Beeson Podcast, Episode #551 Dr. Andrew Westmoreland June 1, 2021 >>Announcer: Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla. >>Doug Sweeney: Welcome to the Beeson Podcast. I’m Doug Sweeney, co-host of the podcast. Happy first day of June. This is the first week of our podcast team’s summer break, in which we want to play for you some of the Beeson Podcast’s greatest hits. Today’s episode is a conversation that my predecessor, Timothy George, had with Dr. Andrew Westmoreland, President of Samford, in 2013. Dr. Westmoreland, who became President of Samford in 2006 retires at the end of this month. In honor of his tenure at Samford and upcoming retirement we want to replay this conversation in which he talks about growing up as the son of a Baptist pastor in Arkansas, how his upbringing has shaped the way he leads, and how he’s learned to deal with conflict. We hope you enjoy listening to this episode from our archives. >>Timothy George: Welcome to today’s Beeson Podcast. It’s a pleasure today to have here in our studio President Andrew Westmoreland, the President of Samford University. Now, he likes, he almost insists that we call him “Andy.” So, I’m going to do that today. Welcome, Andy! >>Westmoreland: Thank you, Dr. George. >>Timothy George: You can call me Timothy. (laughs) >>Westmoreland: Well, I might do that for purposes of ... just this session. >>Timothy George: Now, I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been at Samford now for 25 years. And I’ve worked with two presidents in the work of Beeson Divinity School from the beginning, Dr. Tom Corts who of course was our president when the school was founded back in 1988. And you. You’ve been the president now for how long? >>Westmoreland: Seven years and some spare change. I’m hoping to get to eight. >>Timothy George: Wonderful. I certainly hope you get a lot more than eight, but- >>Westmoreland: No, it took me about 50 years to find the center of the universe here in Birmingham, Alabama. I want to divert just a bit and say a word of appreciation to you, Timothy, and to affirm the great work of Beeson Divinity School. Truly, it’s one of the great honors of my life to be associated with Samford and thereby Beeson. I never thought I’d have the opportunity to work with you, but I am so grateful for it and grateful for the men and women here who have pledged their lives and service to this great, great program that you have. >>Timothy George: Thank you. I wanted to ask you to maybe just tell a little bit about your own background, how you grew up? You’re not a native of Alabama. Where did you come from? What sort of family did you have? >>Westmoreland: I grew up in Arkansas. I’m the son of a Southern Baptist preacher. He pastored small churches, very small churches, in Arkansas. So, I had all of those experiences of a preacher’s kid growing up with all of the positives and the occasional negatives associated with that. But I’m grateful for all of the experiences. >>Timothy George: I heard you talk a lot about your father and I want to ask you to say a little bit more about him in a minute, but what about your mother? I haven’t heard you say a whole lot about your mom. >>Westmoreland: Well, she was a delightful lady. She died just a couple of years before we moved to Alabama. My father died when he was 66. Then my mother lived much, much longer. In fact, I have reflected on the fact that probably I was more open to moving to Alabama and to Samford because she’d been living near us and we’d been watching after her for several years before she died. She was kind of the classic small town pastor’s wife. And she was just a delightful person; always very interested in me and in what I was doing. I still miss her very much. >>Timothy George: During our Beeson [inaudible 00:03:07] it’s almost become a tradition that you bring greetings on behalf of Samford University and we ask you to say a few words. And you’ve told many, many stories about your father, about growing up as a preacher’s kid in Arkansas. What was that like? >>Westmoreland: Looking back on it now I’m grateful for all of it. I probably was not so grateful at the time. I saw some of the challenges. We were all in relatively impoverished situations. I didn’t fully recognize that at the time. But the churches where my dad served were on the edges of the little towns where we lived. The congregations, in some cases, we even had the annual call. I’m sure you’re familiar with that term. Some of the people listening in may not be. But that’s where even the church would decide at the beginning of the new church year whether or not they would have the pastor back for another year. >>Timothy George: Kind of like a renewable contract. It may or may not be renewed. >>Westmoreland: Indeed. And I never could quite figure out how that worked with the sense of call, with a place, but the church would vote about whether or not to do that. And I can remember, for instance, in one of the very small churches where we served, near the end of the church year my family had to leave the building. There was no educational space, it was that small. We walked outside. It was the last Sunday night in September. I can remember it had gotten a little chilly there in Arkansas that night. And so we stood out there and we waited a long time. I must have been, I guess, seven or eight years old at the time. Even a seven or eight year old can discern that whatever is going on in that room, it’s not going to be unanimous when it goes on that long, but as I recall they kept my dad on another year and we continued on. But lots and lots of great memories, great experiences. And as I said, I’m grateful for all of them. We all understand some things in the fullness of time about how those experiences have contributed to our lives. >>Timothy George: You are a leader. You’ve written about leadership. You think a lot about it. Are there lessons you learned from your father that inform your own understanding of leadership and the way you exercise it? >>Westmoreland: The older that I get the more that I recognize the importance of the example that he provided. I think that I can probably never get to be as good with people as my father was. Were my father sitting here I think he’d say that his great strength was not in preaching. He was largely self taught with preparation for preaching. But his pastoral skills were very, very strong. I can remember watching him deal with an occasional cantankerous deacon and some of those situations. He exercised extraordinary grace in dealing with people. He was not afraid to take a stand and would where he needed. But he recognized the importance of respecting people, trying to work with them where they were, and how they were. I’ve tried to pick up some of those skills over the years. But he was a master at that. >>Timothy George: One of the things I have noticed about you and admired very much about you is the way you handle conflict. Now, conflict is a part of life. It’s certainly a part of being a leader in a Christian university or in a church. I remember soon after you came here, maybe in your first year, there was an issue that came up in one of our Baptist Associations. For those listeners who don’t know, Samford University has a very close and supportive relationship with the Alabama Baptist Convention. That’s important to us. And this was an issue in which Samford was sort of the brunt of attacks and maybe some innuendos and things like this. I remember almost as soon as this came to your attention you made a special effort to go to that place, to meet with those who were offering the criticism, to listen to what they had to say, and to respond in a way that was helpful in that particular moment. Now, there are other ways of dealing with that. You could have just blasted them with a letter. You could have done lots of other things. Why do you choose to deal with conflict in the way you do? >>Westmoreland: I suppose that I have learned over the years the things that don’t seem to work and I try to stay away from them as strategies. I do try to think about how I would want that contact to be made if I was on the other side of the equation or the problem. I genuinely feel that the direct approach is often overlooked. You do often, as a leader, resort to a three or four page letter that you dash off and send. Or these days, an email message. But I like to pick up the phone and call. And it is interactive in a way that some of these other means of communication are not. I definitely prefer face to face. And in the case that you’re talking about, I think I can recall that I received a letter and I picked up the phone and called the person. We had a nice chat. Then subsequently we had a good face to face visit. I believe in trying to heal relationships every way that we can. There’s so much brokenness in the world. And that is not to say that I believe that we need to run from taking a stand. Clearly, we need to stand tall for those things that are important and stay there. But we need to treat everyone with respect. Every single person with respect. And as you well know we’ve gotten away from that in the world today. >>Timothy George: Yeah. One of the characteristics, I think, of your leadership, I would say as an observer and participant in it here at Samford, is that you emphasize the personal quality of relationships and of, I would say, administration. Now, that’s not always easy to do, because there are policies, there are procedures, and sometimes we get out of sorts with some of those things. You have a responsibility to keep the ship going in a certain direction. But in my interaction with you the personal is very important. And in some ways I think that’s related to the Christian mission, isn’t it? >>Westmoreland: Oh, I think so. Yeah. >>Timothy George: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God didn’t send a text message. He sent his son. >>Westmoreland: (laughs) That’s great. >>Timothy George: So, I think that does impact the way we ought to think about leadership and try to do it. >>Westmoreland: Yeah, and also in the same scriptures that you’re citing we remember that nowhere in there does it say, “Well, this is all going to be very easy.” In fact, it’s the opposite of that. But I wouldn’t want to work at a place where the personal was of no consequence. I just can’t imagine working in that environment. Now, these days, because of the fiscal pressures that we all face, I suppose I’ve had to make of myself more of a fiscal manager than I ever wanted to be. I know that there are people who come with those particular gifts. I’m not one of them. I’ve had to work on those skills over the years, and then I’ve tried to hire people who were extraordinarily and are extraordinarily gifted in those fields. But I suppose that the relationship orientation is still the area of the work to which I am most drawn. >>Timothy George: You’re eluding to one of the challenges that everyone, I think, in higher education faces – and that’s the economic environment in which we live. What are some other issues? You interface a lot with the wider community of higher education through various associations and accrediting bodies and commissions that you’re a part of. As you look at the landscape of higher education in America today and maybe particularly Christian higher education, what are the challenges we face going forward? >>Westmoreland: Well, I’ve been in this work now for 33 years. I’ve never seen such an array of challenges in higher education generally, and I suppose Christian higher education specifically, as we seem to be facing today. So, this podcast could consume your entire year of podcasts if we got too far into those things. But in particular we face a crisis of public confidence now. Our consumers are by and large skeptical of higher education in a way that they certainly weren’t a generation ago. I can remember years ago, lawyer friends telling me that as they were working with a defense case if they could get a great professor of some stature on the stand or perhaps a university president to testify for their client that that was the best possible thing that they could get. Well, I don’t hear much of that anymore. We’ve lost, I think, some of that standing that we had. And we could talk about the reasons for that. I think that the public believes that we are overpriced, generally. They are worrying about the relevance of what we do and whether or not that helps their sons and daughters to actually get jobs, to do all of those things. Once that begins, that leads inevitably into issues of public policy. Because as you well know the federal government has assumed a much greater role in higher education, including the kinds of education that we offer at Samford because the federal government controls all of the lending activity for student loans. That has a direct impact on all of us. So, when you get the skepticism of people in Congress and just as we’re recording here today, recent speeches by our President threatening a rather serious disruption of higher education. None of us can know exactly what that means. You also throw into that the very disruptive element right now and disruptive might not be negative, but disruptive nevertheless, of the approaches to learning. The online alternatives, all of those things. And for us to figure out how to make higher education accessible, affordable, and all of those things is a real challenge. Regardless of whether you’re in the public or the private sector right now. >>Timothy George: Now, many of our podcast listeners will be quite familiar with Samford University. Others will have maybe not heard very much about it. And I wonder if you’d speak to that latter group and inform all of us about what is Samford University? What is our special place in this landscape you’ve just described with all of its challenges and troubles? And how can we move forward with confidence and hope in the work that we believe God has given us to do in this place? >>Westmoreland: I’ll answer the last part of that question first, on how we move forward with confidence and hope. We have read the book, we know how it turns out. And there is no reason for us to have a crisis of confidence now or at any time. We are God’s people. We’re called. So, that does not mean that we have to have all of the answers. We won’t have them here. I would like to say I never fully lose hope. I worry, I will confess, from time to time. But I maintain a strong sense of confidence and I’m grateful for all those who serve here and who maintain that great sense of confidence. What’s special about Samford? A bit of demographic information. Our student population this coming year will be about 4900 students. They will come to us from almost all of the 50 states and from about 20 countries. It is a place where we offer a breadth and depth of education. We still, at the undergraduate level, have a solid commitment to the liberal arts. We have wonderful, great, professional schools wrapped around a liberal arts core. It is still, 172 years after the founding, a distinctly Christian university with highest aspiration to be Christ centered. I always admit that we don’t hit that mark every day. We are a bunch of humans, after all. But that is our goal. And our people come in every morning focused on that. I am full of great stories about the work of our students and faculty and staff every day. One that I heard just yesterday morning was a story of one of our footballs players. A young man from Olive Branch, Mississippi, who got word, on email message, from a Birmingham resident that young man saw him in Wal-Mart earlier this week and noticed that this fellow was limping a bit. He asked about him. And the fellow told him the story. And then our student stood there in an aisle at Wal-Mart and said, “May I pray for you?” And so they stood there in Wal-Mart and this young man, a football player, prayed for a fellow he didn’t even know. So, this gentleman was writing in to say that, aside from the young man’s parents, that he assumed he would be proud of him, that he was next in line as a fan of this young man. Well, the truth is that that sort of thing is rather commonplace. That describes the character of the overwhelming majority of our people here. And so what’s special about the place? Well, we offer a superior academic program in every respect and our people are keenly attuned to doing the will of God wherever they find themselves. >>Timothy George: As the leader of a divinity school in this kind of university I am very grateful for the support we’ve had from Samford University, the administration. And I’m very mindful of the fact that in many universities that’s not the case. If there is a divinity school it’s usually literally on the corner of the campus, not very well supported in terms of encouragement and so forth, a little bit embarrassing, in fact, to many universities. I think that’s not an exaggeration. We’ve not had that experience here. A lot of that is due, I think, to you and to your predecessor, Dr. Corts, and the vision that you’ve had for how a divinity school can strengthen the core mission of the university. Could you say a little more about that? >>Westmoreland: Oh, certainly. And I’m thrilled to. I’m so grateful for the presence of Beeson Divinity School here. And as I look on the impact now of your 1,000 graduates who are out there all across the world, doing wonderful things even as we speak here. And as I interact with your faculty here in knowing their hearts and understanding the serious impact of their scholarship. As I talk with a fellow like Robert Smith and marvel at how God has gifted him. I could go on and on and on. Beeson is such a blessing to Samford. I think that our people fully understand that. This is a case where I am always pushing for not less integration but more. And you know that very well. I’m always pitching another idea for how Beeson can be completely woven into the fabric of Samford. I understand those other models, but I would never want us to move toward one of those. I think that what we have here is beautiful and I want us to continue to work toward perfecting it. >>Timothy George: Thank you so much. My guest today has been President Andy Westmoreland. He’s the President of Samford University, a wonderful leader himself, and great friend and encourager to me, and to Beeson Divinity School. Andy, thank you so much for sharing just a little bit of your heart for this place and the work God has given you to do. >>Westmoreland: Thank you Timothy. And God bless you in the important work that you are called to do. >>Timothy George: Thank you. >>Kristen Padilla: You’ve been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and, myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at www.BeesonDivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.