WACO, Texas (ABP) — Baylor University regents voted to postpone indefinitely a call for President Robert Sloan's resignation, and they unanimously rejected a request by the university's faculty senate to hold a faculty-wide referendum on Sloan's administration.
After a motion was introduced at the Sept. 24 regents' meeting calling for Sloan's resignation, a second motion called for the matter to be postponed indefinitely, chairman Will Davis announced after the executive session.
“It does not kill the idea for ever and ever. It can be brought up at another time,” he said. Davis declined to reveal the vote margin on the motion to postpone, but one regent characterized it as “very close.”
The motion to postpone a call for resignation was the latest in a series of votes by regents on Sloan's leadership. The board voted 31-4 in September 2003 to affirm Sloan. But his support had eroded by spring, and at the board's May meeting, a motion to ask for Sloan's resignation failed by an 18-17 secret ballot.
Regents took no vote on Sloan's presidency at their July retreat, other than unanimously affirming the Baylor 2012 10-year plan that has become the controversial centerpiece of his administration.
While Davis described the Sept. 24 meeting as “collegial,” a regent said the mood was “very tense.” A majority of the board members expressed their views during extended discussion of Sloan's leadership, he added.
Twice in a little more than a year, the university's faculty senate passed votes of no confidence in Sloan's leadership. At a recent retreat, the group voted 29-1 to call for an independently administered secret-ballot survey asking all university faculty whether they believe Sloan should remain as Baylor's president. Davis said the regents unanimously turned down that request and he personally did not believe it was appropriate to put the issue to “some kind of popularity contest.”
The regents' vote came the same day Baylor started parents' weekend and dedicated a $103 million science building. The 508,000-square-foot facility consolidates the chemistry, biology, geology, physics and neurology programs under one roof, along with most of the university's pre-professional healthcare programs and five multidisciplinary research centers.
New facilities have been a key component of Baylor 2012, Sloan's 10-year vision for making Baylor a top-tier university. But capital expansion at the university, coupled with unprecedented levels of debt, during Sloan's tenure as president have raised the ire of his critics. They also faulted him for increasing tuition, failing to foster good relationships with alumni and faculty, and imposing more narrow religious restrictions on faculty.
Prior to the regents meeting, 22 former Baylor regents submitted a resolution calling for the current board to replace Sloan immediately with an interim leader and initiate a nationwide presidential search.
The resolution accused Sloan of creating “the greatest divisiveness and distrust in the history of Baylor.”
“As a consequence, the faculty and staff have become demoralized, deflated and uncertain, and alumni and friends of the university are astounded that such problems have been allowed to continue for so long to the detriment of so many,” the resolution stated.
Signers included John Baugh, founder of the Houston-based Sysco Corporation and a major Baylor benefactor. Baugh had addressed the regents at their May meeting, warning he would ask for loans to be repaid and his financial gifts to Baylor be returned unless the board took action to rescue the university from “the paralyzing quagmire in which it … is ensnared.”
Sources close to the university estimated gifts by Baugh and his family at more than $25 million, plus $3 million in outstanding loans.
Following the Sept. 24 regents meeting, Baugh said he felt university leaders were “still bogged down,” but he would not make a decision regarding his gifts and loans until he knew more about “what went on behind the scenes” or until “the direction they take is definitive.”
Sloan, 55, is a Texas native graduate of Baylor, Princeton Seminary and the University of Basel. Before assuming the Baylor presidency in 1995, he was dean of Baylor's Truett Theological Seminary.
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