March 27, 2006
First Things
Joseph Bottum
Down in Waco, Texas, there is a Baptist school called Baylor University. It was never a major player in American academics, and with the strained situation in which American colleges found themselves at the end of the baby boom, Baylor had problems figuring out what it should do.
Certainly, the school played a regional role there in central Texas, but it lacked much national appeal. Its relations with the Baptist Christianity of its founding were strained, and the intellectual resources of its faculty and programs appeared thin. In the tight market of America academia, what reason had parents to send their children to a place like Baylor? The school seemed in flight from its niche market as a full-fledged Baptist institution, and for a purely secular educationâ€â€well, surely one can do better than Waco.
In the mid-1990s, however, the school decided to do something about its problems. It began by hiring a dynamo of a new president named Robert Sloan. (First Things later published the talks given at his installation by Gertrude Himmelfarb and Richard John Neuhaus). It adopted a plan to achieve a new identity by 2012, and it went out actively seeking high-profile facultyâ€â€high-profile religious faculty, that is, for the plan involved positioning Baylor as a national center for religiously informed education.
The idea was that the school would simultaneously redefine its niche market and build a nationwide reputation. Philosophers, literary critics, legal scholars, sociologists: On and on the list went, a parade of new faculty members and new programs that suggested Baylor University was serious about trying to become the premier Christian research university in America.
Today, the plan is in tatters, and Baylor has apparently decided to sink back into its diminished role as a not terribly distinguished regional school. President Sloan is gone, the new high-profile faculty are demoralized and sniffing around for positions at better-known schools, energetic programs like the Intelligent Design Institute have been chased away [i.e., the Michael Polanyi Center — go here], and the bright young professors are having their academic careers ruined by a school that lured them to campus with the promises of the 2012 plan and now is simply embarrassed by them.
A case in point is Francis J. Beckwith, who was denied tenure by Baylor last week. Author of several books, including a new volume forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, he was associate director of the J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies, associate professor of Church-State Studies, and associate editor of the Journal of Church & State. You can find his accomplishments listed in more detail here and here. None of this, of course, proves that he deserves tenure, but it looks awfully impressive when compared with the publication records of other faculty members. Read More ›