Recognition for Excellence in Science -- Good or Bad for OBU?

Earlier this month, a U.S. Navy officer was on campus to invite OBU students apply for the Navy's Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate program.  The program recently designated OBU's physics and math majors as the only "tier one" undergraduate majors in Oklahoma and North Texas.  What a fine honor!

Or is it?

Not so long ago, it wouldn't have surprised me if certain administrators in Thurmond Hall were upset or embarrassed that a secular government institution like the U.S. Navy recognized OBU for excellence in science.  After all, most fundamentalists approach science with suspicion at best -- and usually with fear and loathing.  They like science when it offers solutions to problems or prolongs and enriches their lives.  But they are constantly having to figure out how to convince themselves and others that science poses no threat to cherished religious ideas like young earth creationism or the literal historicity of the miracle stories recorded in Scripture.

Fortunately, the administrators cited in the article affirmed the value of rigorous academic preparation in science and mathematics at OBU.  The Reverend Dr. Stan Norman, OBU provost, said:

"We are pleased the Navy has designated these academic programs as their one majors for the NuPOC Program.  The success achieved by our physics and mathematics graduates is evidence of the high level of academic excellence provided by our faculty in the Hurley College of Science and Mathematics . . . The recognition of these programs by the Navy is further validation of that academic quality."

Let's hope this attitude prevails throughout the university.  Especially in the College of Theology and Ministry, it will be important for students to realize that excellence in science does not threaten excellence in theology, philosophy, biblical studies, and ministry.  And, as news of OBU's continued excellence in science education spreads, it will be important to protect the Hurley College faculty from colleagues and BGCO pastors and laypeople who would prefer to replace them with fundamentalists.

There's a lot of credit to go around.  The students should be commended for their hard work in some of the most rigorous majors on campus.  Our thanks to the president and provost for their commitment to legitimate science education and for resisting what must be rather intense pressure from friends and colleagues in post-Takeover Baptist higher education to water it down.  Not lost in all this are the contributions of an administrator closer to the students and faculty -- a well-loved former chief academic officer who now serves as dean of science and math.  Finally, our deepest thanks to Hurley College faculty, old and new.  They are the best in the business!

OBU Sues USA Over "Abortion Pill Mandate"

As we speculated last week, the Alliance for Defending Freedom, a conservative legal advocacy group, filed a lawsuit Friday against U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on behalf of OBU and three other Christian colleges in Oklahoma.  The suit alleges that an administrative rule the HHS issued in January 2012 violates the universities' First and Fifth Amendment rights.

The HHS Mandate, one of many bureaucratic rules across the government related to the implementation of the health insurance reform law, immediately met fierce resistance from the Catholic hierarchy and a number of Protestant religious liberty advocates.  Both before and since the HHS made accommodations so that insurers, rather than employers themselves, would bear the costs of contraceptive measures that might violate certain employers' religious beliefs, dozens of lawsuits representing several hundred plaintiffs have been filed.

Personally, I see some compelling reasons to oppose this action.

• For one thing, it is needlessly divisive.  While many alumni/ae are no doubt supportive of OBU's lawsuit, many alumni/ae will be disappointed and angry.
• Second, this a giant slap in the face to employees, particularly women, who up to this point have believed that they, not the president or the trustees, should decide what contraceptives they can access through the university's group health insurance plan.
• Third, there's no real upside for OBU.  There are already more than enough cases working their way through the federal courts on this matter. If this was really important, OBU should have had a conference call with trustees and launched this action in early 2012.  At this point, it's just piling on.  There is no chance that this lawsuit will ever be decisive or relevant to the ultimate legal or political resolution of the HHS Mandate.
• Furthermore, it's ridiculous to assume that all, or even most, Southern Baptists believe the morning after pill is ethically identical to, say, an abortion at 6 or 8 weeks gestation.  Along these lines, it's dubious at best and egregiously dishonest at worst for OBU's PR office to try to sell this as opposition to the "abortion pill mandate." [EDIT: OBU's website changed the headline to "OBU Joins Fight for Religious Liberty." I wonder who else complained...]
• Since this action comes so late in the public political and legal debate over the HHS Mandate, many will interpret this action as blatantly partisan and ideological rather than arising out of a legitimate religious or theological concern that has any kind of consensus among OBU stakeholders, and particularly among the faculty and staff who will be affected.

Even so, after consulting with several people who have shown the most interest and involvement in the Save OBU project since its inception, I do not think Save OBU should take a position on this matter and I do not intend to condemn it or the administrators and trustees who advocated for it.  This matter is substantially different from the kinds of concerns we have raised about academic freedom and ethical administration.

Institutions have a right to preserve their own autonomy and prerogatives.  While it seems to me that most religious moderates are satisfied with the cumulative accommodations the federal government has made since the initial outcry over the HHS Mandate on January 20, 2012, I am sensitive to the criticism that the original mandate was tone-deaf to religious liberty concerns.  I understand why President David Whitlock and the OBU trustees took this action.  But I hope there will be a healthy debate among students, staff, and alumni about precisely what interest OBU has in the case and, specifically, whether an "abortion pill mandate" actually exists.

Coincidentally and for the sake of full disclosure, I have a professional and scholarly interest in evangelicals' attitudes regarding contraception.  If you are interested, you can read some of my thoughts in this recent Associated Baptist Press commentary.

I realize that many will disagree with the decision not to oppose the administration and trustees in this matter because there will be significant overlap between people who support Save OBU's efforts and people who would prefer that their alma mater did not join a late, irrelevant lawsuit over the "abortion pill mandate."  This lawsuit will divide OBU constituents, but I hope those of us who want OBU to remain a legitimate liberal arts university will be continually united against our alma mater's very real and ongoing threats to its heritage and identity.

A Brief Revival for Save OBU

As I noted a few times over the summer, I've deliberately scaled back the Save OBU effort.  For one thing, I believe it would be counterproductive to keep hammering OBU's now veteran administrators for offenses that occurred 2-3 years ago.  We made our point.  The last thing I want is to make things more difficult for the students and professors who are still trying to engage in rigorous, intellectually honest Christian higher education on Bison Hill.  Another fact is that I spent too much time on an issue that is near and dear to my heart, but not very relevant to my personal or professional life.

We certainly celebrate the university's many recent successes.  But we hopefully trust that things have stabilized.  Unless the situation at OBU takes another turn for the worst, you won't see daily updates and commentary on every OBU news release here.

Even so, there are a few developments I would like to keep before our friends and supporters.  The most recent Forbes list indicates that OBU's slide in the rankings has, mercifully, stopped.  The Hobbs College of Theology and Ministry has a new faculty member this year.  And sources confirm that OBU is planning to follow the lead of several other Catholic and evangelical institutions and sue the United States in federal court over an administrative rule issued by the Department of Health and Human Services last year.

I'll report on each of these matters in the days to come.

I also want to say more about an idea I considered over the summer.  The several Southern Baptist colleges that have reverted back toward fundamentalism in recent years should band together and petition the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.  Ideally, other evangelical colleges would join us in solidarity.  The CCCU should give guidance about how to protect academic freedom and ensure ethical administration when fundamentalists threaten and obliterate long-standing norms of institutional behavior.  Or, alternatively, the CCCU should give its blessing to these takeovers and say publicly that it does not care about what many Christian colleges have experienced in recent years.

Let's stay informed and stay connected.  Given that another unethical firing or any number of fundamentalist-inspired violations could potentially occur at any moment, we need to keep our movement active so that we can mobilize more easily when the next crazy thing happens.  Has the war already been lost?  Perhaps.  But if we truly want to be "loyal to our alma mater," the least we can do is stand up for what we know is right.

Save OBU is not dead yet!

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.

OBU Honors Union University's David Dockery

We've wondered before about parallels between OBU and Union University, a Baptist college in Jackson, TN.  Longtime OBU President Bob Agee came to OBU from Union and retired to Jackson.  Union's president, the Reverend Dr. David Dockery, is widely considered to be the dean of Baptist college presidents.

At the 2013 SBC Annual Meeting in June, OBU honored Dockery for his contributions to Southern Baptist life over the past 20+ years:

OBU presented the Herschel H. Hobbs Award for Distinguished Denominational Service, named in honor of a legendary Southern Baptist pastor and denominational statesman, to Dr. David S. Dockery on Tuesday, June 11, at a reception in the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas. 

The reception was part of the 2013 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting. 

Dockery, who serves as president of Union University in Jackson, Tenn., received the award from Dr. David W. Whitlock, president of OBU. 

“David Dockery has had a profound impact on Christian higher education, generally, and OBU, specifically,” Whitlock said. “In the providence of God, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities paired me with Dr. Dockery in their first-year mentorship program when I became president of OBU. His wisdom and influence was so important to me in that first year, and I count it a blessing to consider him a friend.”

Forgetting, for the moment, how revisionist (and maybe even offensive?) it is to honor post-Takeover SBC elites in the name of Herschel Hobbs (who fundamentalists booed at the 1980 SBC meeting), now seems as good a time as ever to compare how OBU and Union relate to the SBC and its post-Takeover leadership.  We'll take up that topic in a series of blog posts this week.

Among the few dozen state convention-affiliated Baptist colleges, Union is clearly the darling of the SBC.  I can't even keep track of how many SBC seminary professors and high-level agency staffers have sent their own children to Union in recent years.  Whenever one of them gets married, graduates, or gets a job, the elite SBC Twitterverse becomes a virtual Union Alumni Association meeting.  We have to ask why so many post-Takeover SBC elites send their kids to Union.  Is Union objectively and uniquely better than all other Baptist colleges?  Or that good for these guys' careers?  Or is proximity to Nashville decisive?

Dockery has mastered one of the most delicate dances in evangelical life: keeping hardline constituents happy while also maintaining some mainstream legitimacy.  In addition to his prolific writing, Dockery has served on advisory boards for evangelical institutions, including Christianity Today and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

His involvement with the CCCU is noteworthy as we try to get a sense for where the CCCU stands on the recent spate of fundamentalist encroachments at Baptist-affiliated CCCU institutions.  I'm sure Dockery wants to stay above the fray, and at this point in his career perhaps he's earned the right.  But I can't help but wonder if he smiled or frowned when he heard about the firings at OBU in 2010 and 2011, the wholesale faculty exodus at Shorter in 2012, or the takeover of Cedarville in 2013.

In a future post, we'll look more deeply at how OBU and Union each relate to SBC leadership.  We'll look for answers to the question of why so many SBC elites send their kids to Union while so few (if any) send their kids to OBU.  And we'll consider OBU's prospects for success if it abandons its rich heritage just to try to win over a few dozen guys who are always going to prefer Union anyway.

Dr. Dockery, who will retire next summer after 19 years on the job, will continue to be relevant to SBC life, especially in his role as chair of the Calvinism Advisory Committee.  I, for one, will always eagerly listen to anything Dr. Dockery has to say about Christian higher education.  And I wish him and Union success in this transition period.

Summer Update & FAQ

Greetings to longtime readers and a warm welcome to the many new people who have stumbled upon this site!

I mentioned in early June that the blog would be quiet this summer.  After a tumultuous 2010 & 2011, OBU's fundamentalist encroachment has subsided somewhat.  Top administrators have made their true intentions known, however.  This means OBU still needs a watchdog. OBU administrators currently lack the political cover necessary to complete their desired transformation.  But as soon as they believe they can get away with it, they will complete the fundamentalist re-orientation of the religion department and move on to other areas of the university.

These days, I'm spending less of my "Save OBU" time and effort on OBU.  Sure, I'm getting emails about various staff and faculty personnel changes.  I hear from a number of prospective students weighing their hopes for a great experience at OBU against the realities of what the administrators' actions have wrought.

Increasingly, however, I'm hearing from constituents of other Christian colleges.  Some are asking why I'm complaining about relatively minor goings-on at OBU when several other Baptist schools are in the throes of full-on fundamentalist takeovers that may result in harm to their reputations, financial ruin, and loss of accreditation.  Others, mostly from evangelical colleges that are not Baptist affiliated, are wondering how the problems at OBU, Cedarville, Shorter, Truett-McConnell, Brewton-Parker, Louisiana College, etc. could even happen at all.

I'll continue to monitor the OBU situation as best I can.  But in a future post, I'll lay out a vision for a collective effort wherein constituents of a variety of Christian colleges will appeal to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) for guidance about how to prevent fundamentalist-inspired trustee takeovers, presidential selections, administrative reorganizations, firings, and incursions against institutional norms and academic freedom.  The CCCU needs to strengthen and enforce standards for its member institutions.  Non-Baptist evangelicals need to understand what fundamentalists are doing to a significant swath of Christian higher education.  And Southern Baptist leaders need to get a clue and stop turning our colleges into their ideological playgrounds, presumably with the CCCU's blessing.  We need to find out: Does the CCCU even care?

Since the site has received hundreds of new visitors this summer and since many of you have written to ask about what's going on, I have responded to some frequently asked questions.

Click here to view our FAQ page.

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