Generation Z is incredibly intelligent, yet many Baylor students are letting their access to education go to waste and no one is saying anything about it. Baylor students seem concerningly comfortable with staying politically passive, educationally unaware and culturally illusioned.
Author: Baylor Lariat
Broadly, language teachers have been working to justify our profession and its importance to American students for decades. Since GoogleTranslate officially launched almost exactly 20 years ago, in April 2006, we have faced the same obstacles which all amount to the same question: why do we need to learn languages if computers can do it for us, especially when “everyone in the world speaks English”?
If you have no time for anything else, just take 20 minutes today and sit outdoors. If you have a porch or a balcony at home, sit there. If you do not, find a bench on campus and sit there for a bit before you head home. Your mind, mood and lungs will thank you.
The accessibility of violence, intentional and unintentional alike, should make us wonder: are Americans supposed to revel in bloodshed, let alone see it at this scale? Better yet, how many times have we heard stories where the violence doesn’t end with the initial crime?
Baylor’s Baptist affiliation seems to spark questions and opinions whenever anything remotely political happens in the community – and reasonably so. In order to respectfully challenge the university’s approach to contentious topics, however, we need to understand what the true mission of a Christian college student should be.
People have expressed emotions, told stories and documented history through art for years and years. It has a profound impact on mental well-being, and it strengthens community and brings people together. Oftentimes, these Creative Arts Experiences are put on by students or showcase their work, and participating in these events supports the student body in doing things they study and love.
There are some sentences that should never sound casual coming from the president of the United States, especially when they involve missiles, American cities and millions of lives.
With the first round of tests, essays and projects coming and going, it can be daunting to look ahead at the many assignments to come. As a result of the ever-turning wheel of college work, many students experience burnout, or a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion. In times like these, it’s as important as ever to remember your ‘why.’
There were over 50 men. That’s how many people witnessed the explicit messages in the 2024 Chi Phi Snapchat group chat at Cornell University. It’s easy to think the extremes of the Cornell case are an isolated incident; however, the sobering reality is that this has become a pandemic.
It seems every other week that a social media influencer or politician gets outed for engaging in the unthinkable. But oftentimes, the vigilante work that goes into exposing potential pedophiles produces inadmissible legal evidence and allows truly legitimate criminals to evade police capture.
The Constitution states that Congress cannot make any law prohibiting the free exercise of the press. As Americans, we have a right to knowledge about our government and global events.
Sports betting and prediction markets take real people and events and turn them into numbers on a screen, dehumanizing them and turning them into vehicles for profit. The harms of sports betting are well documented and researched; you can’t step foot into a Las Vegas casino without seeing a “When the Fun Stops” brochure prominently displayed on an ATM.
It seems as though each year the importance of election season grows, with 2026 being no exception. With the ever-growing political tension and scrutiny between parties, the responsibility to build bridges falls on us — those with the power to vote. If you’re struggling with where to begin, here are five questions to help get you on the right path.
In classrooms across Baylor, an epidemic has gone silently unnoticed: a lack of motivation to learn. While this seems to be addressed in the conversation about literacy rates and artificial intelligence, it has yet to be discussed that students would rather do homework or respond to emails than sit attentively in class.
We live in a time and country with no shortage of things worth caring about. Yet too often, an issue does not seem to matter until its consequences are relevant, immediate, visible or catastrophic. A war thousands of miles away is an easy headline to scroll past; a local decision can happen without most of the people it affects ever knowing; an injustice can continue quietly for years if it never becomes dramatic enough to command national attention.
Joking about mental health is easy. Actually facing mental health issues head-on is not.
We seem to have forgotten the meaning of “What Would Jesus Do?” Instead, it has become a familiar saying that is slapped on bracelets, T-shirts or bumper stickers and fails to make it into our daily life. And, often, the way we live is not more than this.
Baylor’s student body has had the opportunity to react to various political events on campus over the past year. Tables add color to Fountain Mall day in and day out, and may or may not be political in nature. One constant remains, however: Baylor University is not, and ought not to be, directly political.
Marketed as license plate readers, cameras like Flock and other similar brands have impacts that extend far beyond helping hand out speeding tickets and traffic fines. They create an environment of mass surveillance where not only our privacy is threatened, but our constitutional rights.
A lot has happened since we left campus last spring: America turned 250 years old, Europeans discovered Buc-ee’s during the FIFA World Cup and the largest known outbreak of Cyclospora ever was recorded in the U.S., leading to over 15,000 confirmed cases from May 1 to Aug. 17.
Welcome back to campus, Bears. We are so glad you are here. Whether today is your first day at Baylor or you’ve done this a few times, we hope your first day of classes goes well. The Baylor Lariat’s editorial board is made up of a group of Lariat editors who meet each week to discuss the issues, events and conversations shaping the Baylor community and beyond. Our goal is to write on issues and events we believe are relevant to our readers.
Baylor’s fiscal issues are affecting far more than the dollar amount you see in BearWeb. It is fundamentally changing our university and what makes Baylor, Baylor. It’s hitting departments, retirement and, on a personal level, The Lariat’s newsroom.
Just blocks from campus, Wacoans live without a place to stay, asking for money on the corner of every popular grease pit location. All the while, one of the state’s largest universities hasn’t done much to drive change.
If I were still carrying a TPUSA title, what happened on April 22 would have been enough for me to walk away. You don’t fight for free speech by banning student journalists. You don’t build a movement by turning away supporters who drove hours to be there. And you don’t honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy mocking fellow students in a half-empty room.
If the majority of your principles as a voter align more closely with one side or the other, failing to vote with that party is not only throwing away one of our most important rights as Americans, but it is also helping the people you disagree with win.
What gives us the authority to decide what is “cringe”? We cannot possibly consider ourselves so important to be the all-knowing determiners of what is the norm. We’ve gotten so wrapped up in our perception of others that it’s warped our sense of self. The reason we joke, “to be cringe is to be free,” is simple — it gives us an excuse to be ourselves in a world that is often far too judgmental.
What might it look like if students attended All Are Neighbors, then walked together to the Quadrangle for prayer and, from there, continued on to the Turning Point USA event? What conversations might emerge not in isolation, but in movement — in the shared experience of listening, reflecting and then listening again?
Our media is designed for distraction; as a result, you can’t have productive conversations because they want intellectual diversions. The result is a kind of intellectual echo chamber masquerading as informed discourse. We mistake familiarity for accuracy and repetition for truth, echoing headlines we have absorbed rather than arguments we have examined.
