The other evening, I headed over to Vanderbilt to watch the Commodores take on the Stanford Cardinal on the gridiron. Off and on, I’ve attended Vandy games since my grad student days. I well remember my first game (October 24, 1970), when I saw Archie Manning, the dad of Peyton and Eli, take the field for Ole Miss . . . and beat us. Then there was the game with the Alabama Crimson Tide on October 9, 1971, featuring the running back, Johnny Musso (the “Italian Stallion”), who was named All-American that year as a member of the Crimson Tide team that went 11-0 before a loss to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. Before that game, I watched Bear Bryant in his trademark houndstooth cap lean against the goalpost as his assistants put the team through its warmups. Also, I got to see Watson Brown (the brother of Mack Brown, who coached Texas to a national championship in 2006, with a culminating win over USC in the Rose Bowl) at quarterback my first year. He was something of a wonder, having led the Commodores to a victory over Alabama in 1969, the year before I enrolled.  

In those years, I saw Steve Sloan take over the coaching reins from Bill Pace and lead us to a tie with Texas Tech in the Peach Bowl (our first post-season appearance in a long time), and then leave for head coaching positions at Texas Tech, Ole Miss, and Duke. Later, when I returned to Nashville in 2011, I saw the strong program of James Franklin, who’s gone to Penn State and made a splash. One of the sweetest visions I had was the FCA guys from Vandy and West Point kneeling in prayer together at midfield after a game. 

One thing that’s particularly intrigued me about Stanford: Back in my grad school days, we comforted ourselves by noting that VU was the only private school in the SEC and that it had tougher admission standards, making recruiting a bigger challenge. But Stanford had the same status in the PAC 10, and Northwestern in the Big 10, and they seemed to fare better overall. Anyway, this fall it was a matchup between schools with similarities.

The Vanderbilt Commodores make much use of their slogan, “Anchor Down!” (It derives from the notion of a sea-going commodore, as in Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who gave a million dollars to start the school in 1873.) Though it sounds as though the team is committed to only playing defense, it’s stirring nonetheless. But in the broader university, you get the impression that the anchor the school may be using is a sea anchor, AKA drift anchor. Unlike a conventional anchor, which digs into the seabed, a sea anchor is more like a parachute, deployed in stormy seas to slow the ship’s slide with the current and to keep it from turning broadside to the waves.

To get my point, you need to go back to the school’s founding. Cornelius gave the money at the urging his second wife, since one of her cousin’s was married to a Methodist bishop, H. M. McTyeire, who was trying to found a school in the South. Years later, in 1966, the graduate school of theology from Oberlin College (where Charles Finney was once president) to the Vanderbilt Divinity school, whose dean is now a lesbian. A lot of drift there.

Just after I moved back to Nashville at the behest of SBTS (to direct the new extension), Vandy decided they would force the gay agenda on religious groups hoping to retain their campus status. The conflict began when the local chapter of the Christian Legal Society insisted that their president be tasked to lead Bible studies for the group. This would effectively serve to deny an office to a non-believer, specifically one who rejected the scriptural teaching on homosexuality. The university said it would be like saying a black student couldn’t be CLS president. (I’m not making this up.)

There was a hearing of sorts, and our quarterback and FCA member Jordan Rodgers (brother of Packer QB Aaron Rodgers) spoke out against the policy: “If someone [running for leadership] doesn’t share the faith that is being taught, what’s the point of having these organizations?” But to no effect. Neither did my letter to board chairman Mark Dalton count. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Dalton (JD ’75) would be in a better position than Coppenger (PhD ’74) to give the school $12.75 million in 2019. Or, more likely, he was just going with the flow that was well under way during his chairmanship.

Actually, “Sea Anchor Down” is probably too generous. I see nothing in the water to slow the university’s cultural drift.

Here’s the text of my fruitless April 7, 2012 letter:

Vanderbilt is my alma mater (Ph.D. philosophy, 1974), and she has, indeed, been a “bountiful mother” in many ways. That’s why it’s particularly painful to see she’s taken the foolish step of denying on-campus student organizations the right to set their own standards for leadership within the bounds of decency. It seems to me that you’ve performed a reduction to absurdity in bending the knee to political correctness. Any policy which insists that a Christian group cannot require its leader to lead a Bible study has shown itself plain daft.

Let me trace a reductio: Suppose there are a hundred students in the Vanderbilt Muslim Association, so someone rounds up a hundred and ten atheist students and they show up one meeting to join, a request that cannot be denied. Then, when elections come, the atheists use their overwhelming numbers to vote in an atheist leader (or to cry “Discrimination!” if a Muslim leader is appointed). Do you really want to open up that logically possible pathway?

I was stung when one of my colleagues suggested that only a “second tier,” wannabe school like Vanderbilt would press this matter. I hope he’s not right, that you’re not pushing extra hard to show yourself progressive down here in the home of the Grand Ole Opry, where you must strive mightily to bring “culchah” and enlightenment to a town where there are way too many evangelicals.

Maybe yours is the counsel of fear, whether of accreditors or lawyers, who show themselves all too ready to jump on the slightest affront to someone’s feelings or sense of limitless entitlement. Maybe in your zeal to marginalize and stigmatize “homophobes” and “Bible thumpers,” you’ve capitulated to the “Christophobes” and “speech code thumpers”, to cultural relativists and antinomians.  Whatever the cause, you’ve really gotten it wrong. (And for what it’s worth, I was a campus minister at Northwestern University the last ten years, and they backed off from the position you’ve taken, allowing us to declare distinctive criteria for leadership.)

Look, one reason I treasured my days at Vanderbilt was the atmosphere of continual offense, a sort of “trial by fire” which sharpened my thinking and toughened my resolve. Those were the days before it was fashionable to swoon and turn litigious at affronts to one’s honor, before eager victimhood and its enablement were the coin of the realm.

As an ROTC grad and young infantry lieutenant, I saw fellow graduate students protest the Vietnam War (and the military in general) by washing an American flag in a bucket of water on the drill field. I sat through a fatuous political talk by Noam Chomsky, wherein he likened the Viet Cong to amiable community organizers. As a conservative Evangelical, I watched a performance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a team of obscene, clever anarchists. One Freudian performer unzipped his fly, pulled out a cigar, and put it in his mouth. Later, he told us how to rip off “Ma Bell” with some sort of counterfeit-dial tone contraption.  Then, in my philosophy classes, along with the reasonable material, I was hit with the ungodly gas of Martin Heidegger one week and the self-confounding atheism of A.J. Ayer the next. 

As a non-smoker and non-drinker, I sat through seminars where the prof chained-smoked cigarettes bummed from the students, and our gatherings in the “graduate pub” were awash in alcohol as we listened to the likes of career atheist Antony Flew. Then, after graduation, when I directed a National Endowment for the Humanities program for Vandy and did a little teaching, I asked a Divinity School prof whether they ever had an evangelical on the faculty, only to hear, “No, we take a more reasoned approach to religion than that.” Well.

As I said, I experienced affront after affront, with a lot of awkward moments thrown in the gaps. And I have to say, it was a rich experience, one I wouldn’t trade. I loved my undergraduate days at a small Baptist college in Arkansas, but I’m also grateful for Vanderbilt’s hurly-burly world of ideas served up by true and often strange believers. 

Looking back at the 1974 yearbook, I see proud entries by the Indochina Peace Campaign, the United Farm Workers, and the Young Socialist Alliance, which based itself “on the principles of Marxism as developed by Lenin and Trotsky.” In contrast, the Young Americans for Freedom sponsored a showing of The Three Stooges in Orbit in response to a campus visit by what they called “The Three Stooges of Hanoi,” namely Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, and Jean-Pierre Debris. The YAF’s “basic philosophy [was] set down in the Sharon [Connecticut] Statement,” declaring “that when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation.” 

If the school had demanded either that the YSA allow leadership by a Goldwater man or the YAF by a Marxist, we would have scratched our heads and asked, “What in the world do you think a Leninist (or a Libertarian) is? Let them be who they are! Bring it on!” 

But now you’ve gone wobbly. Why? We Christians aren’t afraid of strong-tea ideas and distinctive commitments. Why are you?

I see from the Hustler’s coverage of the “town hall” meeting on the topic that administrators are playing the race card, likening their stand to the one they took against segregation back in the “dark days.” But surely they can see the morally relevant difference. The color of one’s skin has nothing to do with his or her fitness to lead a group of Christians, Muslims, Marxists, or Libertarians. On the other hand, core convictions have everything to do with it.

Please, don’t confuse sensible discrimination with senseless discrimination, and that at the expense of institutional integrity – whether yours or that of the organizations in question.