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March 05, 2005
Baylor and Christian academia
(Warning right now: We're not going to be much for timely commentary around here.)
Another side benefit of picking up Christianity Today last night (a magazine I really ought to be reading more) was that I caught up on Robert Sloan resigning as Baylor's president.
If you haven't read about the struggles at Baylor over Sloan's administration and vision for the campus' future, you should. Baylor 2012 (which is best described in this piece by Randall Ballmer) is the campus' vision, largely engineered by Sloan, in which "Baylor intends to enter the top tier of American universities while reaffirming and deepening its distinctive Christian mission."
Which, you might guess, is a tall order.
Most of the notable Christian campuses are liberal arts schools. Grove City, Taylor, Biola immediately jump to mind. Apart from Notre Dame (which has that whole Catholic thing that many, for some reason, find unsettling), Wheaton might be the closest thing to an academic powerhouse in Protestant Christendom - but you can't consider Wheaton a research university the same way you would consider Northwestern or the University of Chicago (just to name their chief competitors).
Yet Sloan's goal was to turn Baylor into exactly that kind of research university, and at the same time deepen Baylor's evangelical bona-fides.
I will not speak to the personal conflicts that might have been the engine of the massive amount of controversy that Sloan has sparked in his time at Baylor. But I find it terribly sad that the level of ambition that Sloan displayed met with such resistance - and that, largely, that resistance didn't fall along the classic conservative/moderate lines that are typical of so many Baptist conflicts (although, to be sure, there was some of that). It just seems that (1) Sloan was bad to rub people the wrong way, and very few of the older faculty were invested in the "new Baylor" vision; and (2) Sloan never satisfied his adversaries that Baylor was going to make this move towards a greater research emphasis without sacrificing the care of students and faculty that "the Baylor family" sees as one of its hallmarks. (I know full well that I've oversimplified - if you know better than me on this, speak up.)
The Baylor goings-on are truly interesting to me because a lot of my sense of mission - mission that, to date in my professional life has gone unfulfilled - has been to take my "committment to Christian education" that I supposedly made when I joined my current faculty and make it real and direct. Granted, it's difficult to point to the Bible in an introductory physics class, when I'm far more concerned with the problem solving. But I still believe there need to be more outlets I have for not only doing God-things, but bringing reflection about God-things to my academic work. I haven't been terribly successful about that yet in my life.
One of my central theses is that Christians in America, historically and over the last 100 years in particular, haven't been terribly active in intellectual life. A lot of the frustrations that the Church has with academic people stem from the fact that we as the Church haven't been doing much in the way of preparing new acadmic people to think in the light of Christ. I took hammer-blow after hammer-blow on the bus between Ohio State and my house in Worthington, reading Mark Noll's Scandal Of The Evangelical Mind and agreeing with statement after statement.
(If you haven't read Scandal and you're serious about faith and academia, you need to, at least once. If you have, this article in First Things is a nifty followup.)
In everything I get to do in my job to encourage students in their faith and in their work, I'm grateful and I do my best. But I find most often, at any moment, I'm either doing one or doing the other. How do I truly bring the two together under one heading?
Posted by Chuck at March 5, 2005 07:04 PM
Comments
You bring the two together by living it, by continually being the person that you are. You demand that we work hard as your students. Because I cared about what you thought of me as a student, I worked harder than I ever have to make an A in your class--and making that A was more joyous than any other A I've ever made. And because we are also, I like to think, friends, you motivate me to question and challenge and grow in my faith, and to live out what I find there.
I have thought more on the contrast between religion and faith in this past week than I probably ever have--even while reading "Walking on Water"--due to your probing, and I am more at peace with my God than I ever have been as a result of that contemplation.
You are not only a physics professor, you are a person of faith. Keep rocking on as both.
Posted by: Rachel at March 5, 2005 11:15 PM
The point I was trying to make, though, was the fact that I don't seem to do both under the same heading very well. I will grant that I brought my faith into General Biology I this fall as much as I ever have into any course. In the physics, the topic of God doesn't come up much. It might ought to.
I'm confident enough that my students here see my faith. I'm not at all confident that my students here see a scholar who has worked out what his faith means TO THE WORK THAT HE DOES, and that's the difference.
I still owe you a Noll-for-L'Engle swap.
Posted by: Dr Chuck at March 6, 2005 12:09 AM