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.

Summer in the University

Summer is an interesting time for a university. We have already said that we do not expect dramatic happenings this summer as there have been during the past two.

After all, we have shown that we are vigilant and that there are enough people who care about our movement to keep us informed of what is happening on Bison Hill.

However, this is the summer to keep watching. The last two summers have included dismissals of well-loved, erudite professors. And for those of you keeping score at home, one of those professors has received the W.O. Carver Award for lifetime achievement from the Baptist History and Heritage Society. So while OBU settled this spring for a professor who could hardly manage to have regular lectures during the scheduled class time, people outside our bubble were recognizing those OBU kicked to the curb.  When two top students informed the dean about what a disaster the Baptist History class was, the dean became defensive and rebuffed the students.

But to the point, from an administrative standpoint, summer, when the students are away, is the best time to make big changes, especially if they are going to be unpopular. This is not always necessarily a bad thing -- the best time to make OBU a smoke-free campus was over the summer. But sometimes it is terrible -- as in the case of our two forced dismissals.

All of that to say, we are watching. Our movement has grown tremendously and there are many who are helping to keep us updated. If anything happens this summer, we will be sure to inform our readership.

Thus, as we all take a little bit of break for the summer, be sure to keep checking in. We are going to keep writing about Baptist History, higher education, and especially the current struggles to maintain academic freedom at OBU.

OBU's Potential

A lot of time is spent on this blog dogging the way things are. And that's true and good because you have to see that there's a problem before you might be willing to find a solution. I think we can all agree there is indeed a problem.

But is it a lost cause? Why are we fighting for OBU, besides the fact that a part of our hearts still probably calls it home?

Jacob mentioned an article on Saturday that I want to take a moment to again consider the import. The article he wrote on mentions a sort-of new scene in higher education: an evangelical renaissance.

Now that I am at a mainline protestant seminary, I am all the more aware of my evangelical tradition. Sometimes, it's easy to forget some of the positives. But I am proud of my Baptist self-identification and believe that it is as a Baptist I have things to bring to the theological discussion table.

Let us not forget what we have to offer. Evangelicals take the bible very seriously. Evangelicalism holds the individual to be of infinite value to God. Evangelicals honor deeply the spiritual aspects of faith.

I sense there is a movement of those who are coming of age in the evangelical churches and realizing that our tradition is deeper than the well from which we currently drink. There is a sense that perhaps we should follow our mainline brothers and sisters into concern for justice issues and leave our parents and their moral majority behind. But there is also a recognition that we cannot simply sell our birthright.

A change is coming. And if you look at what kind of students are coming out of OBU, you will see it.

The potential for our university is to foster this movement, to mold students who give it wings. We are already bringing forth those who say, "You know what, maybe being Baptist isn't about denying women a place in ministry or hating homosexuals. Maybe it is about something bigger."

It's not that the answers changed, the debate is over, and the Bible lost. It's that the questions are changing and our tradition is being reclaimed.

There is a movement stirring in the hearts of young evangelicals who believe that their voices have value in the academic and theological conversation. They do not wish to abandon their roots, but to determine what exactly their tradition means for them. Movements always begin within the academy.

The time is coming when evangelicals might again be taken seriously by the world.

As an "unapologetically Baptist" Liberal Arts University, OBU stands at the cusp of the birth of this movement. If we continue to take seriously the quality of education, academic freedom, and all of the good things on which we claim to stand, we can grow into our potential-- the potential to be a part of the voice of the new evangelicalism.

Maybe this is a little abstract-- after all, I do spend most of my time talking to graduate school professors. But, I hope you can see where I am coming from, and maybe even seeds of these thoughts in your own life-- especially if you, too, are a product of OBU.

There is the chance that real, Evangelical, academic, light could shine from Bison hill-- and perhaps that it already does.

But it seems that there are some who are so attached to the old ways that they do not understand or desire this light. It scares them. It means their tradition is changing. And change is never good. The SBC has decided on what side they stand. That is why we must stand and support our University. To lose that voice would be to lose a treasure for both our own tradition and the others with whom we would interact.

A Look from the Other Side

Imagine: a professor has just left (to teach at Oxford, no less) and now that professor must be replaced. You have two candidates. Candidate A obviously has the more impressive resume, including an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Princeton. Accordingly, the faculty committee recommends candidate A, unanimously.

But here’s the problem: the position is to teach theology. Candidate B is a man and also supports your fundamentalist agenda more closely so you must choose him because you are both trying to make the faculty more conservative and your theological imagination does not have room for a woman to teach the scriptures.

That’s exactly what happened with a recent hire at OBU. Obviously, this makes me angry. It makes me angry that faculty recommendations are so easily ignored. It makes me angry that interviewees are being discriminated against because of gender. It makes me angry that better professors are being rejected for less qualified professors.

But maybe I am not the one receiving the worst end of this deal.

What must it feel like to come on campus to start a new job, knowing you are not the one that your colleagues wanted? 

Surely, if I know that the recommendation was unanimous for another, he knows. And, after all, you apply for a job you are qualified for, you hope you get the job, you get the job, you take it. You don’t think, “Wait! There is another who is better than I! Take her instead!” Academic jobs are few and far spread these days.

So what does it feel like to embody all of the tensions in your new workplace? Is it fair to walk into work everyday knowing that you are being compared to another who honestly may or may not have done a better job, but in the collective minds of those who surround you would’ve taught perfectly?

The new professor is not a bad guy and not a terrible professor. Obviously, he’s a little reformed for my taste and teaches from a pretty conservative bias. But don’t we all teach from our biases? These are forgivable because he is able to see that there are views besides his own which are viable. He’s downgraded the Greek textbook, which is frustrating, but it’s got to be hard to follow someone who left for Oxford. And he was always pretty nice to me, so I feel like I have to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But for many with ties to OBU, he will always be, at best, second choice. As I met many moderate alumni and supporters when I moved to Texas, the question they always asked was, “What do you know about this guy from Liberty?”

It’s got to be a hard place to be. I know when he came many upperclassmen felt they shouldn’t like him on principle. Surely we are not alone. And frankly, that is unfair all the way around-- for us, for the one who was passed over, for the faculty, and especially for the one who was hired.

When appeasing the BGCO hurts the Academy, we all suffer.

An Evangelical Renaissance in Academe?

Several of our readers pointed us to an essay that appeared last week on the Inside Higher Ed blog.  The essay pointed out the need for evangelical scholars to reclaim Christian thought from fundamentalism.  I commend the entire piece for your consideration, but want to comment on some of the relevant points in light of OBU's history and present problems.


The context of this essay is the opening of a new Center for Christian Thought at Biola University in California.  The authors, Gordon College Professors Thomas Albert Howard and Karl W. Giberson, explore some of the reasons why serious Christian engagement with philosophy and culture at a conservative evangelical institution might be problematic (or at least difficult) in light of the fundamentalist resurgence of the past 30 years.


Howard and Giberson tell a story that is familiar to those of us who have studied, lived, and worked in the 20th century's Christian war between modernists and fundamentalists.  But today's OBU students may not realize that there is a noble Christian academic tradition outside of fundamentalism.

Stung by ridicule after the Scopes trial, Fundamentalists retreated to the sidelines of American culture.  There they nurtured a parallel universe of publishing houses, magazines, journals, radio stations, and, not least, colleges and universities to combat the threat of secularism from without and the threat of theological modernism from within. 

Fundamentalists carried into exile many core tenets of Christian orthodoxy -- the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement -- shared by Catholic and Orthodox Christians as well.  But they also carried dubious novelties, such as newfangled teachings on biblical inerrancy and speculations about the End Times.  What is more, they became pointedly hostile toward American culture and disengaged from serious intellectual pursuits, convinced that Christianity was almost exclusively about “the world to come,” with only negligible concern for the here-and-now.

For OBU, at least, we can see the fault lines forming.  Will we continue to be a locus for serious, honest, and searching Christian engagement with the scientific, economic, political, philosophical, artistic, and ethical concerns of the modern world?  Or are we we retreating into the "parallel universe" of fundamentalism to "combat the threat of secularism without and the threat of theological modernism from within?"


The administration's moves over the past two years seem to be a headlong descent into that parallel universe: turning our bookstore into a purveyor of fundamentalist pulp, firing conservative-to-moderate evangelicals who do not toe the party line, welcoming new faculty on the basis of doctrinal agreement rather than academic merit, and cozying up to the fundamentalists who run the BGCO and the SBC.  In the religion department alone, this fundamentalist "parallel universe" exists in the apologetics/"worldview" curriculum and the professional societies new faculty belong to.


This parallel universe attempts to imitate academic rigor and respectability, but the fundamentalist attachments are so bizarre and anti-intellectual as to make the whole enterprise suspect.  Back to the new Biola center:

But beyond the problem of Mr. Worldly Wiseman is the problem of Biola itself.  The problem of Biola, however, is not the problem of Biola alone; it is shared by a number of the more than 115 evangelical schools in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), the largest umbrella network of evangelical institutions of higher learning.  The problem is, quite simply, lingering attachment to some of the more dubious certainties and habits derived from Fundamentalism and hardened by the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies of the 20th century. 

I'm glad Howard and Giberson pointed out the CCCU (Council for Conservative Christian College and Universities), of which OBU is a member.  As badly as the D.C.-based CCCU wants to seem like a uniquely faithful coalition of colleges, the evidence seems to suggest it is just another part of the parallel universe.  It's not a total joke/sham like the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE), which "accredits" fundamentalist Bible academies that could never attain accreditation through an actual accrediting body.  But the CCCU just isn't as special as it thinks it is.  And frankly, I'm not sure why OBU (or any college) is a member.  The CCCU does provide one service you'll be pleased to learn about: Supposedly whenever Dr. Norman actually has to undergo a performance evaluation that includes input from faculty, Dr. Whitlock has proposed to use an instrument developed by the CCCU.  Isn't that reassuring?


We've entered a new world at OBU -- one in which you can't even find the classics of the Christian faith (or any decent new research, either) in the college bookstore, but you can find reassurance in apologetics and "worldview" classes.  While plenty of other conservative Christian colleges are also facing hostile takeovers, some are not.  Some are continuing ahead on the path of enlightened Christian liberal arts education -- the path we would still be on if not for the fact that our leaders have to appease the BGCO.  As schools like Gordon, Wheaton, Biola, Whitworth, and others forge on, OBU and other Southern Baptist schools have to fight against our fundamentalist overlords.  (True fact: Wheaton just hired an amazing professor OBU rejected in order to hire someone from Liberty University.  I'm sorry, but whoever made that decision has absolutely no business in Christian higher education.)

What is more, many old-guard defenders of the status quo, convinced that the residue of fundamentalism is simply “what the Bible plainly teaches,” are not in short supply among donors, board members and vocal alumni.  They would likely perceive some changes such as admitting Catholic faculty, constructively engaging evolution, or modifying statements of faith away from simplistic biblicism as greasing the slippery slope toward perdition.

As fundamentalism faded from view in the middle of the last century, OBU built a proud reputation for an academically rigorous, unapologetically Christian, and unashamedly Baptist brand of higher education.  Yet today, resurgent fundamentalists seem intent on destroying everything we built.  And unless we stand up and fight, they will win.