NEWS STORY: Southern Baptists Battle for Soul of Louisiana College

c. 2004 Religion News Service PINEVILLE, La. _ With its neat red-brick buildings and green, impeccably groomed campus, Louisiana College, a small liberal arts institution owned by Louisiana’s Southern Baptists, does not look like a tense, unhappy battleground. But it is. For months, the college has been gripped by conflict between faculty and trustees over […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

PINEVILLE, La. _ With its neat red-brick buildings and green, impeccably groomed campus, Louisiana College, a small liberal arts institution owned by Louisiana’s Southern Baptists, does not look like a tense, unhappy battleground.

But it is.


For months, the college has been gripped by conflict between faculty and trustees over whether it has slowly drifted from its Southern Baptist identity.

The college’s turmoil is but another example of a familiar struggle within many church-owned colleges and universities, whether Georgetown or Baylor or Loyola or Louisiana College: How does an institution display top-flight academic excellence and an intellectual atmosphere of free and skeptical inquiry, while holding as a matter of faith that certain truths are already definitively settled?

At Louisiana College, the tension over that question has attracted the unwelcome attention of the powerful Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the independent agency whose accreditation is every college’s first claim to be taken seriously.

A team that visited Louisiana College in September filed a report describing a campus marred by “pervasive mistrust” and a demoralized faculty operating in “a general climate of fear.”

Moreover, the report found, trustees had abandoned their proper policy-setting role and thrust themselves into the daily life of Louisiana College. In recent months, investigators noted, trustees have taken a direct hand in faculty hiring, drawn up a new textbook policy and are rewriting the faculty handbook _ all with little or no faculty participation.

Investigators said they came away from conversations with trustees “concerned that the college’s … traditional commitment to academic freedom was in jeopardy.”

Few people believe the situation will spin out of control so badly that Louisiana College will suffer the ultimate punishment: loss of accreditation.

“I cannot see any scenario that would get us to that point,” said the Rev. Bill Hudson, the trustees’ chairman.


But some faculty say probation is not so far-fetched.

“Probation would cut in half our freshman class next year,” said Carlton Winbery, a New Testament scholar who heads the religion department.

However things wind up in terms of accreditation, all parties agree that something else is at stake: Louisiana College’s Southern Baptist identity, its soul, and how it will look five years from now, accredited or not.

“The college is at the point where the constituencies are either ready to fall apart, or ready to form a new consensus and move forward together,” said Malcolm Yarnell III, an educator and theologian who will take over the troubled institution as its new president in January. “That’s how critical it is.”

(OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Louisiana College is on an 81-acre campus of dogwoods, pines and oaks centrally located in Pineville.

Its 1,000 students attend an institution ranked among “America’s 100 Best College Buys” by Institutional Research & Evaluation Inc. The state Baptist convention contributes about $3 million a year to the school, affectionately called “the jewel” of Louisiana Baptist life.

It is an intimate place. Many faculty members, like education associate professor Joseph Aguillard, are third-generation Louisiana College families. Aguillard’s parents met at Louisiana College. Years later, as a student there, he proposed to his wife under a tree outside what is now his office window.


Its culture is unmistakably evangelical.

Every student is required to take courses in the Old and New Testament and another on Christian values. Students earn “spiritual credits” through required chapel attendance. The Baptist Collegiate Ministries is one of the most active campus groups. Campus clubs are not permitted to screen R-rated movies on campus.

Most faculty are Southern Baptist. And for all, Baptist or otherwise, there is a clear expectation that faculty, staff and administrators are to be members of a local church.

“It’s a very spiritually oriented campus,” said history professor Thomas Howell. “Nobody on the faculty quarrels with that. That’s what Louisiana College is intended to be.”

But the contours of its spirituality are very much at issue.

In one respect, the battle at Louisiana College is a late mopping-up action in the conservative revolution that has pushed moderates out of Southern Baptist seminaries, schools and agencies during the past quarter-century.

One survivor is Winbery, whose religion department has been the target of a good deal of conservative displeasure.

Winbery describes himself as a Southern Baptist wholly devoted to the Bible and free in conscience to interpret it however he will. The range of permissible Baptist beliefs is thus much broader for him than for conservatives who remade Baptist life since the mid-1970s and encoded their theology in a definitive statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message.


“I take an almost nonsectarian approach to the study of Scripture, the whole time letting them know I’m a committed Christian,” Winbery said. Exposing his students to all the complexities and contradictions of Scripture, “I tell them this is how I work it out for myself, and I hope you’ll come to some position that’s appropriate to your faith.”

He said he believes many trustees want him and others to actively evangelize in class.

“The most horrible thing I can think of is a student pretending to be converted so they can get a better grade,” he said.

More broadly, Winbery and most other faculty members believe that faculty and trustees hold fundamentally incompatible educational philosophies at Louisiana College.

Howell said, “I fear what they want is not an institution that educates, but indoctrinates … a place that basically protects students against what they see as worldly or immoral influences.”

MO/PH END NOLAN

(Bruce Nolan is a staff writer at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans)

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