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In the thirteenth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with J. Michael Hardin, Professor of Quantitative Analysis (and former Provost) at Samford University and a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Hardin begins by discussing how the history of “Big Data” reaches back to the 1940s and 1950s, what can be learned from that history, and how the use of such data relates to the rise of artificial intelligence. He then also discusses how the disciplines comprising the liberal arts provide the wisdom artificial intelligence needs. Ream and Hardin discuss Hardin’s own experience as a mathematician and data scientist, how his interests in those fields emerged, and the relationship those interests share to degrees he also earned in philosophy and theology. They explore Hardin’s experience as a scholar at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, his experience as an administrator at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, and his recently completed tenure as provost at Samford University. Hardin offers details concerning how his article in the fall 2024 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review relates to the leadership he sought to exercise at Samford and the experiences he now hopes to encounter during his service as a full-time faculty member. Ream and Hardin close by discussing Hardin’s understanding of the academic vocation he sought to cultivate at Samford, how Hardin’s emerging interests in musical composition relate to his interests in mathematics, philosophy, and theology, and his experience coaching a football team that defeated a team led by College Football Hall of Fame nominee Nick Saban.
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 J. Michael Hardin, Professor of Quantitative Analysis and Biostatistics at Samford University and a Fellow with the American Statistical Association. Thank you for joining us.
J. Michael Hardin: Good to be here. Thank you.
Todd Ream: As a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and a pioneering scholar in the field of data analytics, would you please open by offering how big data, as we often call it, captivated your interest?
J. Michael Hardin: I’ve always been fascinated with mathematics, and I could do it relatively easily when I was growing up. And so as I was in graduate school, I got interested. I was in math and then switched to statistics. And big data came.
I took a job with the Air Force in ’79. And we used to collect data every hundred milliseconds or so on, you know, military systems that would go and maybe a mission that lasts as long as four or five hours. And that data would come in on tape, the old, what would look like real to real tape, you know, but it would be big old spools of tape and you would have to bring that in hand trucks. And then they would hang that on the tape readers and the computer and off we would go.
And so almost from the very beginning of my career, certainly, I was 23 at that time, I’ve been dealing with large amounts of data. And as I went through and got into healthcare and doing clinical trials, they would collect data. And really it was through those backgrounds that I got interested. It just never seemed like a big deal because I’d started dealing with so much data from the very beginning. And so when they said, well, we’re going to have 5,000 people and 10,000 variables, it’s like, okay, big deal. We were measuring 10 or 20,000 parameters, say on a missile system, you know, every so many milliseconds. And so it generates lots of data.
So it’s through those kinds of connections that I got interested or was interested. It just never seemed to be an option not to have to be able to deal with what’s now called large data.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Were there any individuals more so than others who had an influence on your interests or helped cultivate your interests?
J. Michael Hardin: Well, I think, undergraduate, I went through and did math and philosophy. I went on to graduate school in mathematics and during that time in mathematics, I just was at Florida State for a quarter. There was an individual over in ed research. His name was Dr., officially he was James K. Brewer. We called him Ken. He went by Ken Brewer and he had gotten, had the same route that I had mathematics to and gotten in statistics. And he had such an infectious personality about how this would be helpful and things like that. He had a big influence on me in the early days of knowing about statistics and data and what you could do with data.
And then when I started with the Air Force in ’79 there was a gentleman there by the name of Larry Parks. Larry actually had helped get me the position and it taught me so much about how to think about data and what to do and the questions. And so I would say in the very beginning it would have been those two gentlemen that had such a big impact on my life.
Todd Ream: What did you view as the field’s possibility to serve humanity as it was emerging? And in what ways as someone who had the opportunity to do so, did you try to shape the field in such ways?
J. Michael Hardin: Well, the opportunity I saw, as I said, I was in graduate school at Florida State and doing theoretical math and I had really, as an undergraduate, been very much into the cerebral. There’s a line from a song that I like by James Taylor called “Line ‘Em Up.” And he’s got this verse in there or this little line in there that says he tried to escape his body and live in his mind. He comes back and he says, but it’s much too much emotion.
And I kind of identify with that song as an undergraduate. The cerebral part of being, you know, looking at math and philosophy, and that’s how they kind of connected the logic. You know, I was fascinated by Bertrand Russell’s and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. You know, I wanted to look at it but I couldn’t read it. I’m not sure anybody has really ever read it except maybe the publisher, but you know, it just was fascinating to me.
When I went to graduate school, though, I began to get a little weary of living in my mind. And one of the things that Ken kind of opened up for my thinking was, you can use those quantitative skills to help others find out answers to important things, such as in educational research. And I’d always been interested in education, and Ken had had a very famous statistician as one of his mentors, Frank Wilcoxon.
If you’re a statistician, you’ll remember Frank Wilcoxon for inventing this, the Wilcoxon’s Unranked Test and the Wilcoxon Ranked Sum Test and variations on those. But Frank Wilcoxon had retired at Florida State and was a mentor there and he’d been a mentor to Ken. And the stories that he would tell about how he had accomplished things, when Frank Wilcoxon was working and then brought those to Ken and shared those and Ken passed them on down, it was the idea of helping people.
And so, I was in there, I served as Ken’s grader, and I would help the doctoral students as they would prepare their research theses and proposals and how would they go about analyzing. And so I saw within all of that, the potential to really work with people. And I enjoyed that part of it. And that’s what I enjoyed even when I was working with the Air Force. It was, you know, maybe the objectives and the projects I worked on was really trying to protect our fighting men and women trying to prevent them from being in harm’s way.
But then as I got more involved in biostatistics and healthcare, it was a way that I could serve, you know, and give back through some skills that I had. I didn’t necessarily know the answer to some of the questions that the researchers would have. It did inspire me to do more of the math to try to figure that out.
Whereas earlier, I was just solving the problems because, well, it was like solving chess problems. They were fun. They were cerebral, but you know, I got motivated by what they could really do for other people. So that’s kind of how I got into it.
Todd Ream: Yeah, that’s very helpful. Would you share with us the ways that data analytics and artificial intelligence relate to one another? And then in what ways should we be rightfully hopeful about that relationship, and in what ways, if any, should we be rightfully fearful?
J. Michael Hardin: Well, you know, analytics and machine learning is a little bit like a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet. And you know, analytics, as I mentioned when I was working for the Air Force, back in ’84, I went to a course in artificial intelligence. I was a mathematical statistician and, as we got in there, there was just different kind of techniques.
Artificial intelligence had been around since the 40s. It was I guess came out of a group of thinkers and scholars that had worked here in World War II. There was a lot of things that came out of that. And the question that they were trying to ask, can we create a machine that would think like a human? And so, there was various starts to that. And a lot of them involved statistical ideas.
The founder of modern statistics, Ronald Fisher, had created something called discriminant analysis, that if you took a course in multivariate statistics, you may have learned about. But that’s closely related to a lot of others. It is a discriminant analysis is in one sense a machine learning kind of algorithm. It learns how to help you classify different objects. You know and, and then it gets closely related to clustering.
Well, those were all under machine learning and artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence in those days began to focus on maybe just the logical things and could you put rules into systems? And there was a whole area when I was finishing up my PhD on rule based systems. Could you teach a machine? Could you give it all the rules and not have to program them all in, but could you give it to it in English sentences and let it reason through that?
And there was systems built to diagnose diseases. There was things like DXplain and my son and others that people like Octo Barnett at Brigham and Women’s Hospital had done. There was other techniques such as decision trees or classification trees where they were trying to diagnose whether a patient coming into the emergency room was undergoing a heart attack or whether they really had some other, you know, symptom.
Now, they showed great results with some of that, but it was a combination of statistical kind of ideas with machine, with what was being called machine learning. By the way, the heart attack thing nowadays, you can do that with a test and not have to depend on, you know, an algorithm to do it. In the mid-eighties and early eighties, that was very much an advancement. And so it’s that interweaving together of the techniques and how they’re used.
So artificial neural networks, which is now all the rage because of things like ChatGPT, have been around since the forties and fifties and been looked at. Initially, there was enthusiasm. It was thought that if you could build up all the pieces of how you think in terms of the logical rules, you could put that in a machine. There’s one logic rule that it was called the, the either are the exclusive are really that was not possible in the neural net. And so there was some discouragement about that.
But then by the end of the eighties, early nineties, people would decide, well, we can use these to predict, well, who will commit fraud on their credit card? And, and who should we, you know, how should we recognize various images and, and, and things like that? A lot of the ideas go back and forth between areas. Sometimes we like to put disciplines in neat boxes, but there’s elements of electrical engineering when it comes to visual recognition that draws on some of the techniques and discriminant analysis is one of the tools. There’s, you know, machine learning steals ideas from statistics and statistics steals ideas mathematics. So they’re all woven together a lot more than people really realize, I believe.
And so as you get into big data and you get into the kind of problems, I remember when they were talking about big data, I would say, to see data come in on big tapes early in my career, but then they were talking about so many customers. We had all this because we were a bank or a credit card company, is there a way that we could make better use of that? And by better use they meant maybe sell them more products or sell them more services uh or maybe do something helpful for them like, you know, detect fraud earlier, and so doing predictive modeling.
And so I spent a lot of time on that. So in the early days when I was teaching back in early 2000s, we would predict, well, what students might come to this university or that university? So I worked with Baylor some, the University of Alabama some, doing that kind of stuff, did a number of presentations.
But again, statistical ideas, trying to predict. Same thing with credit cards. I used to consult some and I’ve taught at Capital One. So if you’ve got one of those pieces of mail that says what’s in your wallet, you may have me to thank for that.
Todd Ream: Well, we won’t give out your mailing address then at the end of this session. In that sense. While you served as provost at Samford you became known as a champion of the liberal arts. And in what ways do the liberal arts, in your estimation, provide an opportunity for the cultivation of the kind of wisdom that we need in order to continue to navigate the kinds of relationships that big data, artificial intelligence, and so on will put in front of us as we move forward?
J. Michael Hardin: To me, and what I got from the liberal arts education I had through earning my philosophy degree, was the ability to think originally. You know, there is a certain amount of language in any area that you have to learn and we spend a lot of time, I think, in early courses just learning that language. There’s the language of mathematics. You know, what does some of those terms mean but in chemistry or in many other things.
What I learned in the liberal arts and especially through philosophy was how to think fresh about problems, take different perspectives on problems. And certainly philosophy was an opening for me where I saw some things that I thought I knew the answers to, but as we would read different philosophers, they would take different approaches to it. So how do you begin to look, you know, at problems and questions from different perspectives and then follow the logical process or follow thinking to work out what the consequences are.
It wasn’t memorizing factoids or something like that. So much of education I feel like some people think is just simply memorizing facts. Well, the truth is those facts are going to be out of date very quickly. You know, they’re probably not facts as much as we would want to give them that idea of permanency. I used to tell students coming in as freshmen that by the time they were seniors, there would be a lot more things that they didn’t know that had been discovered while they were in school. And a lot of things they had been taught, or had learned about, had now been displaced.
And so I think the liberal arts, if they do one thing, one contribution that I know they make is, is that broad mindingness, that ability to see things from different perspectives, follow those leads where they go and then come up with a perspective or solution to a problem that maybe has no one’s ever thought about before. That to me is so important. That’s what’s needed in the world today. It’s not just memorizing a bunch of facts.
Actually computers, databases, Google, all of those, if we just need to know, you know, some fact, we can get that pretty quickly. It’s now, what do we do with that? What, what do we make out of that? To me, that’s the real challenge. That’s, that’s really the education that I hope that we’re providing through, you know, what we do in Christian higher education.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now about the education that you received and that prepared you to grapple with these kinds of questions. You earned two bachelor’s degrees, one in math and one in philosophy, three master’s degrees, one in mathematics, one in research design and statistics, and one in divinity, but then just one doctoral degree, applied statistics. When looking back, what questions do you think you were seeking to prepare yourself to address via such an impressive education?
J. Michael Hardin: Well first I have to say I would have gone on for another doctoral degree but my wife threatened for divorce. And she said, when you retire, you can do another one.
I was always very curious and wanted to learn. I enjoyed history. I enjoyed reading, but I also enjoyed just learning anything new. And I would ask a lot of questions and, and things like that. So in a way as an undergraduate, the math degree was something that I thought I could get a job with, which would make my parents happy. And my real passion was philosophy. And so what I did there was just take overloads so that I could get both of those at the same time.
Interestingly enough, when I graduated from University of West Florida I was offered the opportunity to go to the University of Chicago. The provost there at West Florida had connections with Chicago and they always tried to get a West Florida student to go to Chicago. And so they approached me about doing that. And what I wanted to do was go to the divinity school. And it just so happened that that’s where the provost at West Florida, that’s where his friend was located.
But my parents, you know, being products of the Depression and having grown up through that, they were not very enthusiastic about that in any way. And so the second option that I had was to go to Florida State in mathematics. And so that’s what I chose. That’s really what I chose or gave into, I guess. Like I said, after I got there, I moved to statistics.
I still kept that love for, you know, philosophy and theology. In fact, I served as a campus minister at Tallahassee Community College while I was at Florida State. And I attended more seminars in the philosophy and religion department than I think I did in the math department during those times and in educational research. So it was just a real, real passion for me to learn.
As I went on and completed, I got the master’s in math when I was working on my PhD in statistics. And I was fascinated actually at the time with what’s called Catastrophe Theory, which is another word is dynamical systems. The world is as complex dynamical systems, clouds, and they behave in very interesting and strange ways that you don’t necessarily predict.
But lo and behold, there’s these beautiful differential equations that underlie all of that. And so I tried to pursue that. There was a connection in catastrophe theory and statistics. And I had hoped I’d write my dissertation in that area. As it turned out, I was one of the few people that was interested in that. There were one or two, but they were just not where I was studying and nobody where I was studying was interested in that. So I wound up with the math degree with a strong emphasis and differential equations, and then the statistics, you know, with something else. So that’s how it all blended together.
And then the divinity degree I did after I had taken a job as an untenured assistant professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. And I would go at night and it took me, I was a very slow student which probably has always been the case, but it took me 13 years to get that degree. I wound up with about 25 or 30 more hours than what I needed because I had to stay under the same catalog, but it was a tremendous experience. It was one I really valued and but again, it was just out of that sense of a calling that I had had almost well, probably even before I graduated high school and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it, but I felt like I needed to do it, but it still fed the learning.
And I learned a lot of things about leadership through the seminary process. My joke used to be when I became a dean, people said, well, now what does that seminary degree have to do with being a business school dean of all things. I said, you don’t know about my prayer life, that I need that degree for my prayer life and doing this job. And the same thing as the provost.
So it was just out of a passion of wanting to know more. And then I saw connections. I, one time, did a talk about statistics, science, and philosophy, trying to pull all of those together. So that’s really where it came from.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As you echoed, you began your administrative and faculty career by serving at Alabama Birmingham in programs such as statistics, biomathematics, health informatics, and computer science, and then served as an associate dean, senior associate dean, eventually dean of the Culverhouse School of Business at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
In what ways did you seek to establish efforts in Birmingham and then in Tuscaloosa as national and international leaders?
J. Michael Hardin: You know, at the University of Alabama Birmingham, I got tremendous opportunities. I started in the cancer center as the statistician for the head of the cancer center. His name was Dr. Albert LoBuglio. And he was pioneering work. And this would have been in, you know, 1988. He was pioneering work in something I think probably many people have heard of now, monoclonal antibodies. Certainly with COVID, we’ve heard about that.
But in ’88, he was working on ways of targeting tumor cells and carrying different kinds of, whether it would be chemotherapy or some radioactive isotope, to a tumor cell because in a way those molecules could be designed, the analogy always was like guided missiles. They could go and seek out those, those cells.
You know, surprisingly though, and this may be a little bit of an aside, the mathematics on how we analyzed a lot of those early stage trials, they’re called phase one trials, revolved around differential equations and how different things disperse within the body. And it was a matter of fitting data, a differential equation. So combining statistics and differential equations together. And so that was really crazy.
But in that example, LoBuglio was one of the nation’s foremost experts. And so I got to learn from a premier scientist, you know, what excellence was. And so as I worked at UAB, it just seemed natural. I was around so many wonderful scientists. One of the people that I worked with actually, their research was growing crystals on the space shuttle and the x-ray crystallography stuff.
And then I worked on a project for which I was head of the statistical team on an evaluation of the Head Start program. Head Start had been shown that by the time you get to third grade, some of the benefits fade out government in the early 90s had come up with an idea we wanted that we would test this this idea and maybe come up with interventions so that you could transition kids from kindergarten or from a Head Start into the public school system. And so there I got to know incredible people at the highest levels nationally.
They served on the review committees. They served on our scientific advisory committees. And so I had them held up to me as an example and, and our investigators on that, that was stationed at UAB. We had at UAB at that time, we had the National Coordinating Center. In other words, we were in charge of running that study, analyzing that study, collecting that data, you know, so that data would be as many as 12,000 variables on as many as 15-20,000 families in 31 states, collected every six months. And it was all done in paper. And so that was interesting.
But again I had, I wanted it to be good. I was, I could just see that there would be a National Science Foundation inquiry into that study and maybe how that would all come out. And it was an interesting time in the country too, because we were looking at what are the roles of mothers in the family and fathers in the family and so many things going on. And that was all part of what we were doing. So I had that kind of experience and I sought that out and it just helped propel me.
When I got into doing even more of the analytics, I mean, one of the things that we did while I was still at UAB is we, one of the most serious problems in the late 1990s and still today is when you go into the hospital, you acquire maybe some kind of antibiotic resistant bacteria, so called nosocomial infections. And so we developed a machine learning algorithm, statistical, that could help identify that much quicker than what you could through ordinary hospital surveillance.
And again, we were solving important problems that was listed in 2000 by the Institute of Medicine as one of the most critical problems in healthcare. So it’s just kind of being around those people and expecting, just knowing that you’re expected to solve these important problems of being part of the team. That was really important.
As I became dean at Culverhouse, Alabama, a lot of people may not know, but it does have a football team and it does get some attention and I often sometimes felt like maybe it just eclipsed the academics. There were many great academics going on. And so I wanted to seek national attention for what we were doing and our business programs and others, and then show how the university could reach out into the community and to the state and, and affect people’s lives in that direction. And so that meant that I would always look at how we could be national leaders.
I didn’t want to copy what other people did. I know lots of people, times people in academics, we see what someone else did, we want to copy it. I wanted to figure out a way in which we identified areas that hadn’t been solved and work on those and really let people look at us and say, oh, there’s how to do it. And be that example.
So I don’t know. All of that together, It has been part of me, what I try to do as a leader, what I try to do as a person. I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve been very lucky.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In 2015, you were appointed provost at Samford University, retiring from that role and returning to the faculty then in summer of 2024.
Would you please describe the discernment process that led you from being the dean of the Culverhouse School of Business in Tuscaloosa to being the provost at Samford? And then what wisdom would you offer colleagues who may find themselves investing in comparable discernment processes in their careers?
J. Michael Hardin: That was an incredibly difficult decision. As dean, I had a job that I woke up every morning just pinching myself that I had that job. I couldn’t believe that I had gotten the privilege of serving as dean of the very place where I had gone to and done my PhD. I also had met my wife at Tuscaloosa and so Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama had such a special place for me. I’d admired so many people that had been there and what they had done.
As the opportunity came up for the Samford position, I’ll have to admit that I certainly prayed about it, maybe tried to discern what, what might be God’s will in that, but it still was very hard. It took me several months. I remember when I first found out that the opportunity might be there, I thought about it and then just wrote it off. They had a very long questionnaire that I really didn’t want to fill out. And so I just put it aside. And I remember and that was maybe in January of 2015.
The very first part of March, my wife and I took a weekend vacation, a little retreat for me to think about some of those things. And she really, we really prayed about it. And as we were driving back to Tuscaloosa, she said, I really think you ought to, I decided not to. But she thought I really needed to do it. She’s, she said, you’ve been prepared in so many ways from the seminary degree. I never really had known how all of that tapestry fit together. As often as said, I could only see the back of the threads of that tapestry and it didn’t make a lot of sense and she was trying to get me to look at the front part of it and see maybe how this is what I’ve been preparing because Samford had just started a new college of health sciences. I’d had so much background in that.
I really was concerned that Samford, though with the liberal arts background, wouldn’t want a broken down old business school dean to be their provost. That would not be looked upon very favorably. And she asked me to do it. And so I went back and almost kind of like the student who is just slipping their homework in under the door at the last minute, I took two days off from work and filled out the application.
And when I got through doing that, I really, as they say in sports, they left it on the field. I left it on those pages, who I was, what I was all about and the vision, the dream that I had, if I went to Samford. In the back of my mind, what intrigued me was what would it be like to live out my vocation as a scholar, as someone who loved higher education within a community of Christians, all trying to do the same thing?
And, you know, I’d seen and read a lot, and I knew that sometimes different institutions had struggled in those areas. And I thought, you know, it has to make a real difference when we say we’re a Christian institution. That should be discernible. And so a thing that kept nagging in the back of my mind, could it be possible to lead an institution so that when people looked at it, they would go, what’s different? What’s different about this place? The way they interact personally, the way they care about people, what’s different? And then there would be the opportunity to explain why, what’s going on. As I think I call my essay, telling new stories.
And so God spoke to me, if I can use that phrase in a way that, I let my application go in and I honestly thought though that I didn’t have a chance. I was very surprised when they called and it was a tough decision because one of the things you had to do to let your name go forward was be willing to let your name be released if you made the finalist.
And that wasn’t probably a problem for anybody except me. When you’re 50 miles down the road at another institution and they, you know, if they release your name as a finalist, you’re gonna get some attention. And so when that did happen to me, I got attention. The Tuscaloosa News the next day when I got announced had a top of the fold story. You know, I’m just thankful that it worked out. I was thankful for the opportunity to be there.
What wisdom I could offer others, it was a time of great personal introspection for me. What is it that I really wanted? I was getting offers to serve at, you know, to be to consider other positions, presidencies and things like that. I also realized that my family was going to be in the Birmingham area. My two kids would be there and we were hoping for grandkids at that time.
And so what was the most important thing to me personally? Did I have to have the title president in my name at some point? Did I have to have the title provost? What really mattered to me as I tried to serve God, what really hung in my head was, I wonder what it would be like to try to serve students in a community of other Christian scholars trying to sort out their life. And that is how I felt like maybe God spoke to me and that was the hope that I came to Samford with and what really attracted me when they offered me that position.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You mentioned your article in the Fall 2024 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review, which you titled “Telling New Stories.” Would you please share about how you came to frame your article in that way? And then offer what you hope it says about Samford’s past, present, and future.
J. Michael Hardin: As I just described, I think the thought for that article was this dream that I had had, this question I had had a great endeavor that been taken on by so many Christian groups about educating, and higher education has just built on so many examples of different religious groups trying to do that. That captivated me, and I wanted to explore that so much more.
As we read the article, ” The American Scholar” by Emerson in our group, you know, at first I thought, I don’t really identify with this, but I had to go back and read it. I promised to do the article for you and I was gonna honor that. Though, as I read it the fourth or fifth or sixth time, that idea about being free from maybe the structures, or I think Emerson talked about the muses of Europe. He was using those kinds of phrases.
And I thought it goes back to something I’d said earlier about excellence. What would it be like not to follow the normal path? You know, not try to imitate. I always remembered something I learned in seminary. Preachers are not so good about doing it, but at least they know the truth. And that is that imitation is a sure form of flattery, but also the surest way to disaster. That is, if you try to imitate that big church and what they’re doing, that doesn’t work out, you know, often. It maybe grows and then collapses.
But, if you go back and look, big churches and many things happened because someone had the insight to realize within this context, with this set of problems, and these people, and this history, if they were combined in just the right way and not so reliant on what had come before, you know, other people had done, not within all of that contextualization, then new things happened that wasn’t expected. And that to me was this essay.
When I saw that in Emerson, I interpreted Emerson as saying, we don’t have to follow necessarily the European model. If we need to contextualize it within, you know, the American experience as I thought about that and said, well, we need to contextualize this within a Christian higher education perspective. That’s how then it came about. And then I saw then the pieces that I’ve been dreaming about might fall into place and then that’s how the essay developed. I hope that makes some kind of sense.
Todd Ream: Yeah. No, thank you. How do you envision then that understanding also intersecting with Samford as it continues to play a growing role in the emergence of the New South?
J. Michael Hardin: As you know, we just had a wonderful book by one of our faculty, Jonathan Bass, on the history of Samford. It’s not a complete history but it does start from the very beginning and come up into the 30s and 40s. I think being aware of that history for me as I thought about the essay, there’s been many times in Samford history, it could have either gone out of existence or it could have gone in other directions.
What I had hoped is that this, this wonderful experiment of Samford, I was trying to call it back to we are here really to be a little different from the world. In my article, I cite Dr. Tom Corts, who had been a president at Samford during the 80s and 90s. And he he had this wonderful Hester Lecture in 2004 that he had given. And there, even more than what I cite in my paper, just vehemently urges us to realize that we’re doing something different in Christian higher education, and that we don’t need to compare ourselves to the latest U.S. News and World Report.
In fact, he was so insightful. He commented even in 2004 about some of the problems with athletics and, you know, and being like that and questioned the fact whether we needed to, as a Christian institution of Christian higher education, needed to latch on to some of that. It makes me wonder, have we really fully embraced, even what Tom was saying, I certainly want my contribution to say, let’s live more into what Tom was suggesting that we are.
You know, we can all compete in those U.S. News and World Report rankings. When I was at business school, I certainly did that. I understood the statistics on how to do that. And, you know, and when you have a football team like Alabama that’s number one, your alumni tend to think that your business school has to have the same ranking and all that.
But in a Christian university, are we competing for top rankings as U.S. News and World Report? Are we competing for the same athletic rankings? Are we trying to do something different? I think the answer, honestly, is still out on that, because I see a lot of Christian institutions trying to chase all of those same metrics. It’s almost to say, look, we’re just as good as a state university down the road, so why don’t you come here? It’s certainly in the day where we’re struggling with enrollment issues, and how do we just financially cover all this?
I hope what my article at least suggests, and I hope maybe it will encourage people to go reread Tom. What would Christian higher education look like if the constituents that support us really took seriously that we’re trying to do something different? Trying to say, what does it look like to live out a Christian vocation within a community, with all that that includes, such as differences of opinion on so many things, do it in a way that exhibits Christian love and community, but allows us to be individuals? And that’s what we’re trying to do. Not trying to be number one in some poll or something like that.
To me, that’s the dream that then the world will go, well, what are we, what on earth are they doing there? Well, they’re doing something different. They’re not trying to play by these same metrics. I think when you play by the same metrics you accept the same assumptions. And I think we have to ask ourselves in Christian higher education, are the assumptions that all the other so-called secular universities, state universities as good as I really think they all do, are those the same set of assumptions that we are bound by in Christian higher education?
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before leaving the conversation thread about your article in the fall issue, fall 2024 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review, I want to ask you about the conversations that you shared with three other provosts over the course of the year leading up to the drafting of that article, Wheaton’s Karen An-hwei Lee, Pepperdine’s Jay Brewster, and Calvin’s Noah Toly.
In what ways did they contribute to the shape of your understanding of the academic vocation as reflected in your paper, but now as you return to the faculty?
J. Michael Hardin: You know, I can’t say how much I enjoyed that experience. I think I refer to it somewhere, just their intellectual hospitality. It was interesting. It was so interesting and welcoming to me to hear their thoughts. I felt like our conversations were always so honest. And just forthcoming about what was going on. And yet we all came at it from different perspectives. You know, Karen was a poet. I did get to know her. I think she offered some very valuable comments on my paper as well.
I don’t know that I really have words to express how much I enjoyed being with that group. It brought back some of the joy of why I’d even gotten into higher education, just because their passion for what they were doing was infectious. It gave me time to think through, well, why are we in all this? And those conversations reminded me of conversations that I had had long ago in graduate school with other people.
And so the importance of that kind of community, I think is something I really took away from that. I don’t know that that totally addresses what you’re asking there, but it was an incredible experience for me. And I will take that back in terms of just the passion I have for, again, the higher ed, Christian higher education experience.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As you look back over the course of your career as a faculty member and administrator, what virtues, intellectual, moral, or theological virtues, if any, prove the most valuable to cultivate and proved most valuable to cultivate amongst the colleagues that you were called to lead?
J. Michael Hardin: I always felt like, kind of putting it in a short phrase, but just to do the right thing. You know, we always, in most cases, know what the right thing to do. A lot of times it’s not that complicated. It’s kind of like, who was it, was it Mark Twain or Will Rogers who made the comment about, you know, yeah, there’s a lot of the Bible that we don’t understand, but there still would be plenty to keep us busy a lifetime if we just followed what we did know.
I think having a sense of just trying to do the right thing. Now you have to have thought through that. So you have to, you have to be fully aware of yourself. I thought through and would know what I would do before I would get into maybe a difficult situation. As an administrator, you know, there can always be phone calls that you get wanting you to do something, whether it’s a favor or something like that, I did try.
The goal of an administrator is to serve the faculty and to serve the institution. And you serve best, I thought, by being consistent. That is, you know, I have very little patience for good old boy, good old girl systems. That generates lack of trust. You need trust and integrity, I think. Sometimes that’s hard because some people don’t like that.
And I’ve seen too many leaders over my time in which they thought the position of being the leader, that just enabled them then to do favors for their friends. That’s, that’s not serving. That’s not serving at all. And I always, that was the one thing that got on the few little nerves that I had left is when I would see that. And it was really getting me fired up.
But I think integrity, you know, consistency, just knowing yourself, you know, deciding what your values were, as I mentioned earlier, asking yourself, what’s really the most important things to me? Is it that title? I one time heard someone say that, and this came from an HR director, but you always want to ask yourself this question when you’re talking to people about working with you, do they want to be somebody or do they want to do something?
And it’s that doers that you want to choose. The somebody who just wants to be something, they haven’t got their ego off their hands and I do think that’s a very important thing. That’s hard. It’s very hard to do that. I still struggle. I mean, I think we all struggle with, well, how do I feel really confident about myself, but yet I don’t become too egotistical. I don’t get to, you know, just fill up with hubris.
You know, I think those are some of the temptations that we have is trying to become too prideful, too arrogant about the positions. So balancing those, but keeping that meekness, that humility to learn. I’ve never thought that the leader had to be the smartest person there. There are many great ideas that come about through conversation and dialogue. And I think listening would be a virtue that would be in that.
But those are just some of my thoughts as rambling as they are, but those are just some of the thoughts that have impacted me as I’ve kind of made my way through these years.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close, I want to ask about two other dimensions of your efforts, uh in recent years that I think say something about your understanding of the academic vocation, so I’d like to ask you to sort of unpack those. But before you retired as provost and returned to the faculty at Samford, you began taking courses in music composition from your colleagues.
If I may, what response, if any, did you receive from students who were enrolled in those courses when they realized that the provost was also enrolled in those courses with them?
J. Michael Hardin: One fortunate thing about being a provost is nobody really knows what that job is. You know, the students know who the president is and they know who the dean is, but what is this provost? And so they didn’t really know. And so when they introduced me in class, I said, well, just check your diploma when you graduate and some of you will have my name in it.
But they were very, very nice. They just let me be a part of it. I remember a couple of times when we were having classroom discussions I would, you know, agree that, you know, the people that would agree with me would go, okay, well, here are, here’s all the smart people on this side of the, you know, great minds and all that. So they would have fun with me.
But it was a small class. There was only five or six other students in there and then me so it’s hard to say exactly what they thought. But I know what I thought. I thought it was a tremendous experience. I enjoyed listening to them. It made me appreciate so much the caliber of students that we have at Samford.
It also made me appreciate again, so much, you know, you get in administration was certainly in the central administration. You know students, but unfortunately a lot of times it’s not under the best of circumstances. It was so wonderful to get to see students doing what they love to do, trying to be who they were. One student in the class was already an excellent composer and songwriter and I’m sure will do great things.
And that was just a real joy for me. So that’s how it affected me. Maybe they just thought I was weird, but it was an incredible experience. I plan to do it again this fall.
Todd Ream: Well, I’m sure it will communicate something, too, about the often used phrase, but often used phrase in the sense that we may not understand what it fully means, but this is a tangible expression of that in terms of lifelong learning and that willingness.
Before we move on from that, I want to ask you though about the study of mathematics and music and in what ways did your background in mathematics contribute to composing music? And composing music, how do you think it contributes to the doing of math?
J. Michael Hardin: Well, I see mathematics having to do with patterns. You know, when you do multiplication, you see patterns when you multiply, you know, whether it’s two times four, two times six, two times eight, you just see these patterns. You can just look at a sequence of numbers and you will try to determine patterns. You know, certainly a lot of our college tests, see how well we can detect those patterns.
Music has patterns as well, say, for example, in terms of chords. You know, when you’re doing chords. There are patterns to that. Whether it’s a C chord, C major chord, you know, it has the same pattern as a G major chord, but it’s just shifted. You know, I might even say mathematically, well, it’s just like translating the axis up or down. You know, I keep everything the same. I just translate it by so many units, so many steps one way or the other.
And so music just always, it seemed, full of patterns to me. I played trumpet when I was in junior high and high school and I did play back in the old days, the little melodicas when I was in elementary school. My parents somehow thought I could learn to play the organ. They got a Wurlitzer organ, one of those back in the seventies. They thought I could learn to do that through study, a home study course. But I did learn, you know, just the patterns and I could figure out, oh yeah, this is how that’s done and so I do see a lot of similarities.
I actually have been going through a great course, uh video on music and math and all of these relationships. And so there’s things dealing with just the mathematics, even how we’re doing this, this presentation here and how the electronics works with frequencies and all of that is there’s mathematics behind all of that. The work that I did for the Air Force was frequency analysis. And again, too, I’m very interested in some of the electronic music and how you do that. And again, there’s tons of mathematics that go into all of that, even at that level.
So they overlap. I’m still learning how much they overlap and there’s even some new theories of music using set theory of all things and so it’s still fascinating to me. So I still feel like a kindergartner with all that.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close, I need to ask you to confirm the details of one additional story I heard about your career. In addition to your accomplishments as a scholar and administrator, rumor has it that you served as a college football coach who garnered an undefeated record, albeit. 1-0.
J. Michael Hardin: Yeah.
Todd Ream: Perhaps also of note is your win came over a team that was led by College Football Hall of Fame Nominee and likely inductee Nick Saban from this institution that you mentioned has a football team at the University of Alabama.
Would you please confirm the veracity of those details for us?
J. Michael Hardin: That is true. The story behind that is that I got a call one day in April when I was senior associate dean and it was from the athletic department. And I thought, well, this is going to be one of those calls. And so I was hesitant to answer it, but I did return the phone call and got this on the other end saying, hey, we’re having a little scrimmage game coming up this weekend, didn’t know if you would have a little time to come to it.
Of course, that was going to be the spring game better known as the A-Day Game. And, you know, only 70 or 80,000 people like to come and look at those games. And so they asked me if I would like to serve as honorary coach. And I said, well, that would be wonderful. And they said, well, we’ll send you some athletic coaching uniform over. And we’ll also have a little get together for Coach Saban over at his house. So just be a few friends. And I said, well, that’ll be fine. We’ll be able to make that.
When I hung up my daughter, who was working on campus, was coming by to pick me up for lunch. And I told her, and she was so excited. And we called her mom. Her mom’s reaction was, my wife, are you okay, Mike? Somebody’s playing this incredible joke on you. And then I kept saying, no, this is true. She said, Mike, are you okay? Did you hit your head? Well, she kept, she never did believe until about Thursday when the uniform came and I took that home.
And then all of a sudden it was like what do I wear to the coach’s house? And so she got into it then, but I did get to be on the sidelines and coach. My joke was, I only called a couple of plays. They were for touchdowns. And so I won. It was the year we went on to win a national championship. And so a number of the students, players were in the business school, and they always would attest that it was my great coaching skills that helped cement that championship.
But it was a lot of fun and we did get to go to coach’s house and while Coach Saban sometimes may appear grumpy on TV interviews, he was a delight and he was wonderful always to me. And those few people turned out to be, oh, 2 or 300 people in his home. And we did get to meet his mother. They’d unveiled the statue at that time.
And then throughout my time there, he was always very kind to me and allowing me to bring people to practice. And I got to travel with the team some, and I would impart whatever coaching wisdom I had. I was hoping I would get a call last year when he had stepped down, but I guess they found someone better.
Todd Ream: The search committee had its eyes on someone in Seattle, Washington instead of down the road in Birmingham.
J. Michael Hardin: Yeah. But I’m ready if they need me and my price, I can go ahead and say this, you know, my contract won’t have to be nearly what they pay for any of those guys.
Todd Ream: There you go. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been J. Michael Hardin, Professor of Quantitative Analysis and Biostatistics at Samford University, a Fellow with the American Statistical Association, and undefeated collegiate football coach. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
J. Michael Hardin: Thank you.
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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.
