Why the faculty’s stand at Southeastern Seminary matters now

In 1987, the faculty of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., faced what many faculty members at colleges and universities across the country are confronting today: The takeover of their institution by outside forces determined to impose ideological conformity and dismantle academic freedom.

The fundamentalist majority that seized control of the seminary’s board of trustees intended to require the Bible be taught as inerrant — a doctrine so fundamentally at odds with how the faculty understood their scholarly vocation that compliance was not a possibility they were willing to entertain.

Rather than submit or scatter, the faculty organized.

They formed a chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), enlisted every member of the faculty, retained a First Amendment attorney, launched a national media campaign and reported to their two accrediting agencies that the new trustees and administration repeatedly violated the institution’s own documents that protected academic freedom and assured participatory governance.

They did not win in the conventional sense — most eventually left, and the institution was transformed into something they no longer recognized. But they bore witness, and in doing so they left behind a detailed record of how faculty can act collectively when the ground shifts beneath them.

At a moment when state legislatures are dictating what can be taught in college classrooms, when university presidents are being installed to enforce political agendas, and when federal funding is being weaponized to silence dissent, the SEBTS faculty’s story is not a historical curiosity. It is a playbook — imperfect, hard-won and urgently relevant. What follows is their account of how they did it and what they learned.

The backstory

The fundamentalist trustees who arrived in October 1987 to take over Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary did not know that Broyhill Hall, the building in which they were meeting, was the remodeled Lea Laboratory of Wake Forest College, where the former college president and professor William Louis Poteat (1856–1938) had taught that the earth and all therein were created through the process of evolution. Nor did they know that Poteat had fought successfully to defend this view among the Baptists of North Carolina, or that he had joined forces with Harry Chase, president of the University of North Carolina, to defeat an effort in the North Carolina House of Representatives to ban the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Poteat’s teaching of evolution would be absolutely contrary to an attempt to approach the Bible with a view of biblical inerrancy, yet that was exactly what the new trustees, appointed by the Southern Baptist Convention, intended to do.

After Wake Forest College moved to Winston-Salem, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary occupied the campus where Poteat had taught and led as president.

In 1987, following the tradition of Poteat in declaring united opposition to fundamentalist control, the seminary faculty resisted the imposition of a doctrine of biblical inerrancy that would have left academic freedom in shreds and made open inquiry into the message of the Bible impossible.

We determined then that, in the face of the takeover of our institution, our task was to continue to do our job of education — to work together tirelessly to seek the truth and to work fearlessly to tell it.

Preparing to bear witness

Prior to the arrival of the fundamentalist trustees, the SEBTS faculty took the first step of establishing a relationship with the AAUP and learned how to organize ourselves as a separate entity of the seminary. We established the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary AAUP chapter.

As a body separate from the structures of the institution, the chapter could convene meetings and conduct business independently from standing faculty committees and administrative processes. We asked the entire faculty to become dues-paying members, and by the time the trustees had arrived on campus, every member of the faculty had joined the AAUP chapter — an exceptional accomplishment.

At issue for us was the fact that from the founding of SEBTS in 1950, the institution’s trustees had supported academic freedom, consistent with the path taken earlier by President Poteat. The intention of the incoming trustees to enforce a view of biblical inerrancy was utterly contrary to the founding purpose of the seminary and to the academic norms in place when the members of the faculty had been appointed.

“We understood we did not have the power to prevent the Southern Baptist Convention from installing a board with a fundamentalist majority.”

Having established a chapter, we next determined our mission. We understood we did not have the power to prevent the Southern Baptist Convention from installing a board with a fundamentalist majority. What, then, could we do? We moved beyond the idea of winning or losing this battle and decided our purpose was “to bear witness.”

We would bear witness that our values of academic freedom and open inquiry in the search for truth were being violated by trustees intent on our teaching the inerrancy of the Bible.

We soon recognized we could not act effectively without operating capital. We asked for financial support from the faculty, and we sought funding from other people and organizations that shared our vision. We applied for and secured 501(c)(3) nonprofit status with the IRS so contributions could be tax-deductible.

Our next move was to secure legal and media counsel from Wade Smith of Tharrington, Smith and Hargrove. Smith had successfully tried high-profile cases defending First Amendment rights. He proceeded to help us try our case in the court of public opinion. To this end, he brought on board Lou Anne Crumpler, a media expert, to help us tell our story.

Crumpler led us in our next organizational move. Under her direction we prepared a press package that we sent to 130 media outlets — newspapers and television stations — from The New York Times to the Miami Herald and westward to the Dallas Morning News and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

This package contained a news release that described the takeover of the school and the faculty’s organized opposition to it, concluding with this statement: “If the long tradition of responsible academic freedom is lost at this school, which has practiced and protected freedom of expression throughout its history, then this freedom will be lost elsewhere. Other seminaries will be swept under by the New Right current. Soon other professional schools will be targeted and taken over, too. … What is happening here is indicative of a larger movement in society that is prepared to undermine democratic processes, ignore valued tradition and set aside due process of law in order to impose its political views on you and me.”

Now, 39 years later, what we predicted is coming true.

Our next decision was critical. The chapter agreed that only the president of the chapter would be authorized to speak to the media. The faculty understood it was important to speak with one voice, and it empowered me as the chapter president to do the talking.

As part of our work with the press, we set up a media room for television and newspaper reporters, and after each meeting of the trustees, I gave my interpretation of what had taken place and answered media questions. On one occasion the room was so crowded with students, faculty members, reporters and supporters that I had to stand on a table to be able to speak to those gathered.

From this perch I was asked, “Will the faculty sign the Baptist Faith and Message statement?” referring to a document clearly at odds with our academic freedom. My answer was, “This faculty isn’t signing anything.” And we never did.

To extend our reach, we attempted to enlist the faculties of the other Southern Baptist seminaries to follow the course upon which we had embarked. We had no takers, although we recognized the other faculties had to respond to the takeover according to their own unique circumstances, and each one did what was possible given those circumstances.

At the time of the fundamentalist takeover, the six Southern Baptist seminaries were responsible for 20% of the theological education in the United States and Canada. Each of the five other seminaries also fell under the inerrantist control of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Students for Academic Freedom

On September 10, 1987, 49 seminary students, completely independent of the faculty, met to form their own organization, Students for Academic Freedom, to carry out symbolic acts based on biblical themes and narratives. They created a symbol for their advocacy of academic freedom: large yellow ribbons that they attached to every lamppost on the campus the first morning of the trustee meeting.

No one needed to tell the trustees what the ribbons meant. They immediately recognized they had been symbolically ambushed by the students and demanded the ribbons be taken down. The grounds crew took them down, but to the students’ surprise, the workers carefully boxed them up and returned them to the students as soon as they were removed. That night, the students put them up again. This drama of hanging the ribbons, having them removed, and rehanging them during the night continued until the trustees left the campus.

During the first day of their meeting, the trustees returned from their morning break to find four students — three women and one man — gagged and kneeling in prayer in the center of the room. The male student, Ken Gray, editor of the student newspaper, had his hands bound behind his back. The gags and shackles symbolized the loss of their academic freedom.

The students didn’t move until the chair of the board finally threatened to clear the room of everyone but the trustees. The meeting resumed with the image of the gagged students recorded by the three television stations filming the meeting.

At the conclusion of that trustee session, Gray went to President Randall Lolley and asked him to untie the rope that bound his hands together. As the president carefully untied the cords that bound Gray, both men cried, feeling their common pain in what was happening to their seminary.

Nena Domingo, a wise and fearless seminarian, led the student resistance. She devised the strategies described above and other expressions of resistance, which included public vigils with students all dressed in black. In one tableau, students recited Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon — There we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. …”

The students performed liturgies that imbued the entire trustee event with the voices of resistance from the Hebrew prophets.

Resignations and celebrations

In the months that followed, faculty members began to depart as they found positions at other institutions. The AAUP chapter responded to these resignations by throwing a party for the departing professors — a dinner and celebration of their new appointments. These events were marked with a toasting and roasting of and a gift for the one who was leaving, with much laughter and occasional gallows humor.

Such celebrations expressed the positive morale of a faculty under siege. We could celebrate because we were fighting against the fundamentalist takeover and were refusing to become victims of it.

Eventually, after the trustees had acted to take control of the seminary and left the campus, President Lolley resigned, as did Dean Morris Ashcraft. Within four months, the trustees installed Lewis Drummond as president. Under Drummond’s presidency, the faculty’s strategy of resistance shifted to challenging the administration’s violations of the seminary’s own governance documents.

Action by the national AAUP

The decision to unite in an AAUP chapter was strategic in bearing witness against the forces threatening our academic freedom. AAUP members from nearby campuses met with us to hear our case, boost our morale and offer strategies for our response. We were not alone.

The AAUP’s national office contributed to our cause through consultations and by introducing us to the Redbook, the compendium of AAUP policy documents and reports. This resource provided the faculty with a crash course on academic freedom and due process, empowering us to examine the institution’s documents, use them to our advantage, and clearly articulate our case to the national AAUP and to our accrediting agencies.

The executive committee of SEBTS AAUP developed an extensive report of the violations of academic freedom at the seminary and, after careful consideration of the consequences of such a move, sent this report to the AAUP’s Washington office. After receiving and reviewing this report, the staff wrote to the administration and board in an effort to resolve the issues posed by the situation at SEBTS.

When these efforts proved unavailing, the AAUP decided to send an investigating committee to our campus. The committee produced an 11-page report, which was submitted to Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and published in Academe in spring 1989. Based on the report’s findings and conclusions, the Association’s annual meeting voted to place SEBTS on the organization’s list of censured administrations, where it remains today, more than 35 years later.

The investigating committee’s report provides a history of the institution and chronicles specific breaches of academic freedom, due process and governance by the trustees and administrators.

The governing documents in place at the seminary largely conformed to the requirements of its two accrediting agencies and the standards recommended by the AAUP. These standards set out clearly the norms of academic freedom and shared governance that guided the faculty’s response to inappropriate actions by the board of trustees and by President Drummond.

The report by the AAUP’s investigating committee laid out the major violations of academic freedom and shared governance standards:

Actions of the president. President Drummond violated the seminary’s policies and procedures when he established a dean search committee of the faculty and then prevented that committee from carrying out its function by naming as dean a candidate whom the faculty committee had rejected. Moreover, the president upheld that appointment even when the entire faculty voted against his candidate as unqualified. The president repeatedly made decisions that affected the faculty without their input — often as a result of pressure from certain trustees.

Actions of the trustees. The trustees inserted themselves into decisions about faculty appointments when these appointments, according to the seminary’s governing documents, should have been based on the evaluations by qualified faculty members. Two prospective faculty members were grilled by the vice chair of the trustees to determine whether their views conformed to the “Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy,” a document entirely foreign to the norms of the institution.

According to the AAUP’s report, the trustees “consistently flouted their own regulations, effectively substituting one doctrinal statement for another, … twisting the meaning of bylaws … to fit their own purposes, simply ignoring stated procedures when it suited them, and substituting the rule of men for the rule of laws.”

Although the trustees held final authority for determining the direction of the institution, they were obligated to follow the seminary’s established rules in making changes. “But not content to follow such a prudently revolutionary course,” the investigating committee wrote, “they were led — whether by impatience, by ignorance or of contempt for the academic enterprise, by a dubious interpretation of their mandate and obligation to a ‘constituency,’ or by an overweening confidence in the rightness of their goals — into a morass of their own making.”

Academic freedom. The investigating committee stated that academic freedom at SEBTS was “placed in peril” by a series of actions taken and statements made by the trustees and the president, and it concluded the faculty’s removal from its proper role in governance had an adverse effect on academic freedom by silencing the voices of those most qualified to understand what constitutes proper governance.

The committee further concluded that academic freedom was undermined by the trustees’ actions regarding faculty appointments and tenure and by their use of unauthorized doctrinal tests; by the trustees’ refusal to reappoint part-time faculty members recommended by the faculty and the president; by the appointment of a dean over the faculty’s unanimous opposition; and by the trustees’ vow not to appoint anyone who was not an inerrantist.

The faculty drew on the AAUP’s report as the basis for the case it subsequently made before the institution’s regional and professional accrediting agencies asking them to place SEBTS on probation.

Reporting to the seminary’s accrediting agencies

Responding to a request from the faculty, the Association of Theological Schools sent an investigating team to the seminary, which led to a decision by that agency to put SEBTS on probation. The faculty made a similar request to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

When the SACS committee came to campus, the committee members made their normal visit with the administration and faculty members and asked specifically to have a meeting with the officers of the AAUP chapter. In this meeting, the accrediting committee members discussed the issues delineated in the chapter’s report and said they wanted the SEBTS AAUP officers to be present for the final meeting with the administration.

In that meeting, the committee members told the president and his administration how they had violated accreditation standards and said they would recommend SACS place the institution on academic probation. They also said if the administration dismissed any member of the current tenured faculty, they would recommend the institution’s accreditation be revoked.

The ongoing life of SEBTS AAUP

By the time the AAUP chapter was in its fifth year, more than half the faculty members who had formed the chapter had left. Each of those faculty who departed did so by their own choice; none were fired. There were no more visits from accrediting agencies, nor were additional documents produced. However, the chapter continued to meet regularly, not on the campus but at the home of the chapter president.

“By the time the AAUP chapter was in its fifth year, more than half the faculty members who had formed the chapter had left.”

The morale of the remaining faculty was remarkably high considering the loss of colleagues and the damage done to the institution. Fred Grissom, president of the chapter at that time, noted that “a principal reason for the high morale was our assurance that we had done the right thing and had done all that we could to protect our academic freedom and the quality of our teaching.”

In addition to continued chapter meetings, the original Southeastern faculty had yearly gatherings that included those who had been involved in our struggle and had gone on to other endeavors. We called these Yellow Ribbon Reunions, adopting the symbol first used by the students in their protests.

These annual reunions went on for about 15 years. There was some sadness in the gatherings, but the prevailing mood was joyful. Grissom said, “We knew much had been lost, but we also knew we had done the right thing and could be proud of our struggle. The reunions were more about celebrating what we had become and our continuing relationships than about regretting what we had lost.”

Most of the faculty members who left SEBTS went on to successful careers in teaching, administration, counseling and ministry; one became an attorney, and another became a seminary president. Those who departed did so with the conviction that they had participated in a worthy effort to bear witness — to bear witness that the duty of the faculty is to pursue the truth wherever it may lead and that this pursuit accords with the prophetic tradition of Hebrew scripture and with the life and ministry of Jesus.

Our white privilege

We are telling our story today from our perspective as former members of a faculty at an all-white seminary who sought to bear witness to our defense of academic freedom under threats from an all-white board of trustees backed by a virtually all-white Southern Baptist Convention.

In 1987, we didn’t recognize the extent of our white privilege. We do now. I and the other three first presidents of the AAUP chapter left SEBTS to take positions at institutions with racially diverse faculties and racially diverse student bodies. We are aware that the inequity produced by the protection of white supremacy has a 400-year history of racial oppression and that this history is woven into almost every effort to ensure academic freedom in this country.

Outcomes of our attempts to defend academic freedom

The faculty was under no illusion that our actions would bring about a return to the shared governance and academic freedom we once enjoyed. However, we did make a difference, and we can identify outcomes that were the result of our collective effort.

No faculty member was dismissed. When the trustees arrived on campus, they were met with information about a critical press release that had gone out to more than 100 media outlets, and three television stations had cameras set up to broadcast the trustee meeting. The trustees demanded an explanation from the president, who told them truthfully that he had not been informed about any of the faculty’s plans.

Naturally, they looked for a scapegoat; however, they met a solid wall of faculty resistance supported by a well-known criminal defense attorney and a public that had been primed to pay close attention to this story. The trustees could not single out one or two faculty members to punish as an example for others.

We documented violations of academic freedom standards. Members of SEBTS AAUP’s executive committee put their research and reporting skills to work, describing in detail the overreach and many missteps made by the trustees and their new president. These reports exposed what was happening at Southeastern.

We involved the national AAUP and the accrediting agencies. Our detailed reports were sent, first, to the national AAUP, which subsequently investigated and censured the administration. The chapter also sent a report to ATS and SACS, both of which sent teams to the campus and, based on their investigations, placed SEBTS on probation.

No faculty member was asked to teach the inerrancy of the Bible. In a rare act of wisdom, the trustees and their new president understood that pursuing their vows to dictate an inerrantist approach to teaching would be a public disaster.

We built collective positive morale. Although the fundamentalists won the war, the faculty and the students who supported them won a critical battle. There was plenty of dismay among the faculty and students, but it was outweighed by feelings of accomplishment and pride that we had effectively borne witness to what the Southern Baptist Convention and its trustees and president at SEBTS were attempting to do.

Lessons from our story

We drew a number of lessons from our experience that may be relevant to the current threats facing faculties at other institutions of higher learning. Our practical counsel is this.

• If at all possible, plan well ahead to respond to threats to your academic freedom. If you haven’t worked on this yet, it’s probably time to start.
• Consult with the national AAUP and secure its help in organizing the faculty as a chapter of the AAUP. Don’t leave your fate in the hands of the administration. As a separate organization you will be prepared to respond to threats both from outside and from within the institution.
• Use the AAUP Redbook as an essential resource.
• Enlist as many faculty members as possible in the chapter. If it seems helpful, use our story to recruit them.
• Raise operating funds from the faculty and outside supporters. Secure nonprofit status with the IRS.
• Secure legal counsel from an attorney experienced in the defense of First Amendment rights.
• Designate one faculty member to speak for the faculty, preferably the person you select as president of the AAUP chapter.
• Develop a plan to get your story out to the media as soon as possible.
• Encourage students to form their own group, separate from the faculty, to advocate for academic freedom.
• To carry out your mission effectively, take steps to build morale and a sense of collegial identity and collective commitment to each other. Celebrate acts of resistance and chapter achievements.
• View your action not as a win-or-lose battle but as the expression of a moral mandate, and if it’s appropriate to your institution, support this mandate theologically.
• Solicit support from alums, contributors, faculty members from other institutions, and the public.
• Persist. Don’t give up.

 

Richard L. Hester was the founding president of the Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary chapter of the AAUP. This article was written in collaboration with the three other first presidents of the chapter: Michael Hawn, Thomas Halbrooks and Fred Grissom. The bulkd of this article was published in the online edition of Academe, a publication of the American Association of University Professors, in its Spring 2026 issue.