Cosby visits Baylor, but critics still aren’t laughing_90803

Posted: 9/5/03

Cosby visits Baylor, but critics still aren't laughing

By Mark Wingfield

Managing Editor

WACO–Comedian Bill Cosby came to Waco Sept. 4 to cheer up the Baylor University community, but critics of the athletic department, president and the university's 10-year vision continued to find little to laugh about.

Cobsy, who spoke in the university's Ferrell Center last year, volunteered to donate his time to help console Baylor students in the wake of basketball player Patrick Dennehy's summer murder.

Meanwhile, both critics and supporters of the administration remained busy beating the drum for their causes.

A group called Friends of Baylor University held a pep rally Aug. 29 to show their support for the university and President Robert Sloan. The group was formed by Waco businessman Clifton Robinson, according to the Waco Tribune-Herald.

“One thing is crystal clear: Issues of personality cannot dictate the future of Baylor University,” he told the crowd of about 100 supporters. “It is imperative that all voices be heard and public opinion not be swayed by a small vocal minority with a different agenda.”

To refute the assertion of critics that donations to Baylor are decreasing, the group presented Sloan with a check for $1 million to be added to the university's endowment.

A group called the Committee to Restore Integrity to Baylor countered the next day with an advertisement in the Tribune-Herald expressing “no confidence” in Sloan's leadership.

Spokesman for that group was Gale Galloway, an Austin businessman who was chairman of the Baylor board of regents when Sloan was elected president in 1995.

“We did a great disservice in putting Robert in that job, because he didn't have a single day's experience running an organization,” Galloway told the Waco newspaper.

Faculty groups continued to express both support and criticism for Sloan as well.

One day after a member of the Faculty Senate announced plans to call for a vote of no confidence in the president, he was removed from the elected body on a technicality.

Ben Kelley, dean of engineering and computer science, the area in which Faculty Senate member Henry Walbesser teaches, drew attention to a previously overlooked rule in the senate's governing documents. Walbesser was ousted from the senate because he had missed four meetings during the academic year.

Ironically, Walbesser missed the meetings because he was on sabbatical doing research, a fulfillment of the new demands on Baylor professors for which some have criticized Sloan.

The Faculty Senate is to meet Sept. 9, and some faculty said they still would call for a vote of no confidence in the president, even if Walbesser is not allowed to participate.

However, some professors reported they felt pressured by their deans not to speak out against the president or to vote against him in the Faculty Senate.

While as many as 100 faculty members rallied behind the president in a formal event kicking off the new school year and flooded regents with e-mails and faxes supportive of Sloan, an alumni critic said she thinks the effort was coordinated.

Bette Miller, daughter of former Baylor President Abner McCall, cited an email sent Aug. 21 from a Baylor administrator to all tenure-track faculty. That e-mail urged the newer faculty members to “send an e-mail titled: VOTE OF CONFIDENCE” and copy a short message: “As a Baylor family member, I would like to take this opportunity to voice my 'vote of confidence' for President Robert Sloan and his administration.”

The administrator's solicitation provided e-mail addresses for regents and urged faculty to “highlight these e-mail addresses and paste them into the 'To' section of your e-mail.”

This “explains why the regents are receiving 'hundreds' of faxes/e-mails in support of Sloan,” Miller charged. “Of course, we also ask our loyal opposition members to write the regents, but there's an important difference–we're not their employers, with control over their job security, raises, tenure, assignments, etc.; and we don't have the capability of checking their outgoing e-mail to see if they've complied with our requests.”

Sloan supporters within the faculty and administration have said privately for several months that they believe former Baylor President Herbert Reynolds has been a driving force behind criticism of Sloan, although Reynolds has kept publicly silent on the matter.

Reynolds broke that silence in a late-August interview with the Tribune-Herald, however.

The newspaper asked Reynolds if he is behind the persistent criticism of Sloan from alumni and faculty. He acknowledged that over the past eight years he has been contacted by “hundreds of individuals concerning Baylor's leadership and direction.”

He did not become actively involved in the cause until last fall, he said, when “I decided I was not going to sit by and watch Baylor undergo a transformation engineered by a small coterie of individuals who, in my opinion, want to impose their own particular worldview on Baylor.” This worldview, he charged, “will lead to a more autocratic milieu, a violation of individual soul competency that has been the bedrock of Baptist principles for centuries, and a general loss of freedom and personal volition in both religious and academic matters.”

While fending off criticism of the athletic program, the president and the 10-year vision, Baylor regents faced criticism on yet another front as the new school began.

Some Baylor alumni and Sloan critics charged the self-perpetuating board stood on the brink of electing former Southern Baptist Convention President Ed Young to the board. The speculation reached such a pitch that one of Baylor's biggest benefactors, John Baugh, wrote a letter to regents Chairman Drayton McLane expressing his concern.

Although not naming Young, pastor of Second Baptist Church in Houston, Baugh wrote that he had “information from several credible sources” that the board's nominating committee intended to recommend “one or more prominent fundamentalist preachers” to become regents.

Young has been a leader of the fundamentalist movement within the SBC, the movement that a decade ago caused the Baylor board to declare itself self-perpetuating. Then-President Reynolds and the board leadership feared a takeover of the university akin to the changes then happening at SBC seminaries.

The story appeared in the Tribune-Herald and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and was picked up by the Baptist website EthicsDaily.com. Young did not comment to any of the media outlets.

Sloan and Baylor spokesman Larry Brumley both denied Young was being considered for the board.

“I have never heard Ed Young's name mentioned by any of our regents in connection with a place on Baylor's board,” Sloan told EthicsDaily.com. “I don't know how some of these rumors get started. I'm kind of amazed at these things.”

Brumley called the story a “malicious rumor” that is “totally baseless.”

On the legal front, Dennehy's father filed a lawsuit against the university, alleging his son intended to expose improprieties in the Baylor basketball program, leading to “violent threats” against him and a cover-up that resulted in his murder.

Patrick Dennehy Sr. seeks unspecified damages against the university, Sloan, McLane, former Athletic Director Tom Stanton, former Coach Dave Bliss, assistant coaches Doug Ash and Rodney Belcher, Assistant Athletic Director Paul Bradshaw and Baylor booster William Stevens.