WORLD magazine has an article in the most recent issue about Baylor University and Dr. Stephen Prickett, a Victorian scholar and professor at Baylor whose contract to teach and to direct Baylor’s Armstrong Browning Library has mysteriously not been renewed for the next year. I say “mysteriously,” because, of course, no one is allowed to discuss personnel matters in public for the protection of those who are being denied tenure or denied a contract renewal. Of course.
As it turns out, I have a bit of inside information, not about the non-renewal of Dr. Prickett’s contract, but rather about the kind of professor that Baylor University is losing when it loses the services of Dr. Prickett. Eldest Daughter took a class with Dr. Prickett and sat in on a graduate seminar that he taught last year. She could tell you about his scholarship and about his interest in doing adventurous and new things to make Baylor an exciting place to study. She could tell you about the production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was staged last spring in the Armstrong Browning Library and about how much fun it was and how much she learned. And Eldest Daughter wouldn’t know as much about this item, but according to the article in WORLD, Dr. Prickett “helped to build a number of world-class collections, making Baylor a destination for Victorian studies scholarship.”
The politics at Baylor are complicated, more complicated than the one page that WORLD magazine was able to devote to the controversy, more complicated than I’m probably aware either. The chairman of the English department is quoted as saying, “There are differences of opinion about how 2012 ought to be implemented.” An understatement, to be sure.
Vision 2012 is a plan initiated several years ago (in 2000) with a dual purpose: to make Baylor into a first-class, or tier one as some call it, research and teaching university AND to retain and deepen its commitment to distinctively Christian scholarship in every academic department. Some see these goals as conflicting; others would prefer to rewrite both goals and change them into something more traditionally Baylor-ish. Some professors feel threatened by the emphasis on rigorous scholarship; others would prefer that “Christian” part of university’s heritage and focus remain subtle and unspoken. Many alumni, who wield quite a bit of power because of their financial contributions to Baylor, just want the school to be an old-style sorority/fraternity school where they can send their pampered, upper middle class and rich offspring to be finished in the Baylor tradition and not challenged too much, academically speaking.
Differences of opinion indeed.
I am still praying that Baylor will “maintain a culture that fosters a conversation about great ideas and the issues that confront humanity and how a Christian world-view interprets and affects them both” and will “assume a unique leadership position in higher education by adding new faculty, facilities and programs, all while retaining and remaining grounded in our strong Christian mission.” (quotes from the Baylor 2012 website) I think it would be a shame for Baylor to lose or reinterpret out of existence the Baylor 2012 Vision.
It looks as if it will be a bumpy road, and it’s too bad if Dr. Prickett was one of the casualties of the infighting that has become the road to 2012 at Baylor.