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In the thirty-ninth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Charles W. Pollard, President of John Brown University. Pollard opens by sharing how his vocation was shaped by the study of law and the study of English. Each practice of study allowed Pollard to cultivate his gifts in ways that made it possible for him to navigate the created order while also being of service to others. He then explores how mentors such as his father, fellow students, and teachers contributed to his vocational formation. Pollard shares how those seemingly disparate forms of vocational formation converged through service he offered on various organizational boards and now for over two decades has offered as president of John Brown University. As a president, Pollard discusses how he views himself as a scholar-practitioner who, despite the demands for his time, still regularly co-teaches a course. He also discusses how he views philanthropy as a practice of storytelling and board service as the cultivation of fiduciary community. Pollard then closes by sharing how the university and the Church can be of even greater service to one another in the years to come.
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 Charles W. Pollard, President of John Brown University. Thank you for joining us.
Charles W. Pollard: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be on your show.
Todd Ream: John Brown University identifies with and primarily serves the global interdenominational Protestant and evangelical church. Over the course of your 21-years as president, in what ways, if any, has the John Brown community needed to assess and clarify how distinctive— such as global, interdenominational Protestant, and in particularly evangelical, are defined.
Charles W. Pollard: Sure. Thank you for that question. I mean, we’ve been in that evangelical tradition for a long time. One of our historical moments was when John Brown Jr. invited Billy Graham to come to campus and Bob Jones, the president of Bob Jones University, was upset with us because we had made a move towards evangelicalism and away from fundamentalism. So our statement of faith came from the National Association of Evangelicals. We were charter members of ECFA, of the CCCU, so this is a long history of being an evangelical institution.
But as an interdenominational institution we do think we have to help clarify what that means because we don’t have a denomination that’s doing that for us. And so we are in the constant tradition of clarifying how we think about that, so over the last 20-years, I mean, particularly in the last 10 as we’ve had cultural issues about sexuality, we’ve had cultural issues about race we have sought to, to clarify that in what we call our institutional commitments. And those have been things that we’ve processed with some faculty and staff with the cabinet, but most importantly with the board as we think about understanding our mission.
And so we, one of our phrases, is clarity is compassion. We want to make sure that students and parents that are coming here know who we are. And particularly in those institutional commitments, we’re answering the questions that they’re asking. We could make statements about lots and lots and lots of things, but we’ve reserved ourselves to asking questions about what our prospective families are asking about the nature of identity.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In what ways, if any, has the John Brown community also needed to assess and clarify how these distinctives then intersect with culture?
Charles W. Pollard: Sure. So, I mean, I think one of the important things to understand for us at least, is that the term evangelical is clearly taken on a political tone in the United States. I think it’s one of the scholars says 40% of the people describe themselves as evangelical never darken the door of a church. Those are not evangelicals in our understanding of evangelicals. So I often will say we are evangelical in terms of its theological sense and just sort of Bebbington’s classic definition of evangelical, not in the political sense.
But also there’s a, there’s a perception in North America that evangelical is sort of a, a white evangelical as well, whereas, evangelicals are really, it’s a, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. 30% of the world is Christian, about 25% of that is evangelical. It’s mostly in the Global South. And our brothers and sisters in the Global South and in China love the term evangelicals.
So I’m not ready to abandon it here in North America just because it has a problem if the majority of people that are evangelical find this to be a very useful term to define how they understand the faith. So that’s another place where we’ve had to define. I think in terms of what’s happened after the George Floyd, we had to help to define what it is, what we mean by intercultural engagement and diversity. And it’s a very broad definition in our understanding because we think all human beings are made in the image of God.
But we also think it’s a deeply, deeply biblical concept. You know, this is from the Trinity and creation, all the way through the prophets most of Christ’s ministries crossing almost every boundary line of identity that there is. And then we will, Paul says the mystery of the Gospel is it’s going to go both to Greeks and to the Jews. And then we have obviously Revelation 7. And so it’s a big, deeply biblical concept, not a social, cultural, political concept when we talk about intercultural engagement and, and diversity on campus.
So those have just been responses to questions that we’re getting, but it’s, those questions come out of cultural conflict that’s happening in, particularly in North America.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I’d like to ask a little bit more now about how theology is done in an interdenominational context. So John Brown was founded in 1919 by the evangelist John Brown Sr. John Brown University today is a Christ-centered, biblically faithful university that educates people to honor God and serve others.
As an interdenominational institution, how does the university theologically come to terms with what it means to be Christ-centered and then also biblically faithful?
Charles W. Pollard: Sure. I mean, there’s some practical things. We ask every faculty and staff to sign a statement of faith that lays out seven again, it comes from the National Association of Evangelicals. And so those are like the foundational truths that we ask people to affirm.
We also have employee expectations, community covenant for our students. And again, many of those are basically the Christian sexual ethic but also other ethics about charity, about honesty, about taking care of the poor. So those are things that we are just part of our institutional documents.
We do other things that we seek to center on those core principles. For one thing, for instance, we ask every person who speaks in chapel to speak from a biblical text. We don’t want people to come and give a review of their newest book. We always will study typically a book of the Bible in each semester. So we do a New Testament book in the fall and an Old Testament book in the spring, and our internal speakers will take that text throughout the semester.
So we have 10 or 15 different internal speakers, including myself and the chaplain. But we’ll focus on Luke or we’ll focus on James or something. So, and we’ll, and we’ll do it in order. We don’t jump around. We’re just gonna say there is a historical context for every scriptural passage, and we wanna do that in the context of that passage for students as we do it.
There’s other things we do. We try to do a gateway class, which is for our freshmen, and it introduces them to the idea of an interdenominational evangelical global Protestant institution, but also the project of Christian higher education. What is this about? What, why is this different than going to University of Arkansas?
We have a similar thing for a new faculty where we a new faculty member gets a course release in the, in the fall, their first year. And they’re involved in a development opportunity that both introduces them to JBU, but then also the larger project in the history of the institution. So that’s another way that we seek to try to do that.
And then we just, we’ll bring in people. We brought in Mark Yarhouse, for instance, to talk to the community at our opening faculty and staff probably 12, 15 years ago about the understanding of how Christian, how Christian responds to same-sex attraction and those sorts of things, and then had ongoing conversations.
This past fall, we read Jonathan Haught’s book, Ancient Generation, but also a Westmont Scholar Felicia song called Restless Devices, which is more of a theological understanding about how to respond to technology. So there’s just, it’s a constant nurturing of our identity, I would say with faculty, staff, and students. We have frequent prayer meetings on campus that are run by departments. Our students are required to take 11 hours of Bible or Christian formation. You know, so there’s just a variety of places.
One of the things that we’ve done most recently is that we’ve gotten a Templeton Grant for our faculty to speak with each other about intellectual Christian virtues that they’re trying to teach, things like perseverance, like honesty, like integrity, and it was a wonderful thing for actually for biologists to talk to English professors about how they do that differently in their different disciplines. And so we’re very appreciative of that support.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Sounds like a wonderful project and in the age in which we live, a very needed and widely recognized effort in terms of that need. Thank you.
I want to transition now to asking you some biographical details. You earned an undergraduate degree in English from Wheaton College and then a Juris Doctorate from Harvard University. While some may call their formal education complete, at that point, you then went on and earned an MA in English from the University of Oxford and a PhD in English from the University of Virginia.
Prior to your appointment as President at John Brown, you practiced corporate and tax law in Chicago with Latham and Watkins, and served on the English faculty at what is now Calvin University. Will you please describe the pathways of discernment you followed as an attorney and then the pathways of discernment you followed as an English scholar?
Charles W. Pollard: I wish I was more sophisticated about following God’s plan. When I was a senior in college, I didn’t know whether I wanted to do teach or I wanted to go into law. So I literally, I took the GRE and I took the LSAT and I did better on the LSAT. So I thought I should go to law school. I mean, that was about as sophisticated as it was.
I went to law school. I love law school. One of the greatest parts about law school for me was there was an interdenominational Christian fellowship that my wife and I helped lead for two years and friends from across different denominational traditions that really loved Jesus and were part of that law school experience.
At the end of that time, I had the opportunity— I only applied to Oxford. It was the only place I was encouraged by some of my mentors and my family, and I got in and so my law firm is actually very gracious. They said, we’ll wait for you for two years. We need lawyers whenever they can come. And so I didn’t have to give up my job. And I, and I went to England for two years.
And then I went and practiced law because I knew that in order to understand the value of law, you needed to practice it for a while, not just study it. But then I had this throughout my career, I’ve had this longing to teach and teach and write. And so I took a big, a big breath and left the law firm and went back to grad school.
Most of the people in my PhD program initially thought I must have been disbarred or something. They couldn’t understand why would leave a, you know, a great job for going into English when there was no jobs. And after a couple months, I wasn’t quite sure if I made the right decision.
But it wasn’t until my second year actually when I started to teach. I still remember Janice and Terry, two of my students, who really didn’t have much preparation as undergrad, as high school students. And I was teaching them writing and when the light bulbs went off in their heads and they finally understood how the language worked and they just excelled, I said, this I can do for the rest of my life. And so I’ve kind of went between law and then English and law and then English and then law and English.
I loved teaching at Calvin but in my second or third year there I was asked to be on the school board of my local Christian school. And after at the end of the first board meeting the board chair resigned and I’d been elected the board chair. At the next meeting the board decided to sell the school and have a 12 and a half million dollars capital capital campaign. And the next meeting, the development director resigned.
And so for about three years while I was teaching at Calvin, I ran a capital campaign for a local Christian school, and I loved it. I woke up thinking about that project, uh. And I also, so I love the kind of the fundraising side, but I also loved teaching and research as I was an English faculty.
So when the call came to think about coming to JBU I had already been prepared a bit to say that I love both sides of that. The thing about law school that’s great is it teaches you how to identify the issue: what is the most important thing that you should be focusing on? And I still use that all the time. I use the law also as I manage our outside firms and as I think about when do we go to a lawyer and when do we don’t?
On the other hand, I love English. I love poetry. And I love the beauty of it. And I still love teaching. And so my wife and I still teach once a year. And so this job enables me to bring both of those things together in a way that’s just been really a gift.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I was going to ask a follow-up question, and you just mentioned briefly there that you and your wife teach a course once a year. Can you tell me a little bit more about the teaching that you do on campus?
Charles W. Pollard: It’s not the most rigorous course, but it’s a course that we love, so we call it “Reading, Eating, and Thinking.” So the students come to our house, they make dinner with us, we sit down and we have dinner. And then we read some novels or poetry that I just wanted to read again for some time. So this semester we’re doing Frederick Buechner’s Godric, and we’re doing Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. And we’re talking about what does it mean to be a saint? And it’s with honor students.
In this role, I meet a lot of students, but I don’t get to know many students deeply because it’s more of a transactional relationship. This class allows me to get to know students both through dinner time, but also then through discussing the literature.
So we kind of team teach it. I mean, I teach the class and she organizes the meals and that’s how we organize it. But it’s been a real gift. And to be honest, it’s a highlight of my week because I have really bright students that teach me new things about books I’ve read for a long time in my life.
Todd Ream: Yeah. I have to ask a very practical question here at this point. How do you fit that class into your schedule? I assume it occurs in an evening, one day a week.
Charles W. Pollard: It includes in the evening, one day, well, it, and it’s every other week, and it has to be arranged around my schedule, so, sometimes it might be two weeks in a row and then we don’t meet for two weeks. So the travel schedule. So I usually can get eight Tuesdays a semester that I can commit to be there. It’s an eight class period, and so it’s a one-hour class. It’s a part of the honors program, which has a little bit of flexibility.
And it is, again, the students are really good and we have wonderful conversations, but it isn’t the most rigorous class they probably have at their time at JBU. I don’t ask them to write a 20-page paper or anything like that.
Todd Ream: But it comes with dinner too, so this has got to be a large bonus.
Charles W. Pollard: Usually that is why most people sign up and what gets the highest teaching evaluations is the dinners, so.
Todd Ream: Well, sounds like a wonderful experience for young people.
I want to go back and ask you, you mentioned mentors and mentors who gave you advice along the way. Can you speak in particular, to whom those mentors were, what kind of advice they gave you in more, in greater detail?
Charles W. Pollard: Sure. So probably the first and foremost would be my father. My father was a lawyer himself. He worked as a private attorney and then served at Wheaton College as their, in those days, he was both their advancement officer and their chief financial officer. They had combined roles, and this was in the early 70s. He worked at Service Master, which was the largest service company at one time and was their CEO and served on Wheaton’s board for probably 30 years.
And so when I first took this job, he was invaluable for me to ask all the dumb questions about what I didn’t know because he had been both the leader of an organization, but also intimately involved in the governance of one of our CCCU schools. And so you know, and there’s good and bad about having your father be a mentor. Sometimes it’s hard to say no to him, but he was invaluable. A deep man of faith actively involved in the Billy Graham Association, actively involved in a variety of nonprofits and really helped me as I thought about the evangelical world in, in many great ways. So he was one.
Second would’ve been Jerry Hawthorne, who was my Greek professor in college. He just loved teaching. And you know, as many people that get into academics, you fall in love with a type of teacher and you say, I want to be like him. And I wanted to be like Jerry and I think the ways in which he taught, he would meet with me for pretty much the 20, 25-years after I was in school. We’d have breakfast and he would encourage me, never, never, you know, sought to direct, but would always help to encourage my desire and vocation to teach. And that was, that was really wonderful. Those were probably my two most important mentors, I would say.
Then there’s friends, which are our mentor in a different way. So when I was in Oxford, I met Michael Spence, who was previously the vice Chancellor of University of Sydney and now currently is the Vice Chancellor of University College in London. And it was one of those C.S. Lewis moments. We met in a Bible study, where it was like, oh no, you too think about things this way. And he was instrumental in helping us through grief after loss of my son and through other things. And we still talk as much as we possibly can given our schedules.
And then we have this group of Christian college presidents that Barry Corey and I helped to start. We meet at a hotel in Colorado and it’s about 10 of us. And we meet for a spiritual retreat once a year. And we take one session on business. The rest is how are we keeping our marriages together? How are we thinking about our spiritual lives? How are we thinking about sustaining ourselves? So it’s been a place of deep friendship in a job that can be pretty lonely.
And even when I go to conferences that I did last week, we try to get together and, and it’s a place where people instantaneously understand the nature of what your life is like and can sympathize with it. So it’s been a very fruitful thing for us.
And then I think I would say the other real institutional or friendship would be Shirley Hoogstra. She was the president of the CCCU, has just retired. I was part of the board that hired her. I was her board chair for the first three or four years of her time and have really admired her leadership and, and we have grown and deepened friendship over that period of time.
Todd Ream: You mentioned your love for English and some of the authors that you’ve read and that you’re reading with students through your course. In terms of the insights that perhaps you have utilized in terms of discernment, who are the authors, whom you turn to with some irregularity or frequency?
Charles W. Pollard: Sure. I mean I love poetry. So some of our poets, so you know, T.S. Elliot’s line and Ash Wednesday teach me to care and not to care. Teach me to sit still. There’s a lot of times as the president, you gotta figure out what you really should care about and what you should just let go and that you should find some time to sit still. You know, Gerard Manley Hopkins in one of his great poems, talks about the world being charged with the grandeur of God. How do I help students see the beauty that’s all around them in ways that they might just miss as they’re going along?
I love people like Frederick Buechner, who I’m teaching. I was a 20th-century scholar when I was more of a scholar, so I love James Joyce. I love Virginia Woolf Salman Rushdie’s novel, um A Midnight’s Children, is one of the greatest books to teach. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. So there’s a variety of things.
I try now increasingly to like, I’m teaching Tim Keller’s the Meaning of Marriage at church, and I’ve picked out marriage poems that I try to use to illustrate and to help people see something from a different perception. I’ve been encouraged that way that comes that way.
I don’t just read literature, I try to read some other things. So I read most of what Tim Keller’s written and listened to most of his podcasts. I find him to be so insightful. He has a masterful way to preach in a way that always brings it back to Christ and to the cross that isn’t forced. And I have been, I have been deeply encouraged by him.
NT Wright, when I was at Oxford, he was at one of the colleges. And I would go on Sunday nights to hear him preach. And I would and he was a fantastic preacher and I would, I read a lot of his stuff. And then C.S. Lewis. So those are some of the theologians that I read.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to ask you now about what a typical day, if any, might look like as a university president, and especially over a 24, 21-year tenure, you mentioned that one of the keys to this job is figuring out what to care about and what to let go. So what does it, what does a typical day look like for you if there is one?
Charles W. Pollard: Yeah, there probably isn’t one, but I, when, when I thought about this question, I probably can give you a typical month.
Todd Ream: Okay.
Charles W. Pollard: It depends on what it looks like.
So, you know, I try, it took me a long time to figure this out, but I try to put all of my one-on-one meetings into a four or five day window so that all of my direct reports, all of those kinds of conversations, so that it creates space for me to think, to think outside of that time. So those days are really full. Lots of interviews, lots of conversations. Our cabinet meets twice a month. I’m probably on the road four to five days a month.
In certain seasons, for instance, I interview everybody that has a direct relationship with students. It’s the other way. I try to help assure our Christian character and our Christian identity. But in this season, February, March, that means I probably have three or four interviews a week. Those are hour-long sessions. I spend a lot of time, more time than I had any idea before I started creating content. I am giving speeches, I’m giving presentations. I am giving welcomes. I’m giving you, you just name it.
The president’s asked to present content about the institution. And to do it well and to do it fresh, you need time to think. You need time to write. You need time to have some new ideas every once in a while. So I do six or seven chapel talks a year. And it usually takes me a couple of days to prepare for those. I very much enjoy those, but also it’s good for me spiritually to have to spend a couple days thinking deeply about a passage and get ready to speak about that to students.
So that’s the, you know, then I have my class, I do fundraising and we’ll we can talk more about that. But we, it is, fundraising is very specific and it’s also very general. I mean just it is a part of almost every day’s activities, but then there’s very specific times where you’re gonna go ask for a significant amount of money. So there, it’s a both/and kind of process. But that’s kind of a month.
But I couldn’t tell you on any one day which of those was gonna be the priority. When I first started, I scheduled a hundred percent of my day, and I soon learned that another 20 to 40% would come in. And so I started to schedule 80% of my day so that I’d have a little bit of room to do the other 20% that just came in the door.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Over the course of a 21-year tenure, which I would also note is four to five times longer than the average university tenure for a president, at a particular institution. But over the course of that 21-year tenure, in what ways has the university presidency changed and thus the context in which you serve as a university president for John Brown changed?
Charles W. Pollard: I mean, one of, I mean and when people ask how I’ve been here for 20 years, I just say I’m a slow learner, but the reality is, the reality is that there are some real benefits to long-term presidencies. I now have 15, 20-year relationships with people in the community, with our supporters, with families. Last night I was with some new prospective parent and she said, yeah, I was, I was here in your first year, so I’m now starting to educate students’ children.
And so those are really beneficial and, and one of the big changes is that there is a very short window for a lot of my colleagues and I do see some stewardship responsibility to give back to them and try to help them because I do think any institution, particularly, Christian colleges, the longer the president can serve, I actually think it’s for the benefit of the institution. But they are very hard jobs now, with lots of pressure, enrollment pressure, budget pressure all those things are very difficult.
When I first started, I had a good first year, but we had a terrible first year in enrollment and then the second year we had to figure it out and we did, and that was great. It was a blessing of God, but new presidents now don’t always have that luxury to have 18-months to figure something out. They come into a crisis and they’re trying to figure out how to salvage that. And so supporting existing presidents has really been something I’ve tried to do more recently.
Most of the job is pretty much the same. I would say there’s been a greater cry to speak on public issues than it was when I first started, and we try to hesitate on that other than if they directly affect our mission or about our Christian faith. I would say that parents are more intensely involved in their children’s lives than they were when I first started. And one of my hopes for them is that they really do want their kids to grow up and they have to give them some space to do that.
And I would say the biggest probably changes in students, the level of anxiety and depression has really skyrocketed and how to respond to that in ways that are healthy for them. The what used to be a really bad day, I got a C is now a suicidal day, what used to be a really terrible emotional event— my boyfriend or girlfriend broke up with me now is a, you know— something might lead to hospitalization. How to help young people be resilient to the inevitable hard things of life is a really important thing.
And we talk about it more and we gotta do it in a way that they can hear. That’s really different than when I first started.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You echoed philanthropy and fundraising a minute ago, and I want to shift now to talk about, you know, two of the details that, you know, command a president’s time at some significant level, one being philanthropy, and then one being board relations also.
So I want to start by asking you just to define, you know, your approach to philanthropy, you’ve echoed some of that a little bit already, but if you could say more about that, and how has that approach to philanthropy perhaps changed and evolved over your time at John Brown?
Charles W. Pollard: Sure. I often say to people when they ask me about, do I like fundraising? I say, I love being with people and I love talking about JB’s mission. And those are the two things that you’re really doing when you do fundraiser, philanthropy.
I also would say it’s one of the most spiritual conversations I have with an individual, where their treasure is where their heart is. And I can’t control where their heart is. All I can control is giving a a good explanation for both the reason for why I need these funds and also how it’s gonna change people’s lives. So it’s an appeal both to the head and the heart. And usually it’s an appeal to a couple who’s working through, had been giving God’s resources, and again, in most of cases we have, are really working hard to figure out how to steward those resources well.
I also see my work as a fundraiser as primarily telling stories. I tell stories about what, how students are changed at JBU. One of the things we’ve done more recently than I did initially is we create more of what we would call spiritual retreats, where we invite 25 or 30 donor couples together, and we present the mission directly to them.
So we had an engineering project. We brought engineers in literally with their senior design projects, a big airplane, a big robot that came down the middle of the aisle and they, we just had the donors interact. We just had the donors interact with the students Yeah. and we just framed the weekend.
I made an ask at the end of the weekend. But most of the weekend was for the donors to directly see the students and the faculty and what they were doing. And that sold themselves. And the reality too is if you’re together for two or three days, the attention that we provide for them about the mission, but also the attention that we provide for them about spiritual renewal for themselves is deeply encouraging. And then we just ask them to share resources as God’s provided for them. And they do fairly generously. So those are big ways I do it.
I’m a little different. I am a bit of an introvert and I do more writing. So I have a wonderful vice president of advancement who has never met a stranger. He’s a great extrovert. He does a lot of the work to establish relations, help us, and then brings me in at the appropriate time to deepen the relationship, and that’s been a wonderful partnership I’ve had with him.
But I also will do a lot of things for him. I try to write the first grant on a new project so that I can write the case study for, for the whole team about how, why we’re doing this and how it will advance the mission. You know, I make myself available whenever he needs in order to visit with someone. But having a good team is a wonderful blessing and I’ve always had a good one. He’s been my vice president for advancement my whole 21-years, and so yeah. That’s been a real blessing.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You mentioned the retreat and the ways in which you introduced engineering faculty and engineering students to prospective donors. In what ways can other members of the educational community, curricular educators and co-curricular educators in particular, become more involved in constructive ways in the fundraising process for the universities where they serve?
Charles W. Pollard: Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, they just carry out their mission really well. I mean, again, everything becomes fundraise. I learned this in my first or second year when I was sitting down with a donor and before we even started, she said, yes, my niece is at JB and she heard you in chapel last week, and she thought you were really good. And all of a sudden I thought to myself, there’s a whole network beyond wide conversation with a particular donor about a particular project, and that includes what our faculty are doing, that includes what, you know, people of the resident’s life are doing. So carrying out the mission well is first and foremost.
And then slotting in as we have opportunities to present to donors, different missions. It’s a tricky part, right? Because you’re trying to figure out what are the main things that have to get done and need funding but also faculty and staff have individual interests that sometimes are not necessarily the main thing that you have to get done.
I partner when they have contacts I partner with them in order to help. And we’ve had, like our Templeton grant came through a faculty contact. We have a center on campus for faith and flourishing that came through a faculty contact. We have an archeological dig that came and has been funded and it came through a faculty contact.
Anytime faculty have sort of sources of relationships that might lead to something that could advance what they’re doing, I am more than willing to sit down. I will go with them, I’ll be involved with them. It’s harder to initiate something that doesn’t already have some sort of funding possibilities outside of the main things we’re trying to get done, in terms of scholarships and in terms of deferred maintenance and construction, those sorts of things that we’re trying to focus on.
But we’ve had some really wonderful benefits here from things that faculty and staff. Small grants, we’re always supporting small grants for research projects here and there. We have a grant writing office that will support that. But an endowed chair, which we’ve done several usually comes out of the interest of the donor first.
I want to do something in business. I wanna do something in engineering. It’s very rare that when it comes to those things that I convince somebody that they really want to do a particular area. It’s more they say, I would like to support this particular subject matter, and what looks to be the best way to do that sort of thing.
Todd Ream: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Shifting now to board relations then over the course of a 21-year tenure as president, in what way have the responsibilities of board members perhaps also changed and the relationships that they share with the president?
Charles W. Pollard: Our board is wonderful. They, in many ways, and they’re very much a policy board, and they’ll often say, and usually they say this to the, to my support, we hire the president. If we don’t like what’s going on in the institution, we fire the president. We’re not involved in the day-to-day operations of the institution. We’re involved in maintaining the mission. We’re not in financial stewardship. We’re involved in, you know, retaining the mission of the institution.
I often describe both my work and their work as in a, in a triangle. So at the top of the triangle is maintain Christian commitment, Christian witness, and one level is the one bottom corner is financial responsibility and the other is academic excellence. And if some project fits into that triangle, then we should do it. If it doesn’t fit in the triangle, then we shouldn’t.
So we can have a fantastic academic program, for instance, that will have no students, that won’t be financially wise to do. We might have a great academic program that wouldn’t further our Christian mission, that wouldn’t be wise to do, so trying to help the board together think what fits within that triangle and have them give advice about what fits into that triangle.
What’s changed? I think what’s changed in some ways is the cultural issues are more pressing. We’ve talked more about government relations in the last 10-years and more about legislation court cases than we ever had before, and so that feels different. But I also would say that my board is very appreciative because these same issues are going on in their churches. The same issues are going on in their community. And they often will tell me they feel like being part of JBU has helped them think through the issues deeper and then take that back to their home church community, and help describe how to do this well from a biblical and theological perspective.
I think the other thing that’s been increasing, the increasing need to have financial oversight understand is the budget real? Is the enrollment numbers real? When is it you have to make the hard decisions to end a program because it is no longer financially sustainable? Board members shouldn’t make those decisions, but they should ask those questions and make sure the administration is accurately looking, because we are tighter, right?
We have a demographic cliff and a variety of other things that are challenging education in terms of its enrollments and in terms of its resources. So understanding the financial aspects of it has become a bit more acute, I would say, for board members.
Todd Ream: Fiduciary responsibility and the exercise of fiduciary responsibility is a concept that unfortunately seems little understood in the broader culture. Can you tell me a little bit about what that looks like for board members who serve Church-related colleges and universities and how, if at all, fiduciary responsibility and the exercise thereof might differ from universities with no religious commitments?
Charles W. Pollard: Sure. I mean, I think first and foremost I would say our board considers our Christian mission, our distinctly Christian academic mission as being their highest calling that they don’t want JBU to become a generic, not private Church-related or historically church or whatever the term might be. They want us to be distinctly Christian in how we go about doing it. And therefore, partly one of, again, their most important thing, I guess is they tell me is to hire the president that will carry that out and then have that president regularly report how they’re trying to do it and the senior staff that are part of meeting with the board.
And so that I think is their kind of primary mission. But then ask good questions. Ask why are we doing this? And what this came out? What was, what was, what was the theological purpose behind that controversy? And so they’re most, I think, their highest level. But again, part of that is making sure you have the resources to carry out that Christian mission and that you’re both in fundraising and also in the way you’re budgeting that you’re doing in a stewardly way that’s wise. And they do. And all of our board supports JBU financially at all sorts of different levels and they put their money where their mouth is when their board members. And that’s important.
I often say, again, going back to fundraising, donors have been given resources by God. And it’s really important for us as an institution to listen to the donor, because that may be a way that God’s helping understand what projects that we should be involved in and which, which we shouldn’t. They have their first stewardship responsibility to God. And the second is to us as an institution. And so we should listen to them as they have their input.
But those, I think, I think in a variety of ways, there’s more to learn as a board member than there was before. And that Christian mission is just vital in institutions like JBU.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Before we close our thread of our conversation about board members then, I want to ask about just what you echoed there in terms of board formation. How are board members then prepared to steward and advance the mission of the institution and the complexity that comes with such an effort?
Charles W. Pollard: I mean I both serve on boards and serve as my board. I mean, most boards now will have a couple hours of the board meeting with education, right? So it’s education on an issue. Gonna, this coming spring, we’re going to spend some time talking to them about how we are using and not using AI in classrooms, in marketing, in a variety of different contexts. And we have some very sophisticated people on our board that will be, have been thinking for about 10 or 15 years. And we’ll have other people that have never used ChatGPT. So but that educating them how we’re educating with that particular topic.
We will have something like that in most board meetings. We do a pretty significant orientation at the beginning for board members, and then we also have a mentor for that board member the first two or three years so they can ask questions as they’re going along. It really is, I think, important for the president and the cabinet to keep highlighting for the board as they come. What are the key issues that they should be thinking about? And sometimes that involves, we’ll do a board retreat about every three or four years, and that will give us extended periods of time to talk about current issues. We’ll have readings that we provide for them, and I usually work that out between myself and the board chair. What are the things you feel the board needs to understand more about.
But they also bring us issues. We just started a subcommittee of the board on cybersecurity, because several of our board members said, listen, this could wipe you out. This could really hurt you. And we just wanna have a little closer oversight about how you’re trying to do cybersecurity. And we’d like to set up a kind of an audit board, audit committee on cybersecurity. And again, these folks are very sophisticated and been actively involved in these questions for a long, long time. So they bring a lot of value in those conversations.
Todd Ream: Yep, thank you. As our time begins to become short for our conversation, I want to ask you about the Christian academic vocation. How you understand it and experience it, but then also how it’s cultivated amongst educators there at, at John Brown. But just to start, what qualities or characteristics in your estimation define the Christian academic vocation?
Charles W. Pollard: Yeah, I mean, I think love for God and for His world. I think love for students, which is our love for neighbor. I think love for your discipline, that you have spent a long time working at and understanding because that’s your way to understand God’s world and there’s really great benefits to that discipline.
A love I think for teaching the next generation that this is actually not a self profession, this is a giving profession, and that you’re actually training up the next generation of students to become citizens in God’s kingdom, to bring about good, to bring about his good.
Those are academic vocation. Those are also Christian vocations. I mean I think the particular intense study is a much more academic vocation than might be in the general Christian vocation, but love God, love neighbor, and love this world. Those are things that all Christians should be actively involved with. We just have a specific focus on study in ways that’s different than the rest of the Church.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You mentioned the Templeton grant earlier in terms of virtues, virtue cultivation, and then the ability for faculty members to talk across disciplinary lines with one another. But in your estimation, what virtues prove critical to the exercise of the Christian academic vocation and against what vices perhaps should we also be vigilant?
Charles W. Pollard: Yeah. So again, some, these would be true for all Christians, some of them honesty, integrity. I think curiosity is really one of the, the great just to be interested in things and interested in tracking things down. Courage patience. I think patience in research. Sometimes things don’t work out, especially in the sciences and some of the other areas that you just have to keep going at it. Kindness, you know, young people come and they have all sorts of foibles that we have to be both patient and kind about as we seek to, to raise them up as good, as good teachers. Humility. I think that one’s a big one.
The ones I worry about for academics sometimes, or in the Christian advocate is pride, arrogance. Many times, we might perceive ourselves as the smartest person in the room, but we may not be able to communicate to anybody if that’s our, if that’s our attitude. And if that’s the, even if that’s the perceived attitude.
I also think one of the most dangerous things is cynicism. You develop an expertise, you help students find the expertise, but in the process, you undermine all of them, all of their relationships, and all of the nature of the faith that which they grew up with, right? Our job is not to shipwreck a student’s faith. Our job is to expose them to the breadth of God’s world and support them as they grow up.
And that’s a gentle pastoral job. That’s not always easy to do and it’s a lot easier actually to create cynicism in a student than it is to create faith or to encourage faith. And, and so I think that’s, that’s a danger like that, you can say, wow, they just don’t know what they don’t know what they don’t know. And I need to show them all the ways that they don’t know what they don’t know, rather than sort of build them up and build up their faith. And so I think that cynicism is a real worry.
I also think the other one is envy. Comparison robs us of joy at every level of our human existence. And it’s hard not to compare in an academic setting, right? We grade people, people have books with certain publishers or other publishers, and being able to celebrate the accomplishments of others without having a sense of envy or comparison, I think is endemically difficult in an academic situation.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. For our last question then today, in what ways do you estimate that the health of the Christian academic vocation then is related to, or a byproduct, perhaps even of the health of the relationship that the university shares with the Church?
Charles W. Pollard: I think that the most important relationship between the Church and the academic institution is trust, that the Church trusts the academic institution as they seek to raise up the next generation. And the academic institution trusts the Church as a partner in this work, as understanding that it is the institution that God has ordained to bring about his mission. It wasn’t the university, it was the Church that we are here to serve the Church. We’re not here to tell the Church what to do.
And so that, but that takes a lot of trust between those organizations and particularly in an interdenominational context, where we don’t have just one church we’re talking to, or one denomination we’re talking to, we’re talking to a broader movement. And so respect for that broader movement, respect for the decisions that they’re making, while at the same time developing up the new generation.
And the Church has to trust academics because sometimes they have to explore ideas that are challenging. That’s part of what the Church should do and has always done. And to give the academics some, some room to explore those as they remain faithful to the teachings of the Church. But I think trust is the most important thing and the thing that has to be constantly nurtured, because otherwise there becomes suspicion in both ways. And that’s not healthy for the university. And if it’s a Christian university, clearly not healthy for the Church as well.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you, thank you very much. Our guest has been Charles W. Pollard, President of John Brown University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Charles W. Pollard: Well, thank you for having me. It was been a joy to talk with 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.
This is an insightful look at “a scholar-practitioner” from a true veteran. Thanks.