Jerry Falwell Jr. in 2011. Since 2007, he has been president of Liberty University, which was founded by his father. Credit Travis Dove for The New York Times
At Evangelical Colleges, Leadership Is Often the Family Business
During
the past school year, several leading American universities, including
Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Carnegie-Mellon, welcomed new presidents.
These men were leading scholars, and they were experienced
administrators; in some cases, they held degrees from the universities
they now lead. And none of them — not one — inherited the job from his
father or mother.
That
goes without saying, right? Nonprofit, tax-exempt universities are not
typically family dynasties. People would think it queer if Drew Gilpin Faust’s
daughter succeeded her mother as president of Harvard. But at
evangelical Christian colleges, including some of the most prominent,
there are different expectations.
Since
2007, the world’s largest Christian university, Liberty University, in
Lynchburg, Va., has been led by Jerry Falwell Jr., the son of the famous
founder. The presidency of Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Okla.,
passed from father to son (although it has since passed out of the
family). Until Friday, when Stephen Jones stepped down as president of
Bob Jones University, in Greenville, S.C., the college had been led only
by Bob Jones and three generations of his direct descendants.
In
some cases, the transition has worked out well. Since taking over his
father’s university in 2007, Mr. Falwell has overseen stable budgets and
explosive enrollment: Between campus and online students, Liberty now
enrolls over 100,000 men and women. But other descendants’ tenures have
ended badly. In 2007, Richard Roberts, son of Oral, was forced out after
accusations that he had misused school funds. Dr. Jones, at Bob Jones
University, left after a year in which he was accused of not being serious about investigating charges of sexual abuse.
Some
Orthodox Jews have rabbinical dynasties, too, and mainline
Protestantism has its royal families. Henry Sloane Coffin, for example,
was a leader of the Presbyterian Church, and his nephew William Sloane
Coffin was the legendary chaplain of Yale in the 1960s. But in
evangelicalism, in particular, where it is common for any solo preacher
to found a church, some of the churches are likely to be treated as
family businesses, with indigenous cultures that only a few can
understand.
“There’s obviously a distrust of outsiders, so you want people who know the system, the ministry, what you are about,” said Matthew Sutton,
who teaches history at Washington State University and is the author of
“American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism.” “The
assumption is that people within family know that best and can protect
the heritage.”
Many
of the men who have founded evangelical colleges, like the elder Jerry
Falwell, did so as offshoots of the churches they founded. And often
they founded those churches because they believed their specific message
was not being conveyed by any existing church or large denomination. It
would thus be a small band of insiders, versed in the particulars of
the founder’s message, who would even be eligible to carry it into the
future. That may be why, for example, the presidential search committee
at Bob Jones University, while not seeking another Jones descendant, has
stated “a preference for a B.J.U. graduate.”
Elesha
Coffman, a church historian at the University of Dubuque Theological
Seminary, in Iowa, said prestige could accrue differently in the
evangelical world.
“Your
ministerial credentials in both evangelicalism and Pentecostalism have
more to do with your biography, your personal story,” Dr. Coffman said.
“Whereas in the mainline, your credentials are the framed things you
hang on the wall.” So having worked alongside a famous preacher, having
been raised by him, is especially valuable on an evangelical’s résumé.
But
D. Michael Lindsay, the president of Gordon College, an evangelical
school near Boston, and the author of “View from the Top,” published
this week, said this dynastic trend was clustered mainly in newer
colleges.
“You’re
citing about five examples, out of 500 or so Christian colleges in the
country,” Dr. Lindsay said. “And you can see it’s not happening in more
established institutions. Liberty was started in 1971 — that’s very
different than Wheaton” — Billy Graham’s alma mater, near Chicago,
founded in 1860. “It’s the same dynamic you see in family companies.”
William
Wilson, the second president of Oral Roberts University not to come
from the Roberts family, noted that once upon a time, even our most
prestigious colleges were start-ups that hired from within the family.
“At Princeton, Jonathan Edwards”
— the theologian and Great Awakening evangelist — “took his
son-in-law’s place as president when he died,” Dr. Wilson said. “At
Yale, there were two Timothy Dwights who were president, father and
son.”
Mr.
Falwell, the current Liberty president, said that in fact he was not
really inheriting his father’s job. Although the elder Falwell had held
the title of president, he was focused mainly on his television show and
on being a public figure. “Everyone assumed he was running the
university,” Mr. Falwell said. “But he was doing other things related to
the church. In later days, he did have a role in student recruitment.”
By
contrast, Mr. Falwell became general counsel of the university in the
early 1990s and helped resolve well-publicized financial problems. “My
job for 15 years was restructuring debt.” By the time his father died, he said, he was far more involved in administration than his father ever was.
And
it is not just in higher education that sons take over for their
fathers, or mothers. Churches and mission groups are inherited by
children, too. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has been handed off to Mr. Graham’s older son, Franklin. When the Pentecostal preacher Aimee Semple McPherson died in 1944, her son, Rolf, took over the Foursquare Gospel Church, as well as its college.
Gene Mims,
a Baptist minister in Nashville and a Liberty University trustee,
agreed that dynastic succession ought to have its limits. “In the third
or fourth generation, it would be more unusual that Jerry Jr.’s son
would succeed him,” he said. But for the time being, Dr. Mims said, the
board’s choice has worked out beautifully. “I think there’s no question
that he’s the best possible person.”
It
remains to be seen whether, when Dr. Mims retires as senior pastor of
his church, his own son, Jeff, who works under him as a pastor, will
take over.
