Fundamentalist to Head Baptist Bible College : Education: Outspoken minister is appointed president of school that has been beset by controversy over its stand that Scripture is without error.

The Rev. Paige Patterson, a chief architect of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, has been nominated president of a Southern Baptist seminary whose increasingly fundamentalist direction has made it a center of controversy since 1987.

Patterson, 49, president of Criswell College in Dallas, announced there Tuesday that he had been unanimously nominated by a search committee to become president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

At Criswell, Patterson said, he has been “a Socratic gadfly on the posterior” of the Southern Baptist Convention. In contrast, he said, he will be “a denominational servant” at the seminary.

Patterson referred to his role as a leading activist in a 13-year-old campaign by fundamentalists to take control of the 15-million-member denomination.

The Rev. Roger Ellsworth, who chairs the board of trustees at Southeastern, said Patterson’s selection will probably be confirmed by the full board when it meets at the seminary May 14. Patterson will succeed the Rev. Lewis Drummond, who announced in February that he will retire from the Southeastern presidency on June 30.

Patterson, who is being forced out at Criswell, said he expects some of the school’s 23 professors to follow him to Southeastern, which has 35 faculty members.

Since fundamentalists gained a majority on the board of trustees five years ago, their efforts to impose the position that the Bible is without errors on the seminary’s teaching have led to declines in the numbers of faculty and students and a decision by an accrediting agency to place the school on academic probation.

Ellsworth said the search committee had nominated Patterson as president because of his record at Criswell in student and faculty recruitment, financial development and accreditation.

Criswell College is named after the Rev. W.A. Criswell, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas. It was founded by the church in 1970 as a Bible institution and Patterson succeeded the Rev. H. Leo Eddleman to become its second president in 1975.

At that time, the college had 12 students, four faculty members and no accreditation. Today it has about 375 students, nearly 30 full-time faculty members and offers accredited bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Despite Patterson’s accomplishments at Criswell, the trustees tried to fire him in October because they felt he had been inattentive to administrative details. The ouster failed because of protests by students and faculty and the intervention of three past presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention. However, Criswell trustees told Patterson in November that he had six months to find another job.

Patterson briefly considered an offer to become president of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s independent Liberty Baptist Seminary in Lynchburg, Va., but he said in mid-December that he had decided to stay in the “Southern Baptist Zion.”