Whoever said, "There's no such thing as bad publicity" should speak with embattled Baylor University president Robert Sloan. Never in Baylor's 158-year history have the eyes of the national media and academic community been so riveted on the world's largest Baptist university. Beleaguered by a combination of athletic scandals and academic controversy, Sloan has been targeted for criticism by numerous members of his faculty and student body. Yet Sloan passed the only test that matters for his job security when, last Friday, September 12, Baylor's Board of Regents affirmed his leadership by a vote of 31-4.
Even taking into account the recent murder of a Baylor basketball player, allegedly by his own teammate, Sloan's greatest liability appears to be his "Baylor 2012" plan. Sloan's stated vision is to transform Baylor into the "world's greatest Christian university," or at least a "Protestant Notre Dame" where research and education are imbued with the Christian worldview.
In his 2001 book Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions, Robert Benne ponders Baylor's challenge within the context of five other schools representing a continuum of Christian education. Benne doesn't venture to predict the success or failure of Sloan's vision, but his analysis gives us an opportunity to consider the history Baylor is working against.
America's leading universities, most notably Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, set a pattern, followed by other institutions, of abandoning a Christian framework for teaching and scholarship. Benne identifies a three-step process: first, these schools abandoned their theological distinctives in favor of a generic brand of Christianity; then they presented Christian faith as a sentimental alternative within a broad ideological spectrum; and finally they excluded Christianity in favor of other supposedly universal ideals.
Why this slippery slope? Benne's explanation begins with the obvious: at crucial junctures in the universities' histories, they lacked a critical mass of committed Christians. Too few faculty members, students, and administrators shared a distinct vision of Christian education. Often the universities lacked the necessary critical mass because they had been forced to seek funding, students, and faculty outside their theological boundaries. Their sponsoring denominations frequently lacked sufficient resources to fund both the schools and their own activities, and failed to direct enough students to adequately populate the schools. Only occasionally did universities declare their intent to secularize. But as institutions weakened their theological distinctives in order to attract more funding, they were "like the proverbial frog in the water slowly being brought to boil."
Without a doubt, Enlightenment education theories also turned up the heat. While secular educators boasted of the all-sufficiency of reason and science, they left little room for such "superstition" as biblical revelation. These debates were most heated within graduate programs, which were often guided by the dominant ethos of their particular fields, rather than the Christian vision of their own universities. After disconnecting their academic programs from any remaining religious ties, secular faculty members turned the tables. If anyone attempted to question this secularization process, they dismissed these concerns as the fears of socially and intellectually backward fundamentalists.
Indeed, Sloan's detractors have often characterized his ambitions as a fundamentalist takeover. By implementing a top-down, swift, and bold vision, Sloan has exposed himself to criticism from faculty members worried about their status in a changing university. Yet Benne's analysis reveals other, more pressing obstacles that Sloan must overcome.
First, Baylor's size (nearly 14,000 students) and commitment to scientific research pose problems not faced by smaller, self-consciously Christian liberal arts schools like Wheaton College in Illinois and Calvin College in Michigan. In order to compete with land-grant universities, schools like Baylor began offering professional training programs in areas such as nursing and engineering. However, this change undermined the academic cohesiveness of a curriculum restricted to the liberal arts. Without this academic cohesiveness, they struggled to maintain a unified Christian ethos across diverse research pursuits.
A second, more serious barrier, in Benne's eyes, is posed by Baylor's Baptist affiliation. Unlike the Reformed tradition that informs Calvin College, the Baptist heritage has not always placed a strong emphasis on theological education and understanding. Baptists are heirs to a devotionally focused pietism that de-emphasizes the intellectual dimension of faith. As a result, they have historically tended to remain skeptical of higher education's value for the Christian life.
This skepticism has revealed itself during past battles for the Southern Baptist Convention's theological soul. While Baylor remained in the hands of denominational centrists, other Baptist universities, including Wake Forest, balked at the Southern Baptist Convention's conservative turn and shed their church connections. Consequently, Sloan's efforts to strengthen Baylor's Christian commitment are besieged on both sides: on one side by secularists who do not value the Christian worldview, and on the other side by pietists who do not value higher education.
Throughout Baylor's history, pietism has guided extracurricular student life, while secularism has defined the classrooms. By declaring war on this two-spheres approach to education, Sloan is fighting a longstanding trend of academic secularization in America. If the recent vote is any indication, though, Sloan's grand experiment has passed a critical test.
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