Crisis of identity: a clash over faith and learning

Christian Century, Jan 27, 2004 by Robert Benne

IT IS OFTEN SAID that academic squabbles are so nasty because the stakes are so low. But at Baylor University the squabbles are nasty because the stakes are so high.

The conflicts are also numerous. The Baylor community is clashing over the school's newly articulated religious identity; over ratcheted-up demands on faculty for research and publication; over financial decisions endorsing higher tuition fees, expensive new Ph.D. programs, new buildings and more debt; and over how these new policies have been arrived at and implemented. The conflicts have been exacerbated by a national scandal in the basketball program: one player murdered another, and the coach (who later resigned) attempted to exonerate himself by having players lie to investigators.

At the center of the conflict is the administration's ambitious plan for the university, which with 14,000 students is the largest Baptist university in the world. Baylor 2012 calls for making the Waco, Texas, school a topflight research institution while strengthening its Christian identity.

This plan was launched in the early 1990s when Don Schmeltekopf became provost. It was accelerated when Robert Sloan, the head of Baylor's seminary, was made university president in 1995, and it was formally accepted by the Board of Regents in 2001.

For most of the academic world, these two goals are contradictory: you cannot become a nationally ranked research university and strengthen your religious identity at the same time. The historic trend--perhaps bucked only by Notre Dame (and some think it has lost its Catholic identity)--dictates that a university must shed its religious identity if it is going to be prominent in the academic world.

About 20 percent of the Baylor faculty is angry at the concept or the implementation of Baylor 2012 or both--angry enough to organize or support resistance to the president. Most of these are tenured faculty of long duration. They are strongly represented in the Faculty Senate, which passed a no-confidence motion on Sloan by a 26-6 vote in early September. About 40 percent of the faculty are not active in the struggle but are upset by the disturbance and wish for peace and quiet. The other 40 percent, many hired in the past decade by Schmeltekopf and Sloan, are enthusiastic about the plan. After the Faculty Senate vote, around 300 faculty rallied in support of Sloan and 2012.

The conflict has been magnified by the unusual presence of Baylor's former president, Herbert Reynolds, who has openly opposed Sloan and the strategic plan. Reynolds is a dignified Texas Baptist of larger-than-life proportions. He lives in Waco and is provided a fine office on the Baylor campus.

Many Sloan supporters believe Reynolds is using his connections to coordinate opposition to Sloan on many fronts--through the media, the Alumni Association and the five members of the Board of Regents who publicly called for Sloan to resign. (In mid-September the board voted 31-4 in support of Sloan.) Reynolds's son and the daughter of an earlier Baylor president have also offered high-profile support for the opposition. Oddly, few administration opponents seem concerned about the propriety of a former president leading a struggle against a current president.

As the 31-4 vote demonstrated, the Board of Regents is solidly behind Sloan and Baylor 2012. Winfred Moore, a former chair of the board and an esteemed Baptist minister, says he is "thrilled" with the direction that Sloan is taking Baylor. The younger faculty are for the most part very supportive of the strategic goals. "We have the momentum to realize 2012 and we will push forward," asserts Sloan.

Nevertheless, the school has serious problems. At many universities a Faculty Senate's decisive vote of no confidence in the administration could be fatal. Add to that the alienation of many long-tenured professors and the distress of almost half the entire faculty and you have a troubled university.

David Jeffrey, who succeeded Schmeltekopf as provost this past fall, thinks the conflict is about identity. Baylor has meant "Texas, Baptist, and family" but is now becoming "national and international," and operating with "an expanded version of being Baptist," Jeffrey said. Of the 172 faculty members added in the past four years, most are not from Texas and a good many are from other countries. Indeed, Jeffrey himself is a Canadian and until recently was an Anglican (though he was raised a Baptist). Among the new hires have been a number of Catholics, which seems to discomfort the oldline Texas Baptists. Students are also now more likely to come from other states and nations.

THE ADMINISTRATION has tried to ensure that half of new hires are, Baptists, as in the past, but the new Baptists are very open to other traditions. The non-Baptists include serious Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, along with a smattering of Jews. (Baylor has long had a requirement that all faculty be practicing Christians or Jews.) These "new Baptists" and members of other Christian traditions have different ideas about how Christianity relates to higher education.