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On January 21, Robert B. Sloan, the embattled president of Baylor University, resigned after months of turmoil. While the tumult at this Baptist institution will require Baptists to sort out who they are and what kind of institutions they ought to support, the resignation has far-reaching implications for all Christians, especially Protestants.

Protestants have simply not been able to establish the one thing Sloan has been striving to establish: a first-rate research university that preserves its soul. Vanderbilt, Duke, the University of Chicago, as well as the much older Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown lost their Christian character long ago as they rose to elite status.

Sloan's resignation poses a serious question: Do Protestants have enough confidence in the intellectual claims of the Christian faith to make them relevant to the educational life of a great university? The question asks whether the Protestant faith is intellectually compelling and comprehensive enough to take its place at the table of scholarly conversation, especially in the institutionalized form of a university. The success or failure of Baylor after Sloan will shed much light on that momentous question.

Eerily enough, a friend at Baylor had predicted this would happen several months ago, after the Baylor faculty senate unanimously endorsed the Baylor 2012 plan—something they had not done for several years. His prediction seemed counterintuitive. After all, Sloan was the main architect of Baylor 2012—the blueprint for elevating Baylor to the top tier of research institutions in the United States while strengthening its Christian identity. Wouldn't faculty senate support of that plan strengthen Sloan's claim to continue to be Baylor's president? No, my friend said, now that the plan was in place the plan's architect could go. Thus opponents, supporters, and Sloan himself saw that he was expendable now that 2012 was secure.

Sloan said he would not have made the decision to resign if he had any doubts about the future of the 2012 vision. "I think the tipping point for me was when I realized that the 10-year vision had really taken hold at the university," he said. "I became persuaded that our board would take up the mantle of the central convictions of Baylor 2012." Sloan will move to the chancellor's office, where he will be devoted to fundraising and institutional relations, but no longer involved in setting university policy.

Sloan has had a tremendous record of achievement in his 10-year tenure. Baylor's student body increased from 12,000 to 14,000. Graduate enrollment reached an all-time high of 1,297. Almost half of Baylor's 780 full-time faculty have been hired under the Sloan administration, including 13 university and distinguished professors. Annual expenditures for research more than tripled from $2.6 million to $8.9 million. There are new doctoral programs in seven areas. Three schools—engineering and computer science, honors college, and social work—have been established. And faculty are now strongly encouraged to engage in research. The endowment nearly doubled, and annual gifts and the operating budget more than doubled. The campus expanded from 450 acres to 750. Almost $400 million in new facilities have been constructed, including a $103 million science building.

The Sloan administration also took effective steps to strengthen the school's Christian character. First, they made a disciplined effort to discern the Christian commitment of each new hire. Up until the Sloan administration, such a process was fairly perfunctory.

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March 2005, Vol. 49, No. 3