by Sandy » Thu Jul 19, 2012 9:27 am
Well, Ed, you can get the list of current Southern or Southeastern profs and where their degrees came from and come up with a similar list. Perhaps there are a few more "in house" degrees on the faculty, but then, the theological faculty at a seminary is much larger than that of a college or university. Samford may indeed not be headed in the direction of Shorter, but it isn't going down the road that forks to the left, either.
A lot of Southern Baptist related schools, including the seminaries, have taken a much more non-denominational, or interdenominational approach over the past decade and a half. The number of students attending Southwestern these days is about half of what it was when I was there, but the number of non-SBC students is double what it was when I was there.
Schools change direction. Grand Canyon University, my alma mater, was a small, very Southern Baptist college when I started there in 1975. During my time there, the school finally achieved financial stability and enrollment growth to insure its future, which had been in doubt many times prior to that. I always wondered how a Southern Baptist school, with a faculty drawn mainly from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Mississippi, could function in secular Arizona, where the population was booming, and extremely diverse. But over time, the leadership, drawn from the state's SBC churches, saw that the college would have to do what the churches were doing in order to grow, and over time, they did it. Then, the scandal at the Baptist Foundation of Arizona forced the school to dissolve its ties with the state convention. It was purchased by a group of alumni who have successfully turned it into a regional Christian university. It is debt free, just completed about $40 million worth of contruction on campus, has about 5,000 students on campus, and 35,000 on line. Some of the alumni in the purchase group were connected with the University of Phoenix, and brought some of their concepts to Grand Canyon, using them in a Christian atmosphere. I think that's probably the future for most small, Christian, denominationally-affiliated institutions of higher education. Remaining theologically conservative, especially in the Bible (not "religion") department has helped the school attract students from a growing number of non-denominational churches.