Called to Teach. Группа авторов
Baylor University, “Baylor Mourns the Death.”
12. For more about Tom’s career, see Baylor University, “Remembering Dr. Pennington and Dr. Hanks.”
13. Deans, department chairs, the Faculty Senate, the Graduate Student Association, Student Congress, and individual professors and students alike declared in agreement: Baylor needs a university-wide venue that will promote a standard of excellence in teaching and foster significant learning among students.
14. Lyon, Gettman, Roberts, and Shaw, “Measuring and Improving the Climate for Teaching,” 127.
Part 1
Excellence
1
Baylor’s Intellectual Heritage
Robert Baird
When I graduated from Little Rock Central High in 1955, I was headed for a small Methodist college in Arkansas and then on to law school. Religious experiences the summer before college led me in a different direction, however, and that fall I found myself in a small Baptist college in Arkansas planning to enter the ministry. But one day in the spring of that freshman year, my English professor asked me to stay after class: “You may not know it,” she said, “but the questions you’re raising about the literature we are reading are philosophical questions. We don’t even offer philosophy here at the present time. You should transfer to Baylor University and study philosophy.” I did, thus encountering the intellectual world of Baylor. My life was forever changed.
So there is much emotional satisfaction for me to begin this book by introducing the intellectual heritage of Baylor. Let me do this in two ways: first by reflecting Baylor’s intellectual heritage as it was first introduced to me, and then with brief vignettes of some of Baylor’s notable teacher/scholars.
My Experience as a Baylor Student
Early in my Baylor career I had among my teachers Ralph Lynn in history, Glenn Capp in debate, and Jack Kilgore in philosophy—all three well on the way to becoming Baylor legends.
In Ralph Lynn’s history course early in the semester he was lecturing on Russia, the United States, and the Cold War. After class one day—
everyone else had left—I said something to Lynn that seems to me now incredibly naive, even for a college sophomore. “The thing is,” I recall saying, “the Russians know that we are not going to attack them. But we don’t know that they will not attack us.” My unstated assumption, of course: we were the “good guys,” they the “bad,” and furthermore, everyone knew it, even them.
Patiently, Lynn turned to the wall, pulled down a map of the world. “With this chalk,” he said, “I am going to put an “x” everywhere the United States has missiles aimed at the heart of Russia, and an “x” everywhere Russia has missiles aimed at us.” When he finished, I stared at a map that had Russia virtually surrounded by U.S. missiles and a United States scarcely threatened by Russia. What a moment! The old cliché: the scales fell from my eyes. All of a sudden it was clear to me that if I had been a sophomore at the University of Moscow that morning, I might have been petrified of the United States.
But even during that moment, I knew that the lesson I was learning had to do with much more than the Cold War. For the first time in my life, I was realizing that we see things through “colored glasses,” through assumptions and presuppositions absorbed from our surroundings. But if our conclusions are colored by where we live, by what we’ve been taught, by whom we have become, how can we be sure that we have the truth? The door to critical thinking, Baylor style, cracked open.
I also took a course in debate from Glenn Capp, the founder of a program that had become, under his leadership, one of the premier forensic programs in the country. Capp had assigned us to read some old speeches. I came across one written by a 1936 Baylor undergraduate. It began as follows:
On a Sabbath morning in 1914 (the great conflict, World War I, had just begun), they held a prayer service in Berlin. The Kaiser was there. The aisles were jammed. A German minister mounted the stand and, reading from the Old Testament the account of the battle between Gideon and the Midianites (and how God favored Gideon), drew across the centuries a 1914 parallel; and then they said: “Our strength is our God.” Then they prayed: “God of Germany, give the victory to Germany. God of righteousness, give the victory to right.”
On that Sabbath morn they held a prayer service in Paris. The war ministers were there. The aisles were packed. A French priest mounted the stand and, reading from the Old Testament the account of the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines (and how God favored the Israelites), drew across the centuries a 1914 parallel; and then they said: “Our strength is our God.” Then they prayed, “God of France, give the victory to France. God of righteousness, give the victory to right.”
On that Sabbath morning they held a prayer service in London. The King was there. The aisles were packed. An English bishop mounted the stand and, reading from the Old Testament the account of the battle between David and his enemies (and how God favored David), drew across the centuries a 1914 parallel. And then they said, “Our strength is our God.” Then they prayed, “God of our fathers, God of England, give England the victory. God of righteousness, give the victory to right.”
My sophomore’s mind was reeling. The Germans see God through German eyes, the French through French eyes, the British through British eyes. And we, it seemed surely to follow, see God through our own eyes—through a glass darkly, a glass well smoked by environmental and hereditary factors. The door to critical thought, Baylor style, opened further.
Finally, I was taking my first philosophy course under Jack Kilgore. He had us read John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, a text that got inside my mind, into my blood, like no other ever had. I still remember the power of one particular passage.
It never troubles him [the religious dogmatist] that mere accident has decided which of these numerous world [views] . . . is the object of his . . . [faith], and that the same causes which made him a . . . [Christian] in London would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Beijing.1
Disturbing though this thought was, Jack Kilgore and John Mill persuaded me to be honest enough to acknowledge that if I had been born in a Buddhist culture, the odds are I would see God through Buddhist eyes; if I had been born in a Muslim country, the bet is I would make pilgrimage to Mecca. The question of truth and our ability to grasp it had been raised in a dramatic way. The door to critical thinking was wide open. Baylor had introduced me, a youngster from Little Rock, Arkansas, to the life of the mind.
Eventually, I came to see these Baylor teachers as part of a larger and longer academic tradition going all the way back to Socrates who argued that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Socrates viewed himself as a gadfly with a God-given task of stimulating individuals to think, to evaluate critically the principles guiding their lives. And that is what the Ralph Lynns, the Glenn Capps, and the Jack Kilgores were doing for me: stimulating me to think seriously about matters that matter.
But what about Baylor’s religious heritage, its Christian heritage, its Baptist heritage? Is the critical spirit to which Baylor introduced me compatible with a religious culture that encourages commitment? Well, it was also at Baylor that I was led to see the mind as a gift of God and the disciplined development of the mind as a moral and religious obligation.
Quite specifically, I was led to see that devotion to the critical life of the mind is one of the ways we acknowledge the religious insight that as limited creatures of God, we are not God. And since we are not, we, indeed, always see through a glass darkly. Against this background of the acknowledgment of human finitude, uncertainty, and the need for the critical spirit, the Baylor faculty also taught me as a young sophomore that while liberal education is