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Regents of Baylor University meet this week to discuss Baylor Vision 2012, President Robert Sloan's expansive plan to make the school into the world's premier evangelical research institution. But Texas newspapers are still focusing on whether the regents will take up another vote on Sloan's leadership.

Both the Houston Chronicle and the Waco Tribune-Herald report on a widely circulating rumor that Sloan will be made chancellor, which both papers characterize as more or less a demotion into a fundraising position. But the Chronicle reports that board chairman Will Davis denied that the group is considering the idea, and the Tribune-Herald reports that even if they did it, Sloan's critics wouldn't be any happier. In May, the regents voted 18-17 to retain Sloan as president.

Sloan supporter Dary Stone, part of Friends of Baylor, told the Tribune-Herald that the regents would destabilize the school by voting on Sloan's leadership every few months. "You can only do this so often, and they've done it plenty," he said.

So the regents probably won't vote on Sloan. But they'll likely take action on Vision 2012, though the newspapers don't report on what aspects are likely to be discussed. The Tribune-Herald does report, however, "Two large parts of that vision came to fruition last week. School officials gave a guided tour of the new $103 million sciences building and new North Village residential facility, designed to attract more students to living on campus."

The Chronicle, meanwhile, rehashes the story up to now:

The direction has divided alumni and faculty of the 14,000-student Waco university.

Critics say it's making the school too expensive for its traditional base of middle-class families, undervaluing professors whose forte is teaching and imposing an evangelical form of the faith they say will hurt Baylor's reputation.

Some more baldly call it a "fundamentalist takeover," a reference to the Southern Baptist Convention's 25-year war over biblical interpretation, won by literalists.

But scholars say the Baylor rift is more complicated.

The Chronicle's opinion pages haven't reflected the nuance of that last sentence, instead taking positions against Sloan and Vision 2012's religious aspects.

The opinion pages of the Dallas Morning News, however, have been far more positive, and are again today as alumnus Don Riddle defends both the school's direction and its president. "Visions are borne on the character of those who understand, articulate and embrace them. Vision 2012 must be implemented by President Sloan, or it must be abandoned," Riddle writes. "My hope is that all who love Baylor—especially the regents—will seriously consider the immense damage to the institution that would result by scuttling President Sloan and the vision. Baylor risks public humiliation in the eyes of the North American Christian community."

One of the other defenders of Vision 2012 has been A. J. Conyers, professor of theology at Baylor's Truett Seminary. "The leaders of Baylor, including President Robert Sloan, are serious about their responsibility," he wrote in an article on the school's website. "We are moved by a Christian institution that has chosen to be what it claims to be, while others are indolently content merely to seem—with the form of religion, but having lost its liberating power."

Sadly, after a long battle with cancer, Conyers died yesterday at age 60.

"Chip was constantly thinking theologically in the best possible sense," Sloan says in an announcement on the school's website. "He was always asking how the Christian faith could impact living. One of the great gifts he left at the end was to be very vulnerable and transparent with his colleagues and students about the process of facing death and the gracious providence of God in it all. He will be dearly missed."

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July (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48