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.
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ROBERT B. SLOAN, JR: Baylor's president photographed in his office on August 29, 2003.
Photograph by Kenny Braun
BAYLOR, THE OLDEST UNIVERSITY in Texas, has added considerably to its number of spires in the past couple of years. The latest reach up to heaven from a parking garage that opened in August. The Dutton Avenue Office and Parking Facility is a massive structure—students call it the Garage Mahal—and holds 1,200 cars as well as a Chili's Too and a Starbucks. The corner spires weigh seven thousand pounds each. There are two more next door at the magnificent new George W. Truett Theological Seminary building, which opened in January 2002, and another one at the new baseball stadium.
This is not to say that Baylor, whose 14,000 students make it the largest Baptist university in the world, is crazy about Christian symbols or iconography. In fact, one of the hallmarks of Baylor has always been that it has never physically broadcast its heritage, unlike, say, Notre Dame, a Roman Catholic school where crucifixes fortify the classroom walls. There are no crosses or statues of Jesus at Baylor, but there are plenty of bricks—"Baylor red" and set in absolutely straight lines, on perfectly laid mortar. There are also old limestone Georgian-style buildings, sprawling oaks, and meadows of lush green grass.
It's the bricks that catch your eye, though—a lot of new ones in a lot of new buildings. You can't walk very far across the clean, orderly campus, especially near the north end, without having to detour around a construction site. On the first day of school this year, students shielded their eyes from the dust rising at the site of the massive half-million-square-foot sciences building, set to open next summer. They took the long way around the huge new dorm complex, which will be ready for sleeping next fall. They stood and stared at the large domed museum, which will be completed next spring. Other structures have been open only for a few years—the giant student center, the law school, and the expansive sports park, with its baseball stadium, softball stadium, soccer field, and tennis center. The 158-year-old university looks like it just came out of the catalog.
Baylor, the pride of Waco, is changing. But these days, when people say they don't recognize it anymore, they're not talking about just the buildings. Baylor is only now emerging from its darkest summer ever. To outsiders—that is, people who don't live in or obsess about the Baylor Bubble—the trouble began when a basketball player named Patrick Dennehy failed to call his mother and stepfather on Father's Day and was pronounced missing. As a nationwide search began, his friend and fellow teammate Carlton Dotson was said to have shot him. Then a babbling Dotson was arrested in Maryland. Then the police found Dennehy's body in a field outside Waco. Then, after allegations of improper payments to Dennehy and drug use on the team, coach Dave Bliss and athletic director Tom Stanton resigned. Then Bliss was heard on tape trying to get other players to lie and say that Dennehy had gotten the money from being a drug dealer. Then Dotson was indicted.
Poor Baylor. The truth is, even before Dennehy disappeared, the school was struggling with a crisis, a spiritual and cultural war that is threatening to rip the campus in half. On one side are the moderates and liberals—that is, Baptists who don't go to church every Sunday—who like Baylor just as it has always been, a place where you could get a good, strong undergraduate education while the bells in the McLane Carillon played "Amazing Grace." On the other side are conservatives who clamor for change—for progress, new programs, new buildings, and deeply religious professors who will bring back the faith they say has been diminished at Baylor. It's the difference between being a good school in a Christian environment and a good Christian school. And it's a big difference.
At the center of the war is Baylor president Robert B. Sloan, Jr., an ordained Baptist preacher and a son of small-town Texas, whose vision and personality are driving every single issue and building project there. The fact is, if the topic is Baylor these days, the talk inevitably turns to 54-year-old Sloan. To some, he's a visionary, rescuing the school from secularism while bringing it into the modern world with a growth and research agenda that would put Baylor in the same league as Duke and New York University. He is a moral man, a man of the cloth, and he has ambition—just what this sleepy little place needs. To others, he's a closet fundamentalist and a control freak who does not abide criticism. They speak of an atmosphere of fear and retaliation. And they aren't just a random bunch of malcontents; their ranks include prominent alumni, faculty, regents, former regents, and the children of past presidents. Their cause was bolstered in August when the Houston Chronicle, until recently run by so many loyal Baylor alumni that the paper's office amounted to a satellite campus, called for Sloan to resign. On September 2, three former chairmen of the board of regents also called for his resignation. A few days later, five current regents did the same.
Baylor is special, a place where generations of family members have ritually enrolled, a place graduates feel connected to by blood. They think with their hearts. They take sides. This struggle has destroyed friendships, alienated the faithful, and cast adrift die-hard Baylor supporters. It is not an arcane argument about academic freedom. It's about the very identity of the university and the people who love it.
"Change is hard, hard on all of us," Sloan told me on the second day of school. "We'll either change, or we will die." If Baylor isn't careful, it could do both.
"DO I LOOK LIKE A FUNDAMENTALIST to you?" Sloan asks, smiling affably. He is sitting in his cozy offce in Pat Neff Hall. He is a six-foot-four-inch charismatic man with a big smile and big ears. In his elegant black pin-striped suit he has the well-groomed mien of a corporate executive, yet he's been known to show up on campus wearing a T-shirt. He speaks in a soft Texas drawl, and his speech speeds up and slows down again like a preacher's, the cadence of a man who loves to hear the sound of his own voice spreading the Good News. He rarely stammers. He doesn't betray any doubt—about God, his vision for Baylor, or himself.
Since becoming Baylor's president eight years ago, Sloan has indeed done some very un-fundamentalist things. In 1996 he reversed a long-standing ban and permitted dancing on campus. He helped bring Baylor into the famously liberal world of PBS, getting the campus its own public television station in 1999 and its own public radio station last year. He has hired Catholics and a few Jews. "If you look at Baylor today," he says, "and you see the dramatic changes we're embracing, that is not the spirit of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism fears change and rejects change. You see the commitment we have to science and research. Fundamentalism is historically anti-intellectual."
At Baylor, fear of fundamentalism is not an idle worry. Relatively speaking—that is, relative to the rest of the Baptist world—Baylor is a moderate place. Indeed, it's one of the last strongholds of the moderate wing of the Baptists. Baptists of all stripes are notoriously stubborn—fundamentalists stubbornly believe in the inerrancy of the words of the Bible, and moderates stubbornly believe in the priesthood of the believer (basically, that one has leeway in figuring out what those words mean). Since the school was founded by Baptist settlers, in 1845, the two sides have fought over everything from evolution to waltzing. Ultimately, Baylor became a good school in a Christian environment, and if you grew up Baptist in Texas—that is, if you were white and from a middle-class family—there was a place for you there, just like there had been for your mother and father. It was private, relatively cheap, and safe, a place where teachers knew the names of their students and took the time to explain things, whether it was Darwin's theories or God's grace. A quaint place where student-organization meetings were announced by writing in chalk on the sidewalks, where freshmen learned to make the bear-claw sign by curling their hand around their kneecaps, where friendships were made easily under the giant oak trees. A place where the football and basketball teams, dressed in old-fashioned green and gold, usually lost but did so with honor and a high graduation rate. A place with a typical student body—there were freaks and preppies, cool kids and science geeks. A place with an atmosphere of quiet faith. Students were expected to go to class but also to chapel. They'd raise hell at Saturday football games but bow their heads on Sunday mornings.
The last time the fundamentalists and the moderates fought this hard was in 1990, when the fundamentalists set their sights on taking over the university's mother organization, the Baptist General Convention of Texas (which elected Baylor trustees, who in turn ran things). But then-president Herbert Reynolds, a moderate, got the university's attorneys to amend the Baylor charter; now there would be a 36-member board of regents—Baylor would elect 27 and the Baptist General Convention of Texas the other 9. Baylor was safe, it seemed, forever. Or at least under its own control.
So when Sloan became the first preacher to run Baylor since 1961, alums and faculty took notice. Abner McCall, the president from 1961 to 1980, had been a lawyer; Reynolds was a psychologist. During their administrations, faith was embraced but so was science. "We teach religion in the religion department, science in the science department," McCall once said. But upon his selection in 1995, Sloan made it known that he wanted to bring faith and reason back together again; this was a Baptist university, and it was going to start acting like one. Early on he sent a letter to all job candidates saying, among other things, that Baylor sought faculty who felt a "commitment to the universal lordship of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ." Candidates had to submit a statement identifying their denomination, the name of their current church, and details about their participation there. Whereas under McCall and Reynolds questions of theology were kept out of the interview process and affirmations of faith were accepted at face-value, under Sloan, applicants were asked "Do you believe in the Trinity?" and "Why would a practicing Christian ever need a psychologist?"
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