Dub Oliver Elected President of Union University

There is huge news this week in the world of Baptist higher education.  Union University in Jackson, TN announced the election of the Reverend Dr. Samuel W. "Dub" Oliver as its 16th president.  Dr. Oliver, currently president of East Texas Baptist University, will succeed David Dockery, who is transitioning to the role of chancellor.

At first glance, this news seems like a win for academic freedom and respectability in Baptist higher education.  Like OBU President David Whitlock and unlike recent Baptist college presidents that have pushed their schools toward fundamentalism (including Shorter's Don Dowless and Cedarville's Thomas White), Dr. Oliver does not hold academic degrees from post-Takeover SBC seminaries.  This alone may be an indication that he has little appetite for fundamentalist encroachment in academic institutions.

Oliver's ETBU is more moderate than Union and most other Baptist colleges.  Along with a handful of schools, ETBU is affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.  After the Conservative Resurgence progressed from the national SBC to the state conventions, moderates in two states (Virginia and Texas) successfully resisted the resurgence.  In those states, conservatives formed rival conventions in order to avoid sharing power with moderates.  Today's SBC leaders have a complicated relationship with the BGCT.  The BGCT pours millions of dollars into SBC seminaries and agencies through its Cooperative Program giving.  At the same time, many Texas Baptist congregations contribute to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.  The BGCT contributes to organizations that post-Takeover SBC leaders loathe, such as the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty.

While solidly committed to distinctively Baptist Christian higher education and employing only believing Christians as faculty, ETBU is nowhere near conservative enough for today's SBC leaders.  They will not be pleased that Union's new president did not personally intervene to prevent ETBU from hiring a female Bible professor.  They will also not be pleased that at Oliver's former institution, the religion department does not employ a single post-Takeover SBC seminary graduate.  ETBU's religion faculty typically present their research at the mainstream American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature meetings rather than the Evangelical Theological Society's conference.  The fact that Oliver tolerated moderates will not inspire the confidence of certain SBC insiders.  At least he had the good sense to sue the federal government over the Affordable Care Act's contraceptive mandate.

However, Union University is a very different environment than the ETBU that Oliver leaves behind.  Union is widely considered to be the flagship of Baptist state convention-affiliated colleges.  Numerous SBC agency staffers and seminary faculty send their own children to Union.  Like Cedarville, the only female employee in Union's religion department is the secretary.  The exclusively male religion faculty is largely composed of SBC seminary alumni.

Union is not a fundamentalist university.  It is a strong, thriving, growing institution.  There is no evidence to suggest that it is on the same trajectory as Cedarville and Shorter, let alone Baptist colleges that are in danger of losing their accreditation.  Like Bob Agee, a former Union administrator who was president of OBU from 1982 to 1998 , David Dockery masterfully earned and kept the trust of two forces in Baptist higher education that, since the Conservative Resurgence, are increasingly at odds with one another.  These tensions will continue to exist at OBU, Union, and many other universities.  I wrote about the two competing forces in my last post:

First, there is a majority among the trustees, faculty, and alumni that wants [the school] to remain academically strong, respected, and rigorous (while, of course, being true to its Baptist heritage).  At the same time, there is a powerful force within Southern Baptist life today that wants doctrinal conformity, is more trustful of authoritarian leadership, and is less tolerant of dissenting perspectives (while also desiring, if possible, academic respectability).

Hiring a president who has never studied or worked in a post-Takeover Southern Baptist institution is a big step for Union.  It proves that Union is ultimately run out of Jackson, not out of Brentwood, Nashville, Louisville, or anywhere else.  Though a few SBC leaders have tweeted out congratulatory messages to Dr. Oliver today, it seems reasonable to assume that some would have preferred a more fundamentalist-friendly president at Union.

Oliver's inauguration service at ETBU in 2009 included greetings and blessings from friends at Baylor and Carson-Newman.  That alone is enough to make today's Southern Baptist power brokers wary.  Presumably his installation service at Union will be more SBC-centric.  The dynamics of relating to the Tennessee Baptist Convention will be different than how Oliver's ETBU relates to the BGCT.  But ultimately Union's trustees have the responsibility to protect and defend Dr. Oliver's stewardship of the institution when he finds himself opposed to forces that would erode academic freedom and encroach upon fragile Baptist freedoms.

Deservedly, Dr. Oliver will begin his tenure with reservoirs of trust and goodwill from both "sides."  He will have an inestimable ally and confidant in Chancellor David Dockery.  There will be plenty of time in years to come to speculate about the role of the Union presidency in the Baptist battles.  For now, it is enough to congratulate Dub Oliver and wish him our best.  Remembering that his election was unanimous, let us be unanimous in our prayers for him for Union, and for all the Baptist institutions we so dearly love.

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.

OBU Honors Union University's David Dockery

We've wondered before about parallels between OBU and Union University, a Baptist college in Jackson, TN.  Longtime OBU President Bob Agee came to OBU from Union and retired to Jackson.  Union's president, the Reverend Dr. David Dockery, is widely considered to be the dean of Baptist college presidents.

At the 2013 SBC Annual Meeting in June, OBU honored Dockery for his contributions to Southern Baptist life over the past 20+ years:

OBU presented the Herschel H. Hobbs Award for Distinguished Denominational Service, named in honor of a legendary Southern Baptist pastor and denominational statesman, to Dr. David S. Dockery on Tuesday, June 11, at a reception in the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas. 

The reception was part of the 2013 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. 

Dockery, who serves as president of Union University in Jackson, Tenn., received the award from Dr. David W. Whitlock, president of OBU. 

“David Dockery has had a profound impact on Christian higher education, generally, and OBU, specifically,” Whitlock said. “In the providence of God, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities paired me with Dr. Dockery in their first-year mentorship program when I became president of OBU. His wisdom and influence was so important to me in that first year, and I count it a blessing to consider him a friend.”

Forgetting, for the moment, how revisionist (and maybe even offensive?) it is to honor post-Takeover SBC elites in the name of Herschel Hobbs (who fundamentalists booed at the 1980 SBC meeting), now seems as good a time as ever to compare how OBU and Union relate to the SBC and its post-Takeover leadership.  We'll take up that topic in a series of blog posts this week.

Among the few dozen state convention-affiliated Baptist colleges, Union is clearly the darling of the SBC.  I can't even keep track of how many SBC seminary professors and high-level agency staffers have sent their own children to Union in recent years.  Whenever one of them gets married, graduates, or gets a job, the elite SBC Twitterverse becomes a virtual Union Alumni Association meeting.  We have to ask why so many post-Takeover SBC elites send their kids to Union.  Is Union objectively and uniquely better than all other Baptist colleges?  Or that good for these guys' careers?  Or is proximity to Nashville decisive?

Dockery has mastered one of the most delicate dances in evangelical life: keeping hardline constituents happy while also maintaining some mainstream legitimacy.  In addition to his prolific writing, Dockery has served on advisory boards for evangelical institutions, including Christianity Today and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

His involvement with the CCCU is noteworthy as we try to get a sense for where the CCCU stands on the recent spate of fundamentalist encroachments at Baptist-affiliated CCCU institutions.  I'm sure Dockery wants to stay above the fray, and at this point in his career perhaps he's earned the right.  But I can't help but wonder if he smiled or frowned when he heard about the firings at OBU in 2010 and 2011, the wholesale faculty exodus at Shorter in 2012, or the takeover of Cedarville in 2013.

In a future post, we'll look more deeply at how OBU and Union each relate to SBC leadership.  We'll look for answers to the question of why so many SBC elites send their kids to Union while so few (if any) send their kids to OBU.  And we'll consider OBU's prospects for success if it abandons its rich heritage just to try to win over a few dozen guys who are always going to prefer Union anyway.

Dr. Dockery, who will retire next summer after 19 years on the job, will continue to be relevant to SBC life, especially in his role as chair of the Calvinism Advisory Committee.  I, for one, will always eagerly listen to anything Dr. Dockery has to say about Christian higher education.  And I wish him and Union success in this transition period.

Fall Update and Plans

Greetings, everyone.  Sorry things have been quiet on the blog lately.  I've been quite busy with my own personal and professional duties (which include a collaboration with Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners on a course for Georgetown undergraduates).  It's actually a good thing: If we're not loudly protesting, then hopefully things are going about as well as can be expected.

In early November, I'll release the results of our BGCO pastor/church staff survey (taken in April).  There is very little appetite among the rank-and-file for a fundamentalist takeover of OBU, and large majorities of people want OBU to have autonomy over its own affairs, without external BGCO or SBC influence.

We should also start talking about Homecoming (Nov. 9-10) and the BGCO Annual Meeting (Nov. 12-13).  My sense is that a combative protest or aggressive media strategy would not be the most fruitful way forward at the moment.  But I know many of us are angry and devastated at the recent changes and I'm open to the consensus of the group.  In any case, it would be smart to coordinate some kind of collective effort, activity, and/or information sharing.

I had hoped for Save OBU to be further along organizationally in advance of the BGCO meeting.  We need to convene an Advisory Board to share the workload and confer legitimacy on the group.  (Right now, Save OBU is easily dismissed --- and mocked --- as a few peoples' online rantings.)  But we're on a long time horizon.  The fundamentalists have mobilized for a long, long battle over the future of OBU.  There's plenty of time to stave off the level of destruction that the Georgia Baptist Convention-controlled colleges have recently experienced.

We saw a huge spike in blog traffic in late August and early September when students and faculty returned to campus.  I haven't been able to keep up with daily postings.  But I'll be ramping up blog activity over the next few weeks.

I'm reading a couple books that I'm sure many of you know well.  One is The Future of Baptist Higher Education, which arose out of a conference on the subject at Baylor in the mid-2000s.  The other is The Future of Christian Higher Education, an edited volume from the late 1990s by Mercer ethicist David Gushee and Union University President David Dockery.

As always, if you have comments, ideas, inside information, or would like to contribute, please let me know!

From the Archives: OBU's Peers Series

When we first started the blog, we thought the experiences of formerly Baptist schools like Stetson, Furman, Wake Forest, and William Jewell would be instructive.  But given the parameters of the BGCO's legal ownership of OBU, it turns out that we're more interested in comparing notes with other state convention-run colleges.

Last month, we posed the question: What schools are OBU's peers?  We looked at nondenominational evangelical colleges, BGCT colleges, and nearby Baptist schools controlled by post-Takeover state conventions.  The best parallel seemed to be Union University in Jackson, TN.  Union is older and larger, but shares much in common with OBU.  Given that Union's president, Dr. David Dockery, is a noted leader in Baptist higher education, we are especially keen to know how Union handles its joint obligations to faculty and students (who need academic freedom and open inquiry) and a fundamentalist-controlled state convention (which prizes doctrinal conformity and absolute control).

Without futher ado, please review our posts in the OBU's Peers series:
Intro: Who's In the Same Boat?
OBU's Peers: Nondenominational Colleges?
OBU's Peers: Nearby Baptist Colleges (Ouachita and Southwest Baptist)?
OBU's Peers: Texas Baptist Colleges?
OBU's Peers: Union University?

OBU's Peers: Union University?

OBU's Peers Series:
Intro: Who's In the Same Boat?
OBU's Peers: Nondenominational Colleges?
OBU's Peers: Nearby Baptist Colleges (Ouachita and Southwest Baptist)?
OBU's Peers: Texas Baptist Colleges

If you've been following the series, you know what we're trying to accomplish.  We're looking around the world of Christian higher education to see how well or how poorly peer institutions are doing with respect to academic freedom issues.  Shorter University in Rome, GA has a lot in common with OBU but, unfortunately, its administration, trustees, and state convention are actively running it into the ground.  I'm open to suggests for schools that are genuinely similar to OBU, but upon reflection, one of the closest parallels I see is Union University in Jackson, TN.

The Agee/Union Connection
While in recent years there's been an administrative pipeline between OBU and Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO (SBU's president came from OBU and OBU's president and provost did stints at SBU), OBU also shares an administrative connection to Union University in Jackson, TN.  Longtime OBU President Bob Agee came to OBU from Union in 1982 and retired to Jackson.

In his day, Agee was known as one of the most prominent Baptist college presidents (and is still an elder statesman in that distinguished fraternity).  In addition to working hard to earn and keep the trust of faculty as a defender of faculty rights and academic freedom, President Agee worked even harder to maintain good relations with local churches and the state convention.  He regularly preached in as many as 40-50 Oklahoma Baptist churches a year.  Agee had a knack for defending academic freedom and OBU's true liberal arts tradition without offending a sometimes skeptical, even hostile, Oklahoma Baptist constituency.  Of course, when the legendary Joe Ingram and former OBU President Bill Tanner headed the BGCO, relating to the state convention was not as difficult as it is in today's post-Takeover reality.  But Agee did a very difficult job and he did it well.

Any Baptist liberal arts college president should like to model his (I doubt they're ready for a "her") career after Agee's.  Union University President David Dockery certainly seems to have done so in his 17 year tenure.  Like Agee, Dockery has spoken fluently and published widely on the subject of Christian higher education.  I have not read Dockery's books yet, but I know some of our readers have.  For now I'll trust that he advocates an authentically open, fearless, and searching brand of Christian scholarship, and not just fundamentalism dressed up in academic/intellectual-sounding language.  Also like Agee, Dockery has managed the difficult task of upholding academic freedom and maintaining the trust of faculty while also staying in the fundamentalists' good graces.  (I admit this may be more perception than fact, but I trust readers will correct me where I'm wrong about the situation at Union.)

This is not to make figures like Agee and Dockery into heroes.  Their jobs are difficult and have becoming increasingly so, especially in light of how dramatically the state conventions have swung toward the fundamentalist end of the spectrum.  But make no mistake: they are compensated handsomely for their efforts.  Standing up for academic freedom might make them feel good about themselves, but at the end of the day, pleasing convention power brokers is how they stayed in their jobs year after year.  Both men care deeply about the ideal of Christian liberal arts education and have devoted their careers to that end.  Agee, for his part, seems to have regressed somewhat in his later years, as we'll discuss below.  Perhaps Dockery has done likewise in order to survive as long as he has.  We are piecing together Pat Taylor's and Agee's roles in David Whitlock's journey to the OBU presidency.  But for now, let's focus on the most successful and prominent Baptist liberal arts college president in the U.S. right now, Union's Dockery.

Save OBU's Questions about Union University
Even when I was a student at OBU, Dockery had already made a name for himself in Baptist higher education.  He spoke in Raley Chapel in the early 2000s, and I'm sure he's returned since.  Union and OBU have a lot in common, although there are some differences.  Union is almost twice as large as OBU (by enrollment).  Union is ranked lower according to Forbes, but does somewhat better in U.S. News, though it still ranks below Stetson, Samford, Belmont, and Mercer.  Union is less selective in admissions, but its draws students with markedly higher SAT scores than OBU.  Union's (all male) theology faculty is highly qualified, and while it's hard to place a department on the ideological/theological spectrum by the professors' CVs, Union's faculty seems to be mostly evangelical but not fundamentalist.  Many of the religion professors who graduated from Baptist seminaries did so before the Takeover, which is reassuring.

While we know a lot about the problems OBU has had as administrators have sought to turn from our heritage, we won't know if Union is truly a good parallel to OBU until we know more about the school and how it relates to its moderate constituents (most faculty, many students) and its fundamentalists (more students, most of the Tennessee Baptist Convention).  If you have inside information, comment below or email SaveOBU@gmail.com.

1. Is academic freedom protected at Union? Do professors or students have to sign creedal statements?
2. Does Union have latitude to select its own trustees, or does the TBC have absolute control?
3. What conflicts involving academic freedom have arisen at Union during Rev. Dr. Dockery's tenure?  How have they been resolved?
4. If it came down to it, would Dockery stand for the school (like William Jewell's President David Sallee [OBU '73]) or the convention (like Shorter's President Don Dowless)?

Can OBU Administrators Learn Anything from Union/David Dockery?
We don't know if OBU administrators have learned anything, but we know they've tried.  David Whitlock looked to Dockery (and Agee) as models when he began his tenure at OBU.  In the Fall of 2010, Whitlock dispatched his struggling provost to Jackson in the midst of the fallout from the first forced dismissal debacle.  Stan Norman shadowed Union's provost and got some on-the-job training, presumably on how not to alienate the faculty.  Unfortunately, when Norman returned, OBU faculty were not impressed.  He immediately delivered what became known as his "On Mission" speech.  Everyone at Union, he said, was unified in adhering to the university's mission.  The reaction of the OBU faculty was, of course, "You mean to say we're not 'on mission?'"  No, he didn't mean it that way, he said, but his tone and phraseology indicated his desire for lockstep.

How presidents relate to students and churches are fairly public, while relationships with trustees and faculty are less so.  Their relationships with state convention elites, however, are almost completely private and usually quite a bit less inspiring.  We can't help but wonder if Whitlock's relationship to the BGCO comes from the Dockery/Agee model.  Consider that before David Whitlock's hiring, OBU's School of Christian Service professors had to endure an hourlong meeting with Agee in which he did not ask a single question nor did he dialogue.  He spoke for the entire hour telling them what they were doing wrong and how they needed to change to satisfy the BGCO.  The entire department was completely dejected after the meeting because they could see what was coming: The new president was to take the university in a fundamentalist direction as the BGCO cheered him on all the way.  Whitlock and Norman even told some members of a local church in a meeting that there were some professors in the religion department they needed to dismiss somehow but Whitlock told the group, "We must do it in a winsome way." This story can be corroborated by a number of individuals.

By now, President Whitlock has learned that it's hard to appease fundamentalists and that there is no "winsome way" to supervise the reversal of a tradition that students, faculty, and alumni hold dear.  But like Dockery (and Agee), he does have a winsome personality and many of the tools needed to have a similarly long tenure and lasting impact.  The question is, does Union retain the support of fundamentalists and moderates because Dockery can effectively and authentically relate to both constituencies?  Could the same be done in Oklahoma, or has the convention moved so far that no president can bridge the gap?  Or have we misread the Union parallel completely?

I trust we'll hear from people with inside knowledge.  And I'll report back soon.