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Louisiana Baptist University

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Louisiana Baptist University is an unaccredited, undergraduate and graduate level, coeducational, Christian university, founded in 1973 and located in Shreveport, Louisiana. It has an on-campus program, and an extensive distance education program, which enrolls over 1,100 students in 40 different states and 20 different countries. LBU currently offers over 250 ground-based and 400 distance courses, mostly in Bible and theology. [1]. All LBU undergraduate and graduate degrees are in Bible subjects, approached from a Christian (Baptist) perspective.

Like many non-traditional colleges and universities, LBU provides a number of mechanisms by which a student may earn credit, including military credit, credit by examination, and life experience credit.

In 2005, Governor Kathleen Blanco declared April to be "Louisiana Baptist University Month" [2].

Accredition, approval, and licensing

On December 10, 1998, the Louisiana Board of Regents unanimously voted to deny the University an operating license for its business programs, required it to cease admitting students, and cease advertising [3]. However, current students were allowed until December 31, 1999 to finish their degrees. Meanwhile, on April 22, 1999, the Board exempted the University from licensing requirements under a "religious institution exemption" [4].

In 2000, author/teacher Steve Levicoff allegedly accused LBU of being a diploma mill [5]. However, unlike diploma mills, LBU has degree requirements, including coursework, reading requirements, final exams, and for graduate degrees [6], writing a thesis or dissertation and maintaining at least a 3.0 GPA.

LBU is one of five approved colleges and universities of the Baptist Bible Fellowship. The BBFI is a fellowship with over 4,000 churches in the United States and several foreign countries. Students who complete their degree in missions through LBU and meet other requirements can be approved as fellowship missionaries.

The University holds full institutional approval from the Association of Christian Colleges and Theological Schools. ACCTS is designed to monitor religious colleges, universities, and seminaries. However, it has no status with the U.S. Department of Education or any other federal agency charged with the accredition of religious institutions [7].

In LBU's 2002-2003 handbook, they said they were listed in the Directory of Postsecondary Institutions published by the National Center for Educational Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education [8]. However, according to their online system, they do not appear to be listed, now. [9]

Dissertations

Unlike accredited schools and even many that are not accredited, LBU does not make graduate student research available to the academic community. This is considered unusual because the purpose of graduate work is to conduct research, write and publish the results in a graduate-level document (a thesis or dissertation) and add that material to academia, recording and storing the additions to human knowledge in a form readily available to other researchers and interested parties. At a accredited school, a master's thesis is microfilmed and made available for loan from accredited schools, and a dissertation obtainable in similiar fashion. Doctoral work is required to be deposited in the United States Library of Congress (LOC), where it is made available to interested parties wishing to examine the work. (Since 1940, all accredited universities in the United States have deposited dissertations in the LOC [10]. The practice began in 1870, and many dissertations have been available online from the LOC since 1997 [11].). Yet, due to the fact that LBU policy does not require these standard practices, it is difficult to determine the quality of graduate work completed at the University, and it is, therefore, also difficult to determine the quality of the instruction.

In comparison, Harvard's Divinity school, for the Doctor of Theology degree (Harvard does not award the Ph.D. for religion), requires that, "once sustained by the Committee, the original dissertation and the first copy, in bound form, together with their abstracts and an unbound, boxed copy for University Microfilms International (UMI), should be submitted to the registrar."[12] As noted on the Library of Congress webpage, since 1999, the UMI has submitted dissertations to the Library of Congress, which are then available for download online [13].

Alumni

Contact information

Louisiana Baptist University 6301 Westport Avenue Shreveport, LA 91129

Phone: 318-686-2360 Email: [email protected]

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