Cedarville's Only Female Religion Prof Resigns

As the new administration of the Reverend Dr. Thomas White flexes its muscles at Cedarville University, the school's only female religion professor is the latest casualty of the Ohio college's fundamentalist takeover.

News of the separation appeared in the November 21 edition of the Cedars newspaper:

Bible professor Joy Fagan is resigning from Cedarville after two decades of service to the university. Her last day is Dec. 20. 

“The why is tricky,” she said. “Every administration has the right to take the university in a particular direction, and every faculty and staff member has the responsibility to determine if they are a good fit for that direction.” 

Fagan said she believes she is no longer a good fit for the university, particularly because of her role as a woman teaching in the Bible department 

“I also believe that when God closes doors, he opens doors,” she said.

Evidently, Prof. Fagan graciously resigned rather than forcing the godly administrators to get their hands dirty and actually go through the lengthy formal, contractual, and/or legal procedures involved in firing a tenured professor.

Two observations:

First, Fagan is not a theologian or a Bible scholar.  Her expertise is in the area of Christian education, which I have noticed is one way fundamentalist Bible academies sometimes justify the presence of a female teacher to people who complain that a college classroom is no place for a woman.  Not that it would be okay, but it might be easier to understand why the White administration would want to get rid of a woman who was teaching theology or biblical studies.  But apparently even a woman teaching Christian is unacceptably liberal and unbiblical at today's Cedarville.

Second, I am continually impressed by the Cedarville college newspaper's reporting.  The OBU student newspaper has almost completely ignored the controversial actions of the David Whitlock administration at OBU.  The Bison never spilled one drop of ink about the forced dismissals of religion faculty in 2010 and 2011.  By contrast, the Cedars newspaper has done a much better job covering the controversy at Cedarville.  I have long suspected that The Bison is censored.  And I'm certain that President White and his deputies at Cedarville will silence, or at least cripple, the Cedars very soon.

OBU administrators wisely and strategically did their firings in the late summer, when people were least likely to be paying attention.  But can you imagine what a difference it may have made if the student newspaper had done actual reporting and editorializing about the firings once school resumed in August or September?  Student awareness of the controversial takeover OBU's new administrators plotted was kept at a minimum because of The Bison's almost complete silence.  That is a fact we all have to live with.  I think the administration silenced the paper.  The White Administration will silence Cedarville's paper.  It's what these people do.

Very soon, the only woman left on the Cedarville Biblical and Theological Studies web page will the the secretary.  Which, they believe, is how it should be.  Maybe one day soon they'll fire the secretary so she can spend more time cooking, cleaning, ironing her husband's shirts, and running the carpool -- as God clearly intends.

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.

Cedarville (OH) Purge Intensifies

It's likely that few people noticed, but I've taken the past six weeks off from blogging.  As I explained last month, I feel that we have raised enough awareness and that the situation at OBU has stabilized significantly since this blog began in December 2011.  OBU's fundamentalist encroachment, though disappointing, has actually been quite minor in comparison to other colleges affiliated with Baptist state conventions.

To cite just one example, our worst fears about Cedarville University have been confirmed.  This spring, I invited a Cedarville alumna to discuss how fundamentalist trustees and administrators were transforming the Ohio liberal arts college.  In the wake of national press coverage of the Cedarville situation, Sarah Jones's four-part series reached many thousands of readers in a matter of a few days.

After a popular administrator was forced out and the entire philosophy major was gutted, we figured Cedarville would soon experience a fundamentalist takeover similar to the one we saw at Shorter University (GA) in 2012, when dozens of faculty were forced out for declining to affirm Shorter's new, fundamentalist direction.

To oversee the purge at Cedarville, trustees unanimously elected the Reverend Dr. Thomas White as president.  White has spent his graduate student and professional careers at post-Takeover SBC seminaries, serving most recently as vice president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, TX.

How quickly will President White move to purge Cedarville of moderates and complete the fundamentalist transformation of Cedarville?  Only time will tell.  For the moment, faculty are obviously very anxious and students are uncertain of what is to come.  Will White merely bring in a few of his own (male) friends and colleagues for important administrative positions?  Or will he lead a Shorter-style implosion?

In the tradition of Save OBU, Save Our Shorter, and Louisiana College student Joshua Breland's very fine blog, a blog called Let There Be Light (@fiatlux125) is monitoring the situation.

I welcome Cedarville constituents to the Save OBU blog.  Next week, I'll have more to say specifically about OBU and where we should go from here.  But now, while students, faculty, and alumni/ae of several Baptist colleges are paying attention, I want to say this:

Many evangelical colleges are flourishing without a hint of fundamentalist encroachment.  Wheaton, Calvin, and Gordon would not tolerate unethical administrative actions or violations of academic freedom.  But Southern Baptist colleges are falling apart before our eyes.  OBU (my alma mater) is actually in much better shape than many Baptist colleges, as administrators there dare not do any more damage than they have already done to OBU's faculty morale and academic reputation.  We need to stand together.  We are all fighting slightly different versions of the same battle.  We must stand for integrity and rigor in Christian higher education.  The reputations, faithfulness to fearless scholarly inquiry, financial health, and even accreditation of our schools will soon be in jeopardy if present trends continue.

Blessings to all of you,

Jacob Lupfer
OBU Class of 2002
Silver Spring, Maryland
Founder and Contributing Editor, Save OBU Blog