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Most who see the name Baylor University in print think about the basketball program scandal in which one player murdered another and the coach scrambled to cover up improprieties as the media spotlight focused in on the school. Those who observe the intersection of worldview and higher education have been paying attention to what's happening at Baylor for a different reason. The university nestled in at the corner of I-35 and the Brazos River has embarked upon an ambitious quest to advance the Christian mind.

Back in 1951, William Buckley began his career as a conservative superstar with the publication of God and Man at Yale. The thesis was that the great university had abandoned its traditionally Christian roots and was actively employing the sort of faculty who would lead impressionable young people astray, that is to say, away from love of God, country, and family. The young Catholic with the million dollar vocabulary and the truckload of savoir faire had put his finger on an issue that became a staple of the conservative complaint against modernity. Buckley helped raise awareness that America's great universities, spurred on by the success of Darwinian theory and the apparent ascendancy of so-called "scientific" forms of government like communism and socialism, now embraced an account of knowledge that ignored or actively discredited the combination of Christianity and Classics that had once been dominant building blocks of the West.

Since that time, a number of small schools like Hillsdale, Grove City, Calvin College, Wheaton, and a few others have provided an alternative to the assumptions of secular liberalism embraced by most institutions of higher education. Among major universities, Notre Dame has been alone in simultaneously claiming a position as a top tier research institution while retaining at least part of its religious identity in teaching and research.

Eyeing Notre Dame's success and hoping to buck a trend toward secularization that had long overtaken schools like Duke, Emory, and Wake Forest, a group of intellectual entrepreneurs at Baylor University, a Big Twelve school and the largest Baptist university in the world, set out to accomplish a unique goal. Baylor President Robert Sloan, former Provost Donald Schmeltekopf, current Provost David Jeffrey, and several others on a Board of Regents that includes Houston Astros owner Drayton McClane, decided to drive Baylor toward a greater acknowledgment of its Christian identity while also pushing for top tier research university status.

Although the plan called for massive upgrades to Baylor facilities and the expansion of degree programs, the key change in policy has been to explicitly seek to hire Christian scholars capable of integrating their faith with scholarship. Examples of the type of faculty attracted by the new emphasis on the integration of faith and learning include well-known philosophers like Boston College's Thomas Hibbs and recent Princeton University Visiting Fellow Francis Beckwith, eminent sociologist Rodney Stark from the University of Washington, and literary scholar Ralph Wood from Wake Forest. Instead of diminishing the quality of Baylor's faculty, the search for explicitly Christian thinkers seems to have attracted scholars who share a passion for the idea of a great Christian university.

While Baylor can point to its share of successes during the nearly decade-long presidency of Robert Sloan, the ambitious expansion into graduate education, new emphasis on faculty research, and focus on aggressively seeking out faculty who can integrate their faith with their scholarship has stirred up a great deal of opposition from the school's older faculty and retired administrators. Thanks to the broad scope of the change and occasional indelicacy in making the transition, President Sloan has suffered two "no confidence" votes from the old-line dominated faculty senate. After the first vote last fall, the Board of Regents backed Sloan with an overwhelming affirmation. In the wake of the second vote in May, the Regents retained Sloan with a simple one vote margin.

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48