Score One For Reason

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Originally uploaded by Randuwa.

When it was time for me to get my masters degree in education, I did what practically everyone in central Kentucky did. I enrolled in Georgetown College's Graduate School of Education. GC is located in Georgetown, who's only other claim to fame is the home of Toyota's first stateside factory and producer of their Camry series.

But I digress. As a Baptist affiliated institution, I arrived from an undergraduate institution where I was named the senior male most typifying what that college stood for in its graduates. Asbury College is a formerly Methodist school with strong Wesleyian-Armenian theological roots. We all knew who our enemies were, and chief among them are the Calvin-Augustinians of whom the Baptists are the pre-eminent expression.

Of course, I making it sound like the conflict in the Middle East, when it was really a battle imagined by tired old men and idealistic ignorant young zealots (all fought on the plains of abstract ideas; i.e. theology).

Nevertheless, when I first set foot on the Georgetown campus I wondered what I might find, how I might be treated, sensitive to learning the nuances of navigating in these "foreign" waters. To my utter pleasure, I found the experience personally affirming and professional enriching. While there I was appointed to the grad student-faculty advisory board. I was ask to serve as an honor guard for the graduation ceremony at my mid-point in the program. I met exceptional factulty, the Dean of the Program, the Law Professor who taught education law, the Art Prof who let me do some independent studies involving technology and iconography.

So imagine my delight after reading this article forwarded to me by my ex-. From the New York Times, an exerpt only.

"Feeling Strains, Baptist Colleges Cut Church Ties"

GEORGETOWN, Ky. (July 22) -- The request seemed simple enough to the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible.

But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college’s 63-year affiliation with the religious denomination. “From my point of view, it was about academic freedom,’’ Dr. Crouch said. “I sat for 25 years and watched my denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more interested in indoctrination.’’

Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades. Georgetown’s parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even bitter.

Officials at Georgetown had long been concerned that differences with state Baptists might become irreconcilable.

Then, a year ago, the Kentucky convention turned down a nominee for Georgetown’s board for the first time. Around the same time, Dr. York asked the college to look for a religion professor who would teach theologically conservative positions.

“You ought to have some professor on your faculty who believes Adam and Eve were the first humans, that they actually existed,’’ Dr. York said.

Dr. Crouch and Georgetown’s trustees decided it was time to exercise their escape clause.


Bravo for Georgetown, my check's in the mail! Remember children, in the land of "Free Speech," money still speaks in a way that is easiest to hear and remember.