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In the forty-second episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with L. Gregory Jones, President of Belmont University. Jones opens by sharing the importance of what he has come to reference as traditioned innovation. In the recent past, the Church understood part of its calling as the creation of institutional responses to social challenges. In the United States alone, the Church once established hospitals, schools, and homes to care for children found without families. While the Church has largely now abdicated such efforts to the state, Jones draws upon the core commitments of Wesleyan theology to argue the Church needs to reimagine what institutions can advance human flourishing today. Jones then discusses how he wrestled with a call to the ministry, the mentors who nurtured that calling, and how his calling eventually led him from full-time faculty service to full-time administrative service. While higher education will likely need to envision itself operating in previously unseen contexts, Jones contends Belmont is well-positioned to partner with the Church to foster expressions of hope. As an example of those expressions, Jones points to Belmont’s recent decision to launch a school of medicine. He then closes by discussing how he and his colleagues at Belmont are seeking to shape the next generation of educators to imagine what roles they can play in aiding human flourishing.
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 L. Gregory Jones, President of Belmont University. Thank you for joining us.
L. Gregory Jones: Delighted to be here.
Todd Ream: As a moral theologian, your early research focused on forgiveness expressed in the publication of works such as Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis and Forgiving as We’ve Been Forgiven. Some of your more recent work, however, focuses on social innovation, as expressed in works such as Christian Social Innovation and Navigating the Future: Traditioned Innovation for Wilder Seas.
To begin, what do you mean by social innovation?
L. Gregory Jones: Well, social innovation I distinguish from social service or social advocacy. Social advocacy is advocating for policy changes. Social service is providing valuable services to people after the fact. When I talk about social innovation, I’m talking about the discovery and development of strategies to move upstream, to build, renew, transform institutions that address complex problems and help foster human flourishing.
Todd Ream: In what ways, if any, does your theological understanding then compare with other understandings of social innovation that may otherwise be out there?
L. Gregory Jones: Well, I actually think that faith-based social innovation is the heart of it and actually was the pioneer of it. We actually lost some of our own imagination for it, but I think that notion of both caring about institutions and transforming them is rooted in a deeper understanding of what I call traditioned innovation, which is really how we’re called to work. Only God creates out of nothing. We’re always innovating in relation to what has gone before us.
And so the way I think about social innovation is its bearing witness to the Holy Spirit who is making all things new, by conforming us to Christ, the One in whom creation came to be. And so I think Christians actually have a deeper understanding and should have a deeper and richer understanding of social innovation than do secular folks.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. You’re a product of the Wesleyan theological tradition and an ordained United Methodist minister. At what point, if any, does the Wesleyan theological tradition then intersect with this understanding of social innovation as we’re talking about it today?
L. Gregory Jones: I think it’s at the heart of it. And actually when Greg Dees and I first had a conversation, he’s known as the father of social entrepreneurship as a secular field. He started the program at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, and the Duke’s Business School.
One day he said to me, what happened to the Church? And I said, what do you mean? Well, you all used to be the pioneers in my field, but it’s like somewhere around 1970, you lost interest. And I’m just curious why. And when I realized that, when he said Church, he was meaning all Christians.
And I began to think that the Wesleyan tradition, of which I am a, a longstanding member, and generations before me, had pioneered a lot of that work, especially in America, in education, in anti-racism and anti-slavery movements in the early 19th century, in movements like the Salvation Army and Goodwill. There were just so in hospitals and healthcare, that the Wesleyan tradition combines an evangelical focus on revival and an awakening with a social call to holiness, which Wesley would’ve said, there is no holiness without social holiness. So personal and social holiness go together.
And so really the Wesleyan tradition globally and especially in the United States has for quite a long time been at the forefront of this movement. It’s just that somewhere along the way, especially establishment versions of the Wesleyan tradition, kinda lost interest and got used to social advocacy and social service and lost that deeper animating focus that is at the heart of the Wesleyan tradition.
Todd Ream: For you then, and perhaps it goes back to that conversation that you had with one of the leaders in the field, if not the leader in the field, what led to an interest in social innovation?
L. Gregory Jones: Well, I’d say that he really prompted me to kind of do work in rediscovering those inclinations. But I also feel like it awakened my own interest that I always had. And part of my interest in the work on forgiveness early on was trying to make sense of how do you heal the past for the sake of a more innovative and life-giving future and that interest in the work of the Holy Spirit.
So Greg Dees’s comment did awaken that, but I found it was also part of the deeper reservoir of my own kind of animating passion as a Christian theologian. And then it was a conversation with my New Testament colleague at Duke, Kavin Rowe, where I was talking to him about these themes. And he said, well, you know, that actually was what caused Christianity to be so surprising in the early centuries of the Christian movement, what he called Christianity’s surprise.
If you look at how the Christian movement went from about 5,000 followers in the year 50 to about 5 million followers two centuries later, still a long time before Constantine, this wasn’t about legalization, it was about the spread of a movement. And he said what was surprising about that was this animating sense of what I now call Easter hope and Pentecostal power.
And so while it was awakened by Greg Dees in those conversations, I then began to see that when Christianity has been most vibrant, it’s been rooted in this vision of social innovation.
Todd Ream: In what ways then has, you know, because it’s always been historically, you know, part of the Church, even if the Church has lost contact with that, what ways has such an interest and impacted how you assess the potential of the Church, universal, but also individual congregations and the places in which they serve?
L. Gregory Jones: It’s kinda like the way that Dorothy Day said she didn’t want to that she wanted to live her life in a way that wouldn’t make sense if God doesn’t exist. That I think that when local congregations or universities, or broader movements, are surprising people because they are holding things together that other people push apart or they’re taking risks that just don’t seem to make sense, it becomes inspiring and I like to tell those stories because then people say, I want to be part of whatever that is.
And it’s not just a social service project. There’s something deeper that’s welling up and pouring out that’s not easily explain explainable. And so it helps people imagine a future that’s much brighter than the past.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Would you offer an example or two for us, of social innovation as perhaps it’s worked on its way on the ground within particular congregations?
L. Gregory Jones: The one that I’d point to that’s gotten a lot of attention that’s not rooted in the congregation, although it’s rooted in the Catholic tradition through a Jesuit, but Greg Boyle’s project at Homeboy Industries was rooted out of worship in the Church, where he was saying Mass and he was hearing women praying for their sons.
And then he discovered that these sons had gotten into gangs and these gangs had gotten into violence and some of them were in prison but they were also at risk of being shot. And so he started out of Homeboy Industries. The motto of it was, the best way to stop a bullet is with a job and rooted in faith.
And Father Boyle would go into prisons and he’d say Mass, and he’d mark the sign of the cross on their foreheads, and then he’d give him his card and say, come see me when you get out. They started a bakery. They started a t-shirt shop. They started a number of different socially innovative projects. And it turned around a lot of people’s lives.
One of the former gang members actually became a senior leader at one of the Hollywood Studios, and it was that transformation that was extraordinarily powerful and I think you can see that in local congregations. And it can be, you know, local congregations often develop a kind of charism in some, it may be hospitality, in others it may be a form of music education. But they’re engaged in their community in a way that’s changing people’s lives. Not just providing services, but more deeply helping inspire what I sometimes call enterprise solutions to poverty or other kinds of challenges and opportunities.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. In terms of where you spend a good portion of your time too, as president of a Church-related university, in what ways has social innovation then also impacted how you assess the potential of a Church-related university?
L. Gregory Jones: Well, part of what drew me to Belmont was that it was the first university in the country to have an undergraduate major in social entrepreneurship. And so it’s part of the warp and woof of our identity.
The person for whom our College of Business is named was the first person to take three companies public in U.S. history. He was actually the entrepreneurial guy behind Kentucky Fried Chicken, turns out the colonel had a great recipe but wasn’t nearly as good an entrepreneur or businessman.
And so that’s been embedded in our identity. And so I found this real common focus, which became manifest then in the growth of Belmont over 25 years. 25 years ago we had about 2,700 students. We’re now at about 9,000.
Todd Ream: Wow.
L. Gregory Jones: We’ve started several new colleges. We acquired a couple, we launched a new medical school last summer.
So that entrepreneurial spirit and that focus on those, finding those creative solutions to complex problems was part of what drew me to Belmont. And then we’ve been nurturing that and finding the deeper veins and reservoir to really work on that in a time when so often Christian universities are identified more by what we’re against than what we’re for. I said, we really need to focus more on what we’re for.
And so we started talking about how to care for vulnerable children. We have an initiative for food insecure families that Brad and Kim Paisley started on our campus called The Store that provides groceries with dignity for food insecure families. And then we started what we’re calling the Belmont Innovation Labs that Josh Yates leads for us, and we’re partnering with the state and with other groups to work on the aging out crisis in foster care.
So I said, you know, we ought to be for children flourishing. The statistics in the state of Tennessee are pretty horrific that 80% of those who age out of foster care between 18 and 22 end up being trafficked, incarcerated or addicted within three years. And I said, that’s horrible.
Todd Ream: Yeah.
L. Gregory Jones: Well, it turns out we’re trying to get underneath to find a creative solution to that. Couple of things to note, one, in Tennessee, it turns out the biggest difference between the 20% who do well and the 80% who don’t is the presence of one adult in their lives over a sustained period of time.
Well, that sounds like something a family or a congregation can take on and address. One of our partners, a senior pastor at Church of the City, which is a great congregation here that’s really made this foster care work central, he noted that there across the country there are about 365,000 foster kids. Guess how many congregations there are across the United States? About the same number.
Todd Ream: Wow.
L. Gregory Jones: All of a sudden something that has horrible consequences, we can actually find creative solutions. And so at Belmont, a lot of those students, although we do have a number of students who come out of foster care at Belmont, but that’s not the primary driver.
The primary driver is a university ought to be a place that’s fostering, flourishing for people, whether they’re enrolled students in our college in our university or not. We ought to be helping communities flourish. And so our innovation labs are oriented that way. We have students who are working on projects all the time, real world projects and real world neighborhoods, try to help people flourish in those sorts of ways.
Todd Ream: And so that innovation becomes a means of contributing to the common good.
L. Gregory Jones: Yes.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Yep. Great. Thank you.
I want to transition now to asking you some other questions about your background and your sense of calling. You earned a bachelor’s degree in communication and a master’s in public administration from the University of Denver, earned an MDiv and a PhD from Duke University, and embraced a calling as I noted a few minutes ago to the United Methodist Church.
At what point did you discern you were called to serve as an ordained clergy person?
L. Gregory Jones: Well, it was a complex process because ministry is my family’s business. It goes back multiple generations to actually a German Methodist immigrant family. So I come out of the Pietist strand of Methodism, in the upper Midwest in Wisconsin and Iowa. And my father was a minister. One of my predecessors was dean of Duke Divinity School. My brother has been an ordained minister and a bishop. And so for a while I kinda ran from it.
And when I went to business school, ended up with a Master of Public Administration, but I started in the MBA program before switching over to the nonprofit side. It was partly, you know, as I reflect on it in retrospect, my idea to find Tarshish when I was called to Nineveh, and ultimately discerned that calling to the ministry. Ironically, shortly before my father quite unexpectedly died at the age of 53 of a heart attack.
And so then I had to wrestle with what was, what does this calling look like? And, you know, if there really is a God, is that good news if my dad died so unexpectedly young, because my dad was one of my heroes. But that just deepened my faith in an engagement with Romans 5 and the notion that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
So I did discern that calling, and had then living more deeply into it. At the same time, I also discovered that that training in the University of Denver Business School also kind of awakened both my skills in administration and my interest in innovation.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Were there any mentors in particular who proved more helpful than others in terms of that discernment process?
L. Gregory Jones: I’ve been blessed with lots of mentors throughout my life. Probably the, the, the other than my father who was a real inspiration role model, and my wife who’s been the person who’s just continued to both inspire and inform me, I say she’s always been closer to God, and so she’s always the one drawing me more deeply into the Scriptures and living that in a deeper relationship with God.
At Duke, I would say it was probably a, a very interesting triumvirate of Stanley Hauerwas, Geoffrey Wainright, and Tom Langford that Langford was the former dean and former provost of Duke who was, who was articulate about the Wesleyan tradition and a deep sense of grace. Geoffrey Wainwright taught me the integral ties of worship and theology in an ecumenical sense, and kind of awakened me to the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox expressions of the Christian faith.
And Stanley was the one who really awakened in me the interest in virtue and character and this kind of, I would say creative discipline of reading and writing. He just taught me to be reading fiction and all kinds of different literature that I’ve really nurtured.
And so the three of them who are about as different temperamentally as you could, you know, I’m probably some unholy combination of all three of them, but I’d like to say on my best days I’ve learned the best of each of them.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Yeah. They’re all obviously distinguished authors and scholars in their own right. But are there other authors you mentioned, you know, from Stanley Hauerwas, you learned to read fiction, for example. Are there authors who also helped you discern that calling or continue to nurture that calling even to this day?
L. Gregory Jones: Sure there are. Well, they’re all over the place. You know, on the fiction side, they range from Marilynne Robinson, who I love. Her now quartet of books from Gilead and Home and Lila, and now Jack to Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which I think is one of the great novels and a great theological novel. The epigraph of the novel is from Romans 9. So that’s on the fiction side.
On the non-fiction side, it ranges from, well, on the fiction side, I’d also add Dostoevsky. On the non-fiction side, I found the writings of Rowan Williams really significantly the former Archbishop of Canterbury whom I’ve been privileged to count as a friend over the years. And also Eugene Peterson, who I think when one thinks about calling the range of his writings over a very long time have really been the kinds of the kinds of books that really stay with me.
I mean, there are classical writers like Augustine and Barth and Wesley that I’d point to, but in the more contemporary vein Eugene Peterson and Rowan Williams combine a kind contemplative, almost mystical intimacy with God, with really deep, rigorous scholarship.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. After serving on the faculty and as the chair of the theology department at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland, you were appointed to serve as dean of Duke Divinity School. Would you please take a few talk, take a few details here in terms of how you came to discern that calling and accept that appointment?
L. Gregory Jones: When I first was approached about that, my inclination was to say no because my dad died while serving as dean of Duke Divinity School. And so I was inclined to think this is not a life-giving calling.
But I also knew that at the same time, during that same period, we had seen my wife and had seen some institutions which we knew about and cared about getting significantly weaker and having trouble recovering. And I’d had an opportunity to serve as director of the Center for Humanities at Loyola, and then chair of the theology department. And people had said that I was pretty good at administration, not just the tasks, but also at building community and nurturing and empowering and strengthening people to work together toward a significant goal.
And so I thought that this would be a place where my wife discovered her vocation, where I had also discovered in a profound sense my vocation. And I decided that to enter the process and put it in God’s hands, that if others saw in this a place where I could serve well, that I would be willing to do so.
I was very young at the time, so I didn’t think that the arrow would eventually actually point to me this time around. And when I got there, I had a lot of feelings of being an imposter, you know, in the imposter syndrome. And my first couple of years as dean, I thought, you know, any day now they’re going to come and say, we made a clerical error and you weren’t supposed to be here.
But you know, by God’s grace and a lot of really wonderful people who surrounded me, I kinda learned it and on the job training and discovered that it really was a calling.
Todd Ream: Yeah. In what ways did the vision that you cultivated for the theology department at Loyola compare with the vision that you developed for the divinity school?
L. Gregory Jones: It’s a great question. One of the wonderful gifts of, of being in the theology department at Loyola over nine years was it was genuinely ecumenical. We were about half Catholic and half non-Catholic. I learned to really develop and appreciate the riches of the Christian tradition across the board.
One of the non-Catholics is actually Eastern Orthodox, and so that was that experience I’d had with Geoffrey Wainwright. I had written my own dissertation on Aristotle and Aquinas, so there was this broader sense that I was bringing the best of the Wesleyan tradition into that.
And my experience with the Center for the Humanities at Loyola had also taught me the riches of other disciplines and conversations with philosophers and English professors and historians. And my office building was right next door to the business school, and so, you know, these interactions became really important.
When I got to Duke it was an ecumenical divinity school faculty with people both from the Methodist Wesleyan tradition at its heart and also Roman Catholics and Lutherans and Presbyterians and Baptists. We’d started a Baptist House of Study and so that ecumenical focus and the divinity school’s position in the wider university.
I actually have reflected a lot that I don’t think I would’ve done as well at a freestanding seminary as I could do in a university setting, because I’ve always liked that intellectual curiosity of how other schools worked. And so developing the vocational clarity for clergy, I learned a lot talking to the dean of the nursing school and the medical school and the law school and the business school. And that became a really context for leadership both administratively and kind of helping students discover their own vocation.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You served as dean of the divinity school on two separate occasions, and in between you served as executive vice president at Baylor University.
Would you describe the discernment process that led you to accept the appointment at Baylor? And then in what ways did that time impact your calling as an academic leader?
L. Gregory Jones: My sense of Baylor was really what when I was approached about going there as executive vice president and provost, they said we want you to do what you did at Duke Divinity School. And I said, what do you think I did at Duke Divinity School? And they said, well, you really developed collaboration across the university and that sense of innovation and we want to see that kind of leadership, now not just at divinity school building out, but from the, from the top of Baylor. And so it was really that sense of what was possible to develop interdisciplinary, inner-school collaboration, in a way that was deeply Christ-centered across the university.
Unfortunately, I arrived at Baylor right as the sexual assault scandal had really taken hold of the university and a lot of the resources that had been set aside for me to work on inner-school and interdisciplinary collaboration had to be devoted to legal fees and settlements. And I began to discern that my calling to Baylor was really at that point more rooted in the work I’d done on forgiveness and to help Baylor hold together during a season of transition and pain and healing rather than what I had anticipated to be the case, which was more about developing collaboration and, and innovation for the whole university.
Todd Ream: Yeah. In June 2021, you began your tenure as president of Belmont University. Would you describe for us that discernment process that led you to leave the divinity school and your second tenure as dean to then moving to Nashville and serving as Belmont’s leader?
L. Gregory Jones: In the summer of 2020, we were in the midst of COVID. I had gone back to the, do a second term as dean, and I really envisioned it as a three to four-year process to help try to, help that community that had been through a rough time, just get back stable. So I didn’t envision that as a long-term appointment.
And really after Baylor, I had decided I was kind of done with a sense of calling to university leadership or any kind of formal role. I was enjoying serving as an advisor to family foundations and other projects. And thought I was kind of scaling down.
When I got a call from a friend who was chair of the board at Belmont, and he said, would you be willing to be considered for the next president? The president is going to be announcing in a few months his retirement. I said well, I’ve been thinking I was kind of moving out of those roles. What are you looking for? And he said, we’re looking for someone who’s Christ-centered, innovative, and likes to build. And I thought, oh, that actually sounds interesting and somewhat like what I care about.
But I knew that we had built my wife’s dream house in Durham and I was pretty sure she wasn’t interested in moving. That dream house includes a room in the basement that she calls the Narnia room, where you can actually go through a wardrobe into a little room for kids. And so I was pretty sure she was going to say no.
Well, she had known I was on the call and after we had assumed that the board chair was calling to tell us about a mutual friend who had a struggle or something, and she said, what did he want? And I said he wanted to know if we’d be willing to be considered as part of a process of selecting the next president for Belmont. And she said, oh, what if this is God calling us? And I thought, no, I’ve got the script here. And that’s not your line. Your line is no way, no how we’re staying in this dream house. And so we began the process of just trying to discern this.
And some dear friends, neither of whom are particularly religious, had along the way said to me just in, in the days before I got that call you know, you really need to become a college president. And I said, no, I’m not interested in that. And these were two people who didn’t know each other, so they weren’t conspiring together. They’re two independent people. I just thought, well, why would they say that? And you know, I say sometimes that God knows I’m thickheaded, so he tends to put a whole bunch of stuff in front of me and put neon lights around it to say, hey, pay attention, bozo.
And so Susan and I started talking about it and praying about it. And the more we learned about Belmont, the more excited we got about the momentum it had and the forward looking future. And then the city of Nashville, such a vibrant city and growing and dynamic, that by the time we learned more and more, we really got a sense that if we were invited, we would say yes.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about your expectations of service as a university president when you stepped into the role, and then now going from four on to five years, in what ways, if any, have those expectations changed?
L. Gregory Jones: You know, I moved into the role in the middle of COVID, so that was an adventure because you know, you couldn’t do anything right. Whatever you did, you were going to get hit by the people on the extremes of both sides, but somebody was always pretty upset. I got an email on my third day as president, accusing me, they actually had heard falsely that Belmont had done something that we didn’t do.
But it was a friend of a parent of a student who said that Belmont was an agent of Satan along with the CDC. And I thought at first I was kinda like, woo, didn’t take long for the honeymoon to end here. Then I thought to myself, well, you know, it takes some people months or years to become an agent of Satan, I’ve done it in less than three days. This is pretty good. You know, to celebrate an accomplishment.
Todd Ream: You may not even have your ID card yet actually in your parking pass.
L. Gregory Jones: Really powerful to be recognized as an agent of Satan so quickly. It was, you know, really trying to manage a lot of stuff in that period of time.
On the other hand though, Belmont’s a really healthy place fiscally in terms of enrollment. And so I was able to really step in. I was following a really strong leader. I had really strong people on the team at Belmont, and so I was able to come in and, and really help build strength and so I could work on kind of cultural dynamics and help to improve and move forward. We had just announced the launch of a medical school. That was a heavy lift, so I could pay a lot of attention to that.
What I’ve discovered is that over these first four years, it really was vision casting and aligning, helping build capabilities. You know, we had in many ways grown from being a small college to a midsize university, but still at times had the mindset and the infrastructure of a small college. So we had to build in those sorts of ways, and that’s been a real gift.
I would say that at the same time, the kind of volatility of higher education and our broader culture has just gotten more and more complicated. Some of that we knew was coming, like the number of 18-year olds in the U.S., we knew that this was about the time that demographic cliff was going to start to head down. It’s much better to be in the South than it is in the Northeast or the Northwest or even the Rust Belt areas of the Midwest, but we knew that was going to be a challenge.
Declining the value of the perceptions of the value of higher education, I don’t think I anticipated it would be quite as volatile as it has turned out to be. But then the FAFSA debacle a year ago. This spring, all of the turmoil that’s been going on. The conflict that started around October 7th and the three elite president testimony before Congress. All of that has just created a very complex set of dynamics.
I’ve been talking to our community about this. I use a phrase from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises where two guys are talking about their business troubles, and one of them says, how did you become bankrupt? And he said, well, gradually, and then suddenly. And I think the volatility in higher education generally is that. It’s been gradually developing and then it’s really hit this spring.
Todd Ream: Yeah.
L. Gregory Jones: And I would also say that I think Belmont’s in a really great position to navigate that. And I don’t think higher education should just think of this as buckling your, your safety belt to ride out a storm and then it’ll return to normal. I don’t think there will be a return to anything resembling normal. What we’re going to need is to find what we treasure as we move into a very dynamic and complex future, and so that emphasis on social innovation, what I call traditioned innovation’s going to be really important.
And I think those universities that are clearest about their North Star, clearest about what they’re for, in our case, being an ecumenical Christ-centered university, are going to be the ones that have the brightest future. So I’m now spending a lot more time articulating mission. And a lot, making sure we’re aligned as clearly as we can be to our mission, while also looking for, you know, creative opportunities for revenue beyond tuition.
Because if you’re just relying on 18-year olds, that’s going to be pretty troubling. The canary in the coal mine for me was the closing of Birmingham Southern College a year ago. 25 years ago, 35 years ago, Birmingham Southern was a really strong liberal arts college, one of the finest in the South, one of the finest across the country. And through a series of bad decisions, but also just kind of inattention to the larger trends, it reached a point where it closed.
That is, it should be a reminder to us all that nothing is a given, and it’s not just a matter of riding out the storm.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions already in our conversation about Belmont’s location in Nashville and that being advantageous. Can you say a little bit more in what ways Nashville is an asset to Belmont, but also in what ways is Belmont an asset to Nashville?
L. Gregory Jones: It’s a great question. I love the way you phrased it because one of the things that I discovered on my first day as president of Belmont, I made a point to go out into the community and my first meeting was with the governor of Tennessee, and I went straight from there to meet with the mayor of Nashville.
At that time, the governor and, and the then mayor of Nashville, he’s no longer mayor, were as significantly at odds. One’s a Republican, one’s a Democrat. They had a very public fight. I joked they probably couldn’t agree on the color of the sky on any given day.
But in my meetings with both of them, they each said that you couldn’t understand Nashville and middle Tennessee’s growth over the last 30 years apart from Belmont and its growth. And I thought, wow, that’s really heartening to hear both of them say that. The governor was a former trustee of ours, but the mayor didn’t have any obvious connections. His wife taught some adjunct for us in the law school, but I just thought that’s really heartening to hear.
And what I would say is that in many ways, there’s been a symbiotic relationship between Belmont and Nashville. We’re known as Nashville’s university at a time when Vanderbilt had been paying less attention to Nashville than I think they should have. The new president’s done a good job of rebuilding those ties, but four years ago he was pretty new as well.
And what I would say is Belmont has long had strength in music and entertainment, and Nashville was known as Music City. Then more recently, Nashville’s really developed in healthcare and often known now as Healthcare City. Belmont has been strengthening our presence in healthcare all the way to launching a new medical school a year ago. Now, technology and entrepreneurship are more of a focus in Nashville, and that’s been a place where we’ve been doubling down in our focus.
And so you can see it’s not just that Belmont has been a great asset to Nashville, or Nashville’s been a great asset to Belmont. By working together and developing intrinsic relationships, we’ve strengthened each other and I think that’s been an incredible gift.
Our music business program, which was the first music business program in the country, it’s now our largest college, the Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business. When it was started 50 years ago, it was because people on Music Row came and said, hey, those of us who run Music Row are musicians. We don’t know anything about business. Could you help us develop a program? And my predecessor from back then, two predecessors ago was a Baptist pastor. I can’t imagine the conversation between these Music Row people and him, but he said, sure, let’s do it. And that built these intrinsic relationships.
We have that with our nursing and medical schools and pharmacy and other health sciences with the healthcare programs. The best universities are going to have the best relationships intrinsically with their region and with partners.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. I want to ask you now a little bit more about the medical school and that initiative, and in particular in relation to Belmont’s strategic path to 2030, which includes five different pathways of which championing integrative health and wellbeing is one of them. Can you say a little bit about the development of the medical school, where it fits within that particular pathway, and what tangible forms of progress have you seen so far?
L. Gregory Jones: Well, the medical school was launched. It’s really the first Christian medical school to be launched in 40 years. And so there was an opportunity, it welcomed students and faculty from multiple faiths and that background, but that deep rootedness in Christ as the true human. And so, a whole person care is something that we think is really important for healthcare and its future.
And that integrative vision of health and wellbeing is to say that the best healthcare isn’t just disease-based. It’s also looking at the social drivers of health and what’s sometimes called behavioral health, and the healthcare world is changing rapidly. So we want our college of medicine, as we developed it, to be paying attention to the whole person, emphasizing primary care, emphasizing the spiritual as well as emotional and mental and physical wellbeing of people.
And to do it in an interprofessional way. So we have 60,000 square feet in our new medical school building for simulation work. We have really high tech robots and AI use in the sim labs. So we have a robot that delivers babies, which one of our nursing students said was the coolest, realest, fakest thing you’d ever seen.
But we also have them coming together because if we’re going to have an integrative vision of health and wellbeing, we’re also going to need both current professions to work together as teams better and we also need to anticipate how technology is going to reshape how we care for one another so that we want to be both high tech and high touch.
We have both those robots delivering babies and we also have actors, who are coming in to simulate how they receive diagnoses from doctors, nurses, allied health pharmacists, et cetera, and I see tremendous growth and progress because insofar as we can anticipate the future of healthcare, we can prepare the leaders that our communities are going to need.
As you know, Christians were the first ones to found hospitals back in the fourth century. We’ve given that over, we did a lot of that in American history. You know, think of all the hospitals that are known as Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Saint this or Saint that. We lost some of that, and it also impoverished our vision of health, and we want to inspire that and prepare our healthcare professionals to work in secular and multi-faith environments, as well as in Christian hospitals.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Before we close our conversation, I want to ask you about your understanding of the academic vocation and in particular, what characteristics and our qualities define it. And in what ways does Belmont then try to cultivate such a vision within the faculty members that come there to serve?
L. Gregory Jones: It’s a great question and I would say that the heart of the academic vocation is the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness, the three great transcendentals. And, and that means that you’re not just trained in a discipline, but you’re trained with expertise in a field that helps you see into key issues that is also going to involve engagement with others who see things differently.
I talk about unlikely friendships in the university, and by that I don’t just mean political differences or racial or socioeconomic or regional, I also mean scientists and artists spending time together because they see the world differently. And so at the heart of it is that pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness from a particular perspective and coming alongside other colleagues as well as students, in teaching, in research, in service.
And research needs to be understood as translational, as well as bench and and more theoretical research and service needs to be understood fundamentally as contributing to the common good of the institution and the community. We’ve sometimes deteriorated service into just being on university committees, which is crazy. So it’s at the heart of all of that.
And I would say that in the world in which we live, it’s also being invested in coming alongside students to help them cultivate wisdom and an ability for their soul to thrive. Character formation has to be at the heart of it, and we’ve developed our approach in that way, drawing on 3 John 1:2 that says, “Beloved, I pray that you would find health and that your souls may thrive.” And so it’s that sense of the whole person thriving, our whole community thriving, and both rooted in and aspiring to wisdom because if we’re just about knowledge or expertise, AI, and ChatGPT, and Google has already won.
Todd Ream: Yeah. When seeking to exercise such an understanding of the academic vocation, what virtues then do you believe are most important for educators to cultivate?
L. Gregory Jones: I would say first is wisdom. I think that it’s at the heart, the heart of it all. I would also note truthfulness.
I would emphasize humility as well, being aware that there’s so much more we don’t know than we do. Sometimes the academic vocation cultivates a sense of expertise that can lead to hubris, when the opposite of that sense of humility that we see, but through a glass darkly as 1 Corinthians 13 would put it.
And then I would say particularly in this time cultivation of, of more virtues associated with joy and hope and love. That hope, that really trust that God, you know, there’s a fundamental difference between hope and optimism. This isn’t an easy time to be optimistic about higher education or about our country or the world. It’s so fragmented and there’s so many challenges. It is a time to be hopeful because of who God is. And you know, that’s where I go back to that Easter hope and Pentecostal power.
And so, you know. I hope that Belmont and anybody who teaches at a university, that people will see that there’s a sense of joy and hope and love, and, it’s embodied. We ought to be a place that doesn’t make sense if God doesn’t exist.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. For our last question then I want to ask, in what way is the health of the academic vocation as you’ve described it, do you think then related to the health of the vocation that the university shares with the Church?
L. Gregory Jones: I think they’re integrally related, and I think that we need to be joining hands to discover that the health of the Church depends on the health of its educational institutions and vice versa. And that for people to thrive, there needs to be integral connections. That doesn’t mean there won’t be tensions, but we really need to be nurturing that in really deep and rich ways.
The title of the old book by Jean Leclercq, the Love of Learning and the Desire for God really gets to the heart of it. And we ought to be cultivating that and seeing those intrinsic connections that will enable everyone to flourish. And I really believe that in the next 25 years the leading institutions in education, whether you’re talking from preschool all the way to graduate school, are going to be those that have a deep seated connection to faith communities and to the love of God.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been L. Gregory Jones, President of Belmont University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
L. Gregory Jones: Thank you, Todd. It’s been a delight to be 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.
