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Today his portrait hangs in the rotunda of Southwestern's B. H. Carroll Memorial Hall. Legend has it that his hands are painted inside his coat pockets to hide his omnipresent cigar. "B. H. Carroll was a gun-slinging, cigar-smoking Texan through and through," says Union University president and Southwestern alumnus David Dockery. "He possessed the sort of entrepreneurial, frontier mindset" needed to train workers in the untamed Texas of the late 1800s.

Baylor Theological Seminary was later authorized to withdraw from the erstwhile Baylor College and officially became Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1908. Two years later, the school relocated to Fort Worth.

After World War II, Southwestern had ascended to its place as the SBC's largest training ground for ministers. By the late 1960s, it was approaching 2,500 full-time students. As it strengthened its theological training, it clung to Carroll's founding vision, emphasizing hands-on training.

While there were growing rumblings of liberalism at SBC seminaries, Southwestern rarely came up for criticism. When the struggle between SBC moderates and fundamentalists went full bore in the late 1970s, Southwestern—by then up to nearly 4,000 students—was virtually ignored in conservative broadsides against liberalism in high places. But the appointment of Atlanta pastor, Texas native, and Southwestern alumnus Russell Dilday as the seminary's sixth president in 1978 thrust the seminary into the fray.

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Dilday became identified as a moderate spokesman and routinely voiced his dismay about decisions by the SBC's new conservative leadership. As a result, his own conservative-dominated board of trustees voted to dismiss him in 1994.

Southwestern's trustees tapped Ken Hemphill, a North Carolina native with no Texas roots, as Dilday's successor. Hemphill's immediate task was quieting the sizable minority among students, faculty, and alumni distressed over Dilday's firing. More recently he has faced the grumblings of faculty members put off by Southwestern's tightening conservative grip. And last November, Hemphill "reassigned" the dean of the School of Theology after he struggled to bring some professors in line with a trustee requirement that all elected faculty sign the 2000 version of the SBC's Baptist Faith and Message.

Meanwhile, moderates started their own George W. Truett Seminary as a part of Baylor University in 1994, symbolically coming full circle back to Southwestern's roots in the facilities of First Baptist Church of Waco—B. H. Carroll's old church. Potentially more serious has been Southwestern's relationship with the moderate-dominated Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT).

In October 2000, the BGCT—with a membership of more than 2.5 million Texas Baptists—voted to redirect $4.3 million in funds normally given to the six major seminaries controlled by SBC conservatives. It spread the funds among three Texas-based moderate schools: Truett, Logsdon School of Theology at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, and Hispanic Baptist Theological School in San Antonio. For Southwestern, that means a loss of $700,000 a year, and a threat to its traditionally rock-bottom tuition (less than $2,500 a year for SBC students).

"To this point our needs have been supplied by the gifts of individual churches and by the Southern Baptists of Texas," Hemphill says, referring to the new, smaller, conservative rival of the BGCT.

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May 21 2002, Vol. 46, No. 6