith also stated, “Our two sister colleges in Rome and Cleveland have made great strides recently to become what the Georgia Baptist Convention expects them to be. I am grateful that they are now moving toward a place where Brewton-Parker College has traditionally posted itself.”

Smith concluded his remarks by declaring, “Our faculty has unanimously affirmed a statement of faith and learning that:

Gerald Harris/Index

Left to right, First Baptist Centerville pastor Allen Hughes, BPC provost Ron Melton, Macon architect Jimmy Michael, and board chairman Cliff Morris have a moment for fellowship during a break at the BPC trustee meeting.

Stands on an inerrant, infallible, and inspired Bible, knows God as triune and omnipotent;

Understands humankind as fallen sinners, but created in the likeness and image of God;

Accepts Christ as virgin born, with divine Sonship, who accepted crucifixion for sinners, rose from the grave for the salvation of sinners, and will return to accept into eternity redeemed sinners;

Understands salvation comes only through Jesus Christ, and that through faith, provided by His grace, resulting in good works;

Recognizes that there is no other way to God or eternal life except through Jesus Christ;

And realizes that all humans are eternal in ultimate form, either residing with Christ in heaven or apart from Him in hell, forever.

We believe these statements, synthesized and framed as reminders of our commitment to God’s Kingdom and our denomination, go far beyond a one-time assignation of allegiance. We offer them as a way of life, a philosophy of teaching and as evidence of a college so thoroughly integrated into the twin realities of educational enlightenment and Christian edification that we are indeed, unapologetically Christian and proudly Baptist.”

The GBC gives about $4 million to its colleges annually (160% of what the BGCO gives OBU).  Shorter gets about half, while the others get about $1M apiece.  While poor little B-PC was trying to keep up with its larger, stronger sister schools in the race to be the most outrageously fundamentalist (TMC requires all faculty to sign the Baptist Faith and Message and Shorter is requiring all staff to sign a "lifestyle statement,") it turns out that Brewton-Parker ran afoul of its accrediting body, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.  Uh-oh.

I don't want to confuse correlation with causality here, but Brewton-Parker is in perilous danger of becoming an unaccredited degree mill.  Far from bailing it out further, at that point the Georgia Baptist Convention will probably just walk away.

What a disaster.

Praise the Lord, there are no meaningful parallels between OBU and BP-C.  That's why I initially planned to limit the Downward Spiral series to relevant peer institutions.  But even though OBU will likely never suffer the fate of Brewton-Parker College, this should be a clear warning to fledgling schools that mistakenly believe that the race to the bottom is a journey they want to undertake.  If you want to be thoroughly fundamentalist, it makes no sense to masquerade as a legitimate academic institution.  There are no winners in a race to Crazy Town.

Reflection on Calvin College (and Other Non-Baptist Evangelical Schools)

I've spent the past three days attending a conference at Calvin College.  Calvin's Paul B. Henry Institute for the Study of Religion and Politics hosted the Seventh Biennial Symposium on Religion and Public Life on the school's Grand Rapids, Michigan campus.  (Outside my involvement with Save OBU, I am a political science Ph.D. student with research interests in the area of religion and politics.)  I had occasion to talk with many professors who work in evangelical higher education, all of whom were very interested in Baptist schools' recent lurches back toward fundamentalism.

Lately, our blog has focused attention on happenings at colleges that are, like OBU, affiliated with Baptist state conventions:

• The coming split between the Kentucky Baptist Convention and Campbellsville University
• The transformation of Cedarville University from a liberal arts college to a fundamentalist Bible academy
• The ever-bizarre goings-on at Louisana College
• The Georgia Baptist Convention's shameful assault on Shorter University
• The GBC's support for fledgling fundamentalist schools like Truett-McConnell and Brewton-Parker
• Ongoing problems at my own beloved alma mater, Oklahoma Baptist University

Considering the all-out assault on OBU's liberal arts heritage from 2009-2001, it has been very disheartening to learn that, with respect to academic freedom and ethical administration, OBU actually has it better than a lot of Baptist colleges.

But we have talked about non-Baptist evangelical schools before.  Last summer, when the new round of Forbes rankings came out, we saw that non-Baptist evangelical colleges not only have fewer restrictions on academic freedom, but also better reputations than Baptist colleges.  (We've also talked about how, before the changes, OBU was regarded as the best Southern Baptist CCCU-affiliated college.  Now it is quickly losing ground to Union, Ouachita, Samford, and others.)

We also speculated about how the purported "Evangelical Renaissance in Academe" is likely not to include Southern Baptists as long as their rightful heritage as legitimate liberal arts colleges is continually under attack from fundamentalist forces.

Baptist power brokers want you to think that if they don't exercise control over colleges, the colleges will quickly abandon Christianity.  That idea is laughable to people affiliated with schools like Wheaton College in Illinois and Gordon College in Massachusetts which, in spite of having no denominational ties, manage to sustain a strong Christian commitment and identity.

Calvin is a bit of an anomaly.  The denomination that controls it, the Christian Reformed Church in America, is not nearly as fearful or dogmatic as today's Baptist state conventions.  Yet in spite of having a rigorous faith examination as part of new professors' hiring process, Calvin does not seem interested in imposing restrictions on academic freedom.  Calvin faculty hires must produce a letter of affirmation from a pastor, commit to joining a Reformed congregation within two years, and appear before a committee of faculty and administrators to discuss matters of faith and the meaning of Christian education.  Yet no one is being run out of the Calvin philosophy and theology departments for doubting  that Jonah was really swallowed by a fish or that the earth was created in 6 24-hour periods about 6,000 years ago.

Also to Calvin's great credit, it attracts academically talented students.  Just as a team is only as good as its worst player or an orchestra is only as good as its worst instrumentalist, there is a sense in which a university is only as good as its least academically capable student.  Let's be honest.  OBU has a HUGE problem in this area.  OBU admits almost everyone who applies, often probationally.  Calvin (and many of the top-tier evangelical colleges) are more selective in admissions and less willing to compromise academic rigor and quality.  If OBU truly wants to be a peer of Wheaton, Calvin, and Gordon, it needs to be more intentional about attracting (and retaining) better students.

When I tell evangelical professors about the worsening state of Baptist undergraduate education in certain quarters, they are almost universally sympathetic.  They cannot fathom seeing colleagues dismissed for the reasons OBU (and so many others) has given.  They cannot believe how much power is concentrated in fundamentalists' hands.  They are frankly offended at the notion that fellow evangelical scholars/professors cannot be trusted to sustain an institution's Christian identity without heavy-handed administrative intervention and denominational oversight.  They are perplexed by the dismantling of philosophy departments and the increasing trend toward dumbed-down "apologetics" and bizarrely defensive "Christian worldview" classes.

For the record, these people are NOT liberals, let me assure you.  They are people who believe in Christ as their personal savior, trust the Scriptures as authoritative, and go to theologically conservative churches every Sunday.

The more I reflect on the massive variation in academic freedom among Christian colleges, the more I think the CCCU needs to get involved.  We've expressed our qualms about the CCCU before.  But for better or worse, it is the institutional representative of these conservative Protestant schools -- Baptist, nondenominational, and otherwise.  Obviously the CCCU lacks an incentive to meddle in member institutions' internal affairs.  But the quality of the schools that have academic freedom starkly contrasts with frankly embarrassing turn of events at Cedarville, Louisiana College, Shorter University, OBU, and elsewhere over the past few years.

The fundamentalists won the Takeover fight in the SBC -- we get it.  "To the victor goes the spoils."  But now that the Takeover has moved from the state conventions to the colleges, we have to ask, when is enough enough?  There are many fine examples of academic freedom, ethical administration, and the responsible integration of faith and learning at so many evangelical institutions.  Baptists can do better.

Should OBU Be OBU? Or Try to Out-Union Union?

In our last post, we noted that OBU recently honored Union University (TN) President David Dockery with the Herschel Hobbs Denominational Service Award.  We can't help but notice that Union has become the darling of the post-Takeover SBC.  Many SBC elites send their own children to Union.  In contrast, OBU fails to attract the children of the SBC's leading men.

As far as I'm concerned, this is great news.

All indications are that Union is a solid Baptist liberal arts university that has absolutely thrived under David Dockery's leadership.  It has more than doubled in size, scope, enrollment, and budget.  My perception is that Union may be somewhat more intentionally conservative than OBU.  Even so, we haven't heard rumblings about unethical firings or unilateral redirection of entire academic divisions based on fundamentalist ideology, as we have seen at OBU and other Baptist universities.  So maybe Union already went through that change.  Or maybe it's just more uniformly conservative and no one protests very loudly.  I don't know enough about Union's history to know whether it was always a happier home for fundamentalists, or whether Dockery has deliberately ushered it in that direction.  Folks who know him praise him and tell me that, while not as extremely right wing as today's SBC, Dockery is a traditional conservative who saw which way the wind was blowing.  Hopefully, for his sake, he didn't have to compromise too many of his own beliefs and principles to win the adulation of post-Takeover SBC leaders.

Somehow, Union has managed to communicate two things.  First, it is a growing, thriving, nationally recognized Christian liberal arts university with a good academic reputation, good professors, and good students.  (Unlike OBU, Union didn't need to add a football program to boost male enrollment.)  And second, Union enjoys a reputation for being a safe place for fundamentalists to send their children to college.

Union's success with this delicate dance must be vexing to OBU's new leadership.  For some reason, the dance has been more difficult at OBU.  When David Whitlock and Stan Norman arrived on Bison Hill, each pointed to Union as a model.  OBU, though smaller, had at least as good a reputation.  But OBU is not as widely considered to be a safe place for fundy kids.  Of course, OBU produces tons of graduates who are fundamentalist, home-schooling culture warriors.  But not as many as certain other Baptist colleges.  At OBU, the chances seem higher that students will end up taking the Bible seriously, not literally.  It has been much more likely that OBU religion and ministry graduates will attend non-SBC seminaries.  As Whitlock and Norman discovered, OBU's relatively moderate reputation has been hard to kill.  At this moment, I do not know of a single SBC seminary professor or high-level agency staffer who has a son or daughter enrolled in OBU.

That's unlikely to change. And frankly, we don't need more once-reputable Baptist colleges descending into fundamentalism.  The SBC elites with children inclined toward religious colleges will continue to send their kids to Union, or, if they don't care at all about academic respectability, to an undergraduate program at one of the seminaries.

It's fine that OBU honored David Dockery.  I intend no offense toward Union.  As I said yesterday, Dockery has done the impossible: kept hardliners happy while also maintaining some mainstream legitimacy.  It's not an easy feat.  Usually you squander much of your institution's legitimacy when you pander to the hardliners.  Just ask Emir Caner (Truett-McConnell), Joe Aguillard (Louisiana College), Don Dowless (Shorter), and Thomas White (Cedarville).  Thankfully, David Whitlock seems less eager to take OBU over that cliff.  I have always believed that Whitlock has it in him to be a great university president, but I doubt any Baptist college president can do what Dockery has done: Pleased the SBC without turning his institution into a joke.

So you have to choose.

While past OBU presidents courageously risked alienating the increasingly fundamentalist SBC as they were building OBU into a top-rated Christian liberal arts university, today's leaders seem too eager to advertise that the Fundamentalist Takeover is, at long last, coming to Bison Hill.  This seems to be the intent of the Hobbs Award.

But the field of schools trying to out-Union Union is already very crowded.  And it's not going well for any of them.  So we will say what we've said all along. OBU should be what it has been for decades: A hospitable home for moderate and conservative faculty and students characterized by academic rigor, academic freedom, and academic integrity.

What's Going On at Campbellsville University (KY)?

We began the Save OBU project concerned about one university.  But we have seen that dozens of other evangelical colleges have been down some version of our path.  As crazy as this may seem to those who have seen OBU's great liberal arts tradition threatened in recent years, OBU is actually in much better shape than a number of Baptist state convention-affiliated schools, some of which have essentially given up their heritage as liberal arts colleges and become fundamentalist Bible academies, throwing away their histories, their reputations, and perhaps ultimately, their accreditation in the process.

The debacle at Shorter University in Georgia was covered elsewhere, though we definitely spent time agonizing over Shorter's decline here.  Recently, we considered the situation at Cedarville University in Ohio.  Many Southern Baptists are watching with (depending on their perspectives) glee or horror as Louisiana College stumbles along.

No Baptist state convention has been as blatant as Georgia's about its desire to jettison academic freedom and respectability in favor of turning its colleges into fundamentalist Bible academies.  I sense that Tennessee may be next, having already parted ways with Belmont and probably wanting to cast Carson-Newman aside in order to further bolster its flagship school, Union University (and perhaps eventually fund the fledgling Tennessee Temple University).

We haven't assessed the situation in Kentucky, where, in the shadow of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, the state convention has a relationship with a few small liberal arts colleges.  Last fall we noted Georgetown College (KY) President Bill Crouch's retirement.  But we haven't yet offered much analysis on the situation in Kentucky.

That will have to change.

This week, the Kentucky Baptist Convention's executive director, the Reverend Dr. Paul Chitwood, has been dealing with calls to to de-fund Campbellsville University over a tenure decision in the university's theology department.  Chitwood's statement was very diplomatic, calling for patience as facts are investigated:

Recent news that the university will not tenure a popular professor in their school of theology has solicited both an outpouring of support for the professor and swirling accusations about the university. For most Kentucky Baptists, a personnel matter at one of our nine agencies or institutions is a matter that should be handled privately by the administration without interference by the public. 

Claims, however, that CU retains other professors in the school of theology who reject biblical authority and professors in other disciplines who affirm evolution, are difficult for many Kentucky Baptists to swallow. This is especially true when well over $1 million of their missions offerings are helping pay the salaries of those professors every year. 

As I peruse emails I have received calling for the defunding of CU and threatening to defund the Cooperative Program if the KBC does not take action, I understand the concerns but am equally concerned that we do not rush to judgment. I earnestly pray that accusations regarding one institution will not be used to undermine all that Kentucky Baptists support, including the education 16,000 Southern Baptist Convention seminary students and more than 10,000 missionaries and church planters taking the gospel to Kentucky, North America, and the ends of the earth. 

I am, however, genuinely troubled by the testimonies of some current and former CU students. 

Tenuous and fragile are words that describe the relationships between most state conventions and their liberal arts universities. Higher education, by its very nature, requires the kind of academic freedom and exploration that is sometimes difficult to envision being funded by missions offerings. But if academic freedom is no longer afforded to those who hold to “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) and teach a high view of Scripture (2Tim 3:16), the time for church support has clearly passed.

Chitwood, for the moment, still has to try to be fair to the fundamentalist lay and clergy leadership of the convention as well as the college's constituents.  But I suspect that if KBC leaders think seriously and strategically about this issue, they will realize it's time to part ways.

Separation is obviously the better course of action for both entities.  We'll speak to insiders and offer more nuanced perspectives in the weeks to come.  But for the moment, let us hold out OBU's experience with the BGCO as evidence that, if the KBC and its colleges continue their tenuous relationship, the pain and agony far outweigh whatever modest benefits each entity thinks it gets from the other.

Campbellsville students, faculty and alumni: If your beloved university decides to stick it out with the KBC, you can expect doctrinal witch hunts, fundamentalist-inspired meddling in personnel and policy decisions, a precipitous and irreversible decline in reputation and national rankings, and ultimately the end of legitimate liberal arts education on your campus.  In ways visible and invisible, you will see consequential decisions made out of the Baptist Building, not your administrators' offices.  Tears will be shed, careers will be disrupted, and pain will be widely felt.

KBC pastors and laypeople: If your convention decides to "fight for biblical authority," "return to biblical roots," or whatever you want to call your decision to flex your muscle at Campbellsville, you can expect a long and drawn-out battle that will exhaust your resources, divert needed funds from other vital mission and ministry efforts, and frankly distract you from your core mission.

More on this later.  Prayers for all involved.  We've been there.  It hurts.  It's ugly.  Sometimes we can both be most faithful to our missions apart rather than together.  Consider that such a time may now be at hand.

The Downward Spiral: Fundamentalists Go Nuclear at Shorter University

In this Downward Spiral series, we're looking closely at other state convention-controlled Baptist colleges that are abandoning their historic legacies as liberal arts colleges and bowing to fundamentalist demands that they prize rigid doctrinal purity above academic freedom, integrity, and respectability.

We began by claiming a victory of sorts, noting that OBU's recent slide may have abated somewhat due to the widespread concern students, faculty, alumni, retired faculty, and the Save OBU movement have expressed over the past 10-12 months.  Then, we looked at Truett-McConnell and Brewton-Parker, both in Georgia, which seem to be in a race to the bottom and a competition to see who can convince the fundamentalists who control the Georgia Baptist Convention that their school has the most ridiculous obsession with total doctrinal conformity and the greatest disdain for actually providing a decent, let alone rigorous, education.  A little closer to home, Louisiana College provides a clear warning about what can happen when Baptist schools unsuccessfully resist fundamentalist takeovers.  Having suffered from financial disasters, divisive battles, horrible leadership, LC is in perilous danger of losing its accreditation. Any OBU constituent who thinks "it could never happen here" needs to take a close look at how convention power brokers interfered in LC trusteeship and administration and ran a once-fine institution into the ground.  LC is not an extreme case.  Rather, it's an ugly picture of what would almost certainly happen to OBU if Provost Norman and Dr Jordan continue to get their way in OBU's governance and affairs.

But let us now turn our attention to a top Baptist college whose supporters have been most gracious and sympathetic to Save OBU -- a favor I would now like for us to return.

Shorter University (Rome, GA)

Whereas Brewton-Parker and Truett-McConnell were never among the top Southern Baptist-affiliated colleges, Shorter University has been a shining example of Christian higher education in the evangelical tradition.  Once the GBC and Mercer University parted ways (a huge boon to both entities and a brilliant idea that I hope will continue to spread throughout post-Takeover Baptist life), Shorter became the GBC's flagship institution.  Like OBU, Shorter specialized in the liberal arts experience.  Graduates went on to success in business, ministry, and other fields.  The school had excellent placement in law, medicine, and other graduate degree programs.  Shorter had first-rate nursing and teacher education programs.  The fine arts department improved not only worship arts in the churches, but also the cultural life of Northwest Georgia.  Of the schools we've studied in this series, Shorter has the most obvious parallels to OBU.  For what its worth, Shorter receives about $2 million per year from the GBC.

What Happened?

We've reported on goings-on at Shorter before.  In fact, I wrote about Shorter in the very first week of Save OBU's existence.  Like some of the other schools we've profiled, Shorter's president started on the authoritarian/fundamentalist warpath almost from the first moment of his election.  I can't speak to the GBC's meddling in Shorter's affairs over the years, though I'm absolutely certain that the fundamentalist takeover of Shorter University has been brewing for years at the GBC and trustee levels.  We'll fill in some of those gaps over time.  President Donald V. Dowless announced soon after taking office that all employees (not just faculty) would have to sign a "lifestyle statement" or be fired.

Whereas such tactics are not really news at already-fundamentalist institutions like Brewton-Parker and Truett-McConnell, this dramatic and unprecedented affront against Baptist freedoms was a big deal at Shorter, which, though thoroughly conservative by any objective measure, has generally respected basic norms of academic and administrative responsibility.

Our friends at Save Our Shorter have kindly answered some questions we asked about the situation:

a) Did this directive from from the GBC or Dowless himself? 

We're not clear on that. We suspect that he had been in contact with Nelson Price, then-chair of the Board of Trustees, who is taking his marching orders from Bob White at the GBC. Bob White’s seeming silence on the current issues stems from the fact that he had written and discussed with pro-GBC trustees, directing them on their responses to the GBC/Shorter lawsuit in 2002. That was brought out in court, however White denied it, and when trustees were questioned, they also denied it.  That incident seems to have shaken White enough to teach him to be more surreptitious in his manipulations. 

b) What has the opposition been like? 

Great outcry in the community. Faculty are incensed but scared. Alumni have tried to have a discussion with Dowless, but he first took an intransigent position, then refused to talk to alumni or community clergy. Of course, there is also the creation of SOS (Save Our Shorter) and the building support of that group. 

c) How many professors are leaving? 

[SOS has what it believes is an accurate count, but asked us not to publish the exact number.]  Suffice it to say that no area of the university is unscathed by this disaster: professors, administrators, IT staff, library staff, coaches... Nursing department is gone, with the exception of one professor who agreed to stay and teach out those students whom the department had recruited. 

d) How does this radical policy affect Shorter today and in the future? 

This is not just an issue about faculty. The lifestyle statement affects virtually every department on campus. Short term, Shorter is facing two challenges, administratively – re-staffing and finding faculty.  They have also had to extend open registration to the end of semester because so many students have not enrolled for classes next fall. Alumni are advising family members and friends not to send their children to Shorter. The Fine Arts department has been decimated. The Shorter Chorale has always been one of the crown jewels of Shorter. Only a handful of students and faculty are remaining. The theatre department, too, has lost the vast majority of its faculty and students.  One of the cultural centers for Rome will have virtually disappeared.

Clearly, Shorter has an unmitigated disaster on its hands.  To make matters worse, Shorter is hosting a visit from SACS (accrediting body) this week.  It's going to be very difficult to convince the SACS delegation that all is well at Shorter.  Thankfully, pro-Shorter advocates are planning a massive demonstration tomorrow morning.  The pro-GBC faction will have to answer tough questions about their bizarre new vision for the college.

IF ANY OF OUR SAVE OBU SUPPORTERS LIVE IN NORTHWEST GEORGIA, ATLANTA, OR CHATTANOOGA, PLEASE JOIN THE PRO-SHORTER PROTESTERS ON BEHALF OF SAVE OBU!

What Can We Learn?

The Shorter debacle is obviously a worst-case, nightmare scenario.  But let's not forget that there are very influential people in OBU life who would love to see this disaster visited upon OBU.  Why fire moderates once every year or two when you can induce a few dozen of them to quit all at once?!

The convention's involvement is crucial, yet deliberately kept out of the public eye.  We don't know for sure if Bob White at the GBC is pushing this issue (though he is obviously cheerleading it from the sidelines).  In the same way, we don't yet know definitively what marching orders the BGCO has given  President Whitlock.  Like all Baptist college presidents trapped in the impossible, irreconcilable gap between an increasingly fundamentalist state convention (with its dwindling financial subsidy) and a university community that depends on academic freedom, liberty of the conscience, and open inquiry as core principles.

One difference between OBU and Shorter is that our current Board of Trustees would never go along with forcing OBU staff to choose between their jobs and their consciences.  (I say this with confidence,  but please correct me if my confidence is misplaced.)  That's why we will be formally reaching out to OBU trustees in the coming months.  They have been asked to believe blatant falsehoods about the forced dismissals (that they were merely "contractual disputes") and have not been provided with adequate context for the series of missteps that amount to an unprecedented change in direction on Bison Hill.  But even if, as we suspect, a year's worth of protests have temporarily slowed OBU's slow yet deliberate transformation away from a relatively moderate liberal arts college in the best of the Baptist tradition, it will only be a matter of time until the Takeover proceeds apace.  For now, we have a number of pro-OBU trustees.  But the convention will be much more careful about who it lets onto the Board in the future.  In a matter of a few years, all but a handful could be handpicked pro-BGCO Anthony Jordan loyalists.  At that point, they could wreak untold havoc.

As we've stated all along, the ultimate resolution is for the colleges and the conventions to go their separate ways.  Short of that, we are going to keep fighting these tired, old battles.  At Shorter, the fundamentalists have gone nuclear.  No collateral damage -- including dozens of employees' careers and hundreds of students' college experiences -- is too great for these people.  They have no place in the field of higher education, Christian or otherwise.  But they hold all the power.  For us little people who do not control the flow of funds and the election of trustees, it will take all the unity, solidarity, effort, and protest we can muster just to keep our hallowed traditions and values alive.

God help us all.

Sunday School: Things Can Get Worse

A Word to New Visitors and Supporters
Welcome, friends!  According to our internal analytics, there's a good chance you're new to the Save OBU website.  In the past week, we have had hundreds of first-time visitors.  Web traffic in Shawnee will spike dramatically as students return for the beginning of the spring semester on Monday.  When we introduced Save OBU in December, students were studying for finals and most have been away from Bison Hill for the past 5 weeks.  Unless the administration has blocked this website, students will have access to weeks' worth of information this blog has presented.  Their legitimate questions and concerns have been rebuffed before, but a critical mass is building.

In the coming months, administrators will have to decide which vision of OBU they support and where their loyalties lie.  They can cast their lots with the fundamentalists who control the BGCO (and the $2.5 million in annual funding they provide in exchange for dismissing moderate professors, gutting core curriculum areas, ignoring faculty norms, etc).  Or, they can side with the students, parents, faculty, and alumni who believe in academic freedom, open inquiry, and OBU's proud liberal arts heritage.  It is already becoming obvious that the two visions for OBU are not compatible.  As Christ himself says, "No man can serve two masters" (Matt. 6:24).  During that time, students can begin a real conversation on campus about the nature and future of OBU.  We are confident they will conclude that all the recent negative changes are an affront to, not an embodiment of, OBU's true nature.

Sunday School Feature
In previous weeks, we have devoted Sundays to telling stories of some fine Baptist schools that have ended their relationships with their state conventions (William Jewell College, Stetson University, and Furman University).  Without exception, these universities have flourished since they rid themselves of fundamentalist control.  Likewise, the state conventions are much better off, being relieved of a significant financial burden and able to dramatically expand other, more fruitful, ministry and mission opportunities.  The splits were painful, but they became necessary as the state conventions came under fundamentalist control over the past three decades.

For most of that time, OBU has managed to walk the fine line between the needs of its academic constituency and the demands of BGCO leaders.  But in recent years, the fundamentalist elites began demanding radical changes on Bison Hill.  Administrators can no longer protect each side's interests.  It's not the administrators' faults.  Rather, they are in an impossible situation.  Ultimately, they will have to make a choice.  If you've been paying even scant attention to the changes on Bison Hill these past two years, you probably believe they have already made the choice to side with the fundamentalists.  But one of the reasons Save OBU exists is to publicly show administrators that students, parents, alumni, and faculty are ready to raise an army to support them if they courageously stand up to the BGCO's agenda.

In the three cases linked above, presidents and trustees sided with the schools' true constituencies (students, parents, alumni, faculty) and true values (academic freedom, soul competency, liberty of the conscience).  They resisted the fundamentalists' agenda for their beloved institutions.  There are other Baptist schools that have done likewise and achieved greatness (e.g. Mercer, Baylor, and Wake Forest).

But we need to realistically assess where we are in this fight.  In addition to dreaming about what might be possible if we end fundamentalist control, we need to prepare for the nightmare of remaining under it.  Frankly, the nightmare scenario seems more likely at this point.

This link lists the 56 Southern Baptist colleges.  More precisely, 51 of them are affiliated with state conventions that maintain cooperative relationships with the SBC.  Five of them are undergraduate programs at SBC seminaries.  Fortunately, OBU is generally believed to be one of the best Baptist schools in America (though remember that many of the best schools have already left their state conventions).  But many of the schools on it shows what a nightmare scenario might look like.

We've already looked briefly at the disastrous consequences of fundamentalism at Louisiana College and Shorter University.  These schools have experienced faculty departures by the dozens, horrible governance problems, and financial difficulties.  Continuing accreditation looks doubtful.  We probably need to look more closely at these cases, as well as other avowedly fundamentalist schools.  In addition, we need to examine the cases of schools where the academic constituency declined to fight (or fought unsuccessfully) against fundamentalist takeover factions.

For years, OBU was in the fortunate position of being able to maintain the status quo even in the throes of the Fundamentalist Takeover.  But that is no longer possible.  If we do nothing, the fundamentalists are going to lead OBU off a cliff.  We will become another nominally-accredited fundamentalist Bible academy, one of many in Baptist life.  If we fight, at least OBU has a chance to survive as a leading Christian liberal arts college.  As one retired professor wisely noted, "We might lose this struggle, but it's not one I would want to lose easily."