Lone Starr
The Eyes of More than Texas Are on Baylor’s New President
by Brad Green
Baylor University in Waco, Texas, is one of the most prominent and important institutions of Christian higher education in the United States. Its motto proclaims that it is Pro Ecclesia, pro Texana—“For the Church, for Texas.” Baylor has recently shown itself to be Pro Texana in electing a native Texan, Judge Kenneth Starr, to be its next president. Starr is currently Dean of the Pepperdine University School of Law, and famous for serving as independent counsel during what came to be known as the Whitewater investigation, which eventually led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
Will Baylor, with the election of its new president, also be Pro Ecclesia?
Robert Sloan & His Predecessor
Founded in 1845, Baylor University is the largest Baptist college or university in the world. It perhaps received the most national attention in the decade from 1995 to 2005, when Robert Sloan, also a native Texan, served as its president. Sloan had an impressive academic pedigree, with a B.A. from Baylor, an M.Div. from Princeton, and a Th.D. from Basel. He had taught in Baylor’s Religion Department since 1983 and was the founding dean of the George. W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor, founded in 1994, the year before he was elected university president.
While Baylor had always striven to offer an excellent education within a Christian environment, Sloan believed that a truly Christian university must do more, that it must seek to ask how the reality of the universal lordship of Jesus shapes and informs the intellectual quest. In Sloan’s words, “A Christian university born out of and still affiliated with Baptist traditions” must
understand, assimilate, discover, and proclaim that truth about God’s world and God’s ways in the world from points of view that are . . . faithful to and thus distinctly defined by the core convictions that shape our central canonical confession that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Sloan wanted to strengthen Baylor’s Christian commitments while simultaneously moving the school into the top tier of the world’s institutions of higher learning.
This quest had begun under Herbert Reynolds, Sloan’s predecessor, and Donald Schmeltekopf, who served as provost for both Reynolds and Sloan (until 2002, when David Lyle Jeffrey became Sloan’s provost). Reynolds had pushed to expand Baylor’s graduate school offerings, considering such a move central to Baylor’s “moving up” in the constellation of American institutions of higher learning. He was also impressed by the work of George Marsden, particularly Marsden’s understanding of Christian higher education. Reynolds became familiar with Marsden’s book, The Soul of the University, and brought the author to Baylor for a speaking engagement.
While Reynolds perhaps never escaped the pietism that had marked (and arguably still marks) Baylor, it can be argued that, in at least some ways, he had begun to steer Baylor in a direction that Sloan would continue and take even further—although Reynolds would eventually become uncomfortable with his successor.
Brad Green is Associate Professor of Christian Studies at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee, and one of the co-founders of Augustine School, a Christian liberal arts school in Jackson (www.augustineschool.com). He and his wife Dianne have three children, and worship at Englewood Baptist Church.
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