Shorter had gotten so far away from its roots by the late 1990s that the Libs attempted a hostile takeover to completely sever its ties to the Georgia Baptist Convention. The Georgie Supreme Court agreed with conservatives and overturned the takeover. Untenured libs left at that time; the tenured ones stuck around. When I graduated from Shorter they had an open lesbian teaching marriage and family, and a theology department that denied fundamental truths of the Bible.
This dustup appears to be the last hurrah of the tenured libs who were not close enough to retirement to bail out when the court slapped them down.
This sort of back-door skullduggery is never a good thing.
And I say that as a Catholic -- let the Baptists be Baptists, and quit trying to make secular humanists (or Catholics, for that matter) out of them against their will.