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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Many faculty and alumni liked Vision 2012, or at least parts of it, but they worried about how to implement it. Ten years is too quick, they said, to try to make a move like this, to try to compete with Yale and Rice. Plus it was expensive: Baylor had to borrow $247 million it didn't have, and Baptists, prudent with their finances, generally don't like debt. Donations were down because of the lagging economy (Vision 2012 was passed by the board of regents two weeks after 9/11), so to pay for all the new buildings, the package came with a staggering 44 percent rise in tuition and fees, from $11,990 in 2000 to $17,214 in 2002, which many worried would price Baylor's traditionally middle-class students right off campus. Sloan argued that even with the hike, Baylor was still a bargain.
Those opposed to the plan pointed to the religious language and also worried about the emphasis on research and the hiring of research-oriented faculty, saying that all that time writing scholarly articles and doing lab work would keep professors out of the classroom, to be replaced by graduate assistants. "We're going to be a mediocre research institution and lose what is the most valuable part of this place," says Professor Walbesser. Even pro-Vision 2012 professors like Scott Moore acknowledge some concern with the deterioration of Baylor's traditional teacher-student relationships, though, he says, "we're a long way from that happening."
The plan's most notorious feature was its division of the 539 full-time faculty members into two groups. The "A" faculty were those hired before 1991 who chose to teach; the "B" faculty were newer hires, who came on as researchers or research-teaching faculty (older faculty who wanted to do research were also in the "B" group). The A's and B's were judged by different standards when it came to tenure (the former got it basically by teaching, the latter by publishing), raises, and promotions, with the result being that the older teachers began to feel passed over by the new ones and even targeted by the administration. "Part of Sloan's plan is to replace the faculty," former Baylor professor Barker says, "and it's occurring." Older professors complained of a caste system that favored the younger, more enthusiastic, and more evangelical professors (in the first year of Vision 2012, 62 percent of new hires were Baptists, compared with 49 percent of the general faculty). A faculty survey, commissioned by the administration, was released in July, confirming the split. Among tenured professors, only 29 percent expressed any confidence in Baylor's direction, as opposed to two thirds of the newer tenure-track faculty. The older faculty felt that teaching had been devalued. Professors spoke of "a climate of fear and revenge." Only a quarter of all faculty agreed that there was a "high degree of trust within the university." (Sloan now says the administration is reconsidering the A and B split.)
"Everybody's afraid of him," a regent told me. "If you've got a cousin or a sister or an uncle working at Baylor and you criticize Sloan, he or she is going to get fired." (In the course of reporting this story, several professors said they were too afraid to speak out, even off the record.) Sloan denies people have anything to be afraid of. "A university should encourage questioning," he says. "I do think people should be civil. People are engaging in whisper campaigns and carrying their disagreement outside the family to embarrass the university."
IT WOULD BE HARD TO HAVE a worse summer than Baylor just had. First, there was the furor over McFarland's case, which mobilized Sloan's opponents. Then, in June, feeling the heat from criticisms of Vision 2012, Sloan sent an unprecedented letter to more than 100,000 members of the Baylor family attempting to alleviate some of the "anxiety" he knew they were feeling. He acknowledged mistakes but wrote, "That is to be expected: The road we are traveling has no scouts."
A few days later Patrick Dennehy, a junior on the Baylor basketball team, became a media star for all the wrong reasons, the lead story on CNN and Fox news. Allegations arose that coaches had paid Dennehy's tuition and that they knew that some of the players had failed drug tests. Sloan set up an internal investigative committee, and on August 8 it told him that there were indeed major violations. The next day Coach Bliss and athletic director Stanton resigned. A few days later an assistant coach revealed tape recordings he had made in late July of Bliss trying to orchestrate a cover-up of the illegal payments made to Dennehy. In a new low for college athletics, Bliss was trying to persuade the dead student's teammates to lie to the committee and say that Dennehy had paid for his tuition by dealing drugs.
To Sloan's credit, he immediately put Baylor basketball on probation for two years. But as president of the university, he still had to face questions of his own. When Stanton quit, Sloan said that the athletic director "felt like, as a matter of leadership and integrity, he should step down, since these things happened on his watch." Of course, they happened on Sloan's watch too. How could a micromanager like Sloan not have known about that magnitude of trouble in the university's basketball program? "The fact is," says Sloan, "a modern-day university administrator must be able to delegate responsibility and hold people accountable."
Baylor did its best this summer to put on a good face. On July 18, a couple of days after the McFarland investigation was dropped for insufficient evidence, the university held a Baylor Family Dialogue, a town meeting to talk about all the family problems. Reservations were so numerous that the meeting was moved from the Alumni Center (the BAA sponsored the event) to the massive Ferrell Center; 1,200 people came, and another 400 watched it live on the university's Web site. The eight panelists—including Sloan, Drayton McLane, and Bette McCall Miller—talked about tuition and debt, the faculty's lack of trust, and the job-candidate questions. Sloan was defended—for his boldness, for not being a fundamentalist—and he was attacked—for being vengeful and divisive. He promised to work hard on his leadership skills. "There have been many missteps along the way," he said. "There will be many more tomorrow. But I have a single ambition for Baylor: that we be a university that takes seriously the confession, Jesus Christ is Lord."
TRY TO IMAGINE UT OR OU having a "family dialogue." The truth is, Baylor has always been different—small enough for everyone to know each other, big enough to have serious problems, and Baptist enough to drive everyone crazy. When the Baylor family fights, members feel the passion and vitriol that people in big, divided families feel. They fight from places where words don't help matters, where their feelings about God and themselves and their families lie.
And so everyone has a strong opinion about Sloan. On the one hand: "I'm still not completely sold on Vision 2012," says Mark Collins, a Houston attorney and Baylor grad whose wife is also an alum and whose daughter is a student there now. "But the heart and soul of Robert Sloan is to maintain respect in the academic world while keeping Baylor a Christian educational institution. We don't have to be ashamed of our Christian beliefs. They're not contrary to the search for knowledge and academic excellence." On the other: "He's a narcissist," says attorney McNamara. "That is a character disorder. Everything revolves around him. He must be aggrandized at all times. Look at all the multiple phallic symbols that have appeared on campus!"
That's the thing about symbols—to one side, they glorify God; to the other, man. Before the fall semester began, both sides mobilized for the battles ahead. A group of Sloan's supporters gathered on campus to attack the media for exaggerating the chaos. At the fall faculty meeting, more than a hundred professors gave the president a standing ovation. At the first Baylor football game, people wore "I Support Sloan" T-shirts and buttons. Yet up in Dallas, thirty members of the loyal opposition met in secret and planned their strategy. Calling themselves the Committee to Restore Integrity to Baylor, they stepped up calls for Sloan to resign. Ex-president Reynolds, the Charles de Gaulle of the Baylor family, finally started talking publicly about the crisis and said he didn't like what he had been seeing. "Over time," he told me, "Dr. Sloan has brought into his inner circle a group of people with the same ideology. They're here to transform Baylor, move it in a direction where there is more religiosity, more rules, more prescribed ways of doing things. And people are expected to fall in line."
It's unlikely that the president will step down anytime soon; it's not in his nature, say his enemies. "The right people have resigned," Sloan told me when I asked about the basketball scandal. "And I have a deep commitment to what's going on here, what we're doing at Baylor." Only the regents can fire him, and they are generally supportive. Even after the faculty senate approved a vote of no confidence—the first in Baylor's history—by an overwhelming 26 to 6 margin, Sloan remained unbowed. He seems to stand stronger against his critics; if anything, the increased controversy only ennobles his mission.
If he survives as president, Sloan will face the daunting task of holding Baylor together. The football team is terrible. The basketball team will be terrible (most of the best players transferred to other schools in August) and will certainly get hit with a major penalty from the NCAA. The school's finances are shaky. In the fall of 2002, to protest the rise in tuition, the foundation Christ Is Our Savior took away $2.6 million in money used to give loans to students; this summer it said it wouldn't renew a $5 million loan to Truett. Last year, either because of higher tuition rates or a sluggish economy, Baylor was 155 freshmen short of its target of 2,775, a loss of more than $2.6 million in tuition, and the number of students transferring to Baylor was down by about 75. This year's enrollment will be up, Sloan says, but it won't hit the target numbers. On Internet chat boards, alumni write of not giving money ("I hear reports of people all the time saying they're taking Baylor out of their wills," says BAA board member Seeber) or not sending their children to Baylor—or, at the very least, of not being able to afford it anymore. And next year things will almost certainly be worse. On TV all summer, parents of high school seniors heard about basketball players running amok, smoking pot and shooting guns. They heard a respected Christian coach try to defame a dead college kid. They heard stories of feuding faculty and a divisive president. This is the place they want to send their kids to?
In the summer of 2003 Baylor alums and students saw something unbearable—they saw themselves becoming like everybody else. Their coach was a cheat. Their athletes were violent and out of control. Their school was spending a lot of money it didn't have and joining the academic rat race. Their students choked on the dust of a bunch of new buildings going up on campus. Their parents complained about how much money it cost to send them there. It was, they realized, a lot like the real world, the one outside the Bubble.
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