Three Responses to Baylor University's Proposal

Comments by Jack Loftis ’57

Editor emeritus of the Houston Chronicle

What do the Baylor University Board of Regents and key members of the school's administration really want from the Baylor Alumni Association?

The answer is—and please believe me—total control of all media communications involving the university.

I have been a voluntary consultant to the Baylor Line for a number of years and rate the magazine among the finest alumni publications in America. When the first signs of friction began to develop between the Baylor administration and the BAA around 2002, the initial insult to the BAA was the administration's announcement that it intended to publish its own magazine, one that I and other BAA board members considered an unnecessary rival to the Baylor Line.

So, despite all the verbal camouflage contained in the proposal for merger that was so inappropriately delivered to the BAA on September 19—a day that had been designated for celebrating the alumni organization's 150 years of existence—I am totally convinced that the number-one goal of those behind the merger plan is editorial control of the Baylor Line or its ultimate demise.

Based on this alone, I think the proposal should be rejected for the sake of all components of the Baylor family. And to those alumni who might have small concern as to whether the BAA remains independent or not, let me remind them of this: What has worked for 150 years has a good case for maintaining its current course.

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Comments by Paul Powell ’56

Former Baylor regent, former dean of Baylor’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary, and well-known Texas Baptist pastor

I just left a fundraising meeting with the chair of the board of a not-for-profit organization that has experienced some internal turmoil. He told his board, “You need to remember how you got where you are."

That statement seems appropriate for Baylor today when it comes to considering the Baylor Alumni Association. We have come a long way through the years, and the alumni association has helped get us there. I came to Waco with three shirts, two pairs of blue jeans, and enough money for one quarter of school. Somehow by God's grace and good Baptist people I got through.

After graduation, I had some wilderness years when I didn't have much time and for sure no money for Baylor. I was getting my seminary education, raising a family, and learning to pastor a church. While I pretty much forgot Baylor, Baylor never forgot me. The Baylor Alumni Association was the one link that kept me in touch.

In the years that followed, I was asked to serve as a trustee (now called regent). I was honored to do that for sixteen years. I was determined to give back in time, money, and sometimes blood defending and promoting Baylor. I walked and worked in those years with two great presidents, Judge Abner McCall and Dr. Herbert Reynolds, and always by our side was the Baylor Alumni Association.

Though an independent organization, it has been a faithful friend and defender of Baylor from its inception—always supportive, always building. We must not forget that. As my friend said, "We need to remember how we got where we are." I do remember. That's why I am a life member of the Baylor Alumni Association. We should welcome—not fear—an independent alumni association that does so much good for the university we all love.

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Comments by Dr. William D. Hillis ’53

Cornelia M. Smith Distinguished Professor of Biology at Baylor and former Baylor vice president for student life

I continually find myself reviewing the circumstances that have apparently brought the spectacular Baylor family to a position that might make it appear to outsiders like a "house divided against itself." I often reflect on my days as executive vice president under Dr. Herbert Reynolds, then later as vice president for student life at Baylor under the administrations of Reynolds and Dr. Robert Sloan.

During my days in those offices, I continued to teach at least one course in biology, so I was a tenured member of the biology faculty. My colleagues on the faculty and on the staff, of which I was also a constitutive part, often came to me after a particularly embarrassing prank instigated by the NoZe Brotherhood. Often they approached me with an apparent solution of how to deal with the "wayward NoZe." "Why don't you just plain ban them from having any part in Baylor campus life?" they would ask, clearly feeling they had proffered the perfect solution to a problem that would almost certainly and instantaneously make my life easier.

"Their action," I would say, " has caused considerable embarrassment to the university and to me personally. But quite frankly, I think we need to be embarrassed occasionally, to keep us humble. To ban them would be the act of a despot, and I personally believe that they play a vital role in the life of Baylor. They make it necessary for us to be honest with ourselves—to strive diligently to be paragons of virtue and not unknowingly make what could turn out to be unintentional harmful errors."

Every governing body needs to have groups that constantly remind them of their responsibilities and trust and of their ever-present infallibility. When Dr. Reynolds envisioned a new charter for Baylor, he asked the cabinet members to hold the plan confidential until he could discuss it with trusted members of the Board of Trustees (as it was then called), and of course we all agreed to do so. When he laid out the details of the plan, I expressed to him privately some concern about the advisability of submitting the governance of the university to a board that had the power to perpetuate itself through time, by electing its own members. "Aren't you concerned that there could come a time when the trustees wouldn't necessarily always make the right decisions for Baylor? After all, men and women are all fallible, and they run the risk of gaining power that corrupts."

Dr. Reynolds responded, as he usually did, with total assurance. "That could never happen at Baylor. We have checks and balances, just like the federal government has, that would be able to call their hand.” And then he continued, saying, "Remember that we have taken pains to be certain that the Baylor Alumni Association is independent of the university. The alumni association would always be able to expect the trustees to consider alternative choices and not to take themselves too seriously, realizing the inevitable possibility of their own fallibility.”

I do not mean in any way to insinuate that our current Baylor regents have anything but the best interests of the university at heart, but it does seem clear to me that one of the unique features of Baylor is that we purposefully have an organizational structure which gives our system a way of doing things with checks and balances that other universities simply do not have in place.

Like our national government that has been the envy of every democracy in the world, we divide the power and responsibility of operation in a highly reliable and commendable way. Nationally, the president can never gain excessive power or authority because he is held in check by a Congress and/or by the judicial system (and vice versa). We have always had a two-party system of government in which one party has the opportunity to hold high expectations of the other. It is unique (and sometimes even hazardous), but it works better than any other form of government in the world.

Baylor's plan of organization, like the soul of the university itself, is unique, and God grant that it shall always be so!

In having a self-perpetuating Board of Regents, we have the inherent possibility of exercise of absolute power, which has been seen time and time again to corrupt absolutely. We need the Baylor Alumni Association to remain independent, so that it can continue in its best efforts to support fully the needs of Baylor and her students, as it has for the past 150 years.

The independent voice of the alumni has the opportunity to preserve the uniqueness of Baylor for years to come. Let it not be silenced because it seems to others that we often "give ourselves a black eye." (Loving brothers and sisters often do just that!) All of the faithful Baylor alumni whom I know and have known and loved down the years are, like the regents, eager to perpetuate a university that offers the best of teaching and learning within a caring Christian environment for the preparation of men and women of faith in God and in his beloved Son for service and usefulness to mankind. These central values have been beautifully expressed in the aims and thrusts of the university, as espoused by the alumni association and published recently in the Baylor Line. Let us be all the more vigilant that nothing shall deter us from upholding these lofty expectations, so dear to the hearts of every Baylor graduate.