Interesting development here: some Baylor alumni want Discovery [sic] Institute poster boy Francis Beckwith removed from his directorship of an Institute at Baylor that was founded on the principle of separation of church and state. As I understand their position, they are not challenging his academic appointment at the university, just his administrative position with the Institute. If Baylor were a public institution (it is not, of course), the case would call to mind City College's removal of Leonard Jeffries from the chairmanship of his department, which was eventually held not to violate the constitutional dimensions of academic freedom. Since Baylor is private, this is murkier (at least to me): I'm not sure how the AAUP principles about academic freedom would bear on this case.
As a general matter, one wouldn't want to see administrators removed because they have differing views from alumni, whether the institution is private or public. But in this case, the position of the alumni may be different: namely, that the Institute is committed (by stipulations in Dawson's will? by its initial charter?) to particular principles and objectives, notably, the separation of church and state. And on the merits, it is quite reasonable to conclude that Beckwith is committed to undermining these principles. If that's the argument, and if the only issue is his administrative role with the Institute, then it is likely the AAUP principles are not implicated. (But, to repeat, I'm no expert on this!)
Baylor faculty and alumni have been locked in a battle with the university's current President, who seems intent, as one alumna suggested to me, on making it a fundamentalist haven. (At the same time, the President wants to improve the academic quality of the university, not recognizing that he won't be able to do both [if anyone can think of a counter-example, let me know].) The battle over Beckwith's involvement with the Dawson Institute is just one symptom of that.
UPDATE: The previous remarks brought forth the correct rebuke from one philosophical correspondent that "we know for example that this isn't true of Baylor's philosophy department which could certainly improve itself (and therefore the University) by hiring: Dean Zimmerman, Al Plantinga, Rob Koons, Mike Rea, etc.... [I take it unlike more run of the mill Protestants like DeRose, van Inwagen and others, people like these 4 more clearly count as "fundamentalist" under a greater # of definitions of "fundamentalist.")"
Good point, so let me clarify: I don't know of a first-rate university with a "fundamentalist" religious identity. There will be a handful of fields, including philosophy, where such an identity would likely be a strong selling point for some first-rate faculty. But my sense is that philosophy is the exception, not the norm in this regard. And the evidence is the absence of first-rate academic institutions with fundamentalist religious orientations. But I'm open to counter-examples.
FURTHER UPDATE (9/23): Further correspondence leads me to post a further clarification to the question in the last paragraph. The worry I'm raising about Baylor's plan to become more religious and more academically prestigious is this: an institution that had a very strong and traditionalist religious identity would not be able to recruit top faculty in many areas, either because their research would be in tension with the religious identity, or because disproportionate numbers of leading scholars in many important fields (e.g., the sciences) are non-religious and so would feel uncomfortable in such an environment. My claim is a sociological one, not an intellectual one--as the example of the "fundamentalist" philosophers, above, shows, there are first-rate scholars who will find such an institutional identity attractive. But as a matter of the sociology of the academy, my suspicion is they are not the norm.
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