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In the third episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Linda A. Livingstone, President of Baylor University. Livingstone begins by discussing the commitments that define the research university and the unique ways the Christian research university is designed to be of service to a world in need. Ream and Livingstone discuss Livingstone’s calling as a faculty member in business, how that calling came to include serving as dean of the business schools at Pepperdine University and George Washington University, and, in particular, how that calling came to include serving as president of Baylor. Livingstone addresses the theological imagination needed to lead a Christian research university such as Baylor and, in turn, how to form staff members and faculty members for lives of service to students as well as a myriad of external constituents. Ream and Livingstone then close their conversation by discussing the virtues that define the Christian academic vocation and the ways that the health of that vocation is connected to the health of the relationship shared by the Church and the university.
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Linda A. Livingstone, President of Baylor University. Thank you for joining us.
Linda Livingstone: Glad to be with you, Todd. Thanks so much for the invitation.
Todd Ream: As president, what qualities of a research university do you find most compelling?
Linda Livingstone: You know, I think one of the things about being a research university is that it really creates a vibrant intellectual life on your campus. You have the ability to bring in really amazing scholars on your faculty from really around the country and around the world that are doing research on important questions that, you know, we hope we’ll help solve some of the really significant problems in the world. And so it creates a vibrant life among our faculty.
But then it also attracts really good students. We know the best students, whether they’re undergraduate or graduate students, PhD students, want to work with the best faculty. Many of them want to do good research. And so we know that the better our faculty are in terms of research and scholarly work and teaching, along with their deep commitment to their Christian faith, the more it’s going to attract really good students. And so there’s just a lot of compelling reasons for, you know, enhancing the research efforts on our campus and hiring the right people to come in and do that for us.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Now I have to ask, what qualities of a research university do you find most challenging or perhaps even at times as a president frustrating?
Linda Livingstone: Well, you know, when we kind of Baylor’s been on the trajectory of becoming more research focused for a number of years, long before I even got here. But when we really laid out, we want to be a Research One university, we want to be a preeminent Christian research university, you know, there were probably two concerns that people expressed to us.
First was, well, then that means you’re not going to care about teaching anymore. And you’re not going to care about teaching undergraduates anymore. And we’ve really leaned hard into the fact that research is a teaching function because our researchers are using students, both undergraduate and graduate, in their labs and with their research. And then they take that research into the classroom and it enhances and enriches the classroom experience.
So we can’t think of research as antithetical to teaching, but it’s really married with teaching. It’s part of what makes universities what they are and it’s part of what makes the learning experience so rich for our students. So we’ve really tried to emphasize that. And frankly, we work really hard to make sure that the researchers that we hire love students and want to teach students as well, and that they’re not just here to do their research. And I think that’s an important piece of it.
And then the other criticism we got was, well, all the other Christian universities that became more research focused no longer are Christian universities. They’ve become very secular and you can pick any, you know, many of the really top academic institutions in this country. And, you know, we basically concluded that we needed to have more faith in God and trust God more than He could stand up and work, you know, can support us in being a university that maintains the integrity of our Christian mission and does really high quality research.
And so that was certainly— we have to continue to make that case and make that argument and kind of tied to that was also the case that people made that, well, you know, there aren’t really that many top scholars that are Christians, right? Like, the world class scholars out there are all, you know, atheists or secular or whatever. And we didn’t believe that.
And I will tell you, that we can support research at a Research One level, there are unbelievable, and you know this, Todd, from all the work that you do, scholars at all kinds of secular research universities who are committed Christians who love the opportunity to be at a university where they can not only do their research at the highest level, but they can also live out their faith in the work that they do and at Baylor, we talk a lot about the fact that we are really among Protestant Christian universities, the only Research One university. Among Catholic universities, there’s a handful of Research One universities. And so it’s actually a very tiny set of institutions where people can really do research at the highest level and live out their faith openly and honestly through their work.
We feel like we really have a commitment to stewarding the resources God’s given us to actually have an obligation to support that in a way that most universities just don’t have the resources and the breadth and and all to be able to do so. There certainly are challenges but we think the opportunities far, far outweigh those challenges.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Clark Kerr, one of my favorite commentators from a generation past about American higher education and the former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, once quipped that academic community found at a research university is defined by quote, “A series of individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over car parking.”
In your estimation, what, if anything, can define the fabric of an academic community at a research university that would prove greater than a grievance over car parking?
Linda Livingstone: Well, parking is a grievance at almost every university with every president I’ve ever talked to so it is not just research universities, but it’s not just faculty, but you know, I think at the end of the day, it’s about your mission. And it’s about having a mission that is bigger than we are as individuals, bigger than we are as, you know, the individual work that we do, that draws us together and gives us a desire to work on behalf of something greater than ourselves. And at a Christian university, you know, that is really about, you know, living out our faith and doing the work that we do, not just for the sake of doing that work, but to honor Christ and to really share His light into the world.
And I have people ask me a lot of times, like how do you maintain the integrity of being a Christian university? And I say, you know, we got, you can have great buildings and you can have beautiful chapels and this and that, but at the end of the day, it’s your people. And if you hire the right people who have a deep faith commitment, who are engaged in their Christian communities or church communities, and they have a desire to live out that faith through their work, whether it’s research or teaching or the administrative work they do, then that’s how you’re going to maintain the integrity of your Christian mission.
And I think when that’s the case, and when you have such a much higher calling than just the day to day work you do, I think that’s how you overcome those kinds of concerns and criticisms that that Clark Kerr mentions. And I think at a Christian university, you have a unique opportunity, even more so, I think, than at some secular universities, to have that higher calling that people buy into beyond their own individual work.
Todd Ream: Drawing again from Clark Kerr here and asking you to expand even a little bit more about what holds an institution together, he once mentioned when he was offering a series of lectures in the early 1960s, that became relatively well known, he argued that multiversity was more apt as a description than university, for today’s institution, especially as a research university.
His concern, in particular, was the reductionistic nature of knowledge that had to be done in such an organization, and he believed that there was probably little that could alter it. What, if anything, then aligned with mission can the story do to alter that and foster a fabric in which university can be an apt term to describe research university?
Linda Livingstone: Yeah, and I think you see this criticism a lot, particularly of major research universities because really, as you get into your research, you can become narrower and narrower in your focus as you become more specialized in the work that you do. And I do think, as you said, it goes back to kind of the mission of the institution and university, uni means one, and so you really have to have people committed to the one overarching mission of the university beyond their own specialized interests.
But I think the other thing, if you kind of go back and look at the term universitas in Latin, and I’m not a Latin scholar, so please don’t ask me to drill much deeper into this than this, but that term means the whole. And I think that then as, particularly as a Christian institution, we’re really charged to look at the whole of what we are doing, and really bound by our mission, which is to serve God, and we’re called by God to do that.
And really, even in the work that we do, how does our research– we argue that all truth is God’s truth and that what greater calling could you have than to search for God’s truth through the research that we’re doing and what greater calling could you have is to then educate and share about God’s truth and the work that we and what we know through the teaching that we do.
And so again, I think there’s some unique opportunities in Christian higher education to make that argument for the university, the whole of the university, the unity of the university that in some ways may be a little bit more challenging in other kinds of settings.
Todd Ream: Thank you. If I may want to shift to ask some biographical details if I may. Now you were raised in Perkins, Oklahoma, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Oklahoma state where you also served as a member of the women’s basketball team and your husband I would also note was a member of the men’s basketball team there, who you met during that time.
Your experience includes serving on the faculty and administration for Baylor’s business school, as well as serving as the dean for Pepperdine’s business school and George Washington University’s business school. Would you describe the discernment process you exercised when deciding to embrace the deanship at Pepperdine and then the deanship at George Washington?
Linda Livingstone: So I was at Baylor, right out of my PhD program, for 11 years and I, the last four years, I was associate dean for graduate programs in the business school. I loved Baylor. Our daughter had been born a few years before that and we figured we’d spend our entire life at Baylor and in, in Waco, and really was not looking for any other opportunities.
And one day one of my colleagues, Blaine McCormick, you may know Blaine, he came by my office. He’d been at Pepperdine earlier in his career, and we’d hired him away from there. And he said, hey, I just want you to know I nominated you to be the dean of the business school at Pepperdine, thought you’d be a good fit. And I’m like, well, shouldn’t you have asked me before you just nominated me? But, you know, Blaine and I were good friends. And I said, well, it’s really nice, Blayne, but I’m really happy here.
And, you know, they called and, and were interested in me coming out there. I was also having conversations with the president of Baylor at the time about a central administration leadership position. And we really knew nothing about California. I was born and raised in Oklahoma. As you said, lived in Texas, so to think about even moving to California was a little bit daunting, but you know, I had a conversation with the president at the time and I, you know, continue my conversations with the folks at Pepperdine.
And one of the things the president told me was, well, you know, Linda, sometimes it can actually be really helpful to leave a place and get some other experience. And, you know, you might actually have an opportunity to come back at some other point in time and probably be better prepared to do some other things than you would be otherwise. Now, I had no idea what path that was putting me on to do that, I assure you.
Todd Ream: We’ll get to those questions here in a second.
Linda Livingstone: Yes. But I thought, okay, I should try this, right? And I talked to my husband, Brad, and he goes like, where’s Pepperdine? I go, it’s in Malibu, California. He goes, well, I think we should at least visit, right? So anyway, we visited and just wonderful people there. I love Pepperdine. It’s obviously a faith-based institution out of that Church of Christ tradition.
And, you know, really felt like it was a great growth opportunity and it kept me on the academic side of things, which would not have happened if I’d taken the position at Baylor. It would have been more on the administrative side of things. And I felt like for my longer term career trajectory, which I didn’t even really know what I thought it was at that point, staying on the academic side was important. And so that’s really kind of what led me to take on that opportunity and to go to Pepperdine. And which we love. We were there for 12 years and our daughter went first through 12th grade in, in Malibu and in Southern California and just a great experience for the whole family.
Todd Ream: And then the move to George Washington, what drew you from coast to coast?
Linda Livingstone: And a very different kind of institution. George Washington is a private institution, but it’s a secular institution, very large, research oriented, doctoral programs, Research One. It’s now an AAU institution. It wasn’t at the time.
And so we’ve been at Pepperdine 12 years. Our daughter was getting ready to graduate from high school. She was going to Rice to college and play volleyball. And I’d been dean there for 12 years. And again, we loved it, but I kind of began to feel like, you know, I’d done kind of what I needed to do at Pepperdine. There were some really difficult issues in the school when I got there that dean had been asked to leave and some real cultural issues.
And so after 12 years, you’ve kind of worked through that and you think, oh, maybe it’s time for somebody else to do this. And I didn’t really know what was next. I had kind of concluded I didn’t want to be a provost. And I knew that some of my opportunities to be a president might be kind of limited because I’d only been at institutions at that point, because Baylor wasn’t as research oriented when I was there. So it kind of limited the opportunities I might have as president if I ever wanted to do that. So I thought, well, maybe I should look at a different kind of institution.
GW called, they really called asking for recommendations and then they started talking to me like really we’d really like you to apply and again, you know, going to Washington DC, moving across the country was like a— it’s an urban campus. I’d never been on an urban campus but again, and my husband was teaching at Oaks Christian School in Southern California. Great school. He loved it. It was going to be a big transition for him. But, you know, after a lot of prayer and thought and just thinking about opportunities, and he’s a historian, so moving to Washington, DC for him was kind of interesting.
And we just felt God calling us to try something new as our daughter went off to college, a new adventure, a new challenge for both of us. And again, at George Washington, their dean had been asked to step down and they had some financial issues. They had some cultural issues in the school. And I tell people regularly at both of those going in it was like, oh my gosh, like, what was I thinking when I took these jobs? It would have been a whole lot easier just to keep doing what I was doing.
But, you know, Brad kept telling me, you know, Linda, God is preparing you for something even bigger and greater. And at some point we’re going to understand why you went into these positions and why you had to deal with the things that you did. So both great experiences, love both universities and have really good colleagues still in those places.
Todd Ream: So in terms of that next experience, then, 2017, you did return to Baylor and to Waco when you were appointed the university’s 15th president. Would you describe the discernment process you exercised when deciding to accept that appointment?
Linda Livingstone: Well, as anyone that knows much about Baylor history knows, that was a very difficult time for Baylor. There had been a sexual assault kind of scandal, crisis at the university. In May of 2016, the football coach, the athletic director, and the president all departed the university because of that. And so the university was in turmoil. There was lots of dissension among the Baylor community. The board was kind of under siege for the way they’d handled some of it.
And so it was a really difficult time for Baylor and they had an interim president, David Garland, who’s a wonderful, wonderful person, a former dean of the Truett Seminary, good friend. And so I, you know, I didn’t ever actually technically formally apply for the job. I kind of, part way through the process, I had people calling and said, hey, we’d love for you to send some information. I knew it would be a really difficult circumstance. And again, we really prayed a lot about it.
But a couple of things: I mean, because I’d been at Baylor, I knew Baylor well. I mean, we were there for 11 years. I knew a lot of the people that were still there and I had to believe that at the core, Baylor was not what this situation was and that there was a lot more that Baylor could be and should be than what they were experiencing at that point in time.
And I think the fact that I knew Baylor and knew kind of the heart of the institution helped me to make the decision to come back. I think if I hadn’t known the university or known some of the people it might have been harder because you don’t know what you’re getting and whether there’s gonna really be a desire to do things differently than they’d been done in the past.
Brad, you should have him tell his story sometime, but he basically like from almost the moment those departures happened in May, and I didn’t even talk to Baylor until probably December of 2016, and he will tell you that in May or June of 2016, he just knew I was going to be the next president of Baylor. And I kept going, Brad, that’s really not going to happen. But he had great faith and he had a great, much better discernment than I did in that process.
But ultimately ended up coming back. And, you know, at that point you come back into a really difficult situation, again the president left, lots of turmoil, lots of issues culturally and in other ways. And that’s when you can kind of look back and go, oh, God put me through some pretty difficult situations at Pepperdine and GW helping to prepare me for an even much more challenging complex situation at Baylor.
And you look back on all of that and you can’t see it while you’re going through it, but you do see God’s hand in your life when you look back a little bit later in life as you kind of see how you’re being prepared for what God’s called you to at that particular point in time.
Todd Ream: In terms of for what you were prepared for, a typical day as a university president, if there is such a thing what duties or activities might define it?
Linda Livingstone: Gosh, you know, I get asked this question quite a bit. There really isn’t a typical day. I’ll just show you what the last several weeks of my life have been like. Three weeks ago we had graduation, so you’re doing all kinds of graduation activities. You’re doing graduation ceremonies. You do all of the end of year stuff with students and faculty and staff to get ready for that.
Last week we had our Board of Regents meeting. So we spent three days with our Regents, which is always great. We have a wonderful board and they approved our new strategic plan, which we’re very excited about so you spend a lot of time prepping for that and, and planning and working with your team to be ready for the board meeting so that it goes well.
This week has been sort of a more normal office week, kind of catching up after all of that. So I’ve been doing all my performance reviews for my team. I would normally like have done just regular one-on-ones with my team. I had a meeting with some of our Baptist General Convention of Texas folks yesterday.
I’m involved with the Big XII Conference and the NCAA, and I have had meetings with both of those organizations this week because of some of the issues we’re working through. I am meeting with some of our donors and friends this week as we kind of go into the summer months and engaging them in some activities that we’re doing. So it’s a variety of things from day to day.
I have not traveled as much over the last few weeks because of all these on campus activities, but I typically travel quite a bit, whether that’s for fundraising or conferences I’m going to. I do quite a bit of legislative work, both in Austin and in Washington, DC, on behalf of the university, as well as on behalf of the Big 12 and the NCAA.
So it’s diverse. It’s interesting. It’s actually one of the things I love about my job, is you, no day is particularly predictable, and there’s a lot of variety in the work that I do.
Todd Ream: Are there any components of it that you find more challenging or difficult that you might be willing to mention?
Linda Livingstone: Yeah. I mean, in a job like this, you do get people with concerns and issues. You have some appeals of issues on campus that some have felt didn’t go their way. And so those are always challenging because you want to try to be fair. You want to make sure you’re upholding the integrity of your institution and your values, but also show some compassion and care for the people dealing with it. So those could be challenging situations sometimes.
You know, I’ve enjoyed the congressional work and the legislative work but it can also be frustrating in a time when it can be challenging to get things done. But it’s still important work, and I need to do it on behalf of Baylor and some of these other organizations I’m a part of, so you do that and you keep working at it. You don’t always see a lot of progress on that or, you know, it takes a long time. And so I think you just have to persevere on some of these things that you don’t see motion on as quickly as you would like.
Todd Ream: So there might be some entities out there in state-level government, federal government that try to rival universities at the pace in which we move even then.
Linda Livingstone: That can be true, yes, definitely.
Todd Ream: You mentioned earlier that there are really only a few Church-related research universities, and there are in that fold more Catholic than Protestant institutions, really only a very small handful, Pepperdine perhaps being the other one in that.
There are, of course, sizable numbers of liberal arts colleges and comprehensive universities that are Church-related, but as a result, how do you and your colleagues discern and cultivate a theological imagination that can sustain a Church-related university and one that’s a research university?
Linda Livingstone: You know, I think that as we think about who we are as an institution, you know, it’s really taking advantage of the rich resources we have on our campus. We have a lot of people on our campus that are theologically trained. We have a seminary. We obviously have a religion department that are important in that.
And you know, we are, we were founded in 1845 by Texas Baptists. So we are Baptist by heritage where, you know, we call ourselves a Christian research university with kind of Baptist ties and heritage. So certainly our ties to our Baptist roots are really important to us. And, and some of the, the core underpinnings of the Baptist faith are critical to us. And we think a lot about those as we think about who we are and what we do.
But you know, as, as we really seek to entrust our Christian mission and with everybody on our campus, we expect people, and I talked a little bit about some of the things we think about in terms of hiring, that everybody on our campus should sort of own our mission and should sort of own kind of that theological imagination.
And we are very broad based in terms of the makeup. We’re a Baptist institution, but we are very diverse in terms of the Christian traditions that make up our campus, certainly Baptist, Catholic, Methodist, Episcopal, Pentecostal, Lutheran. So, in some ways, even though we come out of the Baptist tradition, these other traditions do inform who we are as an institution and the ways in which we engage and work with one another.
I had the privilege of writing the postscript for your book, The Anxious Middle that you did for Jerry Pattengale. And in the opening chapter of that, one of the things that you all said in that you were looking at communities of monks in the Benedictine tradition, you said, “Every monk is considered responsible for the entire community.”
And that’s kind of how we think about it at Baylor, that we all need to be responsible for the spiritual well being of our community. And I say that, you know, with regard to students, we have chaplains, we have a lot of chaplains on our campus, but we do not believe that they’re the only ones that should be caring and concerned about the theological well-being of our students or of our campus.
We really expect our, all of our faculty and staff, our coaches, all to take that seriously. We have begun an initiative the last couple of years where we’re really leaning into our faculty and staff’s spiritual well-being. We want them all to be engaged in their local church community and certainly not substituting for that, but we also want them to feel like they’re supported spiritually on our campus so that they can be spiritual support for our students.
And so we’ve started faculty staff chapels on our campus. This year we added a spiritual well-being day that each of our faculty and staff can take as kind of part of their benefits, where we want them to take a day and really do something that helps them renew themselves spiritually. And so, we really are trying to find ways to strengthen our spiritual well-being on campus, the mission, and to really help everybody in our campus feel a sense of ownership in that.
Todd Ream: Thank you. On what intellectual, moral, or theological virtues is such an imagination dependent? Especially within the context as you’ve described it at Baylor, historically Baptist, broadly Christian but also a research university context.
Are there certain virtues that find that you and your colleagues, you know, need to draw upon greater frequency than perhaps others?
Linda Livingstone: Yeah, you know It’s interesting because we have started implementing across campus what we call an intercultural engagement model that we’re doing with our students, but certainly staff and faculty will be involved in that It’s really designed to help us understand how to work and and engage with folks that come from different backgrounds and experiences. And it is built on a virtues model.
And, and I love it because one, it, it’s really grounded in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. And certainly wanting people to be, do their work and be animated by their faith in Christ, but also to recognize that our hope is in Christ. It’s not in our work and the things we do each day. And then obviously we talk a lot about, you know, loving our neighbor. And how do we as a Christian institution live in our values, but also show love and care for everybody in our community. So those virtues really underpin a lot of what we think about on our campus. They certainly underpin that intercultural engagement model.
But I would also say some of the other virtues that I personally think are important that are certainly embedded in that model and that I think should animate what we do on a campus. I talk a lot about courage and humility as they relate to one another. I think you have to have courage to stand up for your Christian beliefs and values as a leader. You have to have the courage to make hard decisions in difficult times.
But I actually think that courage needs to be married with humility. You have to know what you know and what you don’t know and when you need others to help you make decisions. You also have to be humble enough to admit when you’ve made a mistake. And I think if you’re courageous and humble, that’s a really good model for good leadership. If you’re courageous and given vices and you’re prideful or you’re arrogant, it can lead to really dangerous decisions on the part of a leader. And so I think that those issues are really important.
Obviously, wisdom is critical. I mean, we are in a difficult time in the world. We have to really nuance things a lot and, and manage in difficult circumstances. So I certainly think wisdom is a virtue that’s critical.
And then the last one I’ll mention, it’s really around kind of empathy and compassion. I think we’ve kind of lost our ability sometimes in society to seek to understand where someone else is coming from. It doesn’t mean we have to agree with them, but if we were more curious about people, more willing to ask questions, more willing to try to walk in their shoes and be empathetic to them, as opposed to and again, probably one of the vices that’s a concern to being more self-centered, selfish, only thinking of ourselves that we might be able to bridge some of the real challenges that we’re seeing in society.
So those are, you know, some of the virtues and kind of the alternative vices that I think we have to pay attention to and then frankly be careful of on the vice side.
Todd Ream: Thank you. When seeking to cultivate such an imagination there at the university and amongst colleagues, are there any authors that have proven more beneficial to consult or perhaps conversation partners that you turn to with greater frequency?
Linda Livingstone: You know I had experience when I, this was when I was at Pepperdine, I had the privilege of being on a panel with Dallas Willard, which I was not worthy of at all, of being on a panel with Dallas Willard. And in fact, we were actually reading something he had written and critiquing it. And I’m thinking, oh my gosh, like who am I, reading and critiquing something Dallas Willard wrote?
But, you know, one of the things that he said at one point was that as and I think this was put on by it was, it was a Christian organization that had this event going on, but through InterVarsity. And one of the things that he said, and this has been important for me at a Christian university, particularly one that’s focused on doing, you know, leaning into our research, he said that in order for a Christian scholar to have influence and to be significant, you actually have to just be a really good scholar first and then people are willing to listen to you as a Christian.
But if you’re, if you don’t have credibility just as an academic and as a scholar, they’re probably not going to care what you think as a Christian. And that always really weighed on me to say, you kind of have to put those two things together. If we’re not really good at what we do, and I think God expects us to be good at what we do to represent Him well. So that’s always really weighed a lot on me as I kind of think about the work we do.
I love some of what Henri Nouwen writes. He’s of course from a different theological tradition, a much more contemplative tradition, but I think that’s helpful to read and learn from those that maybe come from different theological backgrounds.
Recently, you mentioned books and things, I read, I think this was last year, I read Kavin Rowe’s book, Christianity’s Surprise, which was an interesting book for me to read. One of our faculty here is really good friends with Kavin. And it was a fascinating book to kind of think about the early days of Christianity, and why it was such a radical concept and idea. And I think we sometimes lose that wonder of what it means to be a Christian. So I thought that was really valuable.
Tod Bolsinger is a really good friend. I don’t know if you’ve ever had Tod on or you’ve gotten to know Tod. Tod’s at Fuller Seminary. He was a pastor for many years and now he’s at Fuller Seminary. And he does a lot of work on adaptive leadership and that in the Church and a faith context. And he’s written two books. He’s got a new book that’s coming out soon. But he wrote a book called Canoeing the Mountains and then one after that called Tempered Resilience and they really help you think about, in a Christian context. This is primarily church-affiliated, but we’ve used them at Baylor. We’ve had Tod on campus a lot. He’s a good friend of us, here at Baylor.
Kind of thinking about your Christian faith and then how does that mean you have to function in an organizational setting? And he’s been really helpful to, certainly, my leadership team, to our student life folks, to our folks in athletics as we think about how we live out our faith in an authentic way while dealing with the ongoing changes and challenges we have to in higher education.
You talk about conversation partners. This may be an odd one, but our daughter Shelby, I told you she went to Rice. She played volleyball there. She came to Baylor after that and went to seminary. She got her MDiv from Truett Seminary, here at Baylor. She’s ordained, a minister as she coaches now. That’s her profession. But honestly, like my husband my Brad and I say, like she’s kind of our theological go-to person and she’s uh for you know, being pretty young and all, she’s very wise and thoughtful and obviously through seminary recently.
And so, you know, I think you take advantage of those resources as well and learn from people that are in different stages of life in different places of life and then we’re really privileged to go to a wonderful church here in Waco. There’s lots of our faculty from Baylor in our Sunday school and in our church and just really smart, wise, humble people with really good wisdom from different perspectives. I think it’s one of the benefits of being in a community where you have a lot of really smart, educated, talented people that think deeply about their faith. You’re in communities daily where you can have those conversations that can think about some of these issues. So those are a few thoughts that I would share.
Todd Ream: That’s great, that’s great. As a father of two daughters, I have to say I greatly appreciate what you just mentioned about your own daughter and how they, how they become conversation partners in ways with us in ways that we might not have imagined when they were three, four, six, eight, et cetera. That was beautiful.
As our time, unfortunately, begins to become short, I want to ask you a couple questions about the academic vocation and how it’s exercised in a context such as Baylor. But first, would you simply offer a definition of the Christian academic vocation as you sort of think about it and conceptualize it? We talked about earlier the relationship between teaching and research, and perhaps that’s a piece of it, including, you know, also service. But how do you conceptualize it and then think about how it’s lived out there on campus?
Linda Livingstone: When I think about being a part of the academy as vocation, I really think about it as a sense of calling and you can talk to the people on my leadership team. You can talk to a lot of the faculty that we’ve hired and staff and they really see the work that they do on our campus as a sense of calling by God to use their gifts to His service in an academic setting. And I think people can feel that vocational calling in many, many areas, not just in the Church or in academics or to mission work.
And I love hearing people articulate that sense of calling and vocation for their work. And they don’t just see it as a job. They see it as a way that they can express their faith through their work to try to make an impact in the world. And so for me, that’s one of the blessings of being in a place like Baylor. There’s so many people do see their work as vocation and calling and not just as a job that they come to get a paycheck every day.
Todd Ream: Thank you. How then do you also define a phrase such as Christian public intellectual and what relationship does it share within a research context, research university context to the Christian academic vocation?
Linda Livingstone: So when I think about a Christian public intellectual, it’s really someone that is trying to shape the public’s narrative around important issues and, and doing it from a Christian perspective. We have lots of public intellectuals that aren’t Christians, but that are trying to shape that from a Christian perspective.
And so I do think not everybody on our campus should be a public intellectual. But I do think that there is a special place for some, certainly some of our research faculty that are doing research in really significant areas that could have a real impact in society, to be willing and able to speak up, particularly if they’re doing interesting research that could have an influence on societal issues, policy, those kinds of things.
I’ll mention just a couple specifically. And you probably know Byron Johnson and he does a lot of work on recidivism in prisons. Well, that’s a really important question. And can we reduce recidivism in prisons? And he looks at it through the lens of faith. That’s an important conversation to have. It could have implications for policy and such. And we need people like that doing that research and then speaking into those important questions.
We have another faculty member that we just hired, Erik Carter. He’s really a national expert on how we work on disabilities, people with disabilities in our society, and what kind of support we need to provide. How do churches need to work with him? What kind of policies do we need to have in place? And, you know, he does this out of his deep faith calling to do this work, but has things to say in the public square about how we need to work with and support and treat individuals in our society with disabilities.
So I could go on and on. We have all kinds of people like that doing really interesting research. But I think that it’s important that we do that in places where it matters and when we have people that have that expertise and that passion to try to make a difference and particularly in some of these spaces we’re really trying to help find ways to support the least of these in our society.
Todd Ream: That’s great. With so many faculty having their own social media accounts, which I’m sure you never hear from external constituents about the usage of these accounts whatsoever.
Linda Livingstone: Oh, only occasionally, can only think of two or three that have happened in the last month or two.
Todd Ream: But with so many of them coming into the their ranks with that already being part of how they exercise their identity and communicate, what responsibilities do we have and what practices can we put into place to help faculty and individuals committed to the Christian academic vocation to engage with the public in wise ways and hopefully also effective ways?
Linda Livingstone: Yeah. It’s an important issue on our campuses and a great one. I mean, we really try to lean into and focus on ensuring that our faculty feel like they have academic freedom to speak up and speak on behalf of the work and the research that they’re doing in ways that are honest and true to the research. And I think academic freedom is one of the most important anchors that we have in academic institutions to ensure that the research that our faculty are doing is free from bias and other things, so we really try to lean into that.
But I think we also work with our faculty. We do a lot of training with our faculty on how to work with the media, how to think about how they respond to questions and issues so that they are certainly representing their views and thoughts and their research well, but reflecting well on the university as well without really trying to restrict them in significant ways.
So it’s an art more than it is a science. And in working with people, we certainly have had some very outspoken faculty on issues and oftentimes on opposite sides of really significant issues. And we try to support their ability to do that, while also making it clear that these are not necessarily the positions of the university on some of these issues.
But it can be a fraught area to work with and to manage. And certainly there are times people in the broader community wish we didn’t allow our faculty sometimes to speak out on these issues. I’m sure you have had that situation in your experience as well.
Todd Ream: Yes, sometimes our constituents keep us well abreast of their opinions on any number of matters.
Linda Livingstone: They do. And, you know, that’s part of being at a university and part of what we, you know, learn how to deal with and help our faculty and students understand how to manage as well.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Our last question, then, in terms of one important constituent or public that universities such as Baylor are called to serve, in what ways do the Church and a Christian research university depend upon one another and can be of greater service even to one another? We’ve touched on this a little bit, you know, before, but as we close, if you wouldn’t mind your thoughts on that question.
Linda Livingstone: Yeah. Well, you know, historically many universities were actually designed almost exclusively to serve the Church, to produce and train clergy. And, you know, we still do some of that obviously through our seminary and we have an undergraduate ministry guidance program that’s really successful.
But now, I mean, the university’s purpose is much, much broader than that. But as a Christian university, I think we still do have a responsibility and certainly we want to continue to work with our churches in really important ways. And I think there’s many, many ways that we do that.
Obviously, as I’ve said, we want our faculty and staff to be engaged in the local church community. We have a staff person here in our chaplain’s office that works with the churches in the community to try to find ways to engage them even more in the life of our students. So we want the churches to be actively engaged in the life of our students. We have data from a faith and character formation study that shows that when students are engaged in a local church community, it helps their character and faith formation significantly while they’re in college. And it helps them to perform better academically. They have higher GPAs. They retain better. So just at that level of involvement in local churches, it’s critical on our campus.
But beyond that, I mean, we have faculty doing research that is helping churches to do their work better. We have some faculty doing research on the future of the Church and what’s that going to look like. We have some folks doing some research on how to manage conflict in a church setting because, you know, only every now and then do churches have conflict in church setting. And so we have research that’s speaking directly into the needs and issues that churches are facing.
And then, of course, because we have a ministry guidance program, we have a seminary, we have students in churches all over this region, whether they’re serving as interim pastors or children’s ministers or music ministers. We engage broadly in the church community. We did that, we hosted the National Day of Prayer on our campus this year, and we did that in partnership with local churches.
So, you know, when I think about how we engage as a Christian university with local churches, it is all across the board, from our teaching, to our research, to our service. We are really working to engage with local, not even just local churches, local, national, and international churches, to support them and to engage them in the work that we’re doing. And I think it’s a really important responsibility we have as a Christian research university.
Todd Ream: Absolutely. Thank you. Our guest has been Linda A. Livingstone, President of Baylor University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Linda Livingstone: Glad to be with you, Todd.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
