Dean's Update - September 15, 2025

Dear Colleagues:

Students have been back with us on campus for a month—how quickly the weeks unfold!

It’s a gift to encounter our students daily. It’s a blessing to educate and encourage them, and to nurture in them a wise love of learning. It’s rewarding to do this laudable work alongside you. I say this—as I know you hear it—with a particular sense and purpose of education in mind.

On that note, St. Bernard of Clairvaux writes insightfully of the desire to learn. Some long to know “for the sole purpose of knowing,” others “to become known,” and still others “for money or honors.” None of these is admirable.

The first group, which describes those in the hold of curiositas, are self-indulgent. Instead of seeking knowledge to rejoice in wonder at what God has wrought, or grow in virtue, or help their neighbor, those given to curiositas are merely acquisitive. They take pride in possessing what others do not.

Those who long to know in order “to become known” are vain. Being thought the smartest, quickest, cleverest person in the room is an experience some of our students have had. Sometimes these superlatives are true of our students. Yet to study and learn out of a desire for adulation is not admirable.

St. Bernard also notes that knowledge can be sought to get ahead in life, for nothing more than “shameful profiteering.” Here, he calls out those for whom knowledge never serves a higher purpose than the bottom line, for whom expertise is simply sold for material benefit or status.

By contrast, we can “long to know in order to be of service, and this is charity.” Knowledge can become part of our service of worship, whereby we return love to the Lord who loves us. Such knowledge may also serve our neighbor, whether by corporal or spiritual works of mercy.

Why do we do what we do? What motivates our search for knowledge? How do we model a Christian desire for learning for our students? These are good questions for all times, but especially at the outset of a new academic year.

Good things abound across our academic community. Please note the following.

• We have a great, new student recruitment video, Day in the Life at Baylor Honors College. In two short minutes, it relates in a lovely and inspiring way the formative education our students receive. Aiden Magee speaks of “truth with compassion, beauty with depth, and goodness grounded in a Christian worldview” as qualities of our academic community. Kristen Nakamura celebrates an outlook in which “success isn’t a competition,” but in which “we rise together.” I’m proud of them—and I’m proud of you for being a college where these things hold true. Share Day in the Life far and wide!
• With fantastic help from Cheryl VanAllen, director of development for the Honors College, and Mandy Anderson, senior director of advancement, the Honors College had a banner night last Tuesday in Dallas, with around 100 alumni, parents, friends, and donors gathered for Dialogue over Dinner: An Evening with Baylor Leaders. Following a meal together, I facilitated a public conversation with President Linda Livingstone and Dean Emeritus Thomas Hibbs about some of American higher education’s challenges and how what we’re doing, across Baylor and in the Honors College, points to a better way. It was heartening to see and hear enthusiastic support for our work.
• Some of our must-be-a-better-way-frame-of-mind colleagues have envisioned an extraordinary missional pathway for select pre-health students. The Micah Scholars program—with a new website that pitches a compelling vision—takes its name and priorities from Micah 6:8’s call to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” Micah Scholars are guided through a carefully planned curriculum and co-curriculum, supported by partnerships with community-based health care providers, that explore “the moral dimensions of healthcare through the lens of Christian discipleship.” Thanks to many colleagues, in and beyond the Honors Program, for bringing this important opportunity to fruition for our students.
• I receive from Provost Nancy Brickhouse a set of annual goals to accomplish within the Honors College. A few of them relate to research grants. To support achievement of this year’s goal of 4 grant proposal submissions, I’ve asked each program director to work with individual faculty to identify and pursue funding sources. I’ll energetically do my part to demystify the grant writing and submission process for first-time grant writers. Please start by reviewing information available through the Office of the Vice Provost for Research as well as college-level guidance about sponsored research and projects review, and then contact me or Mike Stegemoller, associate dean for faculty, with ideas and questions.
• My daily news feed features a range of takes on Artificial Intelligence, from activist advocacy, to anxiety, to antipathy. We need each other’s best understanding and counsel, so plans are in the works for a series of college-wide forums that (a) address the aims of liberal education and the opportunities and challenges of AI, (b) demonstrate instances of responsible and effective educational use of AI, and (c) discuss Joseph Vukof’s Staying Human in an Era of Artificial Intelligence. Copies of this book have been purchased for all HC faculty and staff. I welcome your ideas and support with any of these forums.
• Congratulations to Barry Harvey, professor of theology in the great texts program, on publication of Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism: Political and Cultural Reflections on the Church (Baylor UP, 2025). William Cavanaugh praises the book’s resistance of “pathologies like racism, nationalism, and the disciplines of the market” and a vision in which Christianity finds “graceful freedom and mad joy amidst the long defeat” this side of heaven. Well done, Barry!

All the best,

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