Editor’s Note: For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. This November – December 1991 Classic explores how Baylor students navigating off-campus life in the early ’90s faced a new set of pressures and how the university responded.
When Tommye Lou Vines Davis came to Baylor in 1962, she roomed in Collins Hall like many of her female classmates. Curfew hours there were strict — the coeds had to be in the dorm by 9:00 p.m. on weeknights and midnight on the weekends. The girls could not leave Waco without obtaining permission to do so. Spur-of-the-moment trips were not likely anyway, for freshmen women were not allowed to bring cars to Baylor. “That was fine with me, since I did not own a car anyway,” says Tommye Lou. “My younger brother came to Baylor my junior year, so I had access to his car if I needed transportation.”
By the time she graduated in 1966 with a major in English and Latin, curfews for women had been relaxed a bit — they could come into the dorms as late as 11:00 p.m. without penalty. The dress code was still strict: no shorts for women unless they were heading for gym class, and then the outfit must be covered by a raincoat. Because so many of the students lived in the dormitories, on-campus social events like campus mixers were well attended. The men’s and women’s social clubs sponsored a variety of dances and traditional parties off campus as well . Alcohol was not allowed at these gatherings; guys did sometimes drink “before they came to the dance,” but drinking was less common among the girls.
After completing an M.S. degree in 1968, Tommye Lou joined the Baylor faculty. Today she is marking her twenty-third year of teaching Latin at the university, and her daughter, Christi Whittenburg, is a senior at Baylor studying speech pathology and communication disorders.
The lifestyle that Christi and her classmates have encountered at Baylor is in many ways different from that which her mother experienced twenty-five years ago. Though she, too, lived in Collins Dormitory her freshman year, there were no curfews imposed on the women there. Students are far more mobile these days — “Nearly everyone has a car,” Christi says. Like many of her classmates, she chose to move off campus her sophomore year — an option which was not available to her mother.
Today Christi and her two roommates live near campus in an apartment complex called “The Centre.” The price tag for these lodgings is pretty steep — the two-bedroom apartments typically rent for $800 a month — but the complex offers the girls important safety features: security gates at the entrances, alarm systems for each apartment, “panic buttons” in each bedroom, a security guard on patrol each night.
Because they are on their own living off campus, they have to be more careful about security, says Christi. “Some girls go jogging at night,” she said, “but that’s not very smart. We never run after dusk. There are a lot of ‘street people’ around — wandering through parking lots, digging in the dumpsters. It can be a little frightening, and you have to be careful.”
Security is but one of their concerns. Like their parents did, these students worry about grades. Job markets are particularly tight these days, and because many students plan to go on for a graduate degree, they find themselves in fierce competition for entrance slots into law school, medical school, or other graduate programs.
There are social pressures as well. Both Tommye Lou and Christi agree that there are more sexual pressures in American society today than there were twenty-five years ago; these attitudes inevitably filter into campus life. As a result, instead of worrying about dress codes. Baylor coeds today must give serious consideration to problems such as date rape. And it has become more common for girls as well as guys to have some experience with alcohol, even before they go off to college. Though official Baylor functions are alcohol-free (“1 have never seen alcohol at a school-sponsored sorority or fraternity party,” says Christi), drinking is not uncommon among individuals in the privacy of their own apartments.
The off-campus lifestyle brings with it a general sense of fragmentation, says Christi. “It was hard for me to adjust during my sophomore year to the fact that I didn’t have twenty friends living right there on the hall with me. whom I could go see any time of the day. There’s just a lot more isolation.”
Baylor’s policies on student conduct have not relaxed during the past twenty-five years. In fact, the 1991- 92 student handbook carries lengthier discussions of prohibited activities such as hazing, sexual misconduct, and sexual harassment than did the handbooks of years past. This year’s handbook devotes five full pages to the penalties applicable to drug and alcohol use. They are headed by the stem warning that “Baylor University policy prohibits the unlawful manufacture,possession, use, sale, transfer, or purchase of a controlled substance or designer drug on or off the campus. It is also a violation of University policy for anyone to possess, use. or be under the influence of an alcoholic beverage on the campus or at a University-related activity off campus.”
Other factors, however, have changed during the past twenty-five years. Baylor University experienced a significant enrollment boom during the 1970s: from an enrollment of 6,440 for fall 1970, the number of students had grown to 9,991 by the end of the decade. With dormitory space available for nearly 3,000 students, the university had no problem in the late sixties following through on its residency requirements. Unmarried female students under the age of twenty-one were required to reside in the dormitories for their first three years: they could move off campus when they became seniors if their parents approved the move. Single men under the age of twenty-one were required to live on campus until they achieved junior ranking, unless they lived with their parents. However, when enrolment soared, the university was faced with an unprecedented housing crunch.
The housing issue became more complicated when the Texas Legislature voted in 1973 to change the age of majority in Texas to eighteen. This ruling eliminated the university’s legal grounds for requiring students to live on campus — after age eighteen, the student legally could choose to live wherever he or she pleased. Though many parents still wielded enough financial clout to dictate where their children would live — “Tin paying for your room and board, so I’ll make the final decision on where you’ll live” — the university itself no longer could require students to reside in the dormitories after age eighteen. Predictably, demand for campus housing declined as more and more students opted for the freedoms of apartment life.
Today, though no students are required to live on campus, the university encourages all freshmen to live in the dormitories; any upperclassmen who wish to reside on the campus are also welcomed.
“About 99 percent of our freshmen do choose to live in the dormitories,” says Dr. Martha Lou Scott, Baylor’s dean for student life. “There have been times in the past when some upperclassmen were forced to live off campus simply because we just couldn’t accommodate them. But this year, with Allen Dormitory being open again and Dawson being closed for renovations, we have room for nearly 3,100 students. We have plenty of rooms available for the students who want to live on campus.”
The issue of on- vs. off-campus living was further complicated in the seventies by the passage of the Educational Amendments of 1972; Title IX of these amendments called for educational institutions to provide equal programs and policies for both men and women. The federal legislation created sweeping changes at universities across the nation. Though Baylor technically received an exemption from Title IX because it is a religious institution, the university sought to comply voluntarily with the act in many areas. Recognizing the growing concern in the country about gender discrimination, the university moved to restructure the strict curfew hours that had traditionally been imposed on Baylor women. At the time, residents of the women’s dorms were required to be in the dormitory by 11:30 p.m. on weekdays, by 1:00 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and by midnight on Sundays. The men had no such curfew restrictions. During the years from 1973 to 1982, the university went through a series of curfew modifications, first varying curfews by the students’ class year, later designating certain men’s and women’s dormitories as “early hours” dorms while abolishing curfews at others. Finally in 1982 Baylor discarded the curfew approach entirely. To maintain a modicum of security in the dormitories, “safety hours” were instituted from 1:00 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. daily for men and women. During these hours, which are still observed today, side doors to the dormitories are locked; residents may come and go, but they are required to use the front doors of the buildings and must show their student IDs to gain entrance.
The relaxation of dormitory curfews removed many parents’ last reason for preferring dormitory housing. If students could come and go as they pleased in the dorms, would it be such a big difference for them to live in an apartment complex? Many students and their parents discovered that the choice to move off campus did bring with it many unanticipated pressures — some of which forced the students into difficult choices.
“When students move off campus, they need to be ready to deal with life as adults,” observes Carey Matocha, who serves as health educator for Baylor students. “When they’re away from campus, they don’t have a resident advisor available and they are more isolated from other students. Problems can get magnified very quickly. If they’re sick, there’s not always someone there to take care of them. And they have more access to things that require big decisions, such as whether to use alcohol. If their peer pressure gets strong and that’s something they decide to do, there’s no advisor there to supervise that situation. There’s no one to see who comes and goes at their apartments, so they have to be adult-like and make good decisions about whom they let in. Unfortunately, some students aren’t ready to deal with life as adults; some get caught up in serious problems because they aren’t prepared for these decisions.”
College students have always been faced with choices of adulthood: how to spend their time and money; whether to use alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs; whether to enter into sexual relations outside of marriage. However, today’s students live in a time when there is little social stigma attached to premarital sex and the use of alcohol. At the same time, the risks associated with some of these choices are surely more serious than those their parents faced twenty-five years ago.
A majority of these students have encountered alcohol use and questions of sexual activity before coming to Baylor. In a 1990 special issue on “The New Rules of Courtship,” Newsweek magazine cited a 1988 study on teenage sexuality: by age eighteen, 70 percent of the girls surveyed said they were sexually active, as did 72 percent of the boys. These numbers were markedly higher than those gathered by the same group in 1979, when 54 percent of the girls and 66 percent of the boys surveyed said they were sexually active at age eighteen.
A 1990 fact sheet distributed by the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse states that 90 percent of Texas high school seniors say they drink alcohol, with 60 percent of those surveyed saying they had been drinking within the past month, although state law makes alcohol purchases illegal until age twenty-one. According to that same survey, 66 percent of the seniors said that alcohol was served at most or all of the parties they attended during the school year.
The students who choose to attend Baylor reflect a more conservative set of statistics, but they have not necessarily been insulated from these experiences during their high school years. In a survey of 1,973 entering freshmen at Baylor in the fall of 1990, 29.5 percent said they had drunk beer during the preceding year; 34.6 percent said they had had wine or liquor. (The 1990 American Council on Education Survey of Entering Freshmen found that at private universities nationwide, 57.7 percent of those surveyed had drunk beer and 59.7 percent had drunk wine or liquor.)
When asked how many hours per week they had spent “partying” during their senior year of high school, only 21.8 percent of the Baylor freshmen said they had not partied at all; 19.9 percent said they had partied more than six hours a week. From these numbers it is fair to deduce that 58.3 percent of the incoming freshmen had partied at least once and up to six hours a week during their senior year of high school. Certainly one may attend a party without consuming alcohol; but, as noted in a discussion of this survey in the final report of the Baylor Task Force on Alcohol and Other Drugs, “For most teenagers ‘partying’ is a euphemism for party scenes that include alcohol and/or other drugs.”
Partying which includes alcohol and teenage sex can create serious consequences for today’s students. No longer is an unplanned pregnancy the primary danger of sexual activity; with the advent of AIDS and an increase in the incidence of other sexually transmitted diseases, teenagers who engage in unprotected intercourse risk future sterility and even death.
And alcohol, when combined with the availability of cars and a teenager’s sense of invulnerability, can also become deadly. Last year the National Commission on Drug-Free Schools reported that “Among adolescents, alcohol is a major factor in early deaths, especially those resulting from injury in motor vehicles and other accidents. The four leading injury-related causes of death among youths under twenty, according to the [Center for Disease Control], are motor vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides, and drowning, in that order, and alcohol was involved in a significant proportion of the more than 22,000 fatal injuries to minors reported in 1986”
Parents who hope to isolate their students from these societal forces by sending them to Baylor learn that even at a conservative Baptist university students have to contend with these problems. Baylor’s policies on these matters are clear: the university will not permit the use of alcohol or other drugs on campus or at any university function (“university function” being defined as “any activity sponsored by the university or by any organization recognized by the university or any activity at which one or more persons represent the university or one of its recognized organizations”). The university also promotes traditional Christian teachings of sexual abstinence outside of marriage and sexual fidelity within marriage. The problem, as any parent knows, is that it is virtually impossible to monitor completely the day-to-day activities of students — particularly those who live off campus. This year at Baylor, those students number 8,637; that is 74 percent of the student body.
Does this mean that in loco parentis — the idea that the university can function “in the place of the parent” — has become a dated notion that is out of touch with reality? “Most universities gave up on the notion of in loco parentis during the 1960s,” acknowledges Dr. William Hill- is, Baylor’s vice-president for student affairs. “Baylor has held to it more than most other universities have. We feel a sense of moral responsibility for our students, and I think we even retain a sense of supervisory responsibility, though most of the students are not living directly under our edicts in the dormitories. There is not much that we can legally do to control their lives, but we want to exercise as much influence as we possibly can to keep them on the high road.”
Thus the definition of in loco parentis has taken on new emphases at Baylor in recent years. Rather than simply policing the students’ activities, the university has moved toward a role much like that of the wise parent who educates the young person about the complex problems he or she will face as an adult and thus prepares the student to do a better job making those decisions when the time arrives.
Administrators in the division of student life have created several new programs in recent years to inform students about these complex lifestyle issues. For the last six years, Dean of Student Life Martha 1986.” Lou Scott and Student Attorney Linda Cates have teamed up in the spring to present seminars on the topic, “What You Should Know If You Want to Move Off Campus.” They speak primarily to dormitory residents, who often are contemplating a move off campus the following year.
“We don’t tell them that moving off campus is good or bad; we just tell them that they need to be aware of a few things,” explains Scott. “We talk about hidden cost factors. In one apartment the amount you pay covers rent and all utilities; in another you pay rent, but you also must pay water, gas, sewage, electricity, and cablevision. In one place your washer and dryer are in your apartment; in another you may have to go across the street to use coin-operated washers and dryers. Is the apartment furnished? Could you save money by bringing your own furniture — and how much would you really save? Will they make you sign a twelve- month contract or can you just pay for the months that you are going to be here?
“What kind of security is available? Do you need to live close to the campus because you’re going to be spending evenings in the library and you want to be able to walk back to your apartment safely at night? Is there a manager living on the property who can take care of emergency repairs promptly? Or are you going to have to wait a week for an out-of-town manager to get around to fixing them?
“We try to warn students not to rush out and sign a lease, but to take their time and shop around. There’s such a surplus of housing that many of the apartment complexes are suing the students if they don’t honor contracts. Talk about financial problems! You can get them overnight if that happens.”
Attorney Cates talks with the students about their legal rights as tenants and what their legal responsibilities will be once they sign a lease contract. “I talk with them about what a lease may provide and what it doesn’t provide,” she says. “We talk about terms in contractual agreements which they may interpret one way but which should be interpreted another way. For instance, many of them think that the landlords are there to make all the repairs that they ask for, and usually that is not the case.
“Many students have trouble getting their security deposits back at the end of a lease, so we talk about what they should do from the time that they pay their security deposit until they leave the apartment. We advise them to walk through the apartment with the manager and do a move-in inventory, so they can note what’s wrong with the place. If they’ll keep a copy of that inventory, then when they move out they can go over it with the manager and show the damages for which they were or were not responsible. We also remind them to do the simple things that many students forget but which cause them to forfeit their deposits — paying all rent owed, leaving a forwarding address, turning in their keys.”
“Probably the most important thing we tell them, though, is to take a good look at their prospective roommate,” says Scott. “Whom they are going to live with is more important than where they are going to live. If roommates don’t really like each other when they move in, they will probably be at each other’s throats by the end of the contract. I’ve seen people who are ready to rip each other’s hearts out by the end of the year.
“We urge them to ask the person they’re planning to live with some very pointed questions: does liking health food mean you crunch granola bars up on all your food, or does it mean that you drink milk with your Oreos? Is my concept of a steady boyfriend/girlfriend relationship the same as your concept, or is it totally different? Is he going to be over here at night? Is he going to be eating breakfast with us? Is he going to be paying for the meals that he eats when he’s over here all the time? Is he going to be here during the time that I expect to be able to bum around the apartment in my housecoat? Students really need to be pointblank blunt about these issues, but that’s one of the most difficult things for them to do.”
Once students move off campus, they must begin setting some of their own rules for behavior. For some students this is a wonderful opportunity to grow and mature. For others, however, it can seem overwhelming.
“It would help us a great deal if students coming to Baylor were better prepared for what the world is going to be throwing at them,” says Baylor’s director of public safety, Jim Doak. “Some parents who have really sheltered their children through high school send them to Baylor thinking that it will be a protective environment that will continue to shield them. It’s just not going to happen. That shield is too easily penetrated by any number of outside people with any number of purposes and plans.
“Some of our biggest problems have come from students who have never been exposed to the fact that some people will try to take advantage of them. We have cases of young ladies who become intoxicated, who come from homes where alcohol was not present and was never even discussed. One evening someone puts a beer in their hands, then another; pretty soon they’re saying, ‘Hey, this isn’t so bad!’ The next thing we know, we’ve got a problem — a date rape or someone missing because they are too intoxicated to find their way back to the residence hall. If parents would share with their children that there is a real world out there that is ready to take advantage of them, I think it would help these students perform better in the college environment.”
“We assume nowadays that college students know everything about everything, which is a very bad assumption for us to make as educators,” says health educator Carey Matocha. “Students may look smart, but when it comes to health-related issues and sexuality, they need good solid information desperately. Many of them have no clue about the risks they are taking. We want them to make good decisions. But without the information, I just don’t think they can be expected to prevent some terrible things from happening.”
To get such information to the students, Baylor embarked on a new program last spring which uses student volunteers to get the word out on serious health issues. The program was the brainchild of Rosemary Townsend, administrative coordinator of the university health center, and Cassie Findley, director of the Wellness Program. Carrie Matocha came to Baylor last March to direct the program.
This fall the group includes fourteen peer educators and twenty-five students in training for next spring. They speak to students about tough problems: AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, date rape, substance abuse, eating disorders. They are carefully trained to distinguish between educating students and counseling them, and are armed with extensive information about where students can go for help with any of these problems.
“The premise of a peer education program is that students will learn or change their behaviors better when they are taught by other students, versus a professor or other adult figure,” says Matocha. “It works well because the peer educators can go comfortably into the environment where the other students are — they go not only to the classrooms but also to the dormitories, into the fraternities and sororities, to any social organization that requests a program. They present the information in a nonthreatening fashion — through skits, improvisations, small-group discussions — but they present good solid information on health-related issues.”
The response to these programs has been excellent. “We’ve been invited by forty different professors in twelve departments to do AIDS education in their classes this fall,” says Matocha. “The programs the peer educators presented to the fraternities participating in the Greek 10 1 program — one on substance abuse and one on date rape — generated excellent discussions about those issues. The group presented two programs on date rape in the women’s dormitories; though voluntary seminars like these tend to draw an average of 15 people, our two programs drew at total of 262 men and women — and we didn’t even serve food! We told them it would be a forty-five-minute program, but they asked so many questions that we ended up staying an hour and a half.”
The students who volunteer to serve as peer educators see a serious need for such programs on the Baylor campus. “Despite the fact that we are in the ‘Baylor bubble,’ we are not safe from any of these problems,” says senior Mrinalini Kulkarni. “These things do exist — maybe not at Baylor to the extent they do in other situations, but we’ re not staying at Baylor for the rest of our lives. We need to be prepared so we’ll know how to handle these problems.”
Students say that drinking and premarital sex are not uncommon but that these activities are not often discussed and that there is a great deal of denial that surrounds them. “When 1 transferred here from another university, I was alarmed at the dual roles so many Baylor students play,” says Kulkarni. “The typical Baylor student parties on Saturday and goes to church on Sunday but doesn’t say anything about the party the night before.
“So many Baylor women are caught in the middle,” says Kulkarni. “They want to be the traditional Baylor girl who’s sweet and righteous and doesn’t do ‘those kinds of things.’ At the same time, dating relationships are different than they used to be. So a girl ends up maintaining a serious relationship with a guy but not wanting anyone else to know because she’s afraid it will taint her image with other girls. As a result, a lot of girls are not responsible [about birth control]. The attitude seems to be, if you don’t take precautions — if you don’t plan to have sex — then you aren’t so at fault if it happens.
“I’ve seen the same attitude about alcohol. Students don’t take the precaution of naming a designated driver who won’t drink, because doing so openly admits that they are planning to drink.
“I think there’s a big sense of relief among the students that at last we can talk openly about these issues and can learn about these problems — we don’t have to keep quiet about it.”
Senior Chris Jones agrees. “I don’t think behaviors on college campuses have changed that much; we’re just talking more openly about those activities now. That’s important, especially when you’re a freshman, because you don’t know who to talk to or who to trust. It takes a while before you find your group of friends that you’re going to hang out with. So during your first year of college, if you get into trouble, you really need to be able to talk with someone and find out where to get some answers.”
The peer education programs provide frank talk about issues that might have made students blanch with embarrassment twenty-five years ago. Matocha makes it clear, however, that talking about these problems does not constitute an acceptance of the behaviors which engender them. “We uphold Baylor’s policies on substance abuse and sexual behavior,” Matocha says. “We also realize that the college years are a time when young people are experimenting with life in general. We try to give students the message that it’s okay to admit you have a problem and to seek help with it; we try to give them the information they need to get that help.”
Vice-President Hillis expresses great hope for these programs, especially for disseminating information about alcohol abuse. “Alcohol is the number one problem on college campuses everywhere. It is considerably less of a problem at Baylor than it is at most schools, but I think we still have young people here who are developing lifestyles that include the use of alcohol on a regular basis. They are facing not only health issues which can arise over the years but also a lot of psychological damage that occurs as a result of using alcohol as a crutch.
“We hope that through educational efforts we can make students think carefully about whether they want to use alcohol. You can make a good case against it from the standpoint of health alone. Students are pretty health conscious today, and we think that if they could learn about these problems, many would choose to seek a healthy lifestyle that would be exclusive of alcohol.
“Look at these students’ attitudes about smoking: there’s much less smoking among these students now than there was among the students of my generation. These students have learned while they’re still in high school how much harm is done by smoking, and they’ve elected not to begin smoking. The problem is they have not been getting that same message about alcohol.”
Once students have adopted destructive behaviors such as alcohol abuse, it can be difficult to reach them and convince them to change. This difficulty is compounded by the current reality that most students live beyond the purview of the campus proper.
To adapt to the shift in student residency from dorms to apartments, the Baylor Department of Public Safety joined forces with the Waco police force in 1987 to find a way to police the area surrounding the campus effectively. They obtained legislative approval for an innovative system in which the Baylor police have co-jurisdiction with the Waco police force for up to a mile beyond the campus in all directions.
“There is no difference between a Baylor officer and a Waco officer from a training standpoint,” explains Baylor police chief Jim Doak. “We all have to be certified as peace officers by the state. Under the plan, the Waco police provided our officers the opportunity to respond off campus to crisis situations and general disturbances such as noise violations. We wanted to restrict it to those areas so that we would not spend more of our time than was absolutely necessary away from the campus, which is still our primary area of concern.
“The co-jurisdiction plan has proved to be wonderful. We have been able to respond to break-in calls as they were in progress and get there far more quickly than city police would have been able to, because we were nearby. And each year we take between 300 and 400 calls about loud parties off the hands of the Waco police. Of course, they are very appreciative of that, because they don’t need to be spending their time dealing with intoxicated students. It’s truly a win-win- win situation for the Waco police, the students, and for us. No one loses except the crooks.”
If students are cited for disorderly conduct, public intoxication, under-age drinking, or other offenses by the Baylor police, they are being arrested for breaking city or state ordinances. But the information about their arrest is also forwarded to Dr. Carl Bradley, dean of student judicial affairs, who initiates appropriate disciplinary action on the part of the university. “Dr. Bradley calls them in for what we call a ‘time of fellowship’ with them,” says Doak. “That seems to be a very productive time.”
Doak stresses that the behavior problems encountered by the Baylor DPS are small compared to those experienced by most university security teams. “When I talk to the chiefs of police at other universities about the problems they are dealing with, I usually leave those meetings saying, ‘Wow! It’s not bad here at all compared to the problems they have.’ One chief, for instance, recently had to deal with a fraternity house party where there were nearly six hundred people and sixteen kegs of beer crammed into one house. People were horribly intoxicated; men and women were using the same restroom facilities openly. We never have that kind of problem here.
“I believe that Baylor’s tradition of deep-rooted theology and the firm stand Dr. Reynolds has taken on the importance of personal morality have kept students from going too. far off course. They are constantly reminded that their mission here is education. So many of our students are really super human beings; I’m delighted to be able to work with them.Unfortunately, our job is to focus particularly on the 2 or 3 percent that have fallen off the wagon; we try to pick them back up out of the dirt and get them going again.”
In the 1990-91 annual report of the university, Dean Bradley reported a total of 785 disciplinary actions; 122 of those were alcohol related. In addition, his office sent 54 warning letters to students who were issued citations by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission for offenses such as possession of alcohol by a minor or public intoxication. These numbers, though small compared to most universities, represent a great increase over the number of alcohol-related cases at Baylor twenty or thirty years ago. In 1962, for instance, when the enrollment was 5,400, only 27 students were cited for “disorderly conduct” — a label which included assaults and criminal mischief as well as drunkenness.
Recognizing that most campus disciplinary problems stemmed from alcohol abuse, the Baylor administration appointed a Task Force on Alcohol and Other Drugs to study the problem and recommend action. Many features of that group’s final report, which was completed last summer, have already been put into action (see sidebar, p. 17).
One result is a new, tighter policy on alcohol violations. Students cited by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission or by Waco or Baylor police are now being referred to special alcohol education classes on campus. Dr. Patrick Ray, staff psychologist at the Baylor Counseling Center, began teaching the weekly classes last spring; this fall he already had filled two classes of fifteen students each by the end of September.
This program, and others recommended by the Task Force, emphasize helping the erring students rather than expelling them from the campus society. A line in the policy statement adopted by the Task Force summarizes the administration’s approach well: “Because the University is committed to a caring relationship among its students, faculties, administrators, and trustees — a caring that is characterized by understanding, forgiveness, and respect for individuality — its disciplinary procedures are intended to be constructive and redemptive.”
“We don’t want discipline at Baylor to be punitive,” concurs Dean Bradley. “We want it to be redemptive.” When a student steps forward and readily admits to having a problem or a concern, we make every effort to help that person without penalizing him or her. This, in turn, has certainly improved the students’ view of how the administration handles this kind of problem. And I have no doubt that this approach has contributed to our low rate of repeat offenses. Last year, out of 785 disciplinary cases of all sorts, we had only 15 repeat offenders.”
These programs and policies are but the first wave of efforts by the Division of Student Affairs to help students and their families deal with the pressures of college life. Administrators have begun to use Baylor’s summer orientation program, through which incoming freshmen and their parents visit the campus, as a time for talking frankly with students and parents about many of the lifestyle issues students face on a college campus. Administrators also moved this summer to institute a new regulation that limits official travel by organizations to a fifty-mile radius from the campus if that travel is done in personal cars. Designed to reduce the incidence of drunken driving by students returning from out-of-town gatherings, the rules remove distance restrictions for trips taken on commercial transportation, to encourage groups to charter buses for their out- of-town events. And another project in the works is a manual for faculty members which will help them learn how to recognize signs of student distress and where to refer students for help.
“Our faculty shows a tremendous degree of concern about our students,” says Vice-President Hillis. “It is surprising how many of our people not only have a commitment to teaching but also are willing to serve as advisors to these students; that’s not something you find in most universities.
“The attitude here is that we have a responsibility — not just to impart the subject matter of education but also to help students apply that subject matter for meaningful living. I think that’s the reason so many parents feel good about leaving their kids at Baylor. They know we have that sense of responsibility.”
