The BGCO's $2.8 Million Subsidy

What is the price of power?  OBU is a large institution.  It has a $80M endowment and runs an operating budget in excess of $40M a year (~1,600 students paying ~$25,000/yr).  Just under 7% of OBU's budget comes in the form of a $2.8 million subsidy from the BGCO.  A relatively modest ($1,500) tuition increase would make the BGCO's subsidy unnecessary, and OBU would still presumably be a good value according to the publications that rate such things.

For the BGCO, the price of control comes in at $2,800,000.00 per year.  Consider, for a moment, what the convention receives in return for its generous investment.  It gets to elect 100% of OBU's 33 trustees -- all beholden to the convention's agenda and worldview.  The trustees, in turn, hire administrators who must kowtow to Anthony Jordan and the most vocal, wealthy, and powerful SBC churches and pastors in the state.  The convention's leaders get the prestige that comes along with controlling a large institution.  And these Baptist elites get the satisfaction of knowing that they have spent other people's money to ensure that they continue to win an epic ideological battle where the values of education, learning, reason, and the pursuit of truth and knowledge are sacrificed in the name of biblical literalism, fundamentalism, and cultural conservatism.

For their part, Oklahoma Baptists get a raw deal.  Though OBU is conservative, the mere fact that many students do engage their faith on an intellectual level for the first time in their lives means that literally tens of thousands of OBU students have left Bison Hill much less committed to the tenets of evangelical Protestantism than when they arrived.  OBU graduates go to moderate seminaries in much larger proportions than Baptist students who attend state schools.  The reason, I suspect, is that while OBU students are, at least nominally, encouraged to apply intellectual scrutiny to their faith, Baptist students at state schools do not take religion classes and are nurtured in the fundamentalism of their childhood by parachurch organizations and Baptist student unions.  Though perhaps counterintuitive, it is actually an empirical fact that Baptist youth who attend state schools actually emerge much more doctrinally conservative than Baptist youth who attend Baptist colleges (Ammerman 1990, ch. 5).  Even after pouring tens of millions of dollars into OBU over the years, Oklahoma Baptists still worry, with good reason, that their children will go to OBU and shed the fundamentalist faith of their childhood.

This is to say nothing of what the $2,800,000 might otherwise be used to accomplish.  If Oklahoma Baptists care about saving souls, they will find OBU to be a pretty poor mission field, since it is almost completely saturated with baptized Christians.  I'm frankly surprised that Messengers continue to throw cash at OBU when they could use that money to fund 40 or 50 missionaries to preach the gospel to a lost and dying world.  It almost makes me think they care more about the prestige of controlling an institution than all those tormented souls in hell that they could have saved if they had just been more mission-minded.  "But OBU sends so many graduates to the mission field," you say.  True enough, but consider how many of those students would have gone from OBU into missionary vocations anyway, even without the BGCO's subsidy.  And consider that Baptist organizations at state universities also send graduates to the IMB, an impressive feat considering how poorly funded they are compared to OBU.

Oklahoma Baptists should find that their investment is inefficient, ineffective, and frankly contrary to the aims of their churches and the Convention, both of which are fundamentally at odds with the pursuit of reason, truth, and knowledge -- ends toward which a true liberal arts college should be dedicated.

So let's review:

What OBU Gets

• $2.8 million, or less than 7% of its annual budget
• But the strings attached are more like shackles, crippling the true aims of a liberal arts education

What Elites in the Baptist Building Get

• Prestige
• Power
• The satisfaction using laypeople's hard-earned tithes and offerings to buy, for a relatively low cost, the suppression of what they vehemently fear and loathe: truth, reason, philosophy, critical biblical scholarship, science, theater and the arts, and objective student journalism (oft censored at OBU)

What Oklahoma Baptists Get

• Graduates who are less committed to a literal Bible than when they arrived
• Aspiring ministers who are more likely to attend moderate seminaries and less likely to attend SBC seminaries than aspiring ministers who attended state schools
• Precious few conversions to Christianity
• The knowledge that Baptist programs at other universities make due with less funding, fewer souls get saved at Falls Creek, and more unconverted people burn in Hell because their leaders continue to choose to give $2.8 million a year to an institution that already raises ~$40 million a year on its own and has an endowment of more than $80 million.

Conclusion
The Baptist elites are the only real winners here.  It's a bad deal for everyone else.  I need your help expressing to the various constituencies how bad this deal really is.  At a minimum, two things need to happen:

1. OBU needs to say to the BGCO: "We got this.  Keep your $2.8 million.  But we'll be electing our own trustees from now on, thank you very much."
2. Baptist clergy, laity, and messengers need to realize that their interests and values are truly not being advanced by subsidizing OBU and that the money would be much better spent elsewhere.

In the end, I believe with all my heart that OBU and the BGCO would each be so much better off if they parted ways as soon as possible.  A hundred years after their partnership was established, it no longer serves the needs of either entity.  In fact, this $2.8 million subsidy and its attendant stipulations detract demonstrably from both organizations' core missions.

Why Is OBU Afraid of Science?

Almost all of my anger about encroaching fundamentalism at OBU concerns its religion department, where I studied from 1999-2002.  As a student of biblical studies and theology, and now as a Ph.D. student in social science, I tend not to get too worked up about issues in the natural sciences.  But the latest OBU press release about its newest science teacher was actually the proverbial last straw for me.  Within hours of reading about our new scientist "biology laboratory curriculum developer," I finally found the motivation to start this blog.

Given the sad state of the academic job market these days, I find it hard to believe that OBU is still hiring ABDs rather than PhDs who have completed post-docs.  The market is saturated with newly-minted PhDs, but maybe OBU is unable to find an actual scientist who is willing or able to answer these private, personal, invasive, irrelevant, and unethical questions in the job interview.  With these questions being asked of prospective professors, it's no wonder we can't find a real scientist:

• Who is God to you?   Do you affirm that He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent?
• Do you affirm the Trinity?
• What is the Holy Spirit?  What is the work of the Holy Spirit?
• What is the Church?   What is the Church’s role?
• If I were a pagan and you an evangelical Christian, what would you say to me as our plane was crashing?
• What experiences have you had leading people to Christ?
• Do you affirm the Bible as God’s Word as truth and without error?
• Do you affirm a literal Adam and Eve?
• What would you say to a student who asked you about the origins of man? (on creation, evolution, etc.)
• Would you ever advise a student to have an abortion?
• Do you affirm that there are only two genders, male and female?
• What is your position regarding homosexuality?  Do you affirm that homosexuality is a sin?

Did our new science teacher just finish his PhD in biology or physics?  No.  His degree is in instructional leadership and academic curriculum.  His master's degree is in education, not science.  Most alarmingly, his faculty web page indicates that his particular interest and expertise is in the controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution in high school biology classes.  This raises all kinds of red flags for me, especially as I remember my own biology professor at OBU, Mike Keas.

Thankfully, Professor Keas left OBU and now teaches in the undergraduate degree program at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (which purports to help its graduates "understand and engage the cultural climate of our day."  He began every class with a "science Bible verse of the day" and never tired of reminding us that he and his wife couldn't have children because "there is something wrong with her."  God forbid anyone doubt your virility, Professor Keas!  Anyway, he dodged the question when a student asked him point-blank whether he was a young-earth creationist.  "Intelligent design" was his preferred intellectual sleight-of-hand.  Once, in a lecture on the evils of homosexuality, he went into graphic detail about the physiology of anal sex.  So, I tend not to trust OBU when it comes to hiring science teachers.

On the other hand, I had an absolutely wonderful physics professor at OBU, who I believe is still there.  He managed to keep biblical literalism and fundamentalism out of the science classroom.  Let's hope his new colleague does the same.

This new hire is a) not a scientist, b) interested in (hopefully not obsessed with) "misconceptions held by public secondary school biology teachers" (the topic of his most recent academic conference presentation), and c) made it through the present administration's screening process to teach science at OBU.  None of these facts inspires much confidence.

How long until anatomical figures in the textbooks have fig leaves covering their naughty bits?

OBU's Problem: The BGCO (Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma)

Welcome to the Save OBU blog!  Like many of you, I have become quite disillusioned with the direction of my beloved alma mater, Oklahoma Baptist University.  For many years, I felt like I was alone in my concern.  Yet in the past few months, I have learned that there are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of OBU stakeholders (students, faculty, alumni, donors, etc.) who feel some version of the sadness and anger I feel about OBU's distressing decline from a very fine liberal arts university to a fundamentalist Bible academy.  Through the recent alumni petition and hints of student activism, I am heartened to learn that disenchanted OBU constituents now know of each other's existence.  Maybe awareness can be the first step toward collective action.

There may be dozens of valid reasons to be concerned about OBU's direction.  Maybe you have heard horror stories from Bison Hill about insufficiently orthodox professors being nudged into early retirement or forced out altogether.  Maybe you are upset about OBU's harmful and reactionary policies on gender and sexuality.  Are you passionate about a field of study that is being pushed out of the OBU curriculum?  Or do you just find the entire campus community to be a bit too authoritarian for your tastes?

The first purpose of this blog is to submit for your consideration that none of these problems will ever be solved (and, indeed, they will only become worse) as long as OBU is owned and controlled by the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.  I am thus advocating a complete and total split between OBU and the BGCO.  Short of that, I believe at a minimum that the BGCO should only be allowed to elect a fraction of OBU's trustees.  Given the fundamentalist takeover of Southern Baptist institutions since the late 1970s, the OBU-BGCO partnership no longer makes sense.  The Convention is fundamentally at odds with the aims of a true liberal arts university.  Frankly, I hope Oklahoma Baptist clergy and laypeople will soon realize that their $2.8 million annual subsidy to OBU could be much better spent elsewhere.

For most of the past decade, I have felt that OBU was a lost cause -- that the fundamentalists had won.  But as I reflect on my time there and what it meant to me, I decided I was not willing to give up so easily, especially since I know I'm not alone.  Do I honestly believe that OBU will achieve a total separation from the BGCO?  Let's just say I wouldn't bet on it.  But I care passionately enough about this issue that I am willing to do what I can to start this conversation.

I am not and never have been an Oklahoma Baptist.  This is not my crusade.  My only commitment is to provide one month of daily blog posts in an effort to raise awareness among OBU stakeholders and advance the argument that, until OBU is free from BGCO control, we are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.  I hope that leaders for this movement will emerge -- from the student body, from the ranks of alumni and retired faculty, and from donors.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen Baptist universities that have renegotiated the terms of their relationships to their Baptist state conventions: Baylor, Wake Forest, Stetson, Furman, Mercer, and the University of Richmond.  The processes were different in each case, but in all cases were long and painful.  Yet in the end, I believe the universities and the Baptist state conventions are better off.  In general, these are the kinds of institutions I believe OBU should seek to emulate.  There are, of course, dozens of fledgling, nominally-accredited and unaccredited Baptist colleges around the U.S. that continue to allow their increasingly fundamentalist state conventions to call the shots.  Maybe that is OBU's destiny, but I hope not.  Like I said, I'm afraid OBU might be beyond saving.  Please help prove me wrong.