Baylor Alumni Association

From the Baylor Line magazine to online newsletters, the Baylor Alumni Association keeps alumni connected to their alma mater and each other.

By Todd Copeland / Photograph by Joe Griffin

During the many decades since Baylor University was chartered in 1845, almost 140,000 graduates have been welcomed into the ranks of our alumni family. Today, Baylor alumni are making a difference in their professions and communities throughout the United States and around the world, and they stand both as the university’s best evidence of success and as the university’s greatest stakeholders. Baylor’s ongoing effectiveness in living out its historic mission, core principles, institutional strengths, and bold aspirations directly affects the value of each graduate’s degree.

It’s no surprise, then, that alumni want to keep up with what’s happening at their alma mater—and in the lives of classmates and friends. Dating back to the early days of the Baylor Alumni Association (BAA), which was created in 1859 when Baylor was still located in the town of Independence, the BAA’s governing board and, later, its full-time staff have striven to keep the members of the extended Baylor family informed and engaged with one other and the university.

“The members of the Baylor family are diverse in their backgrounds, interests, and opinions, but we all share a common bond—our love for Baylor,” said Jeff Kilgore, executive vice president and CEO of the BAA. “The work of the alumni association is based upon that love and connectedness, and a major focus of the organization is to honor the loyalty and intelligence of our alumni by helping them to stay in touch with Baylor, celebrate Baylor’s successes, and honestly report the various challenges that our alma mater faces at times.”

In the winter issue of the Line, as part of the BAA’s celebration of its Sesquicentennial in 2009, we explored the BAA’s role in keeping the Baylor family connected, and in the spring issue we looked at how the BAA has supported Baylor’s mission over the past 150 years.

With this issue, the spotlight turns to the BAA’s longstanding role as a communicator—both sharing news with alumni about Baylor and the Baylor family and speaking on behalf of alumni to the school’s leadership and external audiences.

Early Communications

The BAA’s early efforts to keep alumni informed and enthusiastic about their alma mater are exemplified by a pamphlet in which the proceedings of the alumni association’s twentieth-annual meeting were published.

After a list of all known alumni and an account of the meeting’s activities, which were held in June 1879 in Independence, the document concludes with the message of a committee “appointed to address absent brethren, as to the present condition and future prosperity of our alma mater.”

In the published address to their fellow alumni, the committee’s members—C. R. Breedlove, C. C. Garrett, and L. R. Bryan—run through a number of positive news items regarding enrollment, the quality of faculty members, and facility construction before ending with an appeal to alumni to champion the cause of Texas-based higher education:

“It seems to us that state pride, and decent respect for the future of our institutions, civil and political, and the future welfare of the two million people already in Texas, to say nothing of the constant augmentations from births and immigration, demand of us ample educational facilities; and likewise admonish us to keep our sons and daughters at home, and to educate them among people with whom they are to live, and to instill in them sentiments of independence and individuality. In this way only can the future grandeur, glory, and stability of our grand state be built up and assured.

We invite the hearty cooperation of every student of ‘Old Baylor’ in attaining this noble end. Our motto is ‘Facilities for Home Education, and Home Education,’ and, while promoting the means of education, and securing its ends in our alma mater, we do not lose sight of the social features of our organization; but, we trust that with each recurring commencement we may gather within the hallowed walls of our alma mater, and grasp fellow alumni by the hand, and renew sweet memories and live the olden times over again.”

In August 1920, as Baylor observed its seventy-fifth anniversary with a variety of Diamond Jubilee celebrations, the first Ex-Students Directory was published, compiled under the direction of Baylor English professor A. J. Armstrong. “To the great Baylor Family whose genealogy is contained within these pages I send my most sincere gratitude that this book has been made possible by the unswerving loyalty characteristic of the Baylor spirit,” Armstrong wrote in the introduction.

The publication was the start of what has become, over the decades, a series of increasingly thicker directories that could easily fill a bookshelf. The BAA most recently published an alumni directory in 2006, issuing versions in book form and on CD.

In 1925, Baylor welcomed its first official and regularly distributed alumni publication—the Baylor Monthly. The publication debuted in April 1925, with Waco pastor and Baylor trustee J. M. Dawson serving as editor with the assistance of Mayes Behrman, the school’s first full-time alumni secretary.

Published by Baylor’s alumni office under the direction of the alumni association, the magazine was sent to alumni free of charge and had an initial circulation of five thousand that would increase to fourteen thousand by 1930. Each issue typically included a regular feature by President Samuel Palmer Brooks; stories about campus events and athletics; letters from alumni; and news of marriages, births, and deaths.

On the occasion of Behrman’s departure from Baylor in 1926, Brooks credited his “human interest and personal touch” for the magazine’s popularity and stated that Baylor’s trustees regard the Baylor Monthly as “the most valuable asset of the Association to the Institution.” The publication continued until February 1932, when Baylor trustees decided to stop publishing the Baylor Monthly due to economic hardships caused by the Depression.

The Line Starts Here

In October 1946, Baylor alumni received the first issue of the Baylor Line. The new magazine—whose name derived from the title of the school’s alma mater, referring to the long line of Baylor graduates marching “forever down the years, as long as stars shall shine”—was published by the Ex-Students’ Association as the successor to the Baylor Century, a fundraising-oriented publication produced by the university in connection with the observance of Baylor’s centennial in 1945.

In a letter to alumni dated June 20, 1946, the alumni association’s new executive secretary, Jack Dillard, wrote, “Your association, for the first time, is operating separately and independently from Baylor University itself. The history of all outstanding ex-students groups shows that they operate best when separate from the university.”

Dillard was the first full-time director whose salary was wholly provided by the alumni organization. From 1928 to 1932, Baylor employee Louise Willis had followed Behrman in managing the alumni office as alumni secretary and editing the Baylor Monthly. And from 1932 to 1946, Lily Russell—who successively served as Baylor dean of women and director of public relations—had maintained the alumni association’s files and aided its operations.

Operating from an office in Pat Neff Hall, Dillard served as the Baylor Line’s managing editor in his capacity as the alumni association’s chief staff person. An editorial that ran in the Line’s debut issue celebrated the association’s assuming responsibility for the publication of Baylor’s official magazine and the broader dawning of a new day in alumni relations, stating, “Long considered an outstanding need for Baylor has been a closely knit, active and wide-awake Ex-Students’ organization.”

That first issue was the start of a publication that would become close to the hearts of Baylor alumni and serve as a primary bond between them and their alma mater. To mark the Baylor Line’s fiftieth anniversary in 1996, the magazine ran a seventeen-page feature story that looked back over the evolution of what began as a twenty-four-page, black-and-white magazine into a four-color quarterly averaging eighty pages in length.

That feature story documented the Baylor Line’s broad editorial scope and its commitment to forthright reporting, providing excerpts from individual issues of the Line over five decades that exemplified the types of stories the magazine has run in the cause of telling “the Baylor story.”

Today, as was the case during the magazine’s first fifty years, the Line continues to introduce new presidents of Baylor—from Dr. W. R. White to Dr. John Lilley—and to recall our student days of camaraderie and relationships with dynamic professors.

The magazine has also consistently earned readers’ trust and loyalty by providing them with balanced, frank accounts of sometimes controversial campus news, including former Baylor president Abner McCall’s decision to close Baylor theater professor Paul Baker’s production of the Eugene O’Neill play Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1963, the changes to the university’s charter in the 1990s, and the turmoil and turnover in the president’s office during the past few years.

In that feature story on the Line’s first fifty years, Sherry Castello, who served as editor of the Line from 1968 to 1990, provided a remarkably succinct explanation of the magazine’s philosophy regarding the coverage of such topics.

“Throughout at least half of its history, Baylor’s alumni magazine has been edited from the point of view that its readers deserve and expect to receive an honest look at the university, warts and all. No ‘good news publication’ that ignores the struggles within an institution will keep the respect or interest of its readers for long,” Castello wrote. “We figure that if there is anything at all to this Baylor Family thing, then the family members must be treated as insiders, given a more thorough accounting of Baylor matters than they can find anywhere else. So when a coach is fired, or there is a drug bust on campus, or a presidential search blows up and starts over, or the faculty is publicly outraged, you’ll read about it in the Baylor Line. But don’t get the idea that we are an adversarial publication either. In fact, our reporting of such matters comes out of our caring about Baylor and desiring improvement. And we believe our readers, Baylor alumni, have more reason to care about the university than any other constituency group.”

While reporting on sensitive topics is clearly a central component of keeping alumni fully informed, the majority of the Line’s pages—from 1946 to today—have been dedicated to celebrating the progress and success of Baylor and the school’s alumni. Whether it’s the Lady Bears’ national championship in basketball in 2005 or the academic achievements of Baylor students who have won prestigious Fulbright and Truman scholarships, the Line has proclaimed good news and helped fuel the fire of alumni pride.

Of course, the first pages most readers turn to are in “Down the Years,” the Line’s class notes section, located at the back of the magazine. Considered the heart of the Line, based on reader interest, the class notes section receives generous space in recognition of its importance in keeping alumni connected with the greater Baylor family.

The Online Era

When the age of the Internet dawned, the BAA soon began to add an online component to its alumni communications.

In July 2001, the alumni association launched the first general-interest online newsletter for Baylor alumni. Aptly named Between the Lines, the monthly newsletter quickly demonstrated its value, bringing alumni timely news of fellow grads affected by 9/11 and chronicling the saga of alums Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry as they were held prisoner by the Taliban in Afghanistan and eventually rescued by American troops.

More recently, in 2007 the association added Baylor Line News to its online communications program, enabling more frequent and streamlined communication between the BAA and the alumni association’s membership. During the last two years, Baylor Line News has helped the Baylor community stay up to date with all the latest happenings at Baylor and the alumni association through timely, quick-read stories.

All of these publications—along with a host of information about the alumni association’s membership program and sponsored events, as well as blogs and message board features—can be found on the BAA’s website at bayloralumniassociation.com.

“We believe that a fully informed alumni body is a loyal, supportive alumni body—even when keeping alumni fully informed requires the communication of Baylor’s challenges and alumni concerns over the university’s direction and governance,” said the alumni association’s Kilgore. “Covering such topics in alumni publications reflects the university’s history as an institution dedicated to truth, diversity, inquiry, honesty, and accountability, and it provides more credibility to the stories of celebration and Baylor pride that occupy the bulk of our magazine’s pages and our online publications’ stories. Telling the Baylor story is something we take seriously, and we are grateful to have been able to serve in that capacity for 150 years.”

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