The Lariat has impressed me since I started law school here in the fall. The articles are generally thoughtful, pertinent and fair. However, I find the recent article about Baylor declining to investigate the local SAE chapter outright offensive. If it were not so offensive, it would be comically ironic.
The gist of the article seems to be that it is somehow newsworthy that the school has declined to investigate Baylor SAE just because of what happened with OU SAE. I cannot see why this is news at all. Why would an incident at another campus solely related to that campus chapter warrant an investigation of the chapter at Baylor?
There is no reason to print such an article, particularly on the front page, except to inflame those who are scapegoating fraternities on this campus and throughout the country.
The most flagrant piece of journalistic irresponsibility came at the end, though, when the Lariat mentioned completely unsubstantiated “rumors” that people had heard such chants at other campuses. It would be nice if the newspaper at a respected institution like Baylor could rise above such nonsense.
The worst part is that in confronting racism in the manner the Lariat has chosen to, the paper has promulgated exactly the evil that those who fight racism in a constructive manner seek to eliminate. It is asinine to impute racist tendencies to all SAE chapters because of an incident at one chapter.
As a member of Kappa Alpha Order at Southwestern University, I constantly faced this same sort of ignorance. My fraternity was founded at the school where Robert. E. Lee was president, Washington and Lee, and the fraternity maintains pride in our southern virtues.
Unfortunately, some of our chapters have confused those virtues with the destructive attitudes that necessitated the Civil War and the Reconstruction, the effects of which are still felt in the South today.
My chapter did, and continues to, completely reject racism. I am not saying that the SAE chapter here at Baylor does the same, as I know basically nothing about them.
However, I can say with certainty that imputing the SAE chapter here at Baylor with the same attitudes displayed by the chapter at OU for no reason other than they come from the same national organization is precisely the same type of thinking that spawned the racism problem in the world in the first place.
— Pierce MacGuire
Waco first-year Baylor law student
