Dean's Update - March 15, 2021

Thirty-three years ago, a gifted professor nearly persuaded me down the road not taken.

Frank Smist’s political science course took stock of a world of Cold War conflict. Those days held relentless awareness of the prospect of nuclear annihilation. To be sure, as the 1980s wound down, Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts at glasnost and perestroika were welcome, and rumors of a McDonald’s planned in Pushkin Square were sensational. Yet such developments tamped down rather than resolved superpower tension. In spring 1989, no one imagined staggering changes coming later that year when the links of the Iron Curtain broke apart.

Dr. Smist said I should spend my summer in Washington, D.C. with a man working on an interesting project. He promised heady work in contrast to Capitol interns making xeroxes and answering constituent mail. Thus, I entered the orbit of Jerrold Schecter. Jerry had been Time-Life bureau chief in Moscow during Leonid Brezhnev’s era. Later, he served as press officer for President Carter’s National Security Council, working with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Gates, Madeleine Albright, and Samuel Huntington. Jerry knew things and people. Leveraging both, he was writing a Cold War espionage history. I was his research assistant.

The Spy Who Saved the World tells the story of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet spy who turned double agent and worked for American and British intelligence. Arguably, he saved the world from the Cuban missile crisis. It was the heady stuff Dr. Smist promised, with forays into just-declassified transcripts of CIA and MI6 debriefing sessions with Penkovsky. (Penkovsky is favorably portrayed in The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rachel Brosnahan.)

In the summer of ‘89, Sovietology and Kremlinology interested me as much as philosophy. Staying ahead of the Russians seemed consequential, a matter of preserving civilization. But in under six months, the Berlin Wall toppled and President Bush met Chairman Gorbachev in Malta where they declared the Cold War over. Suspicion gave way to nascent trust. Worry about nuclear holocaust was not cast off, but it was lessened. The world rejoiced. Without consciously choosing it, I gravitated to philosophy, delighting in wisdom secure from the vagaries of politics.

Had I taken the other road, I might have known of a KGB officer who, in December 1989, watched an exuberant crowd storm toward the East German secret police headquarters in Dresden. A brief argumentum ad baculum later, and the people dispersed. Despite a reconfiguration of the global order precipitated by the Bush-Gorbachev announcement mere days before, that lieutenant colonel, now Russian President Vladimir Putin, apparently has wished for three decades for the world to be like it once was. His devastation of Ukraine has taken the world to a darker, more dangerous place. We grieve to see the innocent suffer, millions rousted from homes, schools and hospitals bombed, and horrific injuries and lost lives. Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling has also rekindled apocalyptic worries suppressed for thirty years.

Boethius writes that “The world stays rarely long the same, / So great its instability,” and he compares the “relationship between the ever-changing course of Fate and the stable simplicity of Providence” to a “moving circle and the still point in the middle.” Philosophy cannot eliminate suffering or overthrow tyrants. However, it puts them in perspective. And if, like Boethius, we take Lady Philosophy’s road, we learn: “Hope is not placed in God in vain and prayers are not made in vain, for if they are the right kind they cannot but be efficacious.”

Please celebrate with me the following updates and news within the Honors College:

• Remarkable donor support has brought us a new endowed faculty chair. The Jim and Sharon Harrod Endowed Chair of Christian Thought has been created with a gift commitment of $3 million. With support from the Baylor Illuminate Chair Matching Program, the chair will provide substantial resources for attracting, retaining, and supporting an exemplary scholar-teacher. Specifically, the Harrod Chair will combine scholarly excellence in a humanities field with strong biblical and theological understanding, estimable teaching, and the ability to inspire academic and general audiences alike. Heartfelt appreciation is due to Jim and Sharron Harrod for their trust and generosity, to Provost Nancy Brickhouse for matching program eligibility, and to David Cortes and our development colleagues for superb collaboration. The Harrods are funding the first half of their commitment this year, opening the door to appoint a chair relatively soon. I have asked program directors for recommendations and I welcome suggestions from all quarters.
• We have successfully concluded two tenure-track faculty searches. Joining the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core this fall will be George Njung (Ph.D., history, Michigan), appointed as assistant professor of African studies. George focuses on transnational approaches to WWI and African migrant and refugee issues. His first book, Violent Encounters: A Gendered History of the First World War in Cameroon, is forthcoming from Ohio University Press. Joining the Great Texts Program this fall will be Kristen Drahos (Ph.D., theology, Notre Dame), appointed as assistant professor of great texts and theology. Kristen’s areas of specialization are in Christianity and modern continental philosophy, and her first book, Dark Beauty: A Cruciform Aesthetics, is currently under review. We’ll warmly welcome our new colleagues when they arrive this summer. In the meantime, thanks to Sarah Walden and Barry Harvey, search committee chairs in their respective programs, and to other committee members and faculty whose efforts yielded outstanding applicant pools and great additions to our academic community.
• Congratulations to Matthew Whelan, assistant professor of moral theology in the Honors Program, on his selection as a Campion Hall Laudato Si’ Research Institute Visiting Fellow. This wonderful fellowship will support Matthew’s research in ecological theology and ethics, and it will put him alongside other superb scholars from around the world who gather under Oxford’s dreaming spires this summer. Well done, Matthew!
• Multiple $1,000 fellowships are available to humanities faculty selected for the University Libraries’ Fundamentals of Data Research Fellowship. Further information and an online application are available here, and our library liaison, Ellen Filgo, stands ready to answer questions.

  All the best,

  Douglas V. Henry | Dean
  Honors College | Baylor University
  baylor.edu/honorscollege | 254.710.7689