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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This summer, Walbesser crossed Sloan again, announcing on August 20 that he was going to call for a no-confidence vote on the president in the faculty senate, which would then prompt the board of regents to consider firing him. The next day Walbesser was told that he'd been kicked off the senate because of an obscure rule, never before enforced, that forbade missing more than four meetings. Walbesser says he had missed the meetings because he was doing research in New Zealand and that he had found a substitute to attend in his place. "Somebody went through that rule book with a fine-tooth comb," he says. "I would suspect maybe somebody in central administration." Sloan denies any involvement. "I don't have the authority to remove anyone from the faculty senate," he says, adding, "I try to live my life honorably. I take very seriously the Christian mandate against retaliation."
Sloan's adversaries don't believe it. "There's a vindictiveness in all of his firings," says Lewis Barker, who taught psychology at Baylor from 1972 to 2000, when he grew weary of fighting with Sloan and left to become the chairman of the psychology department at Auburn University. Barker cites several cases of faculty who engaged in behavior he says was disapproved of by Sloan, from having an affair to being openly critical of the administration. "In each of these cases," he says, "there was no due process. Robert judged them and found them guilty."
One of the more egregious instances, says Barker, is that of John Fox: "What he did to Fox gets closer to evil. Robert dismantled this man's life in a way the Mafia should study." Fox was one of the first people to challenge Sloan; he was the one who proposed the no-confidence vote back in September 1996. After twenty years of teaching anthropology—and fourteen years after the university had granted him tenure—Fox was fired in 1997 following accusations of sexual harassment and of drinking with students at a field school in Guatemala. Fox denied the charges and sued, claiming that he was really fired because of the no-confidence motion and that his tenure had been taken away unlawfully; he claimed that Baylor changed the rules for tenure revocation just three days before his revocation hearing. A jury agreed that Fox's due process rights to tenure were violated, and he won two years of back pay. Baylor appealed and won, but Fox's attorney, McNamara, says that in mid-September she filed a motion for rehearing before the Texas Supreme Court. Asked about the suit, Larry Brumley, Baylor's associate vice president for external relations, says, "The claim that this was retaliation for Fox's no-confidence posture is completely without merit."
Graduate dean Lyon defends Sloan's handling of personnel issues: "I would not, in all candor, see Robert Sloan as having a more vindictive personality or a thinner skin or a stronger ego than most of the other leaders I've worked with—a successful football coach, successful business people. They do have a personality type that helps them be good leaders. He is more sure of himself." So much so, say some professors, that Sloan has taken control of areas not generally under his command, such as hiring, which they complain he's taken out of their hands. Usually, a department picks a person it wants or "rank-orders" several candidates. Sloan ended this process, sitting in on interviews along with the chair of the department, the dean of the college, and the provost. According to a November 2002 faculty survey, as many as 30 percent of the candidates recommended by department search committees were turned down by Baylor administrators. "That's almost unheard of," Professor Weaver says. "The faculty are the ones capable of judging the competence of the candidates." By comparison, former president Reynolds says that from 1973 to 1995 the turn-down rate was only 2 percent.
Sloan's antagonists include alumni too, and their wrath is in part related to his dealings with the alumni association. In the spring of 2002 Sloan announced a plan to set up the Alumni Services Division (ASD); the university would also publish a magazine, Baylor Magazine, that would be sent free to 100,000 alumni, as well as to faculty members and the parents of students. The only problem was, Baylor already had an alumni group, the independent Baylor Alumni Association (BAA), and a magazine, the award-winning Baylor Line, which the association had been publishing since 1946. Sloan notified the BAA that the money the university was to give it for the next year ($350,000) would be discontinued. He defended the move, saying that the BAA, a membership organization, had not been doing a good job of communicating with all alumni; for example, fewer than a quarter of Baylor grads paid dues and received the Baylor Line. Sloan said the new group and magazine would be for all alumni.
Members of the BAA say they knew their organization needed to extend its reach, which is why they'd gone to Sloan in August 2000 with a costly long-range plan that they thought he had agreed to; then they began drawing from their endowment to implement it. Almost two years later, Sloan set up the ASD, and soon he had hired away most of the BAA's staff. Tyler mayor Joey Seeber, a member of the BAA board since 1992 and its president in 2001, hasn't forgotten. "The BAA came up with the plan, paid to develop the plan, brought it to Baylor, got their agreement, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and implement it, and then it was hijacked by the administration," he says. "If Sloan was not dishonest, he was at least deceptive in that August meeting."
Sloan disputes that. "We agreed on pursuing a possibility, but we never agreed on a budget," he says. "We bogged down over the numbers." Yet Copeland, the editor of the Baylor Line, says the problem is less what Sloan did or didn't do than how he treated the BAA: "The concerns they had about us were legitimate, but the way they did it was a disaster. The sad thing is, he made us feel like we were under attack and couldn't trust him." Says BAA executive-committee member Jack Loftis, the former editor of the Houston Chronicle: "The administration showed total disrespect for the alumni association in starting up that magazine. I felt a personal assault."
Seeber says Sloan had been upset about several issues of the Baylor Line, including one with a short article about drug and alcohol abuse on campus and another about the Baylor graduates who were trial lawyers involved in the Texas tobacco settlement; the latter was said to have upset a big university donor. Sloan also didn't like the letters page, which published letters critical of him and the university. "It's all about him being in total control," says McFarland. "You either agree or you're ostracized." Sloan agrees that there were some issues that bothered him but denies that was the reason he started his own magazine. Regardless, the upshot is that he now has purview over Baylor Magazine, which is published by Baylor's Office of Public Relations and which features an article in the current issue titled "Breaking News: Faculty Speak Out for Sloan."
"Baptist ministers by nature are accustomed to being in charge," says Texas Monthly writer-at-large Jan Jarboe Russell, who herself grew up Baptist and wrote about Baylor and Sloan for this magazine in 1991. "They're not used to being questioned. In Baptist culture, the ministers are more powerful than any politician. And their ambition is clouded by the attitude 'I'm just here to serve God.' I think Sloan is a vigorous defender of what he believes to be true."
"ROBERT SLOAN'S PASSION FOR THIS INSTITUTION is without equal." It was August 25, and Baylor spokesman Larry Brumley was introducing his boss at the annual Baylor President's Media Luncheon to a crowd of two hundred local businessmen, government officials, and journalists. "Robert Sloan loves this university, its students, its faculty and staff, and its alumni and its legion of friends who believe in its mission: to change lives and impact the world. His tenure has not been without controversy, but what leader who presides over an organization of Baylor's size and influence has not encountered turbulence? Bold, innovative leadership stirs emotion—it stretches conventional thinking, and it pushes people outside their comfort zones."
Before the luncheon started, Sloan had worked the room like a politician, going from table to table, shaking hands and greeting friends and supporters. After Brumley's introduction, he got up and did what he has been doing for much of the past two years: He preached about his baby, Vision 2012, one of the most ambitious programs any major university has ever conceived. "We are less than two years into this endeavor," Sloan said. "There are surely things we wish we could go back and fine-tune or redo. But we have accomplished much in our goal to put Baylor into the upper echelons of American universities, while reaffirming and strengthening our Christian mission."
Sloan spoke of the economic benefits of Vision 2012 and then showed a video of all the new construction: the $15.5 million Dutton Avenue Office and Parking Facility, the $33 million North Village Residential Community, the $23 million Harry and Anna Jeanes Discovery Center in the Mayborn Museum Complex, the $103 million Baylor Sciences Building. He talked about "Baylor's growing research agenda" and showed another video of busy students and professors writing formulas and doing experiments. "Baylor aspires over the next ten years to develop into one of America's leading Christian research universities," the narrator intoned, noting the university's work on finding a cure for cancer, keeping air and water clean, and doing "out-of-this-world" studies on semiconductors. When it was all over, Randy Riggs, a Waco city councilman and Baylor grad, told me, "It all sounds good. Progress is good, but at what cost? We don't want to lose what makes Baylor special."
Sloan announced Vision 2012 in 2002 to almost immediate support, and alarm. It was a ten-year plan with twelve imperatives—for example, recruit faculty "who embrace the Christian faith" and who are "leaders . . . in productive, cutting-edge research," increase the number of graduate students by 25 percent, build "outstanding facilities," build a $2 billion endowment—all of which would vault Baylor into tier one of American universities, as defined by U.S. News and World Report's annual rankings (the latest U.S. News overall rankings have Baylor at number 78).
Vision 2012 is risky, and to some it is worth the risk. It was an "audacious and much-needed experiment in American higher education and religious life," wrote Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher. Baylor was doing what it had always done to survive over the previous century and a half: It was adapting to the modern world. While critics noted the paradox of returning to one's faith-based roots while spending so much money on scientific research, Sloan's supporters reveled in it.
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