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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Title IX Transformation Of Baylor

The Texas Baptist university's leadership turns hard left in the culture war
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This arrived today in the e-mail box from a reader who is an outraged Baylor University alumnus:

The Greeks have broken out of the wooden horse and are opening the gates:

Here is the set of recommendations that Baylor has agreed to adopt to reform its Title IX procedures: https://www.baylor.edu/thefacts/doc.php/301337.pdf

Page 107 recommends creating an “equity office” out of the recognition of intersectionality of all harassment and discrimination issues. Intersectionality is not up for debate within the governing structure of the university and the university apparently is supposed to establish a political commissary so that the DoE effectively has its own political officer at the right hand of the President to ensure compliance with correct political doctrine–see the organizational flow chart and how high the Ministry of Love is placed.

Page 150 Recommends training people (presumably faculty, staff, and students) using a multi-disciplinary approach to intersectionality to create the proper culture. In other words, tenured Christian faculty will be forced into political re-education from the nutjobs from the most disreputable and contemptible pseudo-disciplines in the academy.

Page 156 brags that 97% of faculty and staff have completed their political re-education on intersectionality.

There is so much here I do not know where to begin. In summary, this is an absolute hijacking of the moral and spiritual vision of the university. The administrators have ceded moral governance to the Federal Government in the person of the DoE and as far as I can tell, DoE has apparently turned the job over to Buzzfeed, delegating the task to SJWs from all the worst academic disciplines. What a complete and utter embarrassment.

The new Intersections training just recently went online. Check out the ominous email from President Livingstone:

Baylor Colleagues,

Baylor University continues to promote a campus culture where each individual is valued and respected. Every faculty and staff member plays an integral role as together we foster safety, integrity and dignity among our colleagues and our students. To support a healthy campus climate, all faculty and staff will continue to participate in online Title IX training on an annual basis. We very much appreciate the faculty and staff commitment to this effort that is so important to the university. We both look forward to this refresher of the valuable information provided in the online course.

Your participation is vital to Baylor and completion of the course is an expectation of all of us. All faculty and staff are required to annually complete the online Title IX training.  Completing the course will be an important factor included in both the faculty and staff performance review processes. Because the training is required of all faculty and staff and considered part of your duties, those who do not complete the online training will have the incompletion noted as an area of concern on their annual performance review.

The course outlines our responsibility under Title IX and other federal regulations in reporting and aiding those who experience harassment, discrimination and sexual violence.  It also provides you an opportunity to learn more about Baylor’s Title IX policy and procedures. Our Campus Climate survey from last spring indicated that we have room for improvements in these areas.

This course, titled “Intersections: Preventing Harassment, Discrimination & Sexual Violence”, is an updated version of the course delivered last year. In the next few days, you will be auto-enrolled in the course and receive notification by email from BaylorCompass that you have a task to complete before March 15, 2018. To login to BaylorCompass and complete this mandatory course before the March 15, 2018 deadline and for additional instructions, visit the Intersections section of the Human Resources website. If you have questions or comments, feel free to contact Chief Compliance Officer Doug Welch at [email address deleted].

Based on the number of incident reports received from Baylor faculty and staff in the past year, we have seen tangible benefits from this effort. Not only does it help to promote campus safety and assists students in need of valuable resources and support, but it also demonstrates the caring community that makes Baylor so special.  We are grateful for your continued commitment to our students and to the University’s mission.

With gratitude,

Linda A. Livingstone
Linda A. Livingstone, Ph.D.
President

In other words, Big Sister is watching you.

More:

Now it is worth remembering why Baylor has a law firm making these recommendations. There were highly publicized incidents of students raping other students and the university administration hiding it. The media reports have predictably focused on the football players, but this was a campus-wide issue and the real damage to the university’s reputation came from the administrative handling of the situation. (In any institution this large, there will be wicked people who do wicked things. It only damages your honor when you do not properly deal with them and the Baylor administration by all accounts failed.) So the problem was mishandling of student rape.

What is the solution offered? Sell your soul to radical leftist feminism and LGBT activists, and implement the ideology of intersectionality as the new rule of life.

Look at some of these slides! [The alumnus provided screenshots; I’m not going to post them all — RD.] There is a slide that invokes GLAAD, a radical LGBT activist group to shape the moral culture of Baylor University–you know them, their motto is Pro Ecclesia Pro Texana.

Some of the precepts are common sense like having the decency not to use slurs or perhaps not to pry too deeply into medical issues–though we can imagine situations where this could be appropriate. But ‘support gender neutral bathrooms’? Allow someone to police your use of 3rd person pronouns? Don’t ever describe people by their sex? Recognizing/mentioning someone’s biological sex is a thoughtcrime? Get out!

Any other leftist boxes to check? Trigger warning, check. Oh, the useless notion of unconscious bias, the application of which has been thoroughly discredited is on there. Why? How did contentious political pseudoscience make it in here when the original problem was a failure to report rape?

Once you open the doors to the leftist activists, they can’t help themselves. It’s like a Bacchic frenzy, they are cramming as much of their ideology into the re-education curriculum as they can get away with. It need not have anything to do with the actual wording of Title IX, the actual caselaw, or the actual problem Baylor had. All that was just a Trojan Horse for the radicals to gain the coercive power to indoctrinate.

I also notice that an example of an unhealthy relationship situation makes use of a same-sex couple. This is a poor example because same-sex sexual activity is against Baylor’s student code of conduct.

Now we must give credit to Baylor, they have done a great job hiding this fact in recent years. You must start here Student Misconduct Defined https://www.baylor.edu/student_policies/index.php?id=32401 only to be redirected here for Sexual Conduct Policy https://www.baylor.edu/student_policies/index.php?id=32294 which says literally nothing, but directs you here: https://www.baylor.edu/content/services/document.php?id=39247. This tells you almost nothing but at least tells you sex is only allowed in marriage–but these days, who knows that means? The Baylor website basically says they understand marriage according to the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message but tough shit, we aren’t going to give you a link; you’re are on your own. I found it: https://www.baptiststart.com/print/1963_baptist_faith_message.html And it turns out that according to the Baptist Faith and Message, marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman. Whew! I’m tired already! Lots of link-chasing and more than a few logical inferences from different webpages are necessary to conclude that in fact, homosexual contact is prohibited by Baylor policy.

Baylor’s credibility as a Christian university hangs by a thread. It may already be gone, there are plenty of Christians who cannot take Baylor seriously. It is not that they do not wish to take Baylor’s Christian commitment seriously, they cannot take Baylor seriously as a Christian institution. Baylor did not come into this situation spotless, and enlisting GLAAD as an ally in casting the moral vision of the university might better be seen as near to the end of a process of degeneration rather than the beginning.

Most of the wounds to Baylor’s reputation (like this debacle) have been self-inflicted from a variety of internal sources. For example, Baylor deserves at least much of the recent shame for the failure to honorably deal with rapes. But failure there does not justify throwing Christian moral teaching out the window and completely selling out to the sexual revolution. Baylor is now conceding the moral domain of sexuality to the categories, concepts, grammar, and interpretation of radical leftism and this is incompatible with Christian moral order.

More:

I think the people who deny Baylor is a Christian university have judged too soon. There are thousands of wonderful and faithful Christians at Baylor who have not bowed down, but they are under siege. Baylor is still a Christian university, but it is hard to see because is is battling for its soul. The embattled faculty and staff cannot count on the administration to help, they have completely rolled over to the feds and political correctness. Remember, they are bringing in GLAAD to teach morality!

Just last Thursday, Baylor celebrated its Founders Day. What would the Founders say about all this? Would Rev Huckins support gender neutral bathrooms? Would Rufus Burleson refuse to describe someone by their sex? Would Judge Baylor, a man who fought the Creek Indians, be bullied by the department of education into this sort of humiliation? Whatever his faults, he at least had some fight in him. The Old Fite seems scarce among the Baylor leadership today. Why didn’t anyone say ‘no’ to the ideology in the recommendations? Dare the feds to take them to court? As my old coach would say, “they have a lot of quit in them.” The faculty and staff are understandably afraid. If anything is going to be done, it will need to come from alumni–especially donors. Baylor’s admins are selling the university’s soul for federal dollars. That good ‘ol Baylor line is apparently the bottom line.

President Livingstone should be summoned to publicly and explicitly clarify the university’s position on sexual identity and expression. Fortunately, it is in the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message:

“God has ordained the family as the foundational institution of human society. It is composed of persons related to one another by marriage, blood or adoption.Marriage is the uniting of one man and one woman in covenant commitment for a lifetime. It is Gods unique gift to reveal the union between Christ and His church, and to provide for the man and the woman in marriage the framework for intimate companionship, the channel for sexual expression according to biblical standards, and the means for procreation of the human race.”

Sexual expression is limited to marriage between a man and a woman for procreation. Period

God, not the white-cis-hetero-patriarchy, has ordained the family by marriage between Man and Woman. Looking at the statement and the supporting biblical passages it cites, there can be no argument but that God determines male and female, not the individual subject. The point about procreation leaves no doubt but that we are talking about biological sex.

If Baylor cannot affirm basic biblical truth about God’s ordering of creation into male and female for procreation and that human sexual activity must be expressed in a marriage that reflects this ordering, it needs to shut its doors. The idea that Baylor has some Christian witness is a joke if it lets MTV, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel paralyze it into sudden uncertainty about the basic facts of creation. I am sure Burleson, Baylor, Huckins and others would rather see it die than continue on in such condition.

I have a number of friends at Baylor who were outraged by the way the previous administration handled the sexual assaults, and who have been worried for a while about what’s coming in response from the new administration. I suppose this is it. I’m eager to hear from readers at Baylor, or in Baylor circles. What do you think? How is this going down? Is this alumnus overreacting?

Man. Even Baylor University, deep in the heart of Baptist Texas, is mainstreaming gender ideology. See, this is why I keep talking about the Benedict Option. There are very few places to hide. Defend what can be defended, certainly, and fight for as long and as hard as you can. But don’t be self-deceived: the cultural left has captured, or is in the process of capturing, the institutions. We really are in a Dunkirk moment, we orthodox Christians. We can vote for Republican politicians until our fingers are bloody stumps, but none of that will compensate for the loss of formative institutions like Baylor to the cultural left.

UPDATE: A reader points out that after the football team rape scandal, there wasn’t much of a moral or spiritual reputation left to defend. From the Dallas Morning News:

This month, a seventh Title IX lawsuit was filed against Baylor.

A volleyball player referred to as Jane Doe says she was attending a party in February 2012 at an apartment where several football players lived. She said she became intoxicated and cannot recall portions of the night, but she remembers one football player picking her up and putting her in his vehicle. She was taken to another location where she says at least four football players raped her. Later, other people told her at least twice that as many as eight football players were involved.

Her mother later met with a Baylor assistant football coach at a Waco restaurant, providing names of players involved. And according to the filing, the players “admitted to ‘fooling around,’ calling it ‘just a little bit of playtime.'” They said the coach determined that the accusation was in a “gray area.”

Also from the suit, the victim says gang rapes “were considered a ‘bonding’ experience for team members,” and players shared video footage and pictures of rape victims – including one 21-second video of two women being gang-raped.

These are allegations in a lawsuit, not facts established at trial. And it is not the case that the catastrophic moral and criminal failure at Baylor justifies the school formally abandoning its moral and religious heritage. Still, this is what nemesis looks like.

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