According to a Baylor email announcement sent to all faculty and staff on March 26, the cost of student meal plans has increased steadily with inflation, allowing for institutional subsidies on faculty and staff dining to remain the same for nearly two decades. However, due to inflation, the university has decided to raise faculty and staff dining rates.

The Christ-Centered Diversity and Belonging Council hosted its Monthly Social Hour from 2 to 3 p.m. on Thursday at the FOS Atrium. The event was a come-and-go meeting where faculty, staff and students were invited to socialize and celebrate the faith theme of the month.

The Christ-Centered Diversity and Belonging Council is holding weekly prayer meetings from noon to 1 p.m. every Friday in Room 322 of the Foster Campus for Business and Innovation.

Dr. Kristen Padilla, director of the center, said she has seen the Baylor Center for Developmental Disabilities grow and transform over the last 10 years. According to its website, the center is hosting two events in January — one for students and one for faculty and staff members.

The Baylor Kendo Club took home first place at the Houston Kendo Kyokai’s 10th Anniversary Taikai on Oct. 26. After seven rounds of competition as one of the only college-based teams at the tournament, the Baylor Kendo Club defeated over 100 competitors from various clubs across Central Texas.

“The people in administration have a great sense of the big picture and the broader environment, right? But in order to adjust and adapt and steer the university proverbial ship in the right direction, they need line of sight information,” Chevis said. “Unless we speak into that … unless they hear from us about what we’re experiencing, they may make decisions that they think are in the best interest of Baylor, but that aren’t going to play out well.”

“My goal was to help modern Christian women who were taught that their divine role was to follow the leadership of men,” Barr said. “My goal was to help women understand where that idea came from and to also understand that idea is rooted in history, not actually in scripture. My thesis for [the book] is just real easy: It’s that biblical womanhood isn’t biblical, and that it’s actually something that’s been created in culture.”

Readers Meet the Author, a series highlighting the prolific work of Baylor faculty and staff, will hold two sessions this semester. These sessions will feature discussions from Dr. João Chaves and Dr. Greg Garrett about their respective works.

Ten Baylor faculty members have been selected by Provost Nancy Brickhouse to serve as Baylor Fellows for the 2023-2024 academic year. Chosen for their impressive innovation in the classroom, these faculty will continue to strive for excellence in their teaching.

After years of anticipation, the Mark and Paula Hurd Welcome Center — known as Baylor’s new “front door” — officially opened to the public Friday.

As it celebrates more than 100 years of musical excellence and achievement, the Baylor School of Music is supplementing its faculty with new directors and lecturers, furthering the legacy of retired staff while also looking forward to the future of Baylor Choir.

Due to a City of Waco main break that caused the basement of the Rogers Engineering and Computer Science building to flood, the elevator will be out of use for around eight weeks.

Baylor’s Office of Academic Integrity offers resources to professors to combat the use of ChatGPT in the classroom. The list of resources was made available to faculty on April 4, five months after OpenAI released ChatGPT and sparked conversations about the ethics of using it in the classroom.

Tenure is given as a reward to faculty that have proven excellence and loyalty to Baylor. As a policy, that’s fine, but is it currently set up to incentivize professors to stay on the cutting edge of current trends, technology, practical theories and innovation? Perhaps it’s time to reevaluate the policy and add additional reviews, incentives and requirements for all tenured faculty in order to retain their tenure status.

The three finalists for the 2024 award, Dr. Jay Banner, Dr. Claire Katz and Dr. Kelly Lambert, were selected from a pool of nominees by a committee of Baylor faculty. The committee evaluates the strategies the faculty use to build relationships with their students to help them connect to the content they are studying.

“When we come together as a group of women, I’ve seen that voice have a real effect and a growing effect across campus,” Pond said. “We’ve been heard across campus, we’re listened to, and we’ve been able to make a difference.”

“As we appreciate our campus and all of the good things that come from it, we really want to instill in our students that is such an important part of society to give back,” Lynch said.

“The pieces that are often performed are definitely by composers that have been canonized, and they happen to be European male composers,” Maxile said. “But even in those European male composers, there are composers of African descent that are slowly moving from the margins of history into the actual pages of history books.”

The Academic Integrity Department has already begun creating a list of tools for professors to use in order to detect ChatGPT, which is available on their website. Including sites that behave like Turnitin.com and will pick up AI, Null said professors are encouraged to use these sites if they feel it is necessary.

Baylor’s work toward diversity and inclusion within faculty, staff and students has changed throughout the years. According to reports from Institutional Research and Testing (IRT) from 2002 and 2021, full-time faculty has gone from a 92.4% white demographic to an 80.8% white demographic. Additionally, there is currently a 38.4% minority student population on campus.

At 88 percent white faculty, Baylor is tied with Loyola University Chicago for having the highest percentage of white faculty among all universities that have 700 to 1,000 faculty members, according to data collected by the Chronicle for Higher Education.