2012 Forbes Data (Part 3): More Comparisons

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

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

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

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

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

OBU's Peers: What Schools Are in the Same Boat?

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?

When I first started the Save OBU blog, I knew we would have to carefully study many of the Baptist colleges that have struggled against fundamentalist encroachment in recent decades.  I immediately turned my attention to schools like Stetson and Furman, which broke ties with their state conventions in the aftermath of the Takeover.  But I soon discovered that we might actually learn more from schools that remained affiliated with state conventions, as OBU has.  Thus the case of William Jewell College, which remained affiliated with the Missouri Baptist Convention until 2003, was instructive (and hopeful).

We have seen that, while they devolve at varying speeds, SBC colleges have only moved in one direction since the Takeover -- and that is in the direction of doctrinal rigidity, ever more stringent control, and restricted academic freedom.  If anything, OBU has fared better than most in this regard, thanks in large part to the sensitive and strong leadership of President Bob Agee (1982-1998).

We know that OBU's situation is qualitatively different than insignificant, thoroughly fundamentalist schools like Parker-Brewton and Truett-McConnell.  And we concede that, while recent eventas at OBU are troubling, we are in much better shape than Shorter, which is facing outright war and destruction at the hands of its president, trustees, and the Georgia Baptist Convention.

All this brings up the question we will consider this week: What schools are in the same boat as OBU?  Where else is there comparable tension between outside forces insisting on "doctrinal accountability" and students/faculty whose experience depends on academic freedom and open inquiry?  How do our fellow travelers navigate the tension?  What can we learn from their experiences, and, conversely, what might they learn from ours?

OBU is never going to be Stetson or Furman.  It will always be more explicitly Christian.  Likewise, it will never be a large research university like Baylor or Wake Forest.  On the other hand, OBU will hopefully never be like the fundamentalist Bible academies that sadly make up most of Southern Baptist educational life these days.

So who are our peers?  This week we'll consider a number of possible candidates.  Unfortunately, I don't have time to research each of them as extensively as I did in the Downward Spiral series, which examined three Georgia Baptist Convention schools that seem to be in a race to the bottom in an effort to appease GBC fundamentalists.  But to the degree that we find common ground between OBU and this week's slate of schools, we will return to them again and again on the blog, continuing to learn as much as we can.

To give a sneak preview, here are a few of the options we'll consider:

• Non-denominational Christian colleges
• BGCT colleges
• Nearby state convention-controlled colleges
• Union University in Jackson, TN

As the week progresses, please share our movement with friends and colleagues at these other schools. I look forward to further narrowing our search for people who are fighting the same battle we are.  The goal is to share information, stories, and strategies so that academic freedom, open inquiry, and authentically Baptist Christian liberal arts education can once again flourish -- not only at OBU, but elsewhere as well.

Save OBU Outreach: Good Non-denominational Colleges

This week, we've made efforts to reach out to people other than our core constituency of students, parents, faculty, and alumni.  We brought attention to how OBU's devolution into a fundamentalist Bible academy would hurt the Shawnee community.  And we looked beyond OBU to the tragic story of how the Fundamentalist Takeover of the SBC so dramatically degraded the quality and rigor of Baptist higher education.  Though every school's story is a little different, other Baptist colleges are going through different versions of the same problems that we've seen at our beloved OBU.

Seminaries

Today we want to speak to another group: non-denominational Christian colleges.  in a very real sense, these institutions have benefitted from the decline of Baptist higher education.  Take the seminaries, for example.  There was a time not to long ago when some of the SBC seminaries were recognized throughout American Protestantism as quite good.  Today, the SBC seminaries have been purged of what few liberals ever existed there, as well as all moderates.  Some of them are led by loud-mouthed fundamentalist culture warriors.  As mainline Protestant seminaries have continued to occupy the moderate-to-liberal end of the spectrum, the decline of SBC seminaries has left a huge gap in evangelical theological education.  Seminaries like Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, and Asbury have stepped into that gap and picked up where Southern Baptists abandoned ideologically diverse, intellectually rigorous graduate theological education.

Colleges

At the undergraduate level, the decline has been just as spectacular.  As I looked at the SBC's list of affiliated colleges yesterday, it occurred to me just how dramatically the Southern Baptists have fallen when it comes to colleges an universities.  Barely over 20 years ago, that list would have included many of the finest private universities in the South.  Today, it's actually pretty embarrassing.    Thankfully, OBU is one of the best Baptist schools by any objective measure.  But perhaps the most tragic consequence of the Fundamentalist Takeover has been the absolute degradation of Baptist academia.

As with the SBC seminaries' decline, independent colleges have stepped in to fill the massive vacuum in Baptist higher education left by the exodus of Furman, Wake Forest, Mercer, Stetson, etc. and the fundamentalists' attack on on the remaining educational institutions.  Schools like Wheaton, Biola, Whitworth, and Gordon have emerged as the standard bearers in evangelical higher education as more and more Baptist colleges have descended into outright fundamentalism.

A few weeks ago, we talked about a recent op-ed piece by two Gordon College professors about a "renaissance" in evangelical higher education.  Though they do not take up this distinction in their essay, the comparison between non-denominational colleges' renaissance and Baptist colleges' decline is stark.

Why has one subset of conservative Protestant schools flourished while another has floundered?  The answer is complicated.  But it's undeniable that the Fundamentalist Takeover of the SBC in the 1980s and the state conventions in the 1990s is a big part of the story.  The SBC seminaries fell quickly, and many of the better SBC colleges left their state conventions.  Those that remained, like OBU, endured varying degrees of Baptist battles in the 1990s and 2000s.  Fortunately, OBU Presidents Agee and Brister generally protected OBU from fundamentalism.  The current administration seems much more accommodating.

While Baptist universities have had to deal with fundamentalist convention-elected trustees (particularly in the seminaries) and appease fundamentalist convention leaders, the non-denominational colleges have been able to pursue excellence in Christian higher education without such distractions.

We applaud our brothers and sisters at these schools for the very fine work they've done.  Admittedly they have outpaced us, given the retrenchment toward fundamentalism in many Baptist colleges.  We envy their freedom and independence.  We hope they realize that our students, faculty, and alumni long for academic freedom and fearless inquiry.

Denominationalism is dying in American Christianity.  While some media and scholarly commentators believe this dynamic is limited to Mainline Protestantism, we see it in evangelicalism as well.  Southern Baptist leaders are well aware that their "brand" has become irrevocably associated with fundamentalist theology, partisan politics, and anti-intellectualism.  At the same time, evangelical institutions without denominational shackles have flourished, from local churches all the way to universities.

Rather than trying to shed its Baptist identity, we want OBU to embrace it -- but in a classical sense, not in the narrow way today's fundamentalist SBC and BGCO leaders have defined it.  But given the past 20-30 years in Baptist life, we can't help but envy evangelical institutions' progress in evangelical theological education and look forward to joining that top tier as soon as we are free from our burdensome imprisonment to the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.

Sunday School: Furman University

Happy Sunday!  Thank you for taking a moment to visit the Save OBU blog and read our "Sunday School" feature.  Every Sunday, we tell the story of how a Baptist university attained independence from its fundamentalist state convention.  Today's Sunday School post tells the story of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

The Story
Furman's predecessor institution dates to 1826, but was renamed for Richard Furman of Charleston, S.C., the president of the first Baptist convention in the U.S., in 1850.  The current campus, built in the late 1950s in Greenvile, S.C., is widely cited as one of the most beautiful college campuses in the U.S.  Furman is a beneficiary of the Duke Endowment, having received more than $100 million since the 1920s.  Of course, Furman was also affiliated with the South Carolina Baptist Convention, which contributed a $1.6 million annual subsidy until 1991.


In the 1980s, Furman administrators and trustees became concerned about fundamentalists taking over the Southern Baptist Convention's boards and seminaries.  As the fundamentalist takeover moved to state conventions and the SCBC started electing fundamentalist activists to the Furman Board of Trustees, administrators and trustees knew they had to act.  Fortunately, they got an early start.  By 1990, only six of the 25 board members were fundamentalists.  In 1990, Furman trustees amended the schools charter, giving itself the sole right to elect trustees.  Previously, they had been elected by the SCBC.  Over the next 18 months, an ugly battle ensued.  You should read this brief summary.  Furman trustees and administrators offered many concessions, but fundamentalist pastors and state convention leaders fought hard, even preparing to take legal action.  In early 1992, a special committee of the SCBC decided it would not use convention funds to sue Furman, and in May 1992 SCBC messengers ended the convention's financial and legal relationship to Furman in a vote by a show of hands.

The Aftermath
As is always the case after Baptist colleges and state conventions part ways, both entities are far better off now.  Furman has expanded its mission and profile while remaining true the highest ideals of liberal arts education.  It has dramatically improved its position in national college rankings.  In fact, in recent years more Furman alumni have gone on to Ph.D. studies than students from any other college in the South.  By every conceivable measure, Furman is significantly better off without the fundamentalist South Carolina Baptist Convention attempting to do continual and irreparable harm to its academic programs.

The SCBC, likewise, is free of a significant administrative and institutional burden.  It still controls three fundamentalist colleges in the state: Charleston Southern, Anderson, and North Greenville.  In the aftermath of the Furman split, the SCBC had somewhat more financial leeway to support its three remaining fundamentalist colleges, as well as bolster collegiate ministries at several dozen other colleges and universities in South Carolina.  (However, in 2010, the SCBC reduced its funding to the three colleges in order to send more SCBC money to the International Mission Board.


Each entity is happier and better positioned to reach its goals, as both Furman and the SCBC readily acknowledge.  Far from becoming a liberal, secular university, Furman remains proud of its Baptist heritage:

Furman's heritage is rooted in the non-creedal, free church Baptist tradition which has always valued particular religious commitments while insisting not only on the freedom of the individual to believe as he or she sees fit but also on respect for a diversity of religious perspectives, including the perspective of the non-religious person. This heritage has always maintained that the religious journey has both a private and public dimension and is a lifelong undertaking that cannot be tied to doctrinal propositions.

Furman recognizes its responsibility both in and out of the classroom to encourage students and faculty to confront the problems of contemporary society and to exercise moral judgment in the use of knowledge. To this end, Furman fosters a sense of social justice and encourages civic responsibility in creating a fair and equitable order. The Latin motto of the university, Christo et Doctrinae (For Christ and Learning), underlines the interrelationship of faith and learning. The university is committed to the education of the whole person. 

And, unsurprisingly, Baptist life is still surprisingly vibrant at Furman.  The Baptist Collegiate Ministry is the largest student group on campus.

Lessons Learned
Furman was lucky to have leaders in the 1980s who saw the fundamentalist takeover for what it was: a political power grab designed to handicap, then control, then subject once proud institutions.  Determined not to let that happen, Furman trustees saw the writing on the wall and made the first move.


For many years at OBU, trustees probably did not have to worry much about the fundamentalist takeover because we had administrators who stood up for academic freedom.  That dynamic has dramatically eroded in the past 10-15 years, obviously.  While we still have a good faculty that does what it can, we seem to have administrators that have a higher loyalty to BGCO elites.  If this is indeed the case, we desperately need trustees to take notice and realize that they may be our last, best vanguards for academic freedom, free inquiry, and OBU's proud liberal arts tradition.


Hopefully, we can begin to strategize in the coming months with trustees who do not want to be complicit in OBU's implosion.  They should be encouraged to study the cases of these other Baptist schools and determine what actions they might take.  At a minimum, they need to take a more active role in trustee succession.  If the BGCO is left completely to its own devices, the fundamentalist takeover of OBU will continue apace.


Yet again, we see a split between a moderate school and a fundamentalist state convention that did not cost presidents and administrators their jobs.  We stand ready to lend extraordinary support to President Whitlock if he can provide leadership for OBU as it charts its own course apart from the BGCO's fundamentalist designs.  He could be a towering figure in OBU history -- and in Baptist higher education more broadly.  Or he could be just one more in a series of BGCO puppet presidents who accede to the BGCO's apparent desire to destroy everything great about OBU.  It's his choice, really.  Furman President John E. Johns, who had been at Stetson previously, capably and admirably led Furman through the split.  He died in 2007.


Furman is a great example for OBU in many ways.  OBU's insulation from the fundamentalist takeover of Southern Baptist life is over.  We are going to change -- one way or the other.  The South Carolina Baptist Convention case is illustrative of our choices.  We can either become more like the fundamentalist and increasingly irrelevant schools the SCBC still controls, or we can become more like Furman.


(This is the third in a series of articles about Baptist colleges that have altered or ended their relationships with state conventions.  See the previous articles on William Jewell College and Stetson University.)