November 11, 2002
Baylor points to new faculty hires as sign of its success
___WACO--Baylor University added 67 tenure-track professors to its faculty this fall, an incoming class the university has proclaimed the most prestigious of all time.
___University administrators also are holding up the new hires as evidence that it is possible to achieve one of the primary goals of Baylor 2012, a new strategic plan. That plan calls for recruiting internationally recognized faculty who will combine academic research and teaching skills with a strong evangelical faith.
___The incoming faculty class is profiled in the November-December issue of Baylor Magazine.
___"There's clear evidence that Baylor 2012 dramatically improved the quality of the folks applying at Baylor," said David Lyle Jeffrey, senior vice provost. "It was quite clear to me in several cases that these people would not normally have been candidates at Baylor. They are the kind of people who normally would have been looking for jobs at Ivy League or major-name schools.
___"They were Christians who were attracted because of the clarity of the vision statement," he surmised.
___New hires this year came from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany; Westminster Abbey; Notre Dame; Oxford; Loyola; and the Russian University of Droozbia Narodov in Moscow.
___Baylor administrators acknowledge that tension remains with some longer-tenured faculty, however, because of new expections for faculty to be engaged in research and academic writing.
___Professors hired before 1991 have been given the option of choosing between a teaching emphasis or a research emphasis. Nearly half (47 percent) of that group have chosen the research emphasis, Jeffrey said.
___Baylor faculty, like Baylor students, must be willing to adapt to a changing world around them, Jeffrey said in the magazine article.
___"Our students have to compete in a world that's changed," he said. "We have to serve those kids, get them ready, provide them with a different experience. Wiser heads recognize that, even though one feels a certain nostalgia for things as they were, we have to try our best to help our young folks get where they need to be for the world they're facing."
___The move to greater recognition in the academic community will not be undertaken by sacrificing Baylor's commitment to Christianity and to service and ministry, Jeffrey insisted.
___"Baylor someday is going to be at least as famous nationally as Vanderbilt or Notre Dame, and it's going to have a deserved reputation for greatness as an academic institution," he predicted. "That's going to happen, and it's not going to happen by sacrificing our Christian commitment."
___Those who say Baylor's goals are contradictory are wrong, he suggested.
___"The academic quality of this class overall is, I'm sure, the highest we've had for many years. My sense of it is that the traditional notion that Christians can't be found out there who are excellent in the academic fields is simply not borne out by the evidence. It's not borne out in this year's hiring."
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