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Robert Sloan ascended to the presidency of Baylor University as a dark-horse candidate in 1995. Only a short time before, he had become dean of the fledgling Truett Seminary, founded as a haven for moderate Baptists in the wake of the Southern Baptist Convention controversies of the previous two decades. The man who resigned the presidency as a polarizing figure was once a unifying force among Texas Baptists.

When Baylor gained legal independence in 1990 from the Baptist General Convention of Texas through secret maneuvers that generated tremendous ill will in some quarters, Robert Sloan was the man who delivered a memorable sermon to the messengers who gathered on campus later that year for their annual meeting. He decried the psychological addiction to controversy that seemed to have developed among his kin and called for a return to the first things of faith. He called for a rediscovery of "the message of the crucified and risen Lord" in which we find "what it means to be truly and authentically Christian." That dramatic statement may have helped push Sloan into the president's office a few years later.

I met Robert Sloan while studying the ambitious Baylor 2012 vision as part of graduate seminar. He and several other prominent Baylor leaders past and present gave me interviews explaining support and opposition for the plan to take Baylor to the top tier of research universities while simultaneously strengthening its Christian identity. My interest in the vision eventually led to a part-time job with the university relations office, where I used my contacts in Christian organizations to raise awareness of the Baylor vision.

James Tunstead Burtchaell documented the seemingly inevitable pattern of once-Christian schools moving toward secularization in The Dying of the Light. Sloan and Baylor 2012 proposed a change of course. The radical contention of Baylor 2012 was that faith and reason need not reside in separate spheres. Old Baylor had a Christian atmosphere on campus, but impartial reason supposedly ruled the classroom. Sloan and others saw the old division as artificial.

For them, Christianity has content that is intellectual as well as spiritual. A Christian perspective could be quite useful in research and teaching of political science, history, economics, sociology, literature, and other disciplines. Some reacted quickly to say that Sloan and Baylor were bringing back the established Christianity of the 19th-century universities that tolerated no other perspectives. Such criticisms are off-base. In reality, the genius of the Baylor experiment is that more perspectives can be considered, not fewer. Given such an understanding, an institution like Baylor could provide needed diversity to American higher education. What George Marsden wrote about in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, Sloan and Baylor undertook to make a reality.

Although the vision began after Dr. Sloan had been president for several years, he had already begun to implement the basic ideas in hiring and promotion. He wanted scholars who could integrate their faith with scholarship and who had or were developing a real voice in the academic community. When the vision was approved after the turn of the millennium, Sloan's administration became even more focused on finding the right faculty and preparing Baylor's facilities for the future. The result was a clash with the Baylor culture in two ways.

First, Baylor had always been extremely conservative with regard to building projects. Sloan moved quickly on construction all over campus. A significant portion of the university's total facility space was built during his tenure. The culmination of his plans was the construction of a $103 million science building.

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January (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49