God and Man at Baylor
This summer, the talk on campus was about a murdered basketball player and a corrupt coach. This fall, it's about a controversial preacher-president who rules with an iron hand, puts religion at the head of the class, and is bent on changing—some say destroying—the culture of the world's largest Baptist university. And UT thinks it has problems.
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In his first year as president, morale on the faculty plummeted. At a faculty senate meeting in September 1996, professors confronted Sloan about the language in the recruitment letters and the attitude of the administration, which was turning away—and scaring away—qualified candidates. After Sloan left the meeting, there followed what the student newspaper, the Baylor Lariat, called a "heated discussion," and anthropology professor John Fox called for a no-confidence vote, though one wasn't taken. Sloan was unmoved. Baylor was a private, Christian university, and it had a right to ask whatever questions it wanted.
Around the same time, attorney LaNelle McNamara, a Baylor alumna who served as mayor of Waco from 1986 to 1987, says she began getting calls from professors who claimed to have been fired or denied tenure because they were insufficiently religious or because they disagreed with the president on religious issues; she subsequently filed complaints against Sloan and Baylor with the American Association of University Professors. "It was the beginning of a mass purging," she told me.
Sloan showed how much he wanted to marry faith and science in October 1999, when he opened the Polanyi Center, where the convergence of the two would be studied, and hired a man named William Dembski to run it. Dembski was a philosopher who'd gone to divinity school at Princeton and whose life's work is "intelligent design" (ID), the theory that there's a design to the universe and an intelligence behind it—namely, God; critics dismiss ID as "stealth creationism." Before Dembski was hired, Sloan talked to almost no faculty members in the science, religion, or philosophy departments, and he didn't announce his hiring afterward. Biology professor Richard Duhrkopf found out only when a friend e-mailed him. Duhrkopf, who knew all about Dembski and his work, told me he was dumbfounded: "My response was, there's no way we would hire him."
The faculty was outraged, some because they feared that ID would get a foothold at a major university, others because Sloan had failed to consult them. The chair of the faculty senate at the time, philosophy professor Robert Baird, told his colleagues that the dispute was "one of the most divisive issues to have arisen on the Baylor campus during my thirty-two years on the faculty." The senate voted to request that the administration shut down the Polanyi Center, but Sloan dug in his heels and refused. Ultimately the name was changed, but the field of inquiry was kept open—after all, this was a Baptist university. Dembski is still on the faculty, as are others who believe in ID, much to the chagrin of science professors. Todd Copeland, the editor of the Baylor alumni magazine the Baylor Line, keyed in on what the outside world thought of Baylor when he picked up the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould at the Waco airport before a 2000 visit to the campus. Gould didn't know much about Baylor, he told Copeland, but he knew all about the Polanyi Center—and that it was a disaster for the university.
The question has been asked since the Enlightenment: How can we believe in God and science at the same time? "If you believe God created the world from nothing," Sloan says, "then there is nothing in the universe outside the creative activity of God." Charles Weaver, a professor of psychology and neuroscience who has been an outspoken critic of Sloan's, insists they're separate. "Faith and science mix in philosophy," he says, "and they mix in theology. They don't mix in neuroscience."
Scott Moore, a professor of philosophy who chairs Baylor's Great Texts program, a component of the university's Honors College, defends Sloan's moves to reemphasize religion at Baylor. "Higher education has become so secularized that the common assumption is that smart people outgrow God," he says. "We think that's false." Moore, who sits in on his department's job interviews, says concerns about inappropriate interview questions are exaggerated: "I've never heard some of the things others have claimed to have heard. I have heard, 'When you think about what it is you do, how does that contribute to your sense of your calling?' The Baptist faith is an integrated life. I want people in my program whose lives are integrated." Larry Lyon, Baylor's dean of the graduate school, says that two questions are typically asked of job candidates: "What is your faith?" and "How is your faith put into action?"
But applicants claim to have been asked other questions, including "How would you integrate the concept of original sin in operations management?" and "What would you do if your son told you he was a homosexual?" Weaver, a Presbyterian elder and Sunday school teacher who has taught at Baylor for fourteen years, believes that he would not be hired at Baylor today: "If I were asked how I'd integrate faith in my classes, I would say, frankly, that they're two separate realms. As a scientist, I have to look at the world objectively. It would be a misuse of my position to get up in class and talk about my personal faith."
But doesn't Baylor, a religious institution, have a right to ask professors and potential professors about their faith? "Baylor absolutely has that right," Weaver says. "But the kinds of answers it accepts will determine whether it remains a great university."
JACLANEL MCFARLAND REMEMBERS THE DAY everything changed. It was New Year's Eve, 1994, and Baylor was playing in the Alamo Bowl at the Alamodome, in San Antonio. The university was in turmoil, and not because everyone realized that this was the last bowl game the Bears would play for a long time. Reynolds was soon to become Baylor's chancellor, and the search for a new president had been going on for more than a year. The regents' first choice for a replacement hadn't worked out, so they had to find someone else. That evening McFarland, a Houston lawyer who had graduated from Baylor and was elected to the board of regents in 1991, nominated Robert Sloan, a young professor who was the new dean of Truett Seminary. He appeared to have good Baptist credentials, and he was bright. Yes, he was an inexperienced administrator, but this was only four years after the charter change, and Baylor was still under attack from the fundamentalists. Perhaps, McFarland thought, a respected and conservative member of the faculty—and a preacher to boot—would be an acceptable choice.
McFarland ignored warnings from a couple of colleagues, she remembers. "They said, 'He's like a German theologian. He's very dogmatic. It has to be his way.'" But the search had taken too long; it was time to move on with the business of running Baylor. "In retrospect," she says with a laugh, "boy, do I understand what they were saying." McFarland wasn't the only early supporter of Sloan's to later change her mind about him. John Wilkerson is another current regent whose backing was instrumental in getting Sloan the job; he has since become highly critical of the president and his plans. And one of Sloan's biggest enemies today is Bette McCall Miller, the daughter of former president Abner McCall. "My first thought when he got appointed," she says, "was that he was a good man, a smart man, a strong Christian man, a very honest man. It wasn't until later that I saw the arrogance, deceit, and vindictiveness."
Robert Bryan Sloan, Jr., was born in the West Texas town of Coleman in 1949 and raised in Abilene. His parents had both grown up on farms but gone to college. His mother became a teacher and then got a master's degree and became an educational psychologist. His father was a traveling insurance salesman who never graduated from college yet still studied for the bar and passed, becoming, Sloan says, a licensed attorney as well as a CPA. "He was an Abe Lincoln-type guy," Sloan says, "very much self-taught." Sloan went to Baylor, where he was a walk-on on the baseball team and majored in both psychology and religion. After graduating, in 1970, he went to seminary at Princeton and studied in England and Switzerland, where he got his doctorate in New Testament theology at the University of Basel. He pastored at various churches, including a two-and-a-half-year stint at the First Baptist Church in the West Texas town of Roscoe. After three years teaching at the Southwestern Baptist Seminary, in Fort Worth, Sloan joined Baylor's religion department in 1983. He was a popular professor, prone to dropping references to Freud and Hamlet into discussions of Jesus and Moses. He became the founding dean of Truett Seminary in 1993. Running the small school—it had 51 students—was the only administrative experience he had when he was appointed in 1995 to replace Reynolds as president.
The vote of the regents was quite close, McFarland remembers, with Sloan barely beating out the other finalist, a Baylor biology professor and vice president. Eventually she would wish he had lost. Over the next eight years she would become increasingly frustrated with Sloan's vision for Baylor and his leadership style. She raised a fuss about the Polanyi Center, spoke up when Sloan was discovered to have made plans to buy a $2.3 million airplane without consulting the board (the regents ultimately gave him permission), and opposed a massive tuition increase that he had proposed. For her outspokenness, McFarland says, she was rewarded in May 2003 with the news that a committee of the board of regents was investigating her for allegedly tipping off her son's fraternity about the identity of an undercover narcotics agent posing as a student. McFarland vehemently denied the accusations; after two months and howls of protest from faculty, alumni, some dissenting fellow regents ("I know exactly what took place," says one who wishes to remain anonymous, "and they had not one shred of evidence") and former regents (Randall Fields, who chaired the board from 1995 to 1997, called the investigation "a witch hunt"), the matter was dropped because of "insufficient evidence." McFarland believes she knows how the whole thing came to be. "I think Robert did it on his own," she says, "without telling [current board chair] Drayton [McLane]." Sloan denies it. "What I did," he told me, "came as a result of information from law-enforcement officials."
McFarland is by no means the first member of the Baylor family to suggest a link between criticism of Sloan and negative consequences. Henry Walbesser, a computer-science professor, was the dean of the graduate school when Sloan became president. In an October 1996 story in the Dallas Morning News about the turmoil at Baylor in Sloan's first fifteen months, Walbesser used an impolitic choice of words when talking about how threatened lawsuits over religious discrimination might finally get the administration's attention: "It is almost like the story of the jackass and the two-by-four. You've got to get the person's attention, and you whack 'em." Walbesser says he told Sloan that it was just a metaphor, "but he took it personally." Walbesser was subsequently fired from the deanship, and, he says, he's been retaliated against in salary negotiations and requests for sabbaticals ever since. (Sloan says he can't talk about salary situations, but he does say, when asked about Walbesser, "People want to claim retaliation when that's a way to shift responsibility, by looking at someone else's motives.")
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