One Month Recap

No Sunday School post today.  That feature returns next Sunday with a story on Furman University.

Instead, I want to highlight some achievements since the Save OBU blog went live December 6.

Mission
While there is obviously unprecedented unrest among OBU students, faculty, retired faculty, and alumni, Save OBU exists to unite disaffected stakeholders and advance the argument that all the recent problems arise from one fundamental problem: BGCO ownership and control.  Without the BGCO, none of the embarrassing and misguided issues related to faculty dismissals, academic freedom, sexism, the bookstore, or the administration's incessant pandering to fundamentalists would exist.  On that front, I am pleased to report:

• Oklahoma Baptists are beginning to be informed about their $2.5 million annual OBU subsidy and its disastrous effect on their missions and ministry priorities.  Hopefully that information will spur OK clergy and laypeople to start conversations in their churches about the futility of owning and operating an institution of higher learning that, in spite of fundamentalist-inspired changes, is leading more students away from literalism and fundamentalism than toward it.
• OBU's senior leadership is on notice.  For too long, they have advanced BGCO elites' agenda at OBU quietly and without much pushback.  "The Norm" raised some issues that were never resolved to students' satisfaction.  The alumni petition raised many of the same issues, but elicited no meaningful change.  Save OBU will persist and continue to grow.  We are here to encourage and support administrative actions that are consistent with OBU's proud liberal arts heritage.  We will provide all the cover administrators need -- more than they ever knew existed -- should they decide to stand up to the fundamentalists.  We will work tirelessly to support them if they lead OBU back to its former greatness as an academically rigorous, intellectually rich, moderate Baptist university.  Even now, we acknowledge the immense courage that will be required for the task.  We are prepared to honor that courage to the greatest degree possible.
• We have heard from dozens of current students and very recent alumni who regard the slide toward fundamentalism as tragic.  We are also building a broad network of alumni and moderate Baptists who are determined not to sit idly by while a cherished institution devolves into a fundamentalist Bible academy.

Immediate Needs
Right now, our two biggest needs are publicity and information.  Organizational and strategic questions will begin to be settled later this year.  For now, here is how you can help:

• First and foremost, if you are upset about the recent negative policy and personnel changes at OBU, please join our movement.
• Whether you are a student, an alum, or an Oklahoma Baptist, tell as many potential supporters about Save OBU as possible.  Start a conversation with friends about whether you want OBU to be a proud, moderate liberal arts university or whether you want OBU to purge all non-fundamentalists and become a strict, authoritarian, unaccredited Bible academy.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.  I have been shocked at how dramatically our web traffic spikes whenever someone retweets us.  Likewise, when you join Save OBU on Facebook and comment on our posts, write on our wall, or share one of our stories, hundreds more people find out about us.  Invariably, we get more people on board through social reach.  (Note to current students:  A few of you have emailed and said that you support Save OBU but are afraid to join the movement because you think OBU administrators can retaliate against you somehow.  They can't.  Take a look at how many students have already joined and engage with us on Twitter all the time.  The only people who could face retaliation are faculty -- they are the only ones who can be punished for their opinions.  You and your parents are free to support Save OBU.)
• We need information about the new bookstore and whether you think it is working out well for OBU students.
• We need people who want to tell their personal OBU stories.  For older alumni, what was OBU like before fundamentalists took over Southern Baptist life?  How has OBU's slide toward fundamentalism affected your feelings toward OBU over the years?  For more recent alumni, what was your OBU experience like?  For current students, how do you feel about the campus climate these days?  We want to feature these stories on the blog.  But we also want to be an outlet if you just need to talk or vent about your feelings toward OBU given the changes.
• Finally, I need help with the blog.  I've been posting almost daily for close to 5 weeks, as well as engaging with dozens of people via email and phone.  But it was a relatively slow period for me and I had time to do it.  I am prepared to continue for a couple more weeks, but I really do need people -- maybe you can do a one-time guest blog or maybe you can contribute regularly.  While we will welcome all the help we can get, we are particularly in need of people who live in Oklahoma and/or are Southern Baptists.  I am neither an Oklahoman nor a Baptist, so this is not really my crusade.  I just have a wellspring of affection for OBU and I am passionate in my belief that BGCO control is at the root of all these problems.

Coming Soon
In the coming weeks, we want to expand on our first month's success.

• With the upcoming start of the spring semester, we will invariably bring more current students into the movement.  (Though we definitely thank our J-Term students who, in spite of class and homework, read the site faithfully every day!)
• The Sunday School series will resume and continue to chronicle Baptist colleges that have split from their state conventions.  So far, we've profiled William Jewell College and Stetson University.  Unsurprisingly, the splits have been hugely beneficial to both the colleges and the conventions.
• We will continue to tell the story of fundamentalists' takeover of Southern Baptist life.  We've talked about heroes like Grady Cothen and Joe Ingram who stood against fundamentalism.  But there were plenty of losers and victims of the fundamentalist takeover, and we will tell their stories as well.
• We will begin our outreach to OBU parents -- significant stakeholders who invest heavily in OBU but are largely in the dark about encroaching fundamentalism on campus.
• We also have an obligation to prospective OBU students, and we will soon provide information for them as well.  OBU does not advertise that it fires moderate professors and guts core curriculum areas.  But prospective students and their families have a right to know the truth and decide for themselves whether OBU is worth a six-figure investment given its direction and decline.

A Word of Thanks
Due to the overwhelming support and encouragement I have received from so many people across the country and across the denominational/ideological/doctrinal spectrum, the past month has been a joy rather than a burden.  Please contact me at SaveOBU@gmail.com.

-Jacob

Student Saturday: Job Search Edition

Now that Christmas break is over, many students turn their attention to one of life's necessities: getting a job.  Seniors are looking for openings in their fields.  Underclassmen are looking for internships.  Sure, we praise education for its intrinsic value.  But let's face it: we all count on our degrees to help us secure gainful employment.

OBU has a nice resource page on Resumes, References, Interviewing, and More.

But based on recent history, there are a few other things OBU didn't teach you.  Given its own dealings with personnel, you should definitely keep these points in mind.  After all, actions speak louder than words.  Of course, our fair alma mater would only abide by the highest ethical standards in its own personnel policies and procedures.  So you should expect other prospective employers to play by the same rules.

• You may have heard that it's unethical for interviewers to ask private, invasive questions about your religious or political opinions that have nothing to do with the conduct of your job.  Well, OBU now does this all the time.
• Do you have impeccable academic and personal credentials for teaching Bible and theology?  Great... if you're a man.  If you're a woman, don't bother.  God has other plans for you.
• You may have thought that employers can't fire you for your personal opinions and beliefs, especially if you are doing an exemplary job.  Well, maybe they shouldn't.  But if they answer to a fundamentalist religious organization, they can.  They have, and they will again.
• You may have thought that you have rights under contracts or institutional personnel policies that protect you from retaliation and baseless termination.  You do, but if your supervisors work for a fundamentalist-controlled religious institution, they can dismiss you anyway.  And can probably even convince themselves they are doing God's will by doing so.
• Want to be the dean of a Baptist university's religion school?  It helps to be an old buddy of the state convention's executive director.  "But the convention's executive director is not the boss of the university's president," you say.  You're right, he's not.  But he thinks he is.  Apparently, that's all that matters.

So, dear OBU students, remember all that you have learned about human resource laws and ethics.  And remember that with fundamentalist institutions, not only do the laws not apply -- the ethics don't either.

And as you move out into the world of work to start building your fortune repaying your student loans, you are counting on our alma mater to maintain and maybe build on its proud reputation.  When the opposite happens, it hurts you the most (and the loans have to be repaid regardless).  You wouldn't want to hand a prospective employer a resume that lists a degree from Bob Jones University, Liberty University, or Pensacola Christian College -- all of which have earned reputations for intolerance, ignorance, and dubious academic rigor.  But if OBU's slide into fundamentalism continues at the current pace, it may not be long before our degrees from OBU on our resumes will cost alumni/ae more jobs than they gets us.

In Case You Need More Instruction on "Biblical Womanhood"

Sorry, folks, no Faculty Friday post today.

To date, Women at OBU has been our most-viewed blog post.  Also, 60% of our Facebook friends are women.  I'm sure you know better than I do what your true God-given role as women really is all about.  But if the 2000 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message was not clear enough for you cute little cupcakes, fear not!  A fundamentalist SBC seminary president's wife has written a book on the subject, available from LifeWay (SBC's publishing arm) for $39.99.

She is a specialist in biblical studies and theology special education and child development.  Clearly, the bar for getting theology books published by LifeWay is shockingly low.  But this gal knows pretty much everything there is to know about being a good, submissive Baptist wife.  (Her bio actually lists "President's Wife" before "Professor of Women's Ministry.")  She has preached spoken in Raley Chapel before ("I met my husband the first week of college...") and no doubt will again as the book tour heats up.

Since other translations and commentaries are driven by "21st century social agendas," Mrs. Dr. Kelley is ready to help free you from your feminist mothers... or something.  And her coauthor is ready to convince you that the theme of the Book of Esther is... you guessed it, submission.  You already know where a woman's place is not (pulpits, teaching Bible or theology at OBU, etc.), but this book presumably has a positive spin on where your place is:

So ladies, make your husband a sandwich and start reading.  The book will undoubtedly be available in OBU's new fundamentalist bookstore soon.

OBU Plummets in Forbes College Rankings

Beginning in 2008, Forbes magazine joined U.S. News & World Report, The Princeton Review, and a few other national publications in the college ratings game.  Personally, I have never put a lot of stock in these ratings.  But these companies rake in hordes of cash every year when eager high school seniors and their parents stock up on the newly-published rankings guides.

To underscore just how important these publications are, let me share a brief personal story.  Being neither a Baptist nor an Oklahoman, I was an unlikely prospective student at Be a Bison Day.  But because I was young and in love, I was determined to follow my girlfriend to OBU.  My parents were concerned, to say the least.  After visiting the campus and hearing descriptions of the anti-social dorm visitation policy and compulsory chapel attendance, my parents thought OBU was pretty weird.  I'm pretty sure OBU's decent performance in the U.S. News rankings was the only thing that reassured them about my decision. Without those rankings, I doubt they would have let me go to OBU.

Even after my graduation in 2002, I would periodically glance at the rankings to see how OBU was doing.  U.S. News changed its categories a few times, from "Liberal Arts Colleges - West" to "Comprehensive Colleges - West" to the current category "Regional Colleges - West" (where we are currently #3 among some not very illustrious peer institutions).

I had not glanced at the Forbes rankings until today.  It was pretty depressing.

In 2009, we were #109.  In 2010, we fell to #233.  Last year, we fell to #299.

Friends, sliding wholesale into fundamentalism has its costs in terms of academic respectability.  At this rate, we will soon struggle to attract the best and brightest students and faculty.  And once word gets out that professors are being fired for ideological reasons and that philosophy (a core discipline in the liberal arts) is being gutted in favor of Christian apologetics, the decline is only going to get worse.  In a few short years, OBU is devolving from one of the most desirable small liberal arts colleges in America (religious or otherwise) to just another fundamentalist Bible academy.

I hope OBU does not have to slide even further before people start to realize that the BGCO's fundamentalist stranglehold on OBU has grave consequences for students, faculty, and alumni.  Not only is the current trend robbing students of the balanced, moderate Christian liberal arts education that made OBU great.  It is also devaluing their expensive and hard-earned diplomas.  Unless we demand that OBU return to its proud liberal arts heritage, I'm afraid this trend will continue.

Forbes's methodology is here.

New OBU Award to Praise Fundamentalists Annually

Quietly and without much fanfare, OBU administrators have created yet another way to show their loyalty to the fundamentalist BGCO and ingratiate themselves to SBC elites in Nashville.

Last June at the SBC meeting in Phoenix, OBU administrators presented the first annual "Herschel H. Hobbs Award for Distinguished Denominational Service" to the Reverend Dr. Tom Elliff.  Elliff is indeed a denominational statesman.  He pastored a megachurch for 20 years, served as president of the SBC, and was a leader on a variety of SBC boards and agencies.  Subsequent to receiving the Hobbs Award, Elliff was elected president of the International Missions Board of the SBC.

However, he is most certainly not a denominational statesman in the mold of Herschel Hobbs.  Hobbs was pastor of Oklahoma City, First from 1949-1972 and was a noted moderate voice in the denomination.  Elliff, on the other hand, catapulted to leadership after the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC was nearly complete and the fundamentalists moved on to seizing control of state conventions like the BGCO.

The comparison between Hobbs and Elliff is not only wrong, it is inflammatory.  It is unbelievable that the Hobbs family and Oklahoma City, First have allowed the BGCO and OBU to hijack Herschel Hobbs's legacy and attach it to so many fundamentalist causes.  I guess no one has the power to stop them.  It just seems so wrong.

In creating this award and renaming the Joe L. Ingram School of Christian Service after Hobbs, OBU leaders are rewriting history and presenting a continuity between the moderate SBC that existed at midcentury and the fundamentalist denomination that exists today.  But the two are not continuous.  There was a definitive break, a calculated, political takeover whereby a few fundamentalist power brokers used fear, slander, half-truths, and raw political power to push moderates aside and remake the SBC and all its institutions in their own image.  Herschel Hobbs was not a part of that crowd.  And OBU leaders are praising the people who were.

Notice how this presentation took place far from Bison Hill and amid the denomination's annual proceedings.  Presumably, if they had tried to pull this off during a regular OBU chapel service, many would have protested loudly and boycotted the award presentation.  So it was much easier to go a thousand miles away when most OBU students, faculty, and alumni were not paying attention.  Yet again, we vividly see where OBU administrators' true loyalties lie.

Alumni Petition & Response

By now, most of you know that hundreds of alumni registered their disappointment with OBU in a petition that circulated early last fall.  The petition is here.  Rather than discuss it item by item, I want to highlight a few pertinent points and focus on the administration's response.

The Petition
While the alumni petition offered a coherent, over-arching narrative about a once great Christian liberal arts college lapsing into fundamentalism, it did address three separate, but related, areas:

Faculty Retention, Turnover, and Dismissals
The petition alleges an increase in turnover under the current administration.  This may indeed be a sign of trouble.  We have already talked about why turnover matters.  The real problem is that OBU is, almost without exception, replacing aging moderates with young fundamentalists.  What was once an overwhelmingly moderate faculty will soon be a majority fundamentalist faculty.  Then, no one will stand up for academic freedom and the BGCO's long-awaited transformation of OBU will be complete.

Then there is the fact that two faculty members were dismissed without cause.  This sends a strong message to would-be professors who might be considering OBU.  The kind of faculty we should want to be attracting will now avoid OBU.  And the kind of faculty we hire are the kind of people who don't mind seeing insufficiently fundamentalist colleagues forced out.

Stifling Discussion
Unfortunately, most faculty, students, and now alumni feel voiceless when it comes to the interpretation of OBU's mission and direction.  This just raises the question of administrators' ultimate loyalty: Is it to OBU students and faculty, or is it to BGCO elites.  So far, the answer seems pretty clear.

Structural Reorganization of Academic Departments
This concern seemed somewhat less problematic to me, but the petitioners do have a point.  The most audacious part of the reorganization is that the new science and religion departments are named for two people who would be completely at odds with OBU's dramatic swing toward fundamentalism.  I'm frankly shocked that the Hurley and Hobbs families have gone along with this charade.  If my father's legacy and namesake was hijacked by fundamentalists who loathe everything he stood for, I would be irate.  If anyone has more information on the Hobbs and Hurley families' reactions to the new academic divisions, please let me know.

We also noted the subtle swipe at moderates by removing Joe L. Ingram's name from the religion department and downgrading the legendary BGCO leader's namesake school to an extension program for fundamentalist pastors.

The petition summarizes its concerns:

...What the recent administration has failed to do is to build up a university inspired by passion and genuine research.  It has forgotten that the Christian college has a constructive task, far more than a defensive one.  It has overlooked the searching spirit of the Christian in a world that is fallen but also perpetually redeemed.  That redemption comes from ridding ourselves of preconceived notions about what it means to be a believer and what it means to have knowledge.  Arthur Holmes reminds us that, "all truth is God’s truth, wherever it be found."  Finding this truth will not be achieved through a loss of good educators or in a university where honest conversation about the definition of truth does not flow freely.  

The Administration's Response
While the petition did not inspire a change of administrators' hearts, it did get their attention.  In fact, by the end of the day administrators found out about the petition, they began a P.R. offensive that included a lengthy letter to the Board of Trustees.  I have obtained a copy of that letter, but I do not think I will publish it here because I do not know if the correspondence was intended to be in confidence or not.

Unsurprisingly, the administration claims to be very proud of the credentials of professors recently hired at OBU.  You will have to judge for yourself.  I have no basis for judgment except to say that a) the academic job market is flooded, so we should have our pick, b) the interview process is now so ideological and such a fundamentalist litmus test that anyone who actually wants to teach at OBU after enduring it is immediately suspect as far as I'm concerned, and c) given the BGCO's tightening grip and OBU's lurch toward fundamentalism, anyone we should actually want to hire would probably not want to come to Bison Hill.

The administration also announced plans to facilitate meetings with students and faculty.  I am not sure whether any students or faculty were satisfied with the results of these meetings.

Finally, they cited improved enrollment figures as evidence that they are not leading OBU away from its liberal arts heritage and that God is blessing OBU.  To that point, we will need to continue to emphasize the primacy of quality over quantity.  We also may need to work hard to make sure that prospective students and parents know that OBU is a lot more fundamentalist than it lets on.  Based on the dozens of students wo have reached out to us in the past month, it appears that most students come to Bison Hill expecting a balanced, moderate Christian liberal arts education and are very dissatisfied with the ways in which OBU is moving away from those ideals.

So What Does This Have to Do with the BGCO and Where Does the Save OBU Movement Come In?
The argument I have been making from the beginning is that BGCO ownership and control is at the root OBU's drift away from academic freedom and its liberal arts heritage.  The state conventions, like the SBC as a whole, have become so fundamentalist that they cannot tolerate an institution they cannot control.  Since they have the power and no one has stopped them, they have remade OBU in their own image, hiring ever more conservative administrators who, in turn, pursue policy and personnel changes that will make OBU a fundamentalist Bible academy.

We see the trustees as an essentially neutral body in this struggle.  They are devoted men and women who want to build on OBU's proud heritage.  We suspect they may not realize the degree to which they are being asked to engage in ideological/institutional warfare.  They have actually taken some steps that the BGCO did not prefer and that OBU administration would have likely never pursued on its own.

Our primary constituents are the untold numbers of students, parents, faculty (current and former), and alumni who feel powerless to do anything about all these negative changes on our beloved Bison Hill.

Until now, the administration has put out small fires, but has never had to engage a large, growing movement.  Presidents have nudged insufficiently fundamentalist professors into early retirement going back (at least) to the early days of the Brister years.  They have dealt with disgruntled faculty, but have not had to concede much because those professors have significant incentives to make due at OBU.  They have dealt with students protesting the unethical dismissals of quality professors, but again, students have great incentives to stick it out.  Administrators are also dealing with a large group of retired faculty dismayed at the recent changes (p. 4), but ultimately they can and will be easily dismissed.  They dealt with the alumni petition, but that movement quickly lost steam.

The question Save OBU wants to ask is this: What if all disaffected students, parents, alumni, and faculty could join together as one?  Could OBU administration really ignore all of us?  In the coming months, we will be building a growing movement that brings together all the various constituencies.  We know that if the BGCO existed today as it did 50 years ago, none of these problems would have escalated to this extreme degree.  OBU has not become liberal or drifted from the mandate of its founding.  Rather, it is the convention that has drifted -- so far to the fundamentalist side that it no longer even makes sense to operate a true liberal arts university anymore, an argument we are making to Oklahoma Baptists.  Yet the power and prestige of controlling the institution is so great that Baptist Building elites have waited for its own fundamentalist character to trickle down to its institutions and agencies, including OBU.  When they meet with SBC power brokers at the seminaries and in Nashville, a fundamentalist OBU would be the ultimate jewel in their crown.  It is our mission and duty to stop that from happening.

Money Monday: Falls Creek a Better Bet for OK Baptists

Literally thousands of Oklahoma teenagers walk down the aisle, pray the sinner's prayer, and accept Jesus into their hearts as lord and savior at Fall's Creek every summer.

According to Cooperative Program projections, the BGCO spends $4.3 million a year to operate Falls Creek and derives a little over $4 million in income from rent and registration fees.  The net subsidy, then, is about $250,000 (compared to $2.5 million for OBU).  In other words, the BGCO spends ten times more on OBU than Falls Creek.

Unfortunately for the BGCO, Falls Creek is a significantly better investment.  The camp and conference center reports that each year, 45,000 young people attend summer camp there (almost 15% of the teenage population of Oklahoma).  Usually, more than 5,000 make decisions for Christ (including over 2,000 professions of faith and more than 500 decisions for special service).  In addition, more than 35% of Oklahoma Baptist pastors and church workers were saved or received their call to ministry at Falls Creek. And nearly a quarter of Baptist missionaries with Oklahoma ties trace their call to missions back to Falls Creek.

OBU, on the other hand, has nearly the opposite effect on young people.  Young Baptists who go to OBU emerge less fundamentalist than those who attend state universities.  OBU sends a significant number of its ministry graduates to moderate seminaries like Baylor, Duke, and Princeton rather than the preferred fundamentalist SBC seminaries.  As for missionaries, many OBU students make other plans because they decide they do not want to serve under the banner of the fundamentalist Southern Baptist missions agencies which, among other things, require new recruits (and career missionaries) to sign the revised Baptist Faith and Message.

Yet, for some reason, the BGCO is fine with spending ten times more on OBU than on Falls Creek.  If the limited Cooperative Program dollars were spent more efficiently, the BGCO could easily commit more money to Falls Creek capital and operating expenses, offer scholarships to needy campers, and dramatically increase the number of people saved through its robust camping ministry.  But BGCO elites would prefer the power and prestige associated with making sure OBU becomes a fundamentalist Bible academy.  They would apparently rather tell the power brokers in Nashville that they resisted moderates than that they dramatically increased the number of people were saved or heard and answered calls to ministry and missions.

One final note:  When Baptist Building elites attempt to justify their need to continue to own and operate OBU, they frequently cite the number of IMB and NAMB missionaries who attended college at OBU.  This is a bit misleading, and I think the Falls Creek people know that their camp has more to do with Oklahoma Baptists' outsized contribution to the missionary ranks:

During the past 90 years, there have been over 200,000 documented decisions. Many of these decisions have been in response to God's call to full-time missions and ministry. Falls Creek is one of the reasons that Oklahoma Baptists have more missionaries on the foreign and home mission field than any other state in the Southern Baptist Convention.

With or without BGCO control of OBU, Oklahoma would send just as many people into the mission fields and just as many men into the clergy profession.  In fact, given OBU's moderating influence on students and the BGCO's opportunity to increase Falls Creek funding if it relinquished control of OBU, it's plain to see that Oklahoma Baptists would contribute even more missionaries and pastors to Southern Baptist life if the BGCO gave up its control of OBU.