Oh Fuchs! A Look at Our Divine New Provost
We’ve finally got a new provost, former Dean of Engineering Kent Fuchs, now that the former one of eight years, Carolyn “Biddy” Martin, has flitted off to a chancellorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After being the longest-serving provost ever, we guess Biddy needed a new place to make conservatives annoyed by her existence. Luckily for us, our new man has an equally lampoonable name, sort of. His last name is pronounced “fox,” not “fucks” as many vulgar language enthusiasts in the Cornell community might have preferred. We can still dub him something funny though, like Silver Fuchs. He’s not bad-looking for an older guy, right?
Anyway, his professional credentials seem stellar at a glance. In his six year tenure as Dean of the largest engineering program in the Ivy League, nobody seems to have had any major beef with him. MetaEzra reports: “I’m not entirely qualified to comment on Fuch’s qualifications for the job, suffice to say that he was re-appointed for the Engineering deanship and Martin thought highly of him.” There is, however, one thing about Fuchs that’s a bit out of the norm: he received a master of divinity degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1984, a year before he got his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. Why this might short-circuit a few lightbulbs in our mind after the jump.
There’s of course the obvious question of whether Fuchs holds some of those more notorious evangelical beliefs, you know, like the whole God hates fags thing. Just to sample a taste of what other Trinity alums believe in, check out this fire and brimstone video of a sermon from Rick Lazarias MDiv ‘76, who respectfully disagrees with evolution on the basis of a lack of fossil evidence:
There is no evidence to say that his beliefs are anywhere near as radical as Zacharias, and it’s inconceivable that he would’ve risen so high up the academic ladder if he were an evolution-denier or an anti-intellectual in any capacity. But as an administrator of a large research university there might be problems concerning his personal feelings about hot issues like stem cell research. In an article examining his unusual combination of engineering and religion, he hinted at being pro-life:
Religious beliefs can also conflict with technological progress. “Technology is like religion,” Fuchs says. “It can be of enormous good to society, or it can be misused.” One possible example: the current debate over whether the U.S. government should fund research on embryonic stem cells. But on this issue, Fuchs sits squarely on the fence. Stem cells could potentially help society, he acknowledges, but there are “issues around unborn children and abortion.”
While his personal views quite frankly do not matter as long as he keeps them to himself and doesn’t let them influence his administrative decisions, what sort of a face does this put on Cornell? Could the installation of a conservative theist (who was almost a preacher) be a response to conservative caricaturing of Biddy Martin’s as the paragon of the academic “liberal elite”? The answers lie safely guarded with the Board of Trustees and their friends at the University, but maybe that doesn’t matter either.
What matters is that the guy is a competent administrator, which seems to be the case and will likely continue to be the case. By most accounts, he’s a nice old guy with an intriguing past, a past that he even jokes about:
“If I were a better preacher, I’d be in a different career now,” laughs Dr. W. Kent Fuchs (MDiv ‘84), dean of the College of Engineering at Cornell University.
It was in homiletics class, when Kent couldn’t refrain from the use of transparencies during a sermon, that he realized perhaps God wanted him to teach instead of preach. “I was near the bottom of my class—I was terrible at preaching. But I was a good educator. I thought maybe I’d work in a university with college students.”
Later on in this article from Trinity’s alumni magazine, he states that his priestly past informs his academic present for the better:
And how does a Master of Divinity fit into the world of Cornell engineering? “I’m very, very glad I went to seminary,” Kent says, reflecting back on that Baptist minister who long ago convinced him of the merits. “I gained knowledge that I could not have picked up on my own, about church history and theology. The breadth of the MDiv is really quite powerful. It’s enabled me to be more involved in teaching and leadership at church. And then there are the practical skills I gained—public speaking, effective teaching, and counseling.”
We hope he glosses over church history and theology in his administrative capacity at Cornell. But the practical stuff? Fuchs def needs to turn that lightbulb on bright.
Tags: administration, silver fuchs
November 12th, 2008 at 1:00 am
[...] University’s PR flack, played it off as an “honest mistake.” Dean of Engineering (the Provost-elect who might be pro-life!) Kent Fuchs apologized for the embarrassing incident and vowed to “clarify our official [...]