Dr. Larry Lyon, Vice Provost, Dean of the Graduate School
Graduate education is especially challenging for Christian colleges. Graduate faculty need to be experts in their discipline, and at least since the time of Charles Darwin, strong disciplinary scholarship coupled with strong Christian faith has become increasingly rare. Similarly, graduate students, unlike undergraduates, are thought to be relatively set in their beliefs and much more interested in learning how to be an accountant, a chemist, or a historian than how to grow spiritually. It is not surprising, then, that most Christian colleges focus on undergraduate education. In fact, most Protestant universities that developed strong graduate programs lost their faith connections.
So, how does Baylor do it? How do we have graduate education at the highest levels while still holding firm to our faith? My fifty years at Baylor suggest two strategies: one for our graduate faculty and the other for our graduate students.
For our graduate faculty, we hire active, committed Christian or Jewish faculty. While it is true that many of the academy’s best scholars are not believers, there are more believers than Baylor could ever hire. They often welcome the opportunity to engage in high-level scholarship without marginalizing or compartmentalizing their religious commitment. Baylor is extremely attractive to such faculty. I have personally seen us hire hundreds of strong faculty who left major research universities to join us.
For our graduate students, we share Baylor’s religious foundation and provide voluntary programs for spiritual growth. The Graduate School’s surveys consistently show new students ranking Baylor’s faith connection among the top reasons they enrolled. Moreover, our exit surveys show that most graduate students report “growing spiritually” while at Baylor.
To be sure, combining faith and learning at the graduate level presents challenges. The challenges, however, are not insurmountable, and the reward is becoming something exceedingly rare and very important—a Christian Research University.