Southwestern Seminary avoids faculty trial with settlement
By Marv Knox

FORT WORTH, Texas (ABP) — Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary apparently has avoided a faculty trial by coming to terms with a professor removed from his classroom for criticizing seminary administrators.

Jeff Pool, 45, an assistant professor of systematic theology, will not return to the classroom. But he will receive salary and benefits through the current academic year, which ends next July 31.

Administrators at the seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, pulled Pool from his teaching duties just before the seminary’s fall term started in late August. That move closely followed Pool’s public charges of “academic censorship” against the seminary.

“I really was removed from teaching not because of my teaching, but because I voiced dissent about actions of the administrators of this institution,” Pool said.

On the advice of the seminary’s attorney, the dean of the seminary’s School of Theology, Tommy Lea, limited his response to a prepared statement.

“The seminary guidelines require that personnel matters be handled confidentially,” Lea said. “The administration has acted in the best interests of the seminary and Dr. Pool in accordance with the seminary’s policies and procedures.

“Dr. Pool has shown himself to be a capable scholar in his discipline of systematic theology. He has demonstrated commendable interest in his students.”

“However, the parties have agreed that Dr. Pool should exercise his teaching ministry in another institutional setting,” Lea said. “The seminary has attempted to provide Dr. Pool and his family financial security to allow him to find another position without interruption of income or loss of benefits important to his family.”

The controversy began last year, when Pool edited an issue of the seminary’s “Southwestern Journal of Theology.” The disputed issue of the journal examined the Southern Baptist Convention’s “Baptist Faith and Message” doctrinal statement. The seminary suspended publication of the journal.

Pool offered the articles to Smyth & Helwys Publishing of Macon, Ga., which published them in a book called “Sacred Mandates of Conscience: Interpretations of the Baptist Faith and Message.”

In a preface to the book and in subsequent interviews, Pool called Southwestern’s refusal to publish the journal “academic censorship.”

Seminary officials have denied the censorship charge on two counts. First, they noted they waived the rights to the rejected articles, freeing their authors to publish them. Second, they said the decision not to publish the journal was made by an editorial board comprised of faculty.

Pool acknowledged not all Southwestern faculty agree with him, but he contended the journal’s editorial board was coerced by pressure from Southwestern President Ken Hemphill and academic administrators.

And that pressure is pushing the seminary into an increasingly narrow spectrum from which it can operate, Pool charged. “Academic freedom here certainly is under significant threat,” he said. “It’s always been tenuous; this is a very, very conservative place. ... But Southwestern is being rapidly aligned with the ‘new SBC’ and the SBC structure.”

President Hemphill was selected by trustees elected during the theological/political campaign to turn the SBC sharply to the right, shortly after those trustees fired former President Russell Dilday, Pool noted.

“There is an agenda for the seminary to follow,” which includes hushing all forms of disagreement or dissent, he claimed.

His ouster from the classroom sends a signal to faculty and potential faculty that “self criticism” within the institution will not be tolerated, Pool said.

“An individual is not necessarily disloyal because he criticizes an institution or a denomination,” he said. “But those thoughts and comments may grow out of his very loyalty. ... It is vital that Baptists do not lose the principle of internal criticism. If there is no selfcriticism, how do we call ourselves to account for our actions?”

October 1997