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In the thirty-third episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with J. Bradley Creed, President of Campbell University. Creed opens by discussing how events in 1979 within the Southern Baptist Convention set in motion a host of changes that would begin by impacting the six Southern Baptist seminaries and eventually, depending upon the state convention, impact historically Southern Baptist colleges and universities. Creed’s service to Baptist higher education took place in the wake of those events, including as a dean at Baylor University, provost at Samford University, and, for the last ten years, president of Campbell University. While Creed spent most of his time directly serving colleges and universities, he shares how the calling which he received was one that led him to have one foot in the academy and one foot in the Church. Such a vocational understanding proved helpful as Creed sought to nurture frameworks for Christian commitment at the institutions he directly served in the wake of rapid changes occurring in Southern Baptist life. Creed then closes by discussing how his understanding of the academic vocation emerged over the years and the ways Campbell seeks to foster an appreciation for the Christian academic vocation amongst educators who join their community.
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is J. Bradley Creed, President of Campbell University. Thank you for joining us.
J. Bradley Creed: It’s good to be here, Todd. Thank you for the invitation.
Todd Ream: In June 1979, the 122nd session of the Southern Baptist Convention was held in Houston, Texas, and what occurred in that meeting is described depending upon one’s perspective as either a takeover or a reform. Risking over simplification on my part I’ll admit, conservative leaders were elected replacing moderate leaders. And those conservative leaders were often identified as holding inearrantist or fundamentalist views of Scripture.
Amongst educational institutions, changes imposed by the newly elected leadership initially impacted the seminaries whose organizational connection was to the convention itself. Colleges and universities were organizationally connected to their state conventions, but eventually those changes made their way to those institutions as well.
As a church historian who graduated from college that same year, how would you describe the theological fabric of the college and universities that shared relationships with their state conventions prior to and up to 1979?
J. Bradley Creed: The beginning of my graduate education started in 1979, and so I did two graduate degrees at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. There was never a time when the controversy was not prevalent and pervasive. It was the zeitgeist at the time.
So you’re, you have correctly identified that the Southern Baptist Convention, a national entity, only owned and operated six seminaries, institutions of higher education. Baptists are a decentralized group, um sometimes the people will act like bishops and, and you know, tend to go in another direction, but you know, technically there’s a separation between the national level, state conventions, and local associations. Historically, the Baptist colleges across the South primarily have been related to the state conventions. Many of those colleges predated the formation of state conventions, but eventually came into alliance in some sort of governing a relationship.
So that was the whole context for my graduate work. First I did a Master’s in Divinity, and then the PhD, which I completed in 1986. It had an unsettling effect in the institution that I went to and to others. Southwestern Seminary at that time was the largest you know, being in Texas, things have to be bigger in Texas. But there were, you know, over 4,000 students when I was there. I had larger classes in some cases at seminary than I did as an undergraduate at Baylor. I would say at that time, Southwestern was, I think arguably, one of the more conservative schools in theology, and it has to do with its history and its background.
And so still because of this orchestrated and concerted effort to, you know, elect a president of the National Convention who had quite a bit of leeway in appointing certain committees, which could have an influence on the institutions, that happened over a protracted period of time. And it was undulating. It went from the beginning until whenever that group declared victory. But it was unsettling on many of the faculty and staff so that that colored everything. While we were there, we didn’t see a lot of divisions. You know, you’d see some students taking sides one way or the other, but it wasn’t as divisive among the students as it later became within the SBC itself and even continues to be today, after the so-called takeover or reformation was complete.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. After watching the changes imposed by the newly elected leadership on seminaries, how did colleges and universities respond over the following, say, 10 to 15 years?
J. Bradley Creed: That was more decentralized and there’s more of a variety there because it all depended on what happened in the state conventions, but there was kind of a parallel in corresponding movement in the state conventions to replicate at the state level what was happening at the national level. And with varying degrees of success, you could almost go state by state.
Early on in 1992, the institution from which I graduated as an undergraduate, Baylor, and to which I returned for eight years later to help found Truitt Seminary. In 1992 Baylor made a very decisive, swift, and somewhat clandestine move to sever its ties from the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Baylor’s contention was that it had been chartered by, not the state of Texas, but the Republic of Texas. And that took precedent.
And what ended up happening there was kind of a detente. And so the schools in Texas that are Baptist-related still have some governing relationship. But I think at Baylor, for example, the state convention still elects or affirms one fourth of Baylor’s trustees. In other places, there was more of a takeover or control, like you saw at the national level.
There were some schools early on that just opted out and, and some of those Baptist schools, even before this controversy was full bore. I think of Wake Forest University that’s here in North Carolina Richmond University in Virginia, Meredith College in North Carolina, and somewhere along the way, Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. There were others that took measures to increase their autonomy and started making changes in their governance structure. It depended on the state.
In North Carolina, the Baptist schools kinda came together. It was not without friction, but it was mostly amiable from what I’ve been told all schools that were still related to the state convention left at the same time. And that would’ve included Campbell Chowan University, Gardner-Webb University, and Mars Hill College or University.
Campbell defines in its official documents that we have an autonomous and voluntary relationship with the North Carolina Baptist Convention. We receive no money from them. They elect none of our trustees. But I’ve had a very amiable and working relationship with the state convention director and we honor that part of our heritage. It hasn’t always been that smooth in other places. But more and more schools received less and less money from the state conventions, whether they retain governing control or not. And that’s what’s happened in the last, you know, 25 years or so at the state level.
Todd Ream: Yep. When you assess how a historically Baptist, Southern Baptist college or university expresses its Christian commitment today, where do you go to look for insights? What commitments and/or practices do you believe are most important to observe and reflect what those commitments actually are?
J. Bradley Creed: Yeah, that’s a very good question because, you know, when you separate from the state convention, you lose some of that connective tissue and, and you lose the culture of that. But the first place that I go to is the mission statement of the university, and that’s very important here. I think you could read Campbell’s mission statement and it’s clearly a Christian identity. There’s biblical language there, but it also has other things that you would see at another university about learning and student life and so forth.
I think you look at who the university hires, particularly at its senior administrative level. When I was hired here, I’m a Baptist, by practice, by persuasion. But there was not a mandate to hire a Baptist as the president. And then I think who that chief executive officer in turn hires to be a part of the senior cabinet is important. You get down to hiring a faculty, and this is where the schools will often diverge.
At Campbell, we hire according to mission, but we do not require all of our faculty to be confessing Christians or even Baptists. And I like to say we take a missional approach to our identity. I would describe other schools as taking a covenantal approach, and I think of, you know, non-Baptist schools like Calvin College and Wheaton, very fine institutions that, you know, have faith requirements and are a little more specific in, in hiring or in ways that we are not.
And then you look at the curriculum. And I think that the ethos and by that I don’t mean just kind of a sense of what’s in the air, but chapel, the place that it has, if worship services are taking place, if their requirements in the curriculum that students, whatever their religious background is, that they would take about the Christian faith, whether it’s an introduction to New Testament, Old Testament, or Christianity.
Prayer, which is common on our campus before we have meetings, you know, some of the more behavioral sorts of things. We don’t have men and women living on the same floors in the dorms and we don’t serve alcohol on campus. And those are the sorts of things that you look at. I think some schools, I look at Calvin College because of their Reformed background and the sort of Kuyperian approach. You see it much more integrated into their curriculum. And I think in the Baptist schools you will see evidence of it, but not so much of an emphasis upon a Christian worldview and those sorts of things.
But those are some of the touchstones and the benchmarks that I observe in looking at a school that’s not my own, but that I have paid attention to while being president here for 10 years.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. I want to ask you now about some further details about your own calling and how you’ve come to understand it. You’ve already mentioned that you went to Baylor as an undergraduate and then did an MDiv and a PhD at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. You then also pastored churches in both Texas and Louisiana. Would you start by describing your call to the ministry?
J. Bradley Creed: I was very blessed to be raised in a Christian home. Baptists have no grandchildren. You have to make that decision for yourself, but I look back at my family and a direct great-grandfather was Isaac Newton Langston. And he was an early Baptist leader in Alabama. I found all this out later and his daughter married a Creed. And so I come from a long line of Baptist deacons.
My mother was raised in the non-instrumental Church of Christ. And it’s interesting, just as a sidelight here, I found out that my great, great grandfather, on my maternal side, was Freeman Benjamin Dowd, who was the national leader of the Rosicrucian movement, and, you know, we would consider that a cult. And so it’s interesting from that, my mother, she had no awareness of that until recently. And I think she maybe would wish that we hadn’t have dug that deeply into our genealogy.
But I had a Christian background. My mother eventually joined the Baptist Church. So the Central Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Texas was formative for me. And a youth minister in particular, who was very helpful, but I just think about those dear lay people that gave of their time to teach me in Sunday school and Royal Ambassadors and, and all of that. And so I made a profession of faith when I was 11. And you know, never wavered from that.
I don’t have a salacious testimony about how I joined a biker gang or, you know, did drugs or anything like that. I wanted to buy a motorcycle in high school when I was working and making my money. But my father said, I don’t care if you have money, you’re not gonna have a motorcycle here.
And in college at Baylor University not knowing what I wanted to do in life, I thought about several things. I just had this growing sense, primarily through the ministry of a local church, that God was leading me into some kind of ministry. And so I was discerning with that call. I was prayerful about it. And probably toward the end of my sophomore year, made that a public decision. And there was never a time though when I mean, education was always a part of that. I knew I wanted to pursue a PhD, so I’ve always had one foot in the academy and one in the Church.
So when I’ve been a full-time pastor, I taught adjunctively and would lecture at, at a state college where I was and, and did some academic writing. And when I’ve been in academia and administrative work, I’ve done a number of interim pastorates in various states. So that’s been the context of my calling and, you know, if I got into this to be a teacher, I have failed because I’ve been really a full-time faculty member. And you tend to go one or two directions in your journey, and I didn’t set out to be a dean or nobody in their right mind wants to be a provost.
But I was out of my good mind for 14 years at a wonderful school, Samford and been a president for 10 years. I think I got into this because I like to learn, but these opportunities opened up for leadership and I’ve taught along the way. I have a faculty appointment here, but I’m not tenured.
And I think the learning part is a part of my own spiritual development. I have always been a pursuer of the knowledge of God and the things of God. Not that I’ve understood that clearly or lived by that, but I’m, I’m still interested in the big questions that you often get through the liberal arts in the great books. What is reality? Is there a God? What does it mean to be a good person? What is the good life? What is community all about?
And I think that’s a part of our journey of being a follower of Christ. We read in the Old Testament about the knowledge of God and the wisdom of God, and then we hear about the mind of Christ, and I think that’s at the heart of, of who I am. As you mentioned, or maybe it was before we started the recording, I’ll be retiring at the end of this year and I was visiting with Daniel Aleshire recently who’s been a friend for years, you know, was the head of the Association of Theological Schools and he’s kind of semi-retired and about to retire completely. And we, we both talked about having a chance to live out our faith not being professional Christians when we retire.
And, you know, the Apostle Paul said for me to live is Christ. He didn’t say for me to live as my ministry or my presidency or my tenured faculty position. And so I will go back to that time and time again. And that call to serve and to lead has been manifested in different ways. But that’s been, I think the center of who I am, working both in the academy and in the Church.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. You served for approximately 15 years as the Dean of Truett Seminary at Baylor University.
J. Bradley Creed: Actually it was closer. I was there a total of eight years. That was one correction to the biography. There were times where it felt like 15 years. No, but I was there from the beginning.
I went as the associate dean when it was two people, a legal pad, and a pencil. And we did everything for one year, recruiting that first class, and took our first class in 1994. And I was to come back in August for the 30th anniversary of the beginning, and was absolutely overwhelmed. I had a speaking role. I was surprised by the number of people who were there. It was a big deal.
And, and the seminary is just doing well under its current leadership with Dean Todd still and the president of Baylor, Linda Livingstone, who was a colleague at Baylor she was Associate Dean in the School of Education when I was there.
And so I was there as a startup. I had started a new church planter at one time, and this was an academic startup, but in the context of a research university. And then after eight years, went on to Samford.
Todd Ream: Yeah. What lessons did you learn by serving as dean for such a young seminary, a startup, you know, arguably, even still but you know, when you took the reins there that you still carry with you perhaps to this day?
J. Bradley Creed: Well, I was very young and I had a chance to go teach at Southwestern Seminary in 1992, and just because of the unrest and instability that was going on in the Southern Baptist Convention, I decided that was not a wise way to go. And then things opened up for me to go to Truett Seminary, and I was a very young dean.
In fact, when I was an associate dean, I remember going to a meeting of all the associate deans on campus, and this officious woman, you know, shooed me out of one room and, and told me that the meeting for the graduate students was down the hall. And with his head of gray hair, nobody makes that mistake anymore.
But it was at Baylor, a crucible for my leadership. It was a divisive time in denominational life. And it was a fermentative time at Baylor where there was, there was a lot of conflict and, and skirmishes over the direction in the purpose of Baylor.
But you know, I learned a lot of things for the first time there, that forged me and have stayed with me and, you know, often talk about, you know, what I’m looking for in a leader. I think the importance of character is essential in any leadership role. And so for the Christian, that goes back to maintaining your walk with Christ and, you know, the disciplines of the spirit that you must go through. I read the Bible every day and pray, and I’ve taken retreats and all those sorts of things.
You know, along the way you learn that in a leadership position, you’re, you’re paid not just to be somebody. You’re paid to do something. You have to accomplish things. And so leadership is a process of, of, of recruiting and mobilizing people in programs together toward a stated or shared gold and strategic priorities. And hopefully you can develop people in the process so that they discover their gifts and you’ve got to get things done. You’re held accountable for that.
I think there, there’s certain things a leader does that I could talk about, and who that leader is important. But a leader’s presence and how the leader lives and exists within the organizational system is highly important. And it’s almost counterintuitive sometimes, because I use this analogy, institutions, though they might be bureaucratic and have org charts and are hierarchical, and you might look at that as an engineer might, they’re very organic as well. I mean, all the way from family units to a church, to a faith-based college or you know, any system.
And so it’s how you function in that system. You have to be a non-anxious presence. Your hair can’t catch on fire anytime there’s a crisis. And you have to manage your own anxiety, and I think I’ve learned to do that over a period of time. As a leader, you have to have some level of comfort in having difficult conversations with people.
So those are just a few things that as I look back, I’ve learned and certainly haven’t always practiced as well as I would like to, but I think are very important in the leadership process.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Next role that you filled for a good portion of your career was as Samford’s Provost, and I believe that you mentioned that serving as a chief academic officer, no one does in their right mind just previously, but nonetheless, you also echoed too shortly after that, something that you thoroughly enjoyed.
Would you describe the discernment process that led you to make the transition from Baylor to Samford and then to that role as provost?
J. Bradley Creed: Yeah, I just got a call out of the blue one day in my office from, and would you hold for Tom Corts, president of Samford University. And a lot of people have been around for a while, know about the Corts brothers. I’d met his wife before and he was a bit cryptic. By the way, Tom Corts, looks like he came outta central casting to be a college president.
He had heard about me and is always trying to tell people good things about Samford, wanted to fly to Dallas and meet me for dinner. And I thought he was looking at me for maybe some other position, but it led to the process where I would come there to be, the, the provost. I had a year overlapping with the provost where I served as associate provost, and that worked very well.
And I think the key to being a provost is twofold. It depends on the president you work with, and then also having good relations with the faculty. And, you know, you can easily get caught between the expectations of those. I worked with Tom Corts until he retired. And then Andy Westmoreland, who had been at Ouachita Baptist came to be the president and worked with him for, maybe, nine years total and had an excellent relationship with him. I was very blessed to have two good presidents to work with. And I felt like I worked fairly well with people but you, you have to stay engaged with people but some degree of separation.
What I liked about being a provost was I could touch on the widest swath of what the university’s about every day, which is the academic mission. And I enjoyed the different disciplines and I knew nothing about pharmacy, but if I were interviewing a prospective pharmacy faculty member, I’d always ask them to tell me about your research. And they were using all these terms that I wasn’t familiar with. I’d not had chemistry in college, but if they could tell me in eight minutes with some enthusiasm and clarity about their research, I thought that was a pretty good indicator they would be good teachers and that tended to bear out.
And so Samford was just a really good place and it’s the heart of what a university’s all about. And to be able to try to interact with the faith basis of that university and academics, was a challenge but also very rewarding.
Todd Ream: In what ways then did the theological fabric of Samford change over the course of the time that you were there in Birmingham?
J. Bradley Creed: You know, other people might want to address that, but I think when I got there, there were, there were questions among some about, to what extent and how do we go about interacting with our Christian mission and identity. Samford was certainly making strides in becoming more academically prestigious, you know, rising in the US News rankings and some excellent faculty. And so one of my charges was to make sure we stayed engaged with that and, and not to do it in an overly prescriptive way, you know, to alienate people, but to have some clarity about it.
And so I worked with the deans on it and didn’t get too much pushback, but you know, faculty are those people who think otherwise. And so you know, I would, I would listen to them and valued them and respected them. And so I approach that as it’s an engaging conversation that we have along over a long period of time about the things that matter most. I would describe that as a university beyond the bricks and the mortar and the curriculum and all the programs we have.
So I tried to engage people in those conversations and I did some specific things—I gave attention to hiring. I got the deans together and we need to have sort of a one-page description of what Samford was all about. And then started bringing faculty and others around this idea of a faith-based university.
The Lilly Endowment was very generous to us. My first couple of years there, we applied for I think they were $2 million grants each. And we got those. You know, I would have faculty, reading groups, lectures, those sorts of things, but that’s how I approached it. And, you know, was able to do that over 14 years. And that’s a long time to be a provost.
I think if you try something over five years, it’s gonna be a more, more of a challenge at a faith-based university like, like Samford and like Campbell, where I am now. But that’s, that was, that was my approach to it. And felt a sense of accomplishment in that by the time I left.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to asking you about your presidency at Campbell. You know, you came in 2015 so served, you know, 10 years essentially there as president, can you start by talking about the discernment process that led you to embrace an appointment as a college president and as president at Campbell University?
J. Bradley Creed: Right. I think that last statement is the most important. I was looking back over some old journals the other day, and it was back in 2005 or 2006. And as I looked at my goals for the next year and my priorities, whenever I’d put college presidency, it was always with a question mark. So I couldn’t tell you, like, I think some people would tell you my goal vocationally, professionally is to be a university president. But I felt because of my experience and what I’d learned in my profile to be a good steward of all that I needed to be open to it.
And probably about 2005, I met a certain profile and so, you know, a couple of times a year I would get these entreaties and queries about, you know, being a president and, interviewed a few times. There was one that I was told I was the second guy. Maybe they told everybody that, but the differentiator was that there was a sitting president they hired.
And I was actually relieved it didn’t work out. There were a couple that wanted me to come and I, I walked away from, and we had had a terrible tragedy in our family. In 2007, our nineteen-year-old daughter who was a student at Baylor, was killed in an automobile accident. And so that wasn’t a time, you know, to think about moving the family.
But Andy Westmoreland and I talked and, you know, he talked about, well, we need to retire together. And I enjoyed working with Andy. So I was gonna be content to kind of run out the tape, you know, for the next, however many, seven years that was or whatever.
And then I get this call from a search consultant and she just kept calling me back. She told me about another opportunity and she was different than most search consultants. I had grown a bit jaundiced because you, you should never lose side of the fact that the search consultant is not working for you. They’re working for the university that’s going to hire somebody, that’s who’s paying them. And I was content where I was and so I let several deadlines pass for submitting materials and ignored it. And somewhere late that fall in October, she said, well, I think they’re really interested in with you. Would you at least send me a résumé? And I did.
And I think within two weeks, you know, late November, mid-November, I had the first interview and they moved pretty quickly towards me and voted me to be the fifth president of Campbell on January 2nd, 2015. And here’s an amazing statistic about this place, not me. I’m only the fifth president here in 138 years. And yeah, the first two were father and son, and the second two had worked together for a long period of time. So there’ve really been two administrations in some ways.
So I knew there was a lot of transition work I needed to build on the great accomplishments of my predecessors, but there was a lot of modernizing and building up systems to support things and moving forward. So that’s how it happened.
And it was clear to me this was the next step that we were to take. And my wife, I think, who walks closer to God than I do is always kind of known before I did that we were supposed to move. And so she was very supportive, and our youngest daughter had just decided she was gonna go to Samford. We lived right behind the campus. After she told us, there’s no way I’m going to Samford, you know, because I worked there. She made the decision to go.
And within weeks I had to pull her aside and say, I need to have a talk with you. You’re gonna get your college away experience because your parents are going off to another college. And she was a little bit sad about that at first, but she graduated from Samford and moved out here to work and met the guy who’s her husband and given me two beautiful grandsons.
And so it’s been a good move for us. And Campbell is Campbell’s just been a great place with wonderful people. And we’ve faced some enormous challenges like all schools have compounded by Covid. But ten years goes in a hurry and I’ll have the shortest tenure of the five presidents. As you know, 10 years in the future is gonna be a long tenure for a president.
Todd Ream: I was gonna say that’s approaching twice as long as the average university president.
J. Bradley Creed: Exactly.
Todd Ream: Yep. Yep. Thank you. When you came to Campbell, how would you describe the theological fabric of the institution and in what ways has it changed, if at all, over the course of your 10 years as president?
J. Bradley Creed: I think, regarding the sort of Christian mission and identity, I approached it similarly to what I did at, at Samford. I knew that, I think the missional question is always the most important for any organization. And because the university had separated, I believe in 2008 from the state convention, you know, there were, there were some questions about, well, what does this mean? I’ve never found the faculty here, demonstrating real strongly one way or another. I mean, they support the mission here.
We, for hiring and for promotion, we have four criteria. You know, there’s teaching, their scholarship, their service, and then support of mission. And I’ve already talked about how we don’t require everyone to confess our faith. We’d like for them to do that, but they need to support our mission. We’ve even had non-Christian faculty members of other faiths that will talk about it. I like how you integrate your faith here.
You know, we’re finding that we’re drawing more Hispanic students, many of whom are Catholics, where we’ve got Muslim students and Hindu students. They like our values that in many ways are Christian values, but the predominant population of our students identify as Christians, and still a, a good majority of those Baptists.
So you know, doing some of the same things in hiring. But I felt like I was appreciated and supported and it was welcomed. Any of these kinds of initiatives that we took with Lilly grants and public conversations we’ve had, you know, pretty soon discovered that the university finances were not what anybody thought and that’s a separate story.
And we really faced some pretty serious crises and then Covid hit and we were about to go through accreditation. So that’s really what I’ve spent a lot of my time doing. And, you know, we have better financial stability and management in reporting now. And so I wish that I could have given more time to that, but I had a supportive cabinet and a good faculty in our Christian studies program and in other areas. And so I don’t see it as essentially different from what happened at Samford. It was similar in many ways.
Todd Ream: Yeah. In what ways did the university presidency itself, sort of writ large, change over the course of your tenure as president at Campbell? And in what ways, if any, did those changes then impact how you exercised your leadership?
J. Bradley Creed: Yeah, well I’ve been in leadership and executive positions for 32-years, which kind of astounds me. And I’ve said this publicly, I have seen more changes in higher education in the last five years than in the previous 25. COVID exacerbated that, but things were already brewing. People in universities know about the in enrollment cliff, the demographic decline, just the public sentiment about college as a path to a good future has changed.
We have political divisions in our country, which filter down we are Division I athletics school, and if you’re keeping up with you know, the so-called settlement, the Alston Case, NIL, name, image, likeness, that is bringing a tidal wave of changes and so it makes it more difficult to be a president.
In 2023, two years ago, the Chronicle of Higher Education issued a report. And it was called “Trouble at the Top,” and it was about the daunting challenges for today’s college presidency. And one of my colleagues with whom I served on the board of the Council Independent Colleges, is quoted at the very beginning and she says, “Welcome to hell. It’s hot here, but this is my home and where I live.” And they just, the, the whole report talks about the challenges of the university presidency right now.
The general public is familiar with campus protests this past year, mainly, you know, over Israel and, and Gaza and some of the highly publicized Senate hearings. We haven’t faced anything like that at our university. We have a diverse student body, particularly for a school with our historical background in, and, and ties, but we haven’t faced that. But we face a lot of other challenges and most of those boil down to finances. And a lot of private schools and even some public schools are under financial strain today. So those are, those are some of the challenges.
And I was hired here at age 58. And I represented the youth movement. And 10 years later you can do the math on what age I will be. And I think 10 years is a good time. If you stay 15, and many people have and done a great job. At that point, some don’t know otherwise. They become dependent on your style of leadership.
I have a colleague, an incredible leader in his previous life who become a university president last year, followed by a man who was in the role more than 40 years, and I said, has that been difficult for you? He said, it hasn’t been difficult for me, but it’s been difficult for the people who worked for so long and many of them have had trouble adapting.
So, you know, as a president, you have to think about your own health and future and, and your interest, but you have to think about the wellbeing of the university. You know, a lot of presidents left right after Covid. And, it sure would’ve been tempting. We made it through that but I wanted to stay, you know, to the end of my contract and accomplish a few more things. Then, you know, the last thing a leader says is, thank you. I, I plan to, to move out of the way, and you, you trust the rest of the Lord.
Todd Ream: Yeah. I appreciate that. Unfortunately, our time begins to become short. I do want to ask you about the academic vocation and the Christian academic vocation in particular because you’ve served as a faculty member, a dean, an associate provost, a provost, and a president, and how have you come to understand the Christian academic vocation and in particular, what qualities and or characteristics in your estimation define it?
J. Bradley Creed: There’s so much that’s been written on this. You know, I think about what George Marsden has done. I think about Mark Noll. And, and I think a lot of what they talk about would resonate. But for me, as I’ve told you already, I’ve had one foot in the academy and one in the Church. And that’s very important in, in an academic vocation in the Christian faith.
I think for me, faith seeking understanding has always been something that has motivated me. You know, a university, you have to deal with all kinds of concepts and different modes of, of knowledge and sometimes those conflict and it brings dissonance with, with aspects of the faith. But I think that’s all a part of what it’s all about here.
To me though I have to remember, as I’ve mentioned earlier, and I’m, I’m still discerning this and trying to understand it, my calling is to Christ, and it wasn’t to a particular position. The Campbell mission statement says that learning was appointed by God for human flourishing. And I think we would read Scripture and, and that bears out.
And I know historically, wherever Christians show up, some people would say pretty soon nobody’s gonna have a good time. That’s kind of the old, age-old men can view the definition of a Puritan, you know, but wherever Christians show up, schools and hospitals soon follow, ministries of healing and ministries of learning and education.
So the university, a faith-based university is not the Church, but its adjunct to and works with the Church. And that’s how I understand that. And I think there’s no domain of knowledge that we should not pursue and the university is a convening place. We have challenging conversations and that’s often where we have some conflict with the members of our denominational bodies, you know, who live by simple faith, which we honor.
And you know, people warned me when I went off to college, you know, don’t study philosophy. I had a brother that did it and he lost his faith. And I still write my first philosophy professor, whose later dean at Baylor. He’s in his nineties, and sends me a Christmas card every year. And that class when I was at Baylor just opened up so many windows for me that made my faith stronger and my intellect stronger. And so it’s a part of the journey.
I went off on the route toward administration and so some faculty would say, well, that’s not an academic vocation. And I never have really taught much full-time, but I have seen what I have done as being important and necessary to support the Christian academy, and still will be a part of my consciousness as I move into the next phase of life.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In that sense of support that you’ve offered then for the cultivation of faculty members and educators, what are the virtues that you thought were most important to seek, to create opportunities for development and formation?
J. Bradley Creed: I’ll tell you how important it is here. Campbell University has done an incredible job of starting a lot of graduate programs. We have a medical school here. We’ve had a law school for 50 years, a school of engineering. And it’s time for us to take a look at our undergraduate program, and so as I leave we had the Campbell Hallmarks— calling, initiative, and character. In fact, just did a video about that recently. I do videos twice a month.
And so character is going to be very important in the curriculum and in mentoring. And we’re thinking through all of that. And I tell students, and I tell faculty as well, we want you to come here and follow your dreams and realize your goals. We want you to be successful, whatever it is you set your mind to do. This is a place where you can answer a calling and we believe that God has created you to answer a call to do something that only you can do. We want you to be great and often add and when you’re successful and if that’s financially so, please be generous to your alma mater.
But then I always add, we want you to be great, but more importantly, we don’t want you to be just great people, we want you to be good people and the world needs more good people. I used to think character was an absolutely essential qualification for holding public office, but I don’t think that’s, you know, a criterion anymore, sadly.
When we talk about character here we think about the classic virtues. You know, when you study ethics in the disciplines, if it’s journalistic ethics or medical ethics or business ethics I think there’s a place for that, but it’s often about what you need to know so you don’t mess up and get into trouble. This has to do with the formation of a person. And it’s very consonant with our ideas of the Christian faith of growing in Christ and bearing the fruits of the spirit and having the mind of Christ.
You know, we talk about courage and temperance and fortitude and, you know, I think we’re talking about students being compassionate and, you know, taking initiative, all those kinds of things, that I won’t be here to see bear fruit. We just got a grant to help us with this, but I think this is one thing that faith-based universities can do and do well and do in ways that other schools can’t. And so it’s an expression of our mission.
You can do that in Indiana Wesleyan, and it becomes a marketing differentiator too. And I think with just what’s happening in our country, not just at the public level of elected officials, but all across the board, we’re gonna need people of character, good people, because that’s essential and have this moral compass. And so that’s a part of our conversation here. And I think schools like ours have a place to shine and shine brightly going forward into the darkness.
Todd Ream: Yep. Thank you. As we close our conversation today, I want to ask you to reflect back on your tenure as president, and in particular, what interactions with educators did you find most edifying? And what interactions did you find with students most edifying?
J. Bradley Creed: Well, I did not have as many apparent or necessary interactions with educators, as I did when I was a provost, so I made it a point to be out on campus. I’m a people person. We live on campus. I love the fishbowl. When I’m walking to my office, the students are going to class, but just, you know, interacting with faculty, going around the school meetings, if there were events, you know, public forum and things like that where I might be a panelist with, with faculty members.
And really, you know, people like to talk about themselves. They want to know that you’re interested in them. And this isn’t just a Dale Carnegie gimmick on my part. I’m genuinely interested and curious about what people are doing and studying. And so I talk to them about their research or what they’re teaching this semester. And that’s the way that I come to their presentations. We do a lot with student research, those kinds of things.
The thing that has been most rewarding to me here is the interaction with students. And, you know, I can tell you I’m pretty sure I know some things that I will not miss being a college president. And I do believe that I’m going to miss the students.
And you know, I’m very visible. Our athletic director and I were just meeting our basketball team is doing well now, and we got a big game coming up and I’ve offered to, you know, camp out by the convocation center where we play overnight waiting in line for tickets, you know, like they do at Duke. And so, you know, I will miss those interactions.
And, Todd, you know, we’re in an interesting line of work, unlike any other profession because a minister grows older with the members of her congregation and a doctor grows older with his patients. We get older every year and our students stay the same age. Really interesting perspective on life, and it’s helped keep me young at heart. And I think that’s been really enriching to me.
I, you know, can speak only from the standpoint of our students, they have their struggles like anybody else. We know the statistics about the rise in mental health issues and all of that. But I’m really confident about the future when I look at our students. And I hope you would feel the same way about your students there. And I know people at Baylor and Samford would feel the same way.
And that’s why we’re in this. I will have six or seven graduation ceremonies I go through at the end of this semester. But if there’s a high and holy moment in academia, it’s a graduation ceremony. We wear special regalia and go through these rituals, but that’s what it’s all about. There’s a sense of closure that you have with that, that you don’t know when you’re a pastor of a church.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. Our guest has been J. Bradley Creed, President of Campbell University. Thank you for taking the time to join us and share your wisdom and insights with us today.
J. Bradley Creed: Thank you, Todd. It’s been a pleasure.
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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.
