First Things on Baylor and Beckwith

Please go read Joseph Bottum's take on Baylor's decision to deny tenure to Prof. Francis Beckwith at the First Things blog On the Square:

... 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, 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.

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In the end, an appeals process exists, and Beckwith may end up getting tenure at Baylor. But either way, his career is badly damaged. If he manages to stay in Waco, he remains at a place that has very clearly informed him it doesn’t like him, and if he leaves, he will have real trouble landing any respectable position. If you’re one of those senior professors brought to Baylor to jazz the place up—if you are, say, someone like Rodney Stark— how can you recruit young faculty to carry forward the 2012 plan?

If I were one of these professors, I’d be forced to advise my protégés to take other offers and pass on Baylor. Academic careers are fragile things: They don’t easily survive a firing, for whatever reason, and young professors shouldn’t take the chance that the mess of an institutional meltdown will ruin their professional life.

In certain ways, the case of Francis Beckwith is merely one example of a general trend worth noticing. In his fascinating book The Dying of the Light, James Burtchaell laid out the pattern by which America’s religious colleges changed their spots, but there are some new elements in the latest episodes.

It works this way: Take an old-fashioned religiously affiliated school. Baylor will do, but Notre Dame and Wheaton and Davidson and the University of Dallas are just as handy.

In each case, the college has an old faculty generally contented with the school’s regional and religious standing. And for some years it has been hiring new faculty who, if not opposed outright to the school’s affiliation, are at least embarrassed by it. These newer teachers came with impressive credentials out of premier graduate programs—but the tightening of the academic job market forced them into positions at lower-tier colleges, and they always believed, in one way or another, that their new schools should take places like Yale and Harvard as their models.

Now, along comes somebody with a vision for the school: a realization that the religious identity is necessary to ensure a steady supply of students and that the nation actually has a set of distinguished senior faculty who want to teach a religiously serious place and want to build up a genuine Christian university. So the school starts to make its move, and the faculty (and often the school’s board of directors) rebels.

The weird part—the new pattern worth noticing—is the common cause made by the secularists and the old religious believers to fight the college’s transformation. You’d think they’d be natural enemies, but it turns out that they both have something at stake in preventing the school from becoming known as a first-rate research university for religiously motivated scholars.

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And then there are the ecumenical troubles. The religiously informed figures brought to campus are scattered across America’s denominational divisions. Some of them, like the philosopher Thomas Hibbs (dean of Baylor’s honors college), are Catholics. Others are northern evangelicals (like the literary scholar David Lyle Jeffrey, provost of Baylor until fired by the new administration after Robert Sloan was forced out as president). All of them are participants in a new style of intellectual ecumenism, in which serious Catholics and serious Protestants join in the work of unfolding a Christian understanding of academic disciplines. But modern radicalism and old-fashioned Protestantism share a distaste both for Catholicism and—interestingly—for evangelicalism, since the old denominational Baptists always thought of the Southern Baptist Convention as distant from the northern evangelical churches.

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Think about it: If you were a young, high-powered academic with ambitions for a Christian school that matched the new intellectual excitement of the American ecumenical endeavor, why would you risk your career at a place like Baylor? You can buy the same kind of trouble at a better price by taking whatever offer you get from an openly secular college.

For that matter, if you were a parent interested in your children’s obtaining intellectually rigorous Christian education, why would you pay the tuition at Baylor University? Indeed, if you were one of those bright, young Christian students, why would you want to go to Baylor in the first place?

(emphasis added)

My Comments:
Mr. Bottum's description of Baylor's "diminished role as a not terribly distinguished regional school" is a nice way of saying that Baylor is, at best, a 2nd-rate institution.


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
Tenure Denial as Revenge

Ashamed of My Alma Mater - Baylor Denies Tenure to Dr. Francis J. Beckwith