December 10, 2001

EDITORIAL:
Hiring, demotion turn up the heat at Southwestern
___Look for frog soup on the menu at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary's next banquet.
___Religion researcher George Barna compares how people handle change to a frog in a kettle: You can't cook a live frog in a kettle of boiling water, because the frog will feel the heat and jump right out, Barna reasons. However, if you place a frog in a kettle of cool water and heat the water gradually, the frog never will notice the rising temperature. Before long, you'll have frog soup.
___The latest news from Southwestern Seminary indicates the political water at the Fort Worth school has about reached the boiling point.
___Some people thought the water boiled at Southwestern in 1994, when fundamentalist trustees fired Russell Dilday as president. In retrospect, that action represented a spike in temperature, which the trustees quickly corrected. But they have been turning up the heat ever since--instituting increasingly rigid requirements for faculty selection, laying down new policies for continued employment on the faculty and hand-selecting key players to keep the heat on faculty.
___Two developments this fall capped the process. To begin, the trustees insituted the office of executive vice president and provost, taking day-to-day administration out of the hands of President Ken Hemphill and centralizing control of academic policy and administration in the hands of the new provost, Craig Blaising.
___Miles Seaborn, a former trustee chairman from Fort Worth explained what this means in an interview printed in the Southern Baptist Texan, magazine of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention.
___"We've been working toward this ever since the firing of Dr. Dilday," Seaborn said of the new position and Blaising's election. "It was a very tragic, traumatic event for all of us that were involved in it, but it's also been a process. There have been folks that got deeply entrenched here at the seminary that are moderates. Some of them have gotten so uncomfortable that they've left and are irritated, but others have kind of hunkered down and gone underground. I think that's Dr. Blaising's biggest challenge, and I've talked to him about how to deal with those situations, because they've got to be dealt with."
___Step one apparently is removal of David Crutchley as dean of the School of Theology 21 months after his election. (See the story on Crutchley's ouster on page 3.)
___When he was elected in March 2000, Crutchley said he wanted to be an "advocate for the faculty." Longtime seminary observers predicted that intention, combined with Crutchley's apparent integrity and compassion, would be his undoing, at least with the trustees most ravenous for change. Faculty vacancies piled up behind the dam of rigid requirements, preventing Crutchley from recruiting qualified scholars. Even adjunctive positions languished, since Texas Baptist pastors who had filled them for years could not affirm the 2000 Baptist Faith & Message statement. So, Crutchley got booted out of Southwestern's kitchen. He can take the new deanship of "globalization," teach full-time or find something else.
___The clear intention, according to Seaborn's own words, is that the new provost and his new theology dean will find faculty who embrace the trustees' fundamentalist cause and root out faculty who do not fully concur.
___The water is about to boil. But the frogs in the soup aren't just faculty who presumed they could immerse themselves in teaching and avoid the trustees' theological/political heat. They're joined by many Texas Baptists who have pretended nothing has changed at Southwestern Seminary.
___All this is very messy. It's malodorous to many Texas Baptists, and perhaps you don't even want to know any more about it. But the situation at Southwestern Seminary is of vital importance to Texas Baptists. We need to learn about it, think about it and respond, for several reasons:
___ Southwestern isn't your father's seminary. Dilday's firing is the most visible symbol of change at the seminary. Others include the high faculty turnover at Southwestern since Dilday's departure, the imposition of fundamentalist criteria for faculty selection and retention, and the trustees' desire for parochial purity. The faculty who made Southwestern legendary couldn't be elected today. Yes, some wonderful faculty remain, but their days are numbered. The water is about to boil.
___ You're footing the bill. Although the Baptist General Convention of Texas voted a new budget that in theory decreases funding for Southern Baptist Convention seminaries, including Southwestern, BGCT churches continued to support Southwestern with their pocketbooks. This year through November, BGCT churches have provided $848,976 to Southwestern Seminary. That is their right, of course. But if you fund Southwestern, you need to realize you're funding the fundamentalist trustees' vision for the school, not the Southwestern that prepared generations of Texans for ministry. If you agree with the trustees, keep writing those checks. If not, you can use your money to fund Baylor University's Truett Seminary and Hardin-Simmons University's Logsdon School of Theology, which truly carry the torch lighted by B.H. Carroll and Texas Baptists a century ago.
___ The future is up for grabs. If Southwestern's fundamentalist trustees succeed supported by Texas Baptists' dollars, the seminary will produce an increasingly autocratic, rigid fundamentalist generation of pastors who, in time, will change the nature of our churches. This is what they want. If you agree with them, you obviously have the right to support Southwestern. If not, you need to consider your church's budget accordingly.
___The water is about to boil. The soup will be on before long.

___ —Marv Knox
E-mail the editor at marvknox@baptiststandard.com


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