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.
Showing posts with label Joe Aguillard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Aguillard. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Monday, April 16, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
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.
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.
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