Accrediting agency biased, say Baptists - Association of Theological Schools

Christian Century, March 15, 1995

The two-year probation assessed Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, by a major accrediting agency has renewed criticism among Southern Baptists that the agency is unfair to conservative schools. Paige Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, told the Fort Worth StarTelegram that the Association of Theological Schools discriminates against seminaries that require professors to sign professions of faith.

Patterson, a leading strategist of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, charged ATS with disregard "for the freedom of a confessional people to be self-determining and faithful to their most cherished belief," the newspaper reported February 4. In a january 27 letter to Southwestern announcing probation, the accrediting agency's associate director said the seminary's confessional nature had nothing to do with its being put on probation.

ATS imposed probation January 6, saving trustees violated school procedures when they fired President Russell Dilday in March 1994 and have impeded academic freedom at the school. In firing Dilday, conservative trustees maintained that he was too sympathetic to moderate Southern Baptists and had tried to block conservative reforms at the 3,117-student school, the largest of the SBC's six seminaries.

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and another key SBC fundamentalist leader, charged that the ATS decision "appears to be rooted in a context of retribution, rather than in a redemptive and constructive intention." Mohler also delivered a one-hour speech to the Fellowship of Evangelical Seminary Presidents in early January in which he accused ATS of being insensitive to conservative schools at which it is mandatory for professors to adhere to doctrinal requirements.

In an interview Mohler said a text of his speech was unavailable but that his remarks to the presidents' group focused on a "major divide among theological institutions" between schools that are "confessional and those that are nonconfessional." Mohler argued that ATS's "prevailing understanding of theological education," reflected in its committee appointments, literature and actions in recent years, "has been inclined toward the nonconfessional model of theological education."

According to Mohler, this nonconfessional model has biased the ATS on the issue of academic freedom. "Non-confessional institutions may exhibit an understanding of academic freedom that is tied to the larger secular academy," he said, which is an understanding of academic freedom which respects no confessional parameters. Confessional institutions, on the other hand, must understand academic freedom first in terms of fidelity to the confession and then in terms of the professor's legitimate freedom effectively to teach within those parameters. Academic freedom in a confessional institution cannot mean freedom to violate the confessional parameters."

But in a January 27 letter to Southwestern President Ken Hemphill, ATS Associate Director Daniel Aleshire claimed that most seminaries accredited by ATS are "confessional" and that "the ATS standards support the confessional nature of these theological schools." Aleshire wrote that the "confessional nature of Southwestern Seminary and the board's authority to terminate the president are not the reasons for the ATS action." Aleshire told Hemphill that ATS's "central concern" is with the actions of the seminary's board of trustees. Over a period of "several years," trustees failed to implement their own procedures for presidential evaluation, Aleshire said, and decisions regarding the hiring or promotion of faculty "created the persistent perception that published criteria and the formally adopted confessional statement have not always been carefully followed."

Tom Graves, president of Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, has also taken issue with comments made by Mohler and Patterson, saying it is "a gross error" to charge the accrediting agency with bias. "The issue is not bias against Baptist beliefs, but the fidelity of our institutions to recognized standards of operating procedures," Graves said. "You just don't fire your president without warning as you are changing the locks on his office door. The issue here is not confessional theology. . . . The issue is a recognized standard of proper conduct for boards [of trustees]." BTSR has been approved for ATS candidacy status by the same committee that voted to place Southwestern on probation.

Southwestern's probation has rekindled talk of a new accrediting agency that would be formed by the SBC seminaries and other evangelical schools as an alternative to ATS. Similar suggestions surfaced a few years ago when Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary was placed on probation because of trustees' actions. Graves remarked that talk of forming an alternative accrediting agency is "frightful." "To become self-accrediting makes as much sense as auditing your own books," he said,