The Baylor board of regents voted May 17 to amend the university’s longstanding mission statement.
The traditional formulation of “Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana” now will include “Pro Mundo.”
The university’s president, Linda Livingstone, praised the change in this way: “Now that Baylor has risen to a Christian Research 1 university, we have an opportunity to shine God’s light around the world and serve others in even more significant ways.”
She went on to argue Baylor “must prepare [students] to lead now and into the future in an ever-changing global environment.”
At first glance, this change might seem laudable or, at the least, unimportant. A deeper reflection, though, will show why the change is misguided for two reasons.
Baylor’s always been globally minded
The first is Baylor always has been oriented toward forming students in the tradition of Christian service that knows no national boundaries.
Baylor’s mission statement reads as follows: “The mission of Baylor University is to educate men and women for worldwide Christian leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community.”
Even more notable is the university’s long tradition of turning out, not just missionaries and clergy, but civil servants, leaders in education and servant-hearted business leaders.
I grew up in Waco and attended Baylor from 2006 to 2010. During my years as a Baylor student, the Christian ideals of service, humility and self-reflection permeated classrooms and the larger campus environment.
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Baylor has done more to form my spiritual life, personal character and professional ethos than any other organization in which I was formed.
After leaving Baylor, I went on to earn degrees from two other universities and now have taught at several more. These institutions vary in size, region and mission, but none of them has the missional coherence of Baylor.
Baylor, like all institutions, has plenty to improve on, but its innate sense of mission is one of its strong suits.
Baylor should maintain its particularity
The second, and more important, reason the motto update is misguided is it obscures the particulars that make Baylor unique.
Baylor should serve the world, yes, but it cannot do it in a generic way. Baylor is a Baptist and Texas university, animated by the particular strengths and weaknesses that entails.
In the same way each person should serve his or her community by using God-given gifts as well as limitations, each institution of higher education should look to carry out the thing it is best suited to accomplish.
Baylor is many things: The oldest university in Texas, the foremost Baptist university in the world, and a medium-sized, family-like community in Central Texas. It is from those particularities, not in spite of them, that Baylor’s service to the world flows.
Baylor’s shifting focus
In recent years, Baylor, like many universities, has made the decision to prioritize standing in national and conventional metrics over and against emphasizing its distinctive identity. The university’s administration has made big pushes to achieve “Research 1 (R1)” status to increase external grant funding and to focus more and more on athletic success.
A “Research 1” university is one the Carnegie Foundation recognizes as having “very high research activity.” The designation is given to universities that meet a set of quantitative criteria in areas such as type and amount of research, external grants and Ph.D. degrees earned.
There are arguments as to how each of these things can benefit Baylor, but none of them touch the soul of the Baylor family.
Just as, for example, the University of Texas owes a primary debt of service to the people of the State of Texas, Baylor first ought to concern itself with the well-being of the Baptist tradition, Texas and the United States, and its own students, faculty and alumni. Baylor cannot be, and should not try to be, everything to everyone.
What makes Baylor distinct
It is not just our unique customs that make Baylor what it is—the homecoming parade, the fondness for our live bears or the nostalgia we associate with Dr Pepper hour. These are symptoms, not drivers, of the intense attachment Baylor people feel for our university.
Baylor can only achieve its most important goals insofar as it maintains its particular communal ethos. The reason so many of us—graduates, employees and alumni by choice—love Baylor so dearly is because it formed us in a way and in a style no other university could have done.
Baylor ought not isolate itself from the broader world of higher education. And Baylor people should not think we are the only community with something special to offer the world.
Being a good citizen and a respectable participant in wider society, though, does not depend on reducing and obscuring what makes us special. On the contrary, the more Baylor is itself and is comfortable being itself, the more good it will do to those it owes—the church, Texas, America and, yes, the world.
The ‘Immortal Message’
In 1931, as he was dying, then-Baylor president Samuel Palmer Brooks penned a letter to the graduating class. He addressed this message, soon to become famous among Baylor’s people, as the “Immortal Message.”
The culmination of the message goes like this: “Build upon the foundations here the great school of which I have dreamed, so that she may touch and mold the lives of future generations and help to fit them for life here and hereafter. … To you I hand the torch.”
During my Baylor days, I worked summers as a student orientation leader. One of my bosses then was fond of coaching us this way: “When we talk with prospective students, we need to put our best foot forward, but we need to make sure it is our foot, Baylor’s foot.”
To President Livingstone and the Baylor Board of Regents, I respectfully request we ground our globe-facing service firmly in the specifics that make Baylor the one-of-a-kind place it has been. Build upon these foundations, not just a great school, but the great school Baylor can be.
John Kitch II is a 2010 graduate of Baylor University and a lecturer in Texas State University’s Department of Political Science. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.
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