Baylor University's presidential announcement puzzling

I'm puzzled by the way Baylor University made the announcement of Ken Starr as the next president of Baylor.

I heard about it in an email from a friend who is editor of the national Church of Christ publication. He wrote wanting to know if Starr would be the first non-Baptist president of Baylor.

With no Baylor announcement to Baylor alumni in any of our email inboxes, Kay and I then checked out Starr on Wikipedia, which already listed Starr as the 14th president of Baylor University.

Finally about 30 minutes later the announcement from Baylor arrived in our inboxes. The fact that Starr is Church of Christ was buried deep in the story. The story also noted that Starr promised to join a Baptist church as soon as he arrives in Waco.

Absent in the story was anything that truly connected Starr to Baylor past or present. Now he is the future of our alma mater! He was until a few minutes ago the dean of the law school at Pepperdine University, the Church of Christ West Coast school.

So do you get hired as Baylor president by promising to join a Baptist church? Or when you become Baylor president does your theology suddenly shift from C of C to Southern Baptist? Interesting development.

For more on this development watch this blog later tonight.

Baylor Alumni Association fails to reflect the school's diversity, width, and breadth

One of the many things I enjoyed about being a big-city newspaper reporter was personal access to news events and newsmakers.  Instead of having to read about people and events through the filter of others, I was there as an  eyewitness.

I was reminded of this perk the other day when I drove past the place in which the much-anticipated meeting for the Baylor Alumni Association was about to be held. My wife said to me, "You like to see things firsthand, so why don't you just go on in?" So I did.

Kay knew that for the past several years I've been concerned about the direction the BAA has taken.

What I saw and heard at that meeting in the chapel at Truett Seminary on the Baylor campus confirmed my worst fears. While proclaiming its desire to represent all Baylor alumni and be the true and independent voice for all Baylor graduates, the organization has in effect been hijacked by a small group of disgruntled alumni who have a political agenda (a.k.a. "an axe to grind!") that they are very carefully carrying out.

Seldom do I attend a meeting in which I feel I am among the youngest in the audience. Even though I am 63, I felt a virtual youngster at this meeting. As I looked around I saw an overabundance of people who could best be described as a "Who Was Who" at Baylor many years ago. These former administrators, former faculty members, and former student leaders seemed to have one agenda: to re-claim the days of yesteryear.

This tiny minority of alumni want to turn the clock back to the days when Herbert H. Reynolds ran the university with his iron fist—the days when everything on campus was as Herb wanted it to be, or else. Or else included faculty and students—liberal or conservative—who didn't bow to his authority and were shunned or tossed aside. The group also didn't want to acknowledge that the glory days of Robert Sloan, Herb's young and visionary successor, ever existed. Many in the room were in the mob that at Herb's instigation ran off Sloan, throwing the university into its current state of political instability and chaos.

At the BAA meeting Herb's name, history, and family were invoked numerous times—almost causing some of his loyalists to genuflect—while Sloan's name, history and family were never acknowledged or present in any way.  Herb's daughter, Rhonda, who led the attacks on Sloan, sits on the BAA board and at this meeting was awarded an honorary leadership position; his widow, Joy, was introduced with adulation. But nary a word was said about Sloan, his wife, Sue, or any of their seven children who like their parents also are Baylor graduates. Nor was a kind word said at all about Sloan's wounded friends or allies or any of the good things accomplished under the Sloan administration. 

I easily concluded that working together for the benefit of ALL Baylor alumni is simply not on the agenda of BAA. Instead divisiveness fills its agenda.

The focus of the meeting was on the current Baylor administration's proposal to assist the BAA in becoming what it should be--a forum for ALL Baylor alumni that unites and motivates instead of divides and weakens.  Instead of supporting the administration's plan, the folks gathered at the BAA meeting last Friday were poised to spit in the eye of yet another administration (the third since Reynolds) that they cannot control.

 

Several days after the meeting, the Baylor administration withdrew its fair-and-balanced proposal, basically letting the BAA wander off on its divisive and schismatic way. 

Baylor needs to march forward into its bright future acknowledging the diversity of its large group of alumni and its great past, including the many good things accomplished by both the Reynolds and Sloan as well as other administrations. What it doesn't need is a small band of gray-haired, angry, schismatics continuing to masquerade as speaking for alumni that they truly don't have any intention of representing fairly. 

Baylor's "palace coup" shows moderates act increasingly like their stereotype of fundamentalists

When during the late 1980s and early 1990s the so-called fundmentalists (also known as the conservatives) opted to clean the Southern Baptist Convention's top bureaucracy of outspoken moderates, hardcore moderates at Baylor University screamed their heads off about the ruthless, vicious way they believed the conservatives were going about their task. Because of those firings, even when good reasons existed for some of them, Baylor's moderates painted the conservatives as people lacking in decency, honor, and just plain good manners. 

So why now—more than a decade later—are Baylor's moderates acting as boorish and ruthless as those they accused back in the 1990s? Somebody needs to pin them to the floor and get them to explain their contradictory actions today.

I say this because on Thursday, July 24, for the second time in recent memory, Baylor's regents fired the university's president.  Of course, they didn't use the word "fired", but that's what they did. Their public-relations staff issued a press release that danced all around the facts.  You had to read deep inside the whitewash to garner the information: President John Lilley refused to go quietly into the night, so he was uncerimoniously dumped, with a regent named immediately as acting president.

I was not a supporter of Lilley's presidency--nothing personal against President Lilley, but simply because he was replacement for Robert Sloan, his predecessor. I've never met the man. I did think, however, that he brought at least a sense of respectable calm and dignity after the storm Baylor's moderates stirred up against former President Sloan.

According to the press release, Lilley was fired to help unite Baylor's warring factions. I'm trying to figure out that one; I thought that was the same reason the regents hired Lilley in the first place. He was supposed to be a peacekeeper and quiet interim, not a lightning rod for moderate anger like Sloan became. 

So who is at war at Baylor right now anyway? Those of us who supported Robert Sloan have mostly sat on the sidelines for the past three years and watched Lilley's benign style with less-than-enthusiastic interest. He seemed to mean no harm, though issues that plagued Sloan also seemed to dog him, too. 

The way Baylor's hardcore moderates treated Robert Sloan was a disgrace, but Sloan has gone to Houston now. I trust he is continuing to do well and has a happy, good life as president of Houston Baptist University. Many of us who supported him are still exhausted from watching in horror as the children of Sloan's predecessors, Dr. Herb Reynolds and Dr. Abner V. McCall, and their moderate buddies bludgeoned Sloan unmercifully, including slanders calling him a "fundmentalist" (which he was not). Apparently the Reynolds-McCall mob couldn't cope with all the good things Sloan accomplished for the school! 

If Sloan's supporters were not fighting against poor Lilley, then who was? As Sesame Street's Big Bird would say, "Today's program was brought to you by the letter M." The "M", of course, stands for the word "moderates". 

The situation right now gives every appearance that the hardcore Baylor moderates saw their chance to strike down Lilley quickly to set the stage to put one of their own on the throne at Baylor.

For several months now I have heard the rumors that Lilley was "on the way out". Since he was hired so late in his life, I've always figured his tenure as president would be short. Since I've been hearing about this for two months now, I presume what happened today was not a big surprise to a lot of Baylor insiders. My hunch is behind the scenes some political scheming and deal-making have been going on.

But firing the poor fellow? In such a cruel manner? And at an age where he is unlikely to ever get another job in a university administration? Did the regents also lock this Baylor alum's office door and refuse to let him re-enter it to claim his personal possessions? Is this and the scene beforehand with BU graduate Sloan the way an alma mater treats distinguished alumni?

And the moderate-dominated Baylor Alumni Association's response?  Its lack of indignation over the regents' ugly behavior is puzzling. Its less-than-convincing statement about the upheaval makes one wonder what role the alumni organization actually played behind the scenes in this latest palace coup. Sloan supporters also couldn't help but notice that during the past three years the BAA has been rewarding Sloan's critics, especially the Reynolds family and its friends, with seats on its own board. So, I'm not surprised at the BAA's actions at the moment.

What did Lilley do wrong?  Fail to grant tenure to a handful of professors? Did the moderates' beloved Herb Reynolds not do that also? Or was that OK because he only shunned conservatives and truth-telling journalists—banishing even liberals who questioned him?

Baylor students and alumni deserve better than the sorry politics that have engulfed the university during the past decade, thanks to Reynolds and his ilk.  Robert Sloan deserved better. John Lilley deserved better, too.

Next time Baylor's moderates point fingers at the SBC's conservative leadership, somebody needs to tell them to first go look in the mirror. After protesting so loudly for years about the SBC's so-called fundamentalists, apparently Baylor's moderates have now morphed into what they hated so much!