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Robert Baird

When I graduated from Little Rock Central High in 1955, I was headed for a small Methodist college in Arkansas and then on to law school. Religious experiences the summer before college led me in a different direction, however, and that fall I found myself in a small Baptist college in Arkansas planning to enter the ministry. But one day in the spring of that freshman year, my English professor asked me to stay after class: “You may not know it,” she said, “but the questions you’re raising about the literature we are reading are philosophical questions. We don’t even offer philosophy here at the present time. You should transfer to Baylor University and study philosophy.” I did, thus encountering the intellectual world of Baylor. My life was forever changed.

So there is much emotional satisfaction for me to begin this book by introducing the intellectual heritage of Baylor. Let me do this in two ways: first by reflecting Baylor’s intellectual heritage as it was first introduced to me, and then with brief vignettes of some of Baylor’s notable teacher/scholars.

My Experience as a Baylor Student

Early in my Baylor career I had among my teachers Ralph Lynn in history, Glenn Capp in debate, and Jack Kilgore in philosophy—all three well on the way to becoming Baylor legends.

In Ralph Lynn’s history course early in the semester he was lecturing on Russia, the United States, and the Cold War. After class one day—

everyone else had left—I said something to Lynn that seems to me now incredibly naive, even for a college sophomore. “The thing is,” I recall saying, “the Russians know that we are not going to attack them. But we don’t know that they will not attack us.” My unstated assumption, of course: we were the “good guys,” they the “bad,” and furthermore, everyone knew it, even them.

Patiently, Lynn turned to the wall, pulled down a map of the world. “With this chalk,” he said, “I am going to put an “x” everywhere the United States has missiles aimed at the heart of Russia, and an “x” everywhere Russia has missiles aimed at us.” When he finished, I stared at a map that had Russia virtually surrounded by U.S. missiles and a United States scarcely threatened by Russia. What a moment! The old cliché: the scales fell from my eyes. All of a sudden it was clear to me that if I had been a sophomore at the University of Moscow that morning, I might have been petrified of the United States.

But even during that moment, I knew that the lesson I was learning had to do with much more than the Cold War. For the first time in my life, I was realizing that we see things through “colored glasses,” through assumptions and presuppositions absorbed from our surroundings. But if our conclusions are colored by where we live, by what we’ve been taught, by whom we have become, how can we be sure that we have the truth? The door to critical thinking, Baylor style, cracked open.

I also took a course in debate from Glenn Capp, the founder of a program that had become, under his leadership, one of the premier forensic programs in the country. Capp had assigned us to read some old speeches. I came across one written by a 1936 Baylor undergraduate. It began as follows:

On a Sabbath morning in 1914 (the great conflict, World War I, had just begun), they held a prayer service in Berlin. The Kaiser was there. The aisles were jammed. A German minister mounted the stand and, reading from the Old Testament the account of the battle between Gideon and the Midianites (and how God favored Gideon), drew across the centuries a 1914 parallel; and then they said: “Our strength is our God.” Then they prayed: “God of Germany, give the victory to Germany. God of righteousness, give the victory to right.”

On that Sabbath morn they held a prayer service in Paris. The war ministers were there. The aisles were packed. A French priest mounted the stand and, reading from the Old Testament the account of the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines (and how God favored the Israelites), drew across the centuries a 1914 parallel; and then they said: “Our strength is our God.” Then they prayed, “God of France, give the victory to France. God of righteousness, give the victory to right.”

On that Sabbath morning they held a prayer service in London. The King was there. The aisles were packed. An English bishop mounted the stand and, reading from the Old Testament the account of the battle between David and his enemies (and how God favored David), drew across the centuries a 1914 parallel. And then they said, “Our strength is our God.” Then they prayed, “God of our fathers, God of England, give England the victory. God of righteousness, give the victory to right.”

My sophomore’s mind was reeling. The Germans see God through German eyes, the French through French eyes, the British through British eyes. And we, it seemed surely to follow, see God through our own eyes—through a glass darkly, a glass well smoked by environmental and hereditary factors. The door to critical thought, Baylor style, opened further.

Finally, I was taking my first philosophy course under Jack Kilgore. He had us read John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty, a text that got inside my mind, into my blood, like no other ever had. I still remember the power of one particular passage.

It never troubles him [the religious dogmatist] that mere accident has decided which of these numerous world [views] . . . is the object of his . . . [faith], and that the same causes which made him a . . . [Christian] in London would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Beijing.1

Disturbing though this thought was, Jack Kilgore and John Mill persuaded me to be honest enough to acknowledge that if I had been born in a Buddhist culture, the odds are I would see God through Buddhist eyes; if I had been born in a Muslim country, the bet is I would make pilgrimage to Mecca. The question of truth and our ability to grasp it had been raised in a dramatic way. The door to critical thinking was wide open. Baylor had introduced me, a youngster from Little Rock, Arkansas, to the life of the mind.

Eventually, I came to see these Baylor teachers as part of a larger and longer academic tradition going all the way back to Socrates who argued that the unexamined life isn’t worth living. Socrates viewed himself as a gadfly with a God-given task of stimulating individuals to think, to evaluate critically the principles guiding their lives. And that is what the Ralph Lynns, the Glenn Capps, and the Jack Kilgores were doing for me: stimulating me to think seriously about matters that matter.

But what about Baylor’s religious heritage, its Christian heritage, its Baptist heritage? Is the critical spirit to which Baylor introduced me compatible with a religious culture that encourages commitment? Well, it was also at Baylor that I was led to see the mind as a gift of God and the disciplined development of the mind as a moral and religious obligation.

Quite specifically, I was led to see that devotion to the critical life of the mind is one of the ways we acknowledge the religious insight that as limited creatures of God, we are not God. And since we are not, we, indeed, always see through a glass darkly. Against this background of the acknowledgment of human finitude, uncertainty, and the need for the critical spirit, the Baylor faculty also taught me as a young sophomore that while liberal education is liberation from the limits of place and time and circumstance, it is also liberation to reflective commitment.

In one phrase, I would sum up the intellectual heritage I encountered as a young student at Baylor: the moral requirement for reasoned commitment in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty.

Influenced by the language of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, I would say that to teach students to live the critical life of the mind without being paralyzed by doubt; to teach students to acknowledge ambiguity without being overwhelmed by uncertainty; to teach them to live with an open and tolerant spirit without sacrificing personal commitment to what one believes, after careful reflection, to be true and good and beautiful just is Baylor’s intellectual heritage.2

Three Vignettes

And now let me turn to brief vignettes, impressionistic vignettes, of some contributors to this intellectual heritage. In these three vignettes we encounter a citizen of the world, a passionate poet, and a musical conductor who undoubtedly arrived at Baylor because of the Nazi horror in Europe.

James Vardaman (1928–2018),

Emeritus Professor of History and Master Teacher

Like so many Baylor students, faculty, alumni, and others, I traveled with Jim on the overnight train from London to Edinburg and the overnight boat from Wales to Ireland. Like so many, I cruised with him on the Danube River and the Baltic Sea. I explored cemeteries with him from Paris to Vienna and museums from Prague, the Czech Republic, to St. Petersburg, Russia. To travel with Jim was to be introduced to a culture and its history by one who spent his professional life immersing himself in cultures plural. There he is teaching for a year in a university in South China. There he is traversing the USSR on the Trans-Siberian railway from Beijing to Moscow. There he is lecturing at universities in Russia, in Serbia, in Egypt. There he is establishing the Baylor-European Study Program in Maastricht, the Netherlands. There he is traveling multiple times in every country in Europe, and the point: traveling almost always with students in tow—students working hard (sometimes literally) to keep up with him.

Jim was constantly teaching all along the way—teaching that included political events and the significance of geography to be sure, but teaching that also included literature, music, and the visual arts, teaching that brought laughter and, I can assure you, at times, tears. The breadth and depth of his knowledge was staggering.

If I were to try to capture Jim’s contribution to Baylor in a sentence, here it is: Throughout his thirty-three years on the Baylor faculty, he was fundamentally concerned to take Baylor students to the world, to open their minds to new horizons and their hearts to new levels of compassion.

And if they could not travel with him abroad, he would bring the world to them, as he did for years chairing the most prestigious lecture series at Baylor: the Beall-Russell Lectures in the Humanities. As a result of his determination, he brought to Baylor individuals ranging from Edward Said to Carlos Fuentes, from Bill Moyers to Maya Angelou, from Czeslaw Milosz to Michael Mayne, Dean of Westminster Abbey.

And thinking of the Abbey, in 2000, Westminster Abbey honored Baylor Professor James Vardaman in recognition of his years of service to Westminster School, to Baylor University, and in recognition of his role in international education. I know of no Baylor faculty member who has had a greater influence on students than Jim. Unless it just might be that professor profiled in our second vignette.

Ann Vardaman Miller (1926–2006)

Emerita Professor of English and Master Teacher

Yes, there is a thread here. Ann and Jim: brother and sister. And yes, she too was a Master Teacher, one of the first two at Baylor to be so named. Ann loved poetry. She wrote poetry. Her life was an exuberant poem.

Ann Miller! A Baylor Icon if ever there was one. A more devoted following among Baylor alumni it would be hard to find. Here are reminiscences from three of her students:

Professor Miller was, of course, always dazzling. But one day she actually undid me. She said she wanted to teach us something about poetic rhythm, so without any fanfare she started to recite Blake’s “The Tyger” from memory. Slowly, at first, the words shaped in that gorgeous, sophisticated, Southern-tinged accent, so far from Blake, but so right. As she went on, she started to hammer out the rhythm on her desk, louder and louder with each stanza. By the third, she was standing up and pounding the desk with her fist. Declaiming the poem. No, orating it. Her fist against the hard wood with every pulse.

She finished, a soft sweat lining her forehead and cheekbones. Out of breath, too. (We, stunned.) She sank into her chair, lowered her head into her hands, and dismissed the class. “Leave,” she said—and then she mumbled, “Go and do what comes naturally.”

I did. I left, went to Pat Neff Hall, and changed my major to English. My parents thought I was nuts.

(Mark Scarbrough, class of 1980, former literature professor, author of 26 books and a forthcoming memoir entitled Bookmarked.)

And another:

I remember being a shy, self-conscious freshman in Ann Miller’s class. The first day she went through the class roster and asked each of us to quote a line of poetry. By the time she came to me my mouth was dry and my heart was pounding, but I was able to remember, “I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.” Relief swept through me as I thought my job was done.

But then she asked if I knew who wrote the line and the poem. I died a thousand deaths as I replied in a squeaky voice that it was my father’s standard reply to “Are we there yet?” on long trips.

Instead of the reprimand I expected, she said, “Wonderful,” and launched into a discourse about how literature can enrich our lives. I don’t really remember what she said after “wonderful”, I just wanted to hear her say it again and again.

(Susan Sneed Alexander, Class of 1982, Master of Science in Speech Pathology)3

One more:

When I was a student at Baylor, and first getting to know Ann Miller, I had occasion to walk across Founders Mall with her one day. It was a gorgeous spring afternoon. The grounds crew had just planted several million daffodils, and all was right with the world.

I’m not sure where we were headed—or why—but on the way Ann spotted, at a distance of thirty or forty yards, two students she knew, sitting on a bench. They were closely entwined, very much minding their own business, which seemed to be each other. As we strode toward the romantic couple, Ann began rather loudly declaiming those immortal lines of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall.”

“In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove; / In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”By the time we arrived at the bench and were standing behind the pink-faced couple, Ann made a smooth segue from the 19th to the 20th century. Turning her attention to the pretty, young blonde sitting there, Ann placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder, shook her head sadly and quoted Yeats[’s poem “For Anne Gregory,” which ends insisting that only God] “Could love you for yourself alone / and not your yellow hair.”

The couples’ response was a marvelous combination of embarrassment and sheer delight.

If I hadn’t understood before, I understood then that I was in the presence of a different kind of teacher—different in relation to her students, different in relation to her work—someone so in love with poetry, with what the written and spoken word can convey, that the language of books [through her] was constantly escaping the page.

(Gayla McGlamery, Professor of English Literature, Loyola University Maryland)4

Daniel Sternberg (1913–2000),

Emeritus Dean of the School of Music

And now a most improbable tale of the intersection of a Polish Jew and a Texas Baptist University.

He was born in Poland, this magnificent Daniel Sternberg, but early in his life the family moved to Vienna where he eventually attended the Vienna State Academy of Music as a student of conducting. After graduation and seeking experience, he went to Russia to become the assistant conductor of the Leningrad Grand Opera and the prestigious Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra.

But the political turmoil leading to World War II drove Sternberg back to Vienna where, in 1938, the Nazi SS rounded him up with other Jews. Sternberg himself has said that as the result of the SS officer who interrogated him, his life was probably spared. Instead of being taken into custody, he was told to “be out [of Vienna] in forty-eight hours or a concentration camp.”5

Sternberg fled to Latvia with his wife, eventually to Stockholm, and finally on board a ship to the United States. In 1942 he found himself in New York among too many talented musicians competing for too few jobs. Aided by an organization seeking opportunities for émigré musicians and artists, he began a pilgrimage south, seeking work, eventually making his way to Waco and to Baylor where Roxy Grove, the chair of the Department of Music, hired herself a musical conductor—and the rest is the marvelous story of Sternberg’s contribution to Baylor and to Waco.

He almost immediately became Dean of the School of Music and eventually Director of the Baylor Symphony. In 1962 Sternberg became conductor of the Waco Symphony Orchestra, a post he would hold with distinction for the next twenty-five years. When he retired in 1980 as Dean of the Baylor School of Music, he left a legacy that makes him a pivotal figure in the history of Baylor’s intellectual heritage.

Conclusion

And now, as a way of drawing together some threads and to point to a moment of courage at Baylor and to support for that courage, let me conclude this way:

Professor Bill Hillis, MD (1933–2018), was persuaded in 1981 to leave his post at Johns Hopkins University to become the chair of Baylor’s Biology Department. As an undergraduate at Baylor, Bill had been encouraged to pursue medicine as a career by Professor Cornelia Smith (1895–1997), a member of the Biology Department and Director of the Strecker Museum. She graced us with her presence at Baylor until her death at the age of 101. Cornelia, by the way, was the wife of Charles G. Smith (1891–1967), Professor of English, and among the most outstanding scholars in Baylor’s history. Now Cornelia, when she was an undergraduate at Baylor, had been a student of Lula Pace (1868–1925), a member of the Baylor Botany and Geology departments. Professor Pace in the 1920s began to be attacked by the Reverend J. Frank Norris (1877–1952), the notorious pastor of the First Baptist Church of Ft. Worth. She was, he said, guilty of teaching evolution. And, in fact, she was so guilty, but to her defense came Samuel Palmer Brooks (1863–1931), Baylor’s president for 30 years.

After Pace died, Norris continued to attack Baylor and President Brooks for his support of the teaching of evolution. On the morning of October 29, 1926, Brooks was addressing Baylor students in a chapel service. During the service a messenger interrupted Brooks with the news that some businessmen had marched from downtown Waco to express their support of him and the university in the face of Norris’ ongoing attacks. At that point the businessmen began entering the hall. The students, seeing how many of them there were, began spontaneously leaving their seats, moving to stand around the walls of the auditorium, and inviting the businessmen to be seated. And how many had marched to Baylor to support Brooks? Several hundred!6 A wonderful moment in Baylor’s intellectual heritage.

References

McGlamery, Gayla. “Undeniably Ann.” Baylor Magazine (July/August 2002). https://www.baylor.edu/alumni/magazine/0101/news.php?action=story&story=7245.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1956.

Russell, Bertrand. A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945.

Sternberg, Daniel. Oral Memoirs of Daniel Arie Sternberg. Interview by Thomas L. Charlton and Wallace L Daniel, Waco, TX: Baylor University Program for Oral History, 1981. http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/buioh/id/ 1190.

1. Mill, On Liberty, 22–23.

2. “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.” Russell, History of Western Philosophy, xiv.

3. The reminiscences of Mark Scarbrough and Susan Sneed Alexander are from private online remembrances of Ann Miller, August 2006. They have been used by permission of Mark Scarbrough and Susan Sneed Alexander (given to me, the author).

4. McGlamery, “Undeniably Ann.”

5. Sternberg, Interview #7, 379

6. The October 29, 1926, event recounted to the author by Kent Keeth, former director of The Texas Collection at Baylor University.