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.

Sunday School - Reassessing Institutional Parallels

As many of our readers know, we began with the intention of blogging on Sundays about other Baptist schools that parted company with their increasingly fundamentalist and anti-intellectual state conventions. So far, we've profiled William Jewell College (MO), Stetson University (FL), and Furman University (SC).

Sunday School Blogging - Not as Helpful or Relevant
Last week, we looked at the planned takeover of a struggling, unaccredited college in Montana.  It's too soon to say whether this is a good idea or not.  And while Save OBU is committed to not taking positions on every minute matter in OBU governance and administration, we are at least open to the possibility that this could be a smart, effective partnership.  Our concern, as ever, is that we need to take care to maintain the quality and integrity of OBU's liberal arts education on Bison Hill.  In recent years, that heritage has been deliberately eroded and administrators seem deaf and frankly indifferent to the concerns of students, faculty, retired faculty, alumni, and friends.  So it occurs to us that new graduate programs, athletic teams, and far-flung satellite campuses may be a distraction from the very urgent business of protecting academic freedom, a rigorous curriculum, and maintaining the best possible faculty.  To the hardworking professors and tuition-paying students who see OBU's great liberal arts tradition being threatened by fundamentalist encroachment, focusing so much attention on peripheral matters seems not only offensive, but unwise.  It's like building a new room onto the side of your house while the kitchen is on fire.

Anyway, there are many other schools whose stories we need to hear.  But at the moment, it's not really worth 1/7 of this blog's space.  The amount of research required is substantial, and I frankly don't think it's the best use of my time.  Furthermore, since we usually talk about faculty on Friday, students on Saturday, and money on Monday, it would be better if we could have a day in the midst of those regular features to talk about any pressing issues that arise.

Baptist Hospital: The Key to OBU's Path to Freedom from the BGCO?
Furthermore, OBU's legal entanglement with the BGCO is different from other Baptist schools'.  It will not be nearly as easy for us to escape the BGCO's stranglehold.  We can't just vote the fundamentalists out.  They own us.  They literally own the buildings and grounds.  They can legally do whatever they want.  Whoever controls the BGCO controls OBU -- it's as simple as that.  When Mark Brister complained, "Anthony think he's my boss," he hit on the biggest problem OBU faces.  While it is not technically true, it is practically true.  When we had BGCO leaders like Joe Ingram who believed in academic freedom, the legal arrangement was not problematic.  Revs. Ingram and Tanner and Presidents Hall and Agee wisely kept OBU off the battlefield as fundamentalists waged war on the SBC in the 1980s.  Now, the fundamentalists are having their moment, and it's reflected in every hiring decision, every forced dismissal, and every curricular intervention.

So the uniqueness of our relationship to the state convention makes comparison to other schools mostly irrelevant.  What we need, truly, are experts on institutional disaffiliation.  The best parallel I can think of is the old Baptist hospital system.  My plea is this: if you know anyone who was involved in BGCO politics when it separated from the Baptist hospital system (I think this was in the early or mid 1980s but I truly don't know), please have them contact me.  Our path to freedom will be more like the hospital's and less like Wake Forest's, Stetson's, or Mercer's.  We need to know every little detail of that separation.

Moving Forward
Moving forward, we need to distinguish between short-term and long-term aims.  Our immediate concern is to repair the utterly broken relationship between the OBU faculty (particularly senior faculty) and the administration.  We absolutely must see some evidence -- and soon -- that student protests, Faculty Council resolutions, alumni petitions, and widespread dissatisfaction have any effect whatsoever on administrators, or if they are truly just doing the fundamentalists' bidding.  Fortunately, our persistence and collective pressure finally seem to be paying off.  Now that students, faculty, retired faculty, and alumni are all well aware of each other's positions, experiences, and expectations, it seems a near certainty that OBU will have to, at a minimum, apologize to the faculty and students for its shameful treatment of two excellent professors and find the provost a position elsewhere in fundamentalist higher education for which he is better suited.  Then, the fireworks over who gets to choose his successor can begin in earnest.

This issue will have to be settled soon, because with the president scheduled to be out of the country for six weeks this spring when interviews and decisions regarding new faculty take place, faculty and students are horrified at the prospect that Dr. Norman will get to oversee that process, ignore search committee recommendations again, and bring in a handful of eager young fundamentalist professors to further erode OBU's academic rigor and quality, even over the strident objections of students and faculty.  Such a scenario is unthinkable.

Longer term, we will seek changes to the trustee selection process, on OBU's end and on the BGCO's end as well.  In order to accomplish this, we may have to start a widespread conversation in Oklahoma Baptist life about what OBU and the convention actually offer each other (hint: not much).  BGCO power brokers are happiest when OK Baptists don't think much about the fact that OBU has a strong moderating effect on students' views and that we send a relatively large number of ministry graduates to moderate seminaries and a relatively small number of them to OK Baptist pulpits.  But we'll probably have to have an extended public debate about these and related issues in the months and years to come. So be it, it's long overdue.