Leadership at Baylor slammed
WACO — A group of Baylor University alumni that includes former Astros owner Drayton McLane, for whom the school’s $266 million football stadium is named, said Thursday that lack of leadership and inaction by the school’s board of regents is to blame for the cloud of shame encircling Baylor in the wake of its ongoing sexual assault scandal.
About 300 people, including McLane, Houston attorney John Eddie Williams, former Gov. Mark White and former Baylor football coach Grant Teaff, attended the initial meeting of Bears for Leadership Reform, a nonprofit group calling for changes in Baylor’s governing board and release of information
from an internal investigation into the school’s acknowledged failure to deal with sexual assault victims as required by federal law.
Leaders of the group stopped short of calling for mass resignations of the board or for donors to stop giving money to the school but were adamant in their call for leadership changes at Baylor, which is without a president after the departure of former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr.
“We have a board that has become tone-deaf to the Baylor family,” said Williams, a former Baylor football player and donor for whom the playing field at McLane Stadium is named.
“If you want to change the culture, you’ve got to change the leadership. If you want to fix the problem, you’ve got to fix the leadership.”
Unfortunately, White said, Baylor’s board of regents is tone-deaf to the problem it has allowed to develop and fester.
“I had a regent say, ‘Mark, don’t you think this will all blow over?’ ” White said. “I said, ‘You sound like the mayor of Pompeii.’ ”
Bears for Leadership Reform includes acknowledged supporters of Art Briles, who was fired as Baylor’s football coach after a report compiled by the Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton outlined what it described as interference by the athletic department in the investigation of sexual assault allegations against members of Briles’ football team, some of whom were eventually tried, convicted and imprisoned.
‘A man of integrity’
The Department of Education said last month it has launched a formal investigation into whether Baylor had violated Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the statute that outlaws discrimination based on sex at institutions that receive federal funding.
Leaders of the group, however, took pains to emphasize that their principal quarrel is with the board of regents’ failure to require Baylor’s administration to create an effective Title IX office to deal with assault victims attending Baylor. Earlier this month, Baylor’s interim president David Garland and the board of regents started a web page called “the Truth” to help further explain the steps the school was taking.
“They treated it (a federal mandate for Title IX enforcement) as if it didn’t matter, and as a result we went for years not taking care of the needs of people who were sexually assaulted on this campus,” White said. “It was not confined to the athletic department. It is a Baylor problem.”
Williams said regents have concealed facts, “and when I get the facts, I’ll make the determination if somebody (on the board) has lied to me.” He said he hoped that “alumni outcry” will lead the board to respond, but if that does not occur, “it’s common sense that (donations to Baylor) will be decreased.”
Williams said he found Briles to be “a man of integrity” but wanted to focus on problems with the regents, saying that Baylor’s failure to investigate cases of sexual assault “is a horrible tragedy and injustice. … They have failed the students if what is alleged is true.”
McLane, a member of the Baylor governing board for 19 years who is now an emeritus regent and said he does not attend board meetings, echoed the call for transparency from the board. “We need to know the facts so we can see how they made the decision and if the correct decisions were made,” he said. “The issue is bigger than Art Briles, bigger than athletics, bigger than the football team.”
McLane, though, said he would like to see Briles’ honor “restored,” and former Baylor regent Gale Galloway of Austin said he has offered $10,000 to anybody who can refute his belief that Briles should not have been fired.
Galloway also said he disagreed with the board’s decision to demote Starr as president. “The board wanted to get rid of Judge Starr and saw this as a perfect opportunity to do so,” he said. “The board stampeded. They are control freaks. The time has come for good board members to stand up and say that they have made a mistake.”
The board of regents posted on the school’s “Truth” website a statement from chairman Ron Murff defending the school’s actions in the wake of the Pepper Hamilton report and its move to be more transparent.
“Many have secondguessed those decisions,” Murff said. “But I need to make clear that, as brilliant and successful as Coach Briles was, he will not be returning to Baylor. This change in leadership was not based on any single incident, but on the weight of the information presented to us and a pattern of poor decisions over a range of disciplinary issues, not just sexual assault.”
Briles continues to enjoy widespread support among some Baylor fans, some of whom donned T-shirts with the phrase “#CAB,” for coach Art Briles, during Baylor’s game last weekend against TCU.
‘Broken system’
Baylor is affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas but since 1990 has been governed by an independent, self-perpetuating board that elects 75 percent of its members. The current leadership, White said, is a “broken” governance system that must be repaired.
Organizers said about 9,000 people have indicated support of the Bears for Leadership Reform through its Facebook page. One of its organizers — Austin attorney James Nortey — said Baylor alumni “must rally and form a Baylor line to send a message” to regents.
Former Baylor regent Emily Tinsley of Houston said regents “cannot keep running (Baylor) like it was their own small, privately held company.” Houston attorney Rell Tipton, a former Baylor football player who serves on the new group’s board of directors, said the board of regents, which includes two of his former teammates, “has failed the university.”
The meeting, held near the Baylor campus at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame, opened with a prayer led by Teaff, the former Baylor football coach and athletic director, who prayed that the group receive “skills to help solve serious issues and wisdom to understand that this is your university.”
No members of the board of regents attended the Thursday meeting, but the group Wednesday said it has formed a task force to review Baylor’s governance structure. The five-member panel includes two regents from Houston — BMC Software CEO Robert Beauchamp and Transwestern CEO Larry Heard — and Baylor alumnus Douglas Bech, CEO of Raintree Resorts International.