Is Baylor 'keeping the faith' in higher education?

Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith With Their Religious Tradition by Robert Benne
 

For faculty, administrators, staff, students and alumni of six church-related institutions of higher education in America, Robert Benne has published an almost irresistibly interesting book. Quality With Soul is, as its subtitle declares, a study of how six leading Christian colleges and universities "keep the faith," both spiritually and in respect to academic excellence. Baylor is one of the six and figures prominently in Benne's study for the steps it has taken recently to try to keep quality and soul together.
In recent years, there have been many studies by American historians of religious higher education that chronicle a general drift to secularization in the 20th century. Against this current, Baylor, Notre Dame, Valparaiso, Wheaton, Calvin and St. Olaf have swum upstream.*
Benne begins by reviewing several of these studies. He approves George Marsden's view that the colleges and universities that have abandoned their faith have done so in phases: first, by making education "generally" Christian, then "nonsectarian"; second, by appealing instead to amorphously defined spiritual and moral values and vaguely patriotic sentiments; then, by exclusion of specifically Christian practices "in the name of allegedly universal intellectual, moral and democratic qualities." Adoption of the normative positivism of the social sciences and a "two-spheres" approach -- essentially a nonintegration of faith and reason -- has been the track by which institutions like Baylor, in particular, have been secularized.
Benne regards the failure to articulate a Christian worldview of public relevance as the generic fault of secularizing colleges such as Wake Forest. A diminished role for chapel and less intentional commitment to the hiring of faculty deeply committed to the college's religious identity usually have been sufficient to complete the secularization process. 
The necessary remedy for reversal -- practiced to greater or lesser degrees by the colleges and universities surveyed -- is as follows: 

• a theological vision articulated across the disciplines; 
• embodiment of that vision as a way of life expressed communally in worship; and 
• hiring of faculty who hold to a high common denominator of affection for the college's Christian vision, because "without committed persons, a religious tradition is merely an historical artifact."

In his second chapter, Benne details the perils of allowing the academic market and its aggressively secularizing paradigms to predetermine the institutional agenda. This, he thinks, is something to which Christians of a pietist tradition, such as Baptists, are particularly vulnerable. The reason, ironically, is a historic aversion to the intellectual life, ostensibly because of a fear it will corrode piety -- a self-fulfilling prophecy, as he observes. Superficially, professional schools may appear less problematic for such a piety than the probing intellectualism of a liberal arts curriculum. Their growth to prominence, however, often is the unreflective means by which the separation of piety from profession and politic becomes decisive and irreversible.
Baylor readers will find Benne's classification system intriguing. He puts Baylor behind Wheaton and Calvin, "midway between orthodox and critical mass schools" (Valparaiso and St. Olaf); those further back are "intentionally pluralist" and "accidentally pluralist." What most works to maintain vital connection to a religious heritage is strong inculcation of a particular Christian vision: the more intellectually rigorous (e.g., Calvin, Notre Dame), the further- reaching in academic and social influence; the more a matter of piety and lifestyle protection merely, the lower the level of outreach into the intellectual life of the wider academy, at least in Benne's findings. Baylor has come to the faith/reason integration model later than other colleges and universities, Benne notes, and Baptists do not, he thinks, have "much of a theological tradition" to anchor such an ambitious intellectual project. But is there more theological heft than he has noticed?
One wonders what differences Benne might note were he to do his study of Baylor today. Much already has happened, even in the three years since he visited here, to move Baylor decisively toward the more "orthodox" side of his classification. Our philosophy department, which he thinks is crucial to Christian intellectual culture on any denominational campus (and I agree with him), has grown dramatically in stature and eminence for Christian philosophy and is about to commence a nationally significant PhD program. The Baylor 2012 vision, with its bold new academic and faith-identity initiatives, has been approved unanimously by our Board of Regents. Extremely high-quality faculty, who share the Baylor 2012 vision, have been added in large numbers since Benne's visit and will continue to be added in the coming years. Further, Benne's contention that at Baylor we "have chapel but not worship" might well have to be revised, as well as his view that there are few overt symbols of our Christian identity on campus (e.g., the chapel spire and beautiful stained glass windows of George W. Truett Theological Seminary).
None of this, however, keeps Benne's book from being a timely read for anyone in the Baylor community. The dynamic changes occurring now might well make it, for historical purposes, a landmark diagnostic at the cusp of a new era of greatness for Baylor -- concerning which, almost certainly, other books will soon enough need to be written.
*(see Burtchael, Marsden, Sloan, Griffiths et al.)
 

Dr. Jeffrey is senior vice provost and Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities