Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. was a Roman Catholic priest in the Society of Jesus. Besides his pastoral duties as a priest he served as a professor of theology and a university president. He also worked to bring the message of the Roman Catholic Church into more forms of communication media, most notably as editor-in-chief in the magazine the Homiletic and Pastoral Review which has been called "one of the most important magazines for priests in the English speaking world".
Background Baker was born on November 12, 1929, to Catherine and Kenneth Baker Sr. in 1929 in Tacoma, Washington. Baker was born a month after the onset of the Great Depression. Under the economic stressors of the time Baker's parents' marriage dissolved and they got a divorce. Baker was given to Daniel and Mary Browne, his maternal grandparents, to raise. Baker had little contact with his parents and shared his grandparents home with their two youngest children, who were his aunt and uncle.
Baker's grandfather Daniel Browne worked as a dock worker and a construction foreman. Browne had traveled west from Nova Scotia and arrived at Spokane around 1900. He moved his family to Tacoma near the new port of Puget Sound in 1920. The booming trade with Asia increased the wealth of Tacoma and it was a large fashionable city when Baker grew up there.
Baker had not been baptized by his parents and neither his father nor his grandfather were Catholic. His grandmother was a practicing Catholic and desired that he attend parochial school at St. Leo Jesuit parish (rather than the local nearby public school). To facilitate this Baker was baptized at the age of five, and reportedly "thought very little of it, seeing it as just another part of starting school."
Schooling The parish school of St. Leo's was staffed by Franciscan Sisters who instructed Baker and his fellow students in their studies and in the Catholic faith. At this time Baker showed no signs of developing a vocation to the priesthood and at one point when the Sisters asked the boys in his class which of them would like to grow up and be priests, Baker was the only one who did not raise his hand. The young Baker got into "various kinds of trouble like other boys his age" and making use of the Catholic sacrament of confession officiated by Fr. Augustine Krebsbach.
Baker had intended to the Catholic parochial school Bellarmine High, but circumstances prevented this. Baker's grandfather had suffered a stroke and was no longer able to work and his grandmother made the only income for the family, bringing in $6.00 a week as a restaurant cook.
Rather than force Baker to attend public high school his uncle, who owned a restaurant, offered to pay the first year of the Jesuit Bellarmine high school's tuition of $80. His uncle also offered Baker a job so that by working weeknights and weekends he could earn the money to continue going to Catholic school. Baker began as a dishwasher and moved up to fry cook. Baker was able to earn enough to buy a 1938 Dodge four door sedan at the age of sixteen.
Three different US military branches had bases in Tacoma and when World War II was being fought many servicemen came into the restaurant, some of the waitresses made money on the side by engaging in prostitution using the job as a contact point for customers. To Baker this worldly behavior was a sharp contrast from the way the Jesuit scholastics teaching at Bellarmine high comported themselves.
Baker spent much of his spare time in student activities including dances and parties, sometimes taking girls from two nearby Catholic girls' schools out for a movie and a hamburger with rootbeer.
With his junior year in high school Baker became a serious student as he began to consider joining the navy to become a pilot or being the first in his family to attend college. At this time he also became more serious about his faith, attending Mass daily as devotion for Lent. Baker in an attempt to get elected to the school council paid five dollars to a friend who flew an airplane to drop leaflets on the school yard in support of his election. A strong wind blew the leaflets away from the school and onto the football field where the principal made Baker collect them. He did not win the election.
As a high school senior Baker began regularly dating a cheerleader named Pat from a rival school. To Baker's surprise that same year the chaplain at Bellarmine high suggested he consider joining the novitiate of the Society of Jesus. While unaware of any priestly vocation Baker wanted to learn more about the Jesuit way of life. After informing his girlfriend (who was unhappy but supportive) Baker began a two-year trial period as a Jesuit novice on August 15, 1947.
Jesuit training In the monastic framework of the novitiate, Baker grew to enjoy the regular regimen of prayer, instruction, and work. After the two-year trial period ended, Baker was committed to join the Jesuits and on the Feast of Assumption 1949 he took the perpetual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in the Society of Jesus and began an eleven-year program to become a priest. In accordance with Jesuit training Baker took two years of classical study and then three years of philosophy. He then went on to teach Latin and Greek as a scholastic at Gonzaga Preparatory School in Spokane. Baker enjoyed teaching and pictured a future serving in that role.
Aware of Baker's interest in teaching his Provincial offered him a chance to study theology at the Austrian Jesuit University of Innsbruck. Although Baker's focus had been the Classics he accepted the offer. Living in the Austrian highlands Baker soon became fluent in German and became an expert skier.
Within a year at Innsbruck he was passionate about his new focus studying theology and became deeply interested in theological matters and movements within the Catholic Church. On July 26, 1960, Baker was ordained a priest at Holy Trinity church in Innsbruck. In 1961 Baker completed his formal study of theology and received the Licentiate degree.
Returning to America and Washington State, Baker was prepared to enter the period of tertianship, where young Jesuit priests are placed in pastoral situations to prepare them for the future. His tertianship was placed on hold, however, when the Jesuit Provincial asked him to fill in temporarily as a philosophy professor for Gonzaga University. For two years Baker taught logic, philosophy of man, and philosophy of God and then entered his tertianship (which he completed in 1963).
Desiring to study more about Christian Scripture Baker received permission to pursue a graduate degree at Marquette University. In 1967 he earned a Ph.D. and then was sent to Gonzaga University to serve as an assistant professor of the theological faculty.
Teaching at Gonzaga University Returning to Gonzaga, Baker felt that a change had overcome many of his fellow priests and the nuns working there. Some among the nuns were removing their habits and placing less emphasis on their religious identity. Baker also felt disquieted by priests, seminarians, and nuns gathering for informal "beer parties" on campus. Investigating such parties, Baker felt that they were leading to an "unhealthy spirit, a breakdown in the commitment to a complete and exclusive following of Christ, a haze dimming the witness to the reality of eternal life."
Advocating for a stricter obedience to the papacy, Baker became chairman of the theology department for Gonzaga in 1968. His position was ""Both arms around the Pope, that's my principle." In the summer of 1968, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, reaffirming the Catholic doctrine against the use of man-made birth control. While a wave of dissent arose throughout Catholic universities across North America, Gonzaga's faculty remained loyal and gave a series of lectures in support of the encyclical. Baker supported the document by preaching from the pulpit of Spokane's Jesuit Church.
With a growing experience in academics and administration, Baker fine-tuned his ideas on what was required to restore and emphasize Catholic identity within Catholic educational institutions. While many Catholic educational institutions were seen as "secularizing" by turning over control to lay boards of directors, Baker advocated the opposite, defending the preservation of ecclesiastical affiliation and the Jesuit spirit of solidarity and service. Baker's sermon during the opening Mass of the Jesuit University of Seattle drew special attention for its emphasis on this subject, and he was instrumental in assuring that Jesuit control remained in the revised charter of Gonzaga.
President of Seattle University In late November 1969 the Jesuit Provincial called Baker into his office and informed him that the president of Seattle University was being replaced and that he, then forty-years-old, was being appointed to the position.
Previous conditions In the years previous to Baker's presidency, a construction boom had taken place at Seattle University under the presidency of Fr. Albert A. Lemiuex (who had led the university since 1948 – soon after it changed its name from Seattle College). University leaders had projected the increased enrollment of the 1950s would continue. Loans were taken out to fund the construction of buildings to handle these projections, such as the student residency building Campion Hall (which required a loan of 3.6 million dollars). But the projections proved wrong and rather than the forecast enrollment of 6,000 students in 1969, a decline in student numbers occurred, resulting in a student body of 1,076, which left the university saddled with near empty buildings and in dire financial trouble.
In addition to financial problems at the university, Baker had to deal with student unrest. During the early stages of the Vietnam War, the majority of Seattle University students had been supportive of the military endeavor. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, the majority of student opinion swung against the war and protests on campus rose drastically. By 1970 hundreds of students were taking part in rallies and teach-ins. The protesters took especial issue with the presence of ROTC on campus.
Also previous to Baker's presidency the Black Student Union (BSU) accused the university of institutional racism for a denial of funding for their proposal to host the first separate black homecoming. On January 14, 1970, the BSU, through its spokesperson Bobby Davis, stated that the $3,700 given to the homecoming committee consisting of only white students was giving money "to a white group to go out and put on a white homecoming for a black team. This is the kind of monolithic amerliorism that black people have to contend with. Your Neil Diamond, or whoever, he is, can only be relevant to white, completely bourgeois people." Later when the student government refused to increase the BSU's budget the group threatened a boycott in which black basketball players would refuse to play. The boycott did not take place, but on January 19, 1970, weeks before Baker took office a bomb exploded between the Liberal Arts and Garrand buildings causing costly structural damage, but no injuries or loss of life.
Baker's tenure Baker, who had been chosen "for both his economic and political conservatism" was installed as the 17th head of Seattle University on February 1, 1970. He was the fifth man to hold the title President (between the school's founding in 1891 to 1936 the job's title was Administrator).