Waco Tribune-Herald | Robert Baird, Board of Directors Contributor | July 11, 2025
Nine days after the announcement of the “Courage from the Margins” research grant to the Center for Church and Community Impact at Baylor University’s Diana R. Garland School of Social Work, the university announced the $643,401 grant had been voluntarily rescinded.
When I first heard that the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation had announced a grant to Baylor University’s school of social work for a study of what religious congregations do and do not do in their caring practices with all people, including women and LGBT individuals, I was so proud of Baylor University. Dr. Jon Singletary, dean of the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work, and Dr. Gaynor Yancey, holder of the Lake Family Endowed Chair in Congregational and Community Health, are among the most respected members of the Baylor community and would, undoubtedly, have overseen and produced a highly professional and valuable study.
When the philosopher Socrates was brought to trial in 399 B.C. by conservative members of the Athenian community for corrupting young people (in fact, he was stimulating them to think creatively), he said in response that it would not be fitting at his old age to toy with words. And in his speech to the Athenian Court, he didn’t toy with words. I am no Socrates, but I am now an old man, having retired from Baylor 14 years ago after having served on the faculty for 47 years, so it would not be fitting for me to toy with words.
So then, in not toying with words, I cannot exaggerate how shocked, disappointed and frankly embarrassed I was when I read that Baylor had shut down the School of Social Work study and the research which could have produced such valuable information. That Baylor, a Christian university and a top-tier research institution, would do such a thing as shutting down the study and returning the money to the Baugh Foundation is beyond disturbing. I do not pretend to know all who were behind this decision, but I also cannot imagine a more serious affront to the Baugh Foundation, which has been so generous to Baylor for over 40 years, a more serious affront to the Christian character of Baylor, or a more serious affront to the notion of Baylor as an elite research university.
To be sure, a religiously affiliated academic community lives with tension. To be religiously affiliated is to be part of a tradition with certain substantive values, and to be committed to deepening and transmitting those values. But to be an intellectual community is to stimulate students to think in new and creative ways with the risk that some students may move in directions at odds with certain religious traditions of the institution. To be an intellectual community is to pursue research — which was precisely what the Baugh grant to the Baylor School of Social Work was intended to do — which some conservatives might object to, but research that would lead to valuable new knowledge. That, of course, is what genuine top-tier research institutions are about.
Confronted with this tension between being religiously affiliated and being an open intellectual community, one option is to sacrifice religious heritage, as many universities in this country historically have done; another option is to conservatively restrict intellectual inquiry. To take the road less traveled, to sacrifice neither spiritual heritage nor open inquiry, is, with a few disturbing exceptions, the road Baylor has taken over the years.
Thinking of disturbing exceptions, a notorious example occurred in the 1960s. Under pressure from religious conservatives, Baylor closed down drama professor Paul Baker’s production of Eugene O’Neil’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” The episode led to nationally renowned Baker and most of his staff leaving Baylor. To say that the incident was not a shining moment in Baylor’s history is a monumental understatement. The rejection of the Baugh Foundation money for Gaynor Yancey’s research will surely go down in Baylor history as another of those disturbing rejections of academic freedom, and this on the heels of Baylor attaining an R1 rating on the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education for “very high research activity.”
In my 47 years with the Baylor’s philosophy department, 18 of them as chair, I never felt a moment’s pressure to alter what my colleagues or I were teaching or the books we were using or publishing. Once in a while, I would receive a call from the dean or provost simply letting me know that they had received a complaint about what I or someone else in the department was teaching, or a book we were using or a work we had published. My colleague Stuart Rosenbaum and I edited many books on controversial topics, including same-sex marriage, abortion and physician-assisted death, but the calls I received from the administration never came with even a hint that I or one of my colleagues should do other than what we were doing. It was simply a heads-up that a colleague or I might receive the complaint directly from the offended party objecting to our interest in same-sex marriage or having our students read Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto.”
But that kind of administrative response is not what has happened here. Conservative voices have shut down vital research. Courage is standing up to those who would coerce you into being something you know, in your heart, you ought not to be. There is so little courage today in the political arena. How I long for Baylor to courageously stand up to those who would keep Baylor from being all that she could be.
Robert Baird is emeritus professor of philosophy at Baylor University. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.
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The Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation Board of Trustees is deeply saddened by Baylor's decision to cancel the recent "Courage from the Margins" research grant following an online campaign of fear and misinformation. A similar project, funded by our foundation and run by the Diana R. Garland School of Social Work over the past three years, has yielded significant insights. They should be permitted to continue the trajectory of the important work they have already been able to accomplish, which focuses on research to equip congregations with evidence-based curriculum on inclusion and belonging for LGBTQIA+ individuals and women.
Baugh Foundation statement on Baylor grant cancellation
— Baugh Foundation
