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.

Sunday School: Yellowstone Baptist College

On Sundays, we often take a look at Baptist schools that have flourished after splitting from their fundamentalist-controlled state conventions.  Already, we've profiled William Jewell College (MO), Stetson University (FL), and Furman University (SC).  In the weeks to come, we'll take a look at Mercer and Wake Forest.

Today we take a break from the usual Sunday routine and investigate an altogether different phenomenon.  At last week's Board of Trustees meeting, OBU announced that it is probably going to take over a struggling college in Montana.  Please excuse me if this is common knowledge or has been in the works for a long time.  Friday was the first I had heard of it.  The relevant text from OBU's press release states:

Trustees also unanimously approved “exploration of the viability of Yellowstone Baptist College becoming an extension of OBU.” 

In his state-of-the-university report, OBU President David W. Whitlock told board members the university has been asked to consider administrative operation of the private college in Billings, Mont. Affiliated with the Montana Baptist Convention, Yellowstone Baptist College opened in 1974. The college has had a cooperating relationship with OBU since 1993, when the Yellowstone began offering OBU’s college-level Ministry Training Institute courses on its campus. 

“We have continued to partner with them and provide support in offering a regionally accredited degree program,” Whitlock said. “As they look at the need to expand their course offerings, particularly in areas like business and education, and as they look at requirements for accreditation as a self-standing institution they realize they have a long road ahead unless they merge and become a part of the Oklahoma Baptist University system.” 

With the trustees’ vote to explore the relationship, OBU will hire the consulting firm of Allen, Stewart and Agee to investigate the possible merger of educational entities. 

“The consulting group has agreed to assign former OBU President Bob Agee to visit YBC with OBU administrators in February and consider whether or not to move forward with this,” Whitlock said. “There are a lot of wonderful opportunities for us to expand the mission of Christian higher education in the northwest United States.” 

Whitlock told the trustees that if the schools enter into the agreement, the Montana college will be governed by the OBU board. 

“There are some marvelous advantages” for OBU faculty and students to utilize Yellowstone Baptist College facilities for summer programs, Whitlock said.

So, it looks like A) YBC is eventually going to close unless we rescue them and B) the decision has pretty much already been made.  At this point, I wouldn't look to the consulting company to dissuade OBU from this venture.  Its principal, former OBU President Bob Agee, was instrumental in paving the way for David Whitlock to become president of OBU (a political thriller for another day).  His fine work in and writing about Christian higher education notwithstanding, many OBU faculty suspect Dr. Agee's involvement in convincing the BGCO that Dr. Whitlock could be counted on to advance a fundamentalist agenda at OBU is evidence that Agee is more comfortable with fundamentalism than we previously supposed.

As with the football program and expanding graduate programs, Save OBU is inclined to not take positions issues that are peripheral to our primary concern of protecting academic freedom and OBU's great liberal arts tradition.  We are less interested in debating the pros and cons of rescuing an unaccredited fundamentalist Bible academy than in making sure OBU never becomes one.

YBC looks to be a an unaccredited, fundamentalist Bible academy.  Not only is YBC unable to attain accreditation through mainstream accrediting bodies, it is not even a full member of the Association for Biblical Higher Education, a sham organization that "accredits" fundamentalist dumps and degree mills.  If you think OBU is authoritarian, check out YBC's Code of Student Conduct.  Also, like so many other Baptist colleges, YBC has turned its back on Baptist distinctives like liberty of the conscience and soul competency, having embraced creedalism through enforcing a "community covenant" that all faculty and students must sign.

My belief is that there are good reasons why these kinds of places go bankrupt.  All YBC has going for it is its location in a spectacularly beautiful part of the country.  (The campus itself is not so spectacular, as you can see.)  It would be a neat place for summer programs, though.  Couple that with OBU's sense that we can capitalize on the relative sparseness of Christian colleges in the Mountain West, and apparently we now have an attractive takeover target.

Again, our only concern is with OBU's fledgling commitment to academic freedom, open inquiry, and true liberal arts education.  Given the horrible problems we've had maintaining those commitments lately, a lot of these peripheral issues like football programs, graduate degrees, and extension campuses seem like distractions from a mission OBU seems to be turning its back on.  Given that YBC is already pretty far along the path administrators' seem so determined to take OBU down, we can't help but fear this takeover might be used as a chance to impose YBC norms on OBU rather than the other way around.  And that would be truly disastrous.

Right now, confidence in OBU administration is at a low ebb, to put it mildly.  The thought that we are going to consider "administrative operation" of a financially troubled, unaccredited college seems troubling.  It makes me wonder if, even after everything students, alumni, and faculty have done to register their lack of confidence in current leaders' stewardship of our beloved OBU, they still aren't listening and don't realize just how widespread the discontent has become.  Sure, the students and faculty in Billings, MT might be comfortable with the "new" OBU.  But there are a lot of people on Bison Hill and around the world who want to see some acknowledgement that things have gotten off track and who need some reasons to believe things will be better from now on.  Thus far, things seem to be getting worse, not better.  And the YBC takeover cannot and will not change that widely-held perception.

All it tells me is that if we're so flush with cash that we can afford to bail out a failing college a thousand miles away, we truly don't need the BGCO's money.  And we obviously don't need the horrendous strings attached to their annual institutional welfare check.  Without those strings, literally none of the problems we've raised on this blog would exist.  None.