Whoever said, "There's no such thing as bad publicity" should speak with embattled Baylor University president Robert Sloan. Never in Baylor's 158-year history have the eyes of the national media and academic community been so riveted on the world's largest Baptist university. Beleaguered by a combination of athletic scandals and academic controversy, Sloan has been targeted for criticism by numerous members of his faculty and student body. Yet Sloan passed the only test that matters for his job security when, last Friday, September 12, Baylor's Board of Regents affirmed his leadership by a vote of 31-4.

Even taking into account the recent murder of a Baylor basketball player, allegedly by his own teammate, Sloan's greatest liability appears to be his "Baylor 2012" plan. Sloan's stated vision is to transform Baylor into the "world's greatest Christian university," or at least a "Protestant Notre Dame" where research and education are imbued with the Christian worldview.

In his 2001 book Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions, Robert Benne ponders Baylor's challenge within the context of five other schools representing a continuum of Christian education. Benne doesn't venture to predict the success or failure of Sloan's vision, but his analysis gives us an opportunity to consider the history Baylor is working against.

America's leading universities, most notably Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, set a pattern, followed by other institutions, of abandoning a Christian framework for teaching and scholarship. Benne identifies a three-step process: first, these schools abandoned their theological distinctives in favor of a generic brand of Christianity; then they presented Christian faith as a sentimental alternative within a broad ideological spectrum; and finally they excluded Christianity in favor of other supposedly universal ideals.

Why this slippery slope? Benne's explanation begins with the obvious: at crucial junctures in the universities' histories, they lacked a critical mass of committed Christians. Too few faculty members, students, and administrators shared a distinct vision of Christian education. Often the universities lacked the necessary critical mass because they had been forced to seek funding, students, and faculty outside their theological boundaries. Their sponsoring denominations frequently lacked sufficient resources to fund both the schools and their own activities, and failed to direct enough students to adequately populate the schools. Only occasionally did universities declare their intent to secularize. But as institutions weakened their theological distinctives in order to attract more funding, they were "like the proverbial frog in the water slowly being brought to boil."

Without a doubt, Enlightenment education theories also turned up the heat. While secular educators boasted of the all-sufficiency of reason and science, they left little room for such "superstition" as biblical revelation. These debates were most heated within graduate programs, which were often guided by the dominant ethos of their particular fields, rather than the Christian vision of their own universities. After disconnecting their academic programs from any remaining religious ties, secular faculty members turned the tables. If anyone attempted to question this secularization process, they dismissed these concerns as the fears of socially and intellectually backward fundamentalists.