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In the seventh episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Beck A. Taylor, President of Samford University. Taylor begins by discussing the similarities and differences between the service he offered as president of Whitworth University for eleven years to the service he now offers Samford. One detail Ream and Taylor discuss is the growing importance of university presidents to be a presence in their respective state capitols and in Washington, DC. They then discuss Taylor’s calling to economics, the teachers and authors who influenced him, and the experiences that led to his transition from service as a faculty member to a dean of a business school and to a university president. As Samford’s president, Taylor discusses his aspirations for the university as it continues to emerge as a national, comprehensive, Christian university with a commitment to residential, undergraduate education as well as professional schools in areas including business, divinity, law, and pharmacy. Taylor discusses in detail the ways Samford resources and supports educators across the university concerning the relationship faith and learning share. Ream and Taylor then close their conversation by exploring Taylor’s understanding of the academic vocation as well as his aspirations for the academic vocation shared by educators who serve Samford.
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 Beck A. Taylor, President of Samford University. Thank you for joining us.
Beck Taylor: Thank you, Todd.
Todd Ream: In 2010, you and your family traveled from Birmingham, Alabama to Spokane, Washington, a total of 2,253 miles when you were appointed president of Whitworth University. In 2021, you and your family traveled from Spokane, Washington to Birmingham, Alabama, also a total of 2,253 miles. I calculated them both independently here, just to make sure, when you were appointed the president of Samford University.
While every university has its own story and culture to which a president must be keenly attuned, location matters, especially in the age in which we live. In what ways, if any, did you find serving as the president of a university in Spokane to be different from serving as a president in Birmingham?
Beck Taylor: Yeah. Great. Thanks, Todd. It’s good to be with you. It’s amazing how those distances are, in fact, the same, going and coming.
Todd Ream: I had to calculate them just to make sure.
Beck Taylor: That’s a great question. I had never lived in the Pacific Northwest when my family and I moved to Spokane, Washington and where I assumed the role as president at Whitworth. And so it was a new experience for us. My wife had grown up some in the West in Colorado so I’d spent some time in the West, but what became very immediately apparent to me was this kind of Western, independent, libertarian kind of culture that pervades much of the Mountain West and certainly eastern Washington there and Spokane.
And that had a lot of implications. Interestingly, it had implications about the way people knew and thought of and trusted leaders. Certainly leaders were appreciated. Some were revered. But having flat organizational charts and having leadership that was very accessible and very knowable, was a high priority.
I went from being Dr. Taylor at my previous role at Samford or Dean Taylor at that time, by most on the Whitworth campus, students and faculty and staff alike, to simply Beck. Sometimes I’d get a doctor back if somebody was just a little unsure. And then if somebody was really formal, they might call me Dr. Taylor or President Taylor. But I think that that interesting detail really reflects a deeper truth. And that was this kind of idea that leadership was expected to be much more accessible and much more proximate.
The Pacific Northwest, as you know, Todd is not a highly churched region of the country. In fact, I think it may be the most unchurched region of the country. And being a president of a faithful institution in a place like Spokane, Washington was very interesting, especially compared to a place like Birmingham, Alabama, that is a card carrying member of the Bible Belt.
And what I like to say is that, you know, if people went to church in Spokane, Washington, it was because they really loved Jesus. I mean, they, you know, there was no social capital. There was no benefit from identifying as a faithful person or as a Christian in that environment. And so leading a Christian university in an environment that was, you know, at best skeptical of, and maybe at worst a little belligerent toward all things faithful or Christian, that was certainly a change for me, especially having come immediately from, from Birmingham.
But in many ways the laws of gravity and Christian higher education are the same in both Birmingham and Spokane. And so, my wife and I found our 11 years there just tremendously beneficial and helpful and productive. And we just knew amazingly faithful, talented people there. What a blessing.
Then of course, coming back to Birmingham, a place familiar. A place that I knew and loved had spent five years of my professional career at, of course, that familiarity really played, I think, an important role in my transition back as president at Samford. But again, cultural differences, right? Again, back in the Deep South, back in the Bible Belt, people are more accustomed to speaking “evangelicalese,” if you will. People understanding the role of Christian institutions generally were not as skeptical about those kinds of things.
But even culturally expecting different things of, of leaders. You know, now back in the South, a lot more capital placed on position, positional capital, so never will anybody around here call me Beck even if I asked them to, so a lot more formality. But again, that formality doesn’t hide a deep sense of familiarity and friendship and colleagueship.
And so we found serving, I say, we, my wife and I, have found serving in both areas of the country just hugely beneficial. And we love people both in Birmingham and in Spokane.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In terms of location and how location can play a role in what ways, if any, do you believe the influence university presidents are called to exercise in state capitals has changed over the course of the 13 years you’ve served as a university president at Whitworth and now at Samford?
Beck Taylor: Yeah, I think that for many decades, university presidents and their boards have seen the importance of public affairs and public relations and as much as we’re interacting with lawmakers, both at the state and the federal level. I think for many decades, that’s been an important part of the role.
But it seems in the last 15, 20 years presidents are having to play more of an outsized role in our state capitals, in Washington, D.C., particularly as higher education has become, has come more under the magnifying glass, particularly around state appropriations, federal appropriations but also regulations as it attends to things like equity and access and, you know, other things.
So I would say, Todd, I’m spending more time with state, my state lawmakers, policy makers, federal policy makers than I did maybe at the very beginning of my presidency at Whitworth. So on the whole, I think it’s more important and, and deservedly so.
The way I think about our state government and our federal government is they are among the largest donors, if you will, to the institution. They don’t see themselves that way, of course, and we don’t really see them like that. But if you were to list the entities from whom the university receives either direct or indirect financial benefit, certainly the federal government would be at the top of that list.
And I would suspect at the top of that list for most universities in the form of federal aid grants to students, federally backed loan programs, research programs and the like that funnel sometimes millions of dollars to our institutions. And then to a lesser extent, state capitals that still afford our students’ state need grants and other kinds of financial resources. So if you look at our state governments as essentially backers of our programs from that financial sense, then we should be spending a lot of time with them and encouraging them about the positive outcomes of the institution.
But on more of a risk assessment front, I would say, you know, we need to make sure our policymakers are thinking well, and they’re not making policy that has unintended consequences, which often occurs and in really encouraging them and giving them a sense of confidence in what we’re doing so that they don’t feel like they have to overburden the institution with a lot of what can feel like at times extraneous regulation.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In your estimation then, how important is it for a person considering appointment as a university president to assess his or her ability to engage with the legislature in a university’s respective state?
Beck Taylor: It doesn’t have to be your favorite thing to do. It’s not my favorite thing to do. I’d much rather work with donors that have a more charitable mindset than the ones that I’ve just described.
In as much as, you know, those relationships are built on relationship and they tend to be long standing and serve long standing goals certainly have good relationships with our policymakers, our congressional delegation, our state legislature. Those relationships are important, but they tend, Todd, to be a little bit more transactional in nature, a little bit of “I can give you this if you’ll give me that.” And perhaps we should expect that in a public affairs, public policy realm.
I think though any president of a university these days needs to be at least comfortable with the idea that that’s going to be a big part of their role, cultivating and strengthening those relationships. And if somebody is aspiring to be a president, I think spending time with universities public affairs, public relations chief, somebody who’s kind of at the point of the spear, if you will, in setting the day-to-day agendas for the president and the institution with those bodies, I think spending some time shadowing that person, hearing about the agenda, going to a national conference on higher education, public policy, those would be ways I think that people could better prepare themselves for the role.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now, if I may, about your pathways to the presidencies that you’ve filled, first at Whitworth and now Samford. You earned an undergraduate degree from Baylor University in economics and finance, and before earning master’s and doctoral degrees in economics from Purdue University, you served as an analyst with Anderson Consulting, which is now Accenture. To begin, why economics?
Beck Taylor: Well, I fell in love with my field of study as an undergraduate. Perhaps a lot of us who found our way into higher education can tell a similar story about our respective fields of study. I was a business major, economics and finance, major at Baylor, as you said, and began to take my core and intermediate classes in economics.
And I think the first thing that stood out Todd was I was good at it, you know? I mean, I think that as students are discerning vocational callings, I think they need to be paying attention to things that they might be more naturally equipped to do. And as I was watching my friends get their exams back and I was looking at my exams, I was thinking, you know, I’m, I’m kind of relatively pretty good at this. Maybe I should pay attention to that.
But not unlike the experiences our students have here at Samford or at Whitworth, I had an incredible experience with my faculty mentors. And so it wasn’t long before I was spending probably too much time, frankly, in my faculty members and mentors’ offices, just talking about career opportunities, choices that I might make in terms of credits that I had left.
And it wasn’t, it wasn’t too long, Todd, before I began to discern that higher education might be a route that, that I wanted to follow, primarily because I looked up so much to my faculty mentors, and as I looked at their lives spending their days, thinking and writing and teaching, and discovering and being curious about the world, certainly that became very appealing and I’m sure that that, that probably attracted me.
But economics as a social science, as it relates to human behavior, predicting human behavior, examining policy, thinking about the ways in which we might write good rules at various levels to incent people to do things that are good for them and good for the systems in which they operate, those kinds of questions are really intriguing to me. And of course, very useful now as a university president. So I just really fell in love with my discipline and really fell in love with the idea of doing it for a lifetime.
Todd Ream: Are there any individuals in particular from your days as an undergraduate or as a graduate student who you would give credit to?
Beck Taylor: Oh, lots, lots, Todd. You know, I’ve written about these people. I’ve had opportunities and texts that you’ve edited to kind of think about the enormous impact that some of my faculty members had. People like Dr. Steven Green, Dr. Allen Seward at Baylor, these are the faculty members in whose offices I spent gobs of time. I’m sure they were wishing I would leave to get on with their good work. At the undergraduate level, those names come to mind.
At the graduate level professors John Umbeck and Jack Barron at Purdue, took a pretty naive understanding of my field and discipline and really developed that into a scholar’s brain and really taught me the ins and outs of academic research.
And just recently, I have to say this just recently, I got to see my graduate mentors, graduate school mentors at Purdue earlier this year. I was honored. I was grateful to be honored by Purdue. And so we had a great dinner there and John Umbeck and Jack Barron were there and got to celebrate with them and just a very nostalgic opportunity, but also one that I was grateful to be able to tell them once again, the impact that they made in my life.
Todd Ream: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Now, if you weren’t in their office, depending upon what they taught, I might have been waiting outside the door with my macro or micro exam in hand, and it might not have been what your exams looked like so they might have been appreciative, actually.
Beck Taylor: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Todd Ream: Economists often resonate with certain schools of thought that are frequently named for founding theorists. What schools of thought, if any, do you resonate with?
Beck Taylor: Yeah, I consider myself to be a classical or a neoclassical economist. As a micro economist I could go back really far in history and talk about some moral philosophers. But I think the, probably the first modern economist that I read as a young student that really resonated with me was Milton Friedman, somebody who really modernized and formalized the study of mathematical models and economics.
And reading Friedman really convinced me of the power, the predictive power, of economics and the opportunity to kind of understand how incentives matter in human behavior and how we can formalize that through various rules, laws, mathematics, things like that so that we can, you know, economists can have quite a bit of power as it relates to having a little, you know, slightly different perspective on how a policy or a rule or a decision might impact a larger system.
You know, as I joked earlier, it’s not that different from my job as a CEO or a university president. So often I’m presented with several ways the university might structure its rules, policies, procedures, and things like that, and I think as an economist, while I don’t have 100 percent foresight, I can often see the peril or the perils in certain policies if they were to be enacted.
And I think that gives me a little bit of a superpower, if you will, to be able to kind of say, well, okay, how do we ameliorate that perverse incentive? Or how do we, how do we take care of people who might be marginalized because of this particular policy or rule? And I think, you know, and I think that that gives me a lot of advantage really as a policymaker at the university level.
Todd Ream: Thank you. After you completed your academic work at Purdue, you returned to Baylor to serve as a faculty member. Shortly thereafter, you began your career as an administrator, serving as an associate dean for research and faculty development for Baylor’s Hankammer School of Business. And you then accepted the appointment as the dean, as you mentioned earlier, for Samford’s Brock School of Business.
Would you please describe the discernment process you followed when deciding to accept administrative responsibilities, such as an associate dean for research and faculty development?
Beck Taylor: Yeah. So, you know, I was so fortunate after finishing my graduate work at Purdue to go back to alma mater. What a gift to go back and to now be colleagues with some of the people that I mentioned earlier and to be in a department that was so formative in my life. And so for the good first portion of my career, I was a faculty member bucking for tenure, teaching and writing and doing research and all of the things that are involved in that. And I had quite a bit of success doing that. And I’m sure that was the result of the investments that so many really placed in my life.
It was because of those investments, Todd, that I began to ask, how might I be beneficial for others who are maybe newer to the profession? Baylor’s economics department was growing at that time. Pretty quickly, I found myself as a more senior member of that department. And so I started asking questions like, how can I be supportive? What, what things can we put into place that would really help junior scholars?
And it was really those conversations that I had with my then dean Terry Maness there at Baylor and we styled this brand new position. The associate dean for faculty research and development was not in existence before, before Terry and I kind of conjured it up. And so I saw it as a way of giving back. Frankly, I saw it as a way of continuing in my role as a faculty member, but also coming alongside junior faculty who just had so much promise and potential, but who frankly needed additional resources. They needed somebody to kind of break the barriers. They needed folks to kind of, you know, help them kind of navigate, you know, the things that can be distracting to junior scholars.
And I really fell in love with the work of, of doing just that. And, you know, leadership at any level, but certainly leadership in a college or university really is about coming alongside others and helping others to achieve their goals and aspirations. You know, whether one’s an associate dean or a dean or a provost or a university president, that’s what we do. You know, that’s the name of the game, is really helping others to achieve their goals and aspirations, whether they be students or, you know, faculty and staff members.
Todd Ream: Thank you. The discernment process then that led you from Waco to Birmingham when you moved there to Birmingham the first time and accepted your responsibility as dean, could you describe that for us?
Beck Taylor: Sure. I would chalk it up to a very persistent friend and colleague who had spent a lot of time at Baylor, whom I knew, who was associate provost at the time here at Samford Dr. Mark Bateman, who sadly passed away this last year, but his persistence probably caught my attention. You know, he called me once, twice, three times and said, hey, we’re looking for a new dean. Might you be interested?
But Todd, I’ll tell you what really turn of the tide in terms of my decision making was the opportunity to sit at the knee really of a giant in Christian and Baptist higher education. And that was Dr. Tom Corts, who served as the 17th president here at Samford, really the opportunity to come to Samford, learn from Dr. Corts, was just too good to be true. And I was already beginning to discern that God might be calling me into higher levels of leadership and service. And so the idea of coming to work for Tom was just an opportunity that was too good to pass up.
I often joke that three months after I got here, Todd, Tom Corts announced his retirement, so it was kind of a bait and switch a little bit, but I got to know Tom. We worked together for a few years after that until sadly his untimely death. But got to then work for Dr. Andy Westmoreland. So it was absolutely wonderful.
But, but the opportunity to come to Birmingham to a new place, to tackle new challenges, and to really take at that time kind of fledgling business program and really help to turn it into one of the premier business schools in the Southeast, which I think it is now, due to the investments and efforts of so many beyond myself was really a great opportunity. I was the youngest, at the time I was appointed here at Samford, I was the youngest dean of an accredited business school in the country.
I was 35 years old at the time. I really give Dr. Corts and Samford huge kudos for taking a chance on me. And really taking somebody who probably didn’t know as much as they probably thought he did and really investing in him as a young administrative professional. And together we got a lot accomplished.
Todd Ream: In addition to the possibility of representing the interests of a university in the respective state legislature, what would you identify as the primary responsibilities of today’s university president? And in what ways, if any, have those responsibilities changed since you started with your tenure at Whitworth to where you are today?
Beck Taylor: Sure. Gosh, we wear so many hats. And on any given day, I feel like I have the best job in the world. I mean, I don’t want to lie. There are a few days when I might trade it with somebody, but generally it is an incredible job. If university presidents don’t tell you they’ve got the best jobs in the world, they’re either lying or they’re doing it wrong because it just every day has just the opportunity for enormous impact and influence and the number of hats that we wear is so very different.
I’m an academic and I lead an academic institution. And so the life of the mind is important to me. It’s important that I have a voice in the academic direction and vision of the institution. Of course, I work alongside other academic leaders to do that. Our provost, Dr. Dave Cimbora, our academic deans here at Samford, you know, we all play a role in that. But first and foremost, I lead an academic institution. So I need to continue to style myself as an academic and play a role in the academic direction of the university.
But I’m also the CEO of a very large and complex organization. We have more than a billion dollars of assets at Samford. Our university budget is nearly $225 million a year. We employ 1,500 employees. We have 6,000 students, 57,000 living alumni. It’s a big operation and so I have to wear a lot of operational hats from strategy to finance to buildings and grounds to athletics. We have a Division I athletics program here. To student affairs, of course, coming alongside students and making sure they’re flourishing in every way. I mean, these are the things that make the job both challenging and a lot of fun on a daily basis.
If anything’s changed over that amount of time, I think, presidents are being pulled in directions that are more tangential to the academic mission of the institution. So much of our time now has to be spent dealing with legislators or boards or bond rating agencies, or bankers, and these are all important things that are important to the life and mission of any institution. But they tend to spin us away from campus. They tend to spin us away from students.
And so I have to be very intentional in my daily work to make sure that I’m getting proximate to students, proximate to faculty and staff members, because it would be easy for me to spend weeks upon weeks maybe not even on campus, frankly, engaging in fundraising and alumni relations and all of the things that are important for a president to do. But what gives me life and energy are the things like coming alongside a faculty member and say, hey, what are you working on? Or coming alongside a student and say, hey, what’s your favorite class right now and why? Those are the kinds of life-giving things that I think for the long term give me the energy and inspiration to do the work.
Todd Ream: In what ways, if any, was the beginning of your tenure at Whitworth different than the beginning of your tenure at Samford because you had served at Samford before as the dean of the business school and had some familiarity with that campus and its culture?
Beck Taylor: Yeah, in addition to, you know, just a change of location and culture, as we talked about earlier, yeah, I’ve never been a president before. I’ve been around a lot of great presidents. But, you know, until that basketball coach calls his first time out, you know, he’s really kind of play acting. And I think the same is true for a president. Until you’re in the chair, you’re kind of making it up. And so certainly there was that component.
Whitworth was a new place as we talked about earlier, and I was learning so much about myself and others really developing my leadership philosophies and principles, and testing those, you know, on a daily basis.
Coming back to Samford three years ago, I had served as the president of Whitworth for 11 years. That’s a pretty good run for any university presidency. I’d certainly learned a lot in that time period. And so hopefully I brought a lot of that experience capital back with me to Birmingham. But as you suggested, coming back to a place that I already knew and loved, with people I already knew and loved, made the transition so much easier.
My entire executive leadership team, for example, that I inherited here at Samford were people with whom I had worked previously, maybe in another or different roles, but to a person I knew each one. That was a very different experience than the one I had moving to Spokane and to Whitworth.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For individuals who’ve yet to visit Samford, how would you describe the university’s story and its culture?
Beck Taylor: Yeah, so we are a storied institution. Samford University is the 87th oldest university in the country. It was founded as Howard College in Marion, Alabama. And really was a college founded by Alabama Baptists. Like so many denominational colleges and universities were founded to try to address kind of the wild frontier at the time to move into a city that was being overrun by sin and debauchery and to really instill a sense of civic mindedness and education, and faithfulness into that community.
That college, Howard College, grew over the decades to become a kind of a modern college and university. And then in 1965, Howard College was restyled Samford University to really recognize the comprehensive university that it had become. We are a university that has had three homes. I mentioned Marion, Alabama.
In the late 19th century, the university moved to an outer suburb of Birmingham. And then in the late 1950s the university made its move to its final home. I like to say here in Homewood, Alabama. You’ve been on our campus, Todd. It’s a beautiful Georgian colonial revival architecture campus. It screams higher education when you walk onto campus.
But maybe more importantly, for all of its 183-year history, Samford has lived at the intersection of Christian faith and learning. And so we continue to think about, in important ways, what it means to invite students to that place where we want them to grow intellectually, more curious about themselves and the world around them, to be exposed to modern thinkers, but also to think about what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ and, and how that identity as a Christ-follower can shape and inform their person, their vocation, and their place in the world.
Todd Ream: Shortly after you began your appointment as Samford’s president, the board and trustees adopted the current strategic plan Fidelitas, Faith, and Future. Would you please describe some of the critical components of that plan? And how do you anticipate it’s shaping and will shape the university’s story and culture moving forward?
Beck Taylor: Yes. Our strategic plan Fidelitas, which as you know, is Latin for faithfulness, is a far ranging aspirational strategic plan that contemplates a university that continues to grow in stature and impact. As our vision statement says, we want to become a school of choice, the school of choice among national, comprehensive, Christ-centered universities, particularly those that place a special emphasis on the residential experience for undergraduates.
But like any good strategic plan, most at the university, whether they live in our athletics department, in our biology department, in our student affairs or Greek life area the hardworking men and women who take care of our physical plant or manage our money, most at the university can see themselves somewhere in the strategic plan.
And so we have, as I said, a lot of aspirational goals within that strategic plan about how to be a more faithful university, how to really equip our students of today for the professions, careers, and callings that they’ll have in the modern world. And so I’m excited to see what Fidelitas will do for Samford. Like any good strategic plan, it serves us. We don’t serve the strategic plan. And so we’re learning how to use the language of the strategic plan. And it’s been fun in the last really 18 months to experiment and see where it takes us.
I should say, because it’s so important to the development of the university, we’re a growing campus. We’ve had 16 consecutive years of enrollment growth here at Samford. And so alongside Fidelitas, we have a really ambitious campus master plan called Samford Horizons, which really develops that 21st century residential college.
And right now, as I look out my window, Todd, we’ve got 300 million dollars of construction ongoing on Samford’s campus right now to really attend to the needs of our residential students. It’s a really exciting time to be at Samford.
Todd Ream: In terms of two of those groups that may prove critical to the success of the strategic plan, your curricular and co-curricular educators I want to ask a couple of questions about the academic vocation then.
And if I may start with, what are the key characteristics of the academic vocation as you came to understand and exercise them through the story that we were talking about earlier today in our conversation?
Beck Taylor: You know, whether it’s faculty members thinking of themselves as academicians and living at the edge of their particular disciplines or 18 year-old freshmen, some of whom I greeted today who are just at the very outset of being a learned person and understanding the world around them, you know, I really start with both the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.
You know, the great commandment is to love God with all of ourselves, right? Mind, body, strength, spirit, and what it means to love God is a thinking person. God in his infinite wisdom imbued human beings with the ability to reason and to think and to explore and to discover and to co-create. And these are virtues and attributes of the human condition that I think the academy is meant to shine a light on, and to elevate, and to introduce at times to people.
But the second part of that Great Commandment, of course, is to love neighbor. And so we’re not just accruing these academic goods to ourselves. We’re doing that and we’re thinking about how we can better serve the people around us, especially those in our communities that are suffering. And so I really start the academic vocation conversation, whether it’s a 18 year-old freshman or the senior most faculty member at the university with this idea of what it means to love God and love others.
And then of course, the Great Commission at Samford, we are, we are animated by this idea that we want to elevate the Lordship of Jesus Christ in all we do. We want the fragrance of Christ to be apparent at our institution. And we want to meet students and community members where they are and introduce them to the gospel sometimes for the very first time. And that’s an important element of the academic vocation here at Samford University.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In terms of those characteristics, in what ways, if any, do you anticipate they might be enhanced moving forward, whether as a result of the strategic plan or other initiatives that are in place on campus?
Beck Taylor: So a project that, Todd, you’ve been very, um helpful with here at Samford, we have a renewed faith and learning initiative here on campus where even, and despite I think a long history of, of faithful academics asking questions about what does it mean to be at the intersection of faith and learning? We have a renewed effort in that regard.
And so we’re really cutting some new ground here at Samford. We’ve got a new general education curriculum that we’re going to implement in a couple of years that I think gives more attention to elevating faith and learning. We’re asking all of our academic schools and disciplines to think with renewed conviction and commitment to what it means to invite students into those spaces and also to be thinking in those spaces, so that’s really quite exciting and I’m excited about that.
We have a center on campus called the Mann’s Center for Ethics and Leadership. Marvin Mann, incredibly generous benefactor here at Samford left us a 100 million dollars a couple of years ago in his estate. And as part of that, has endowed this Mann’s Center for Ethics and Leadership.
And we’ll be searching for the center’s new director here in the coming year. I’m really excited about how that center can coexist with our current efforts to really introduce our students to things like Christian virtue, philosophy, ethics, decision making, things like that can span all disciplines and professions and really span the institution in that way. So, I mean, we have a lot of different kinds of history to kind of lean on but we also have a lot of novel ideas percolating at the institution, which is quite exciting.
Todd Ream: What virtues do you believe are most critical to exercising the academic vocation as we’ve talked about here today on campus and as the campus community moves forward into its future?
Beck Taylor: Yeah. Thank you. Well, of course, the Christian classical virtues of faith, hope and love are very important.
But as I, as I think about faithful believers who embody faith, hope and love, what are, you know, what are the growing edges of, of the academic vocation in terms of, of virtue making? I think curiosity comes to mind. How do we instill in people a real sense of discovery? So much of today’s rhetoric and discourse is about being certain about things. And Todd, maybe there are some things that we can be certain about, but so much of God’s grace has been given to us in our ability to discover, to ask hard questions and critical questions, to think critically about the issues of today. And so, you know, going into conversations with a posture of learning and curiosity, I think is something that we want to instill in others.
And then that goes hand in hand with the virtue of humility, right? Being able to enter into a conversation and admit that I don’t know everything about that particular topic, or there may be some experiences that others have had that lend themselves to having insights that I don’t have. That curiosity and humility, I think need to go hand in hand.
But I think curiosity also has to be paired with conviction. You know, we’re people of the book. We do have some convictions and so we need to help people understand how to navigate complex ideas with both that humility and that conviction. Our political discourse in this country are frankly, and sadly our discourse in our churches, too often, I think lends itself too much to either the curiosity or the conviction and not kind of an integrating of the two.
And so, we’ve engaged here at Samford for a number of years in conversations about what does it mean to have civil discourse? What does it mean to walk into very tough spaces and to critically analyze, but also to listen clearly and to come away from those with renewed and new insights and convictions? And, you know, I think that our world would be a better place if places like Samford, places like Whitworth, places like so many who combined faith and learning in the way that these two institutions do, if we invited more and more people into the spaces that we convene.
Todd Ream: As we prepare to close our conversation then, and you mentioned churches, and perhaps they’re one of those constituencies we need to invite into our spaces. I want to ask you about in what ways do you believe the ability to continue to cultivate these virtues for Church-related higher education stems from the health of the relationship that our institutions share with the Church and the churches that helped establish and have nurtured and sponsored them?
Beck Taylor: Such a great question. I remind people all the time that, but for a handful of examples and literally a handful, every private college or university in this country was founded by the Church and for the Church. And so almost every private college and university can trace its roots and its history back to a faithful group of people who thought it was important for their communities to be blessed by an educational institution for all the reasons we talked about earlier.
Sadly in the 20th century, as you know, many institutions began to jettison those relationships. And now, you know, depending on how you count, you know, there are just a fraction of institutions left that really take very seriously their relationship with the Church. Universities are not churches. We serve the Church in important ways, I think, and here at Samford, we do that in a variety of different ways.
First, you know, we’re historically Baptist university. We were founded by Alabama Baptists back in 1841 and have enjoyed a long and rich history with that denomination here in our state. But we are not an entity any longer of the Alabama state convention. That is, we don’t take cooperative program dollars any longer. Our board is an independent, self-perpetuating board.
But at the same time, we spend a lot of effort trying to nurture relationships with our Alabama Baptist partners and with our church partners more generally to ensure that we are being a resource for lay and ordained leadership. That we’re coming alongside with programs that train people who are being drawn into vocational ministry, that partner with our churches to address issues in the cities in which they exist. You know, so we try to be a partner with churches.
And fortunately we have incredible granting organizations like the Lilly Endowment, for example, that come alongside places like Samford to think with us and then to help fund importantly initiatives that give us even deeper impact in roots into the local church. We love the local church at Samford University, and we are always asking ourselves, how can we best serve the local church? And I think that’s an important part of what it means to be a Christ-centered university today.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Our guest has been Beck A. Taylor, President of Samford University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Beck Taylor: Thanks, Todd. Good 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.
