Debate About Baylor's Future: Can Baptist Baylor Learn Anything from Catholic Notre Dame?
Drew at the Shrine of the Holy Whapping has a post about what my undergraduate alma mater, Baylor University, can learn from Notre Dame in its efforts to receive recognition as a top-tier school while maintaining its distinctively Southern Baptist character. Will Baylor become the Baptist Notre Dame? Does it even want to?
Drew links to an interesting article in the Associated Baptist Press titled "Debate about Baylor's future asks: Should Baptists learn from Catholics?"
Given the constant infighting that has plagued Baylor for at least the last 20-25 years, I have my doubts that the university will ever be successful in achieving anything other than mid-tier status. And even at that, Baylor's long-term future as a "confessionally Christian" school I think is somewhat in doubt.
The shabby treatment received by renown philosopher, author, and scholar Dr. Francis J. Beckwith, who was recently denied tenure (allegedly for "collegiality" reasons) at Baylor, only confirms my suspicions.
Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
First Things on Baylor and Beckwith
Tenure Denial as Revenge
Ashamed of My Alma Mater - Baylor Denies Tenure to Dr. Francis J. Beckwith
posted by Pro Ecclesia 8:10 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
My husband graduated from Samford University, and according to him, most Southern Baptists regard Baylor as "Baptist in Name Only." (Or as he put it, "It's like the Baptist equivalent of Georgetown.")
Baylor is probably the Baptist equivalent of Notre Dame, only without the academic reputation.
Baylor IS Baptist, but like Notre Dame, is a major university. I guess to someone attending Steubenville, Notre Dame would seem to be pretty Catholic in Name Only. Similarly, to the smaller Baptist universities and Bible colleges, the "univers" part of Baylor University probably seems like rampant secularism.
Baylor certainly is NOT the Baptist equivalent of Georgetown (that would be Brown). Also, the University of Richmond and Furman University are probably deserving of being called BINO.
I grew up in Birmingham, and from my outsider's perspective, Samford oftentimes seemed to be out-Baptisting the Baptists. (Plus Georgia and Alabama tend to be pretty darned conservative places to begin with.)
Totally agree that Furman is BINO -- the prof I had for a summer course in grad school who taught there was a flagrant gay activist. I couldn't reconcile his presence there with the SBC.
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