Let Us Not Presume: Making Room for the Loyal Critic

Byron P. Newberry, Associate Professor of Engineering and Immediate Past Chair, University Tenure Committee

Excerpt

... How can we tell if someone does not support the mission of the university, short of his or her expressly disavowing any interest in either academic excellence or religious faith? This question takes on added urgency in our present time of change. But if the mission of the university has not changed, what has changed? Owen Lind says it is the interpretation and implementation of the mission that has changed. No single institution, much less any individual person, could ever hope to accomplish all the things that are possible under the heading of academic excellence and religious faith. So we set priorities. We can’t do it all, so we say, 'this and that are what we will try to do best.' Lind has chronicled the shift in priorities over the span of his tenure here, culminating most recently in Baylor’s Vision 2012. But priorities are things which lend themselves to disagreement. I think doing X is most important, and you think doing Y is most important. But this is not a bad thing. Rather, it is vital to having any hope of our moving in the right direction. Healthy debate and respectful dissent are the gyroscopes that keep nudging, perhaps sometimes shoving, the institution back onto its proper course. In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles Evered notes, 'institutions are like families. Some encourage free expression, and some shut down, especially in crisis, and encourage conformity. It seems to me that those colleges that encourage only one line of thought become lazy, incestuous, and smug.' Stephen Evans speaks of contested goods. The religious and academic mission of the university is a contested good in the truest sense. We agree that the mission is vital to our flourishing, but we can have, and should have, sustained argument as to how it is to be accomplished.