Sharing Student Scholarship Online: Religion at Baylor, 1900-1920

For the first five weeks of the spring 2013 semester, we’re putting up teasers about the fascinating Baylor history that Higher Education and Student Affairs students analyzed and shared on the class’ blog. So far we’ve explored students and student organizations, curriculumfinance, and access at Baylor. This final week we’re examining the role of Religion at Baylor. Students write about how non-Baptist students were received at Baylor, how Baylor students and administrators lived their faith, and how the BGCT interacted with Baylor. Did you know that…

HESA Baylor History blog

  • Among the statistics one would expect in a university catalog—enrollment numbers, student hometowns, the denominational breakdown, and so forth—the Baylor Bulletin in the early 1900s also included the number of students who had converted to Christianity. Learn more about the dynamic at Baylor for non-Baptist students.
  • 88 percent of Baylor students chose to attend Sunday School in addition to the church service, according to the 1915 Bulletin. Read more about how Baylor talked about, wrote about, and enacted its Baptist and Christian culture.
  • The formation of the Education Commission within the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 1897 helped free Baylor from the need to fundraise (temporarily), but also meant that the BGCT would be more involved with the university and its activities. Explore how Baylor and the BGCT interacted from 1900-1920.

We hope you’ll explore these blog posts and enjoy the benefits of the HESA students’ research and scholarship. If you’re inspired to dig deeper, most of their sources can be found in the University Archives within The Texas Collection and in our digitized materials available online in the Baylor University Libraries Digital Collections.

Background on this project: Students in the Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) masters program have taken on the challenge of creating original scholarship that adds to what is known about Baylor’s history between 1900 and 1920. As part of Dr. Nathan Alleman’s Foundations and History of Higher Education course, students were grouped under the five class themes: curriculum, finance, students/student groups, access, and religion. In collaboration with Texas Collection archivists and librarians, students mined bulletins, newspapers, correspondence, and other primary resources as they researched their topics. Final papers have now been posted on a University-hosted EduBlog site and grouped by their particular sub-topic so that patrons, researchers, and other interested persons could benefit from these students’ work. This is the first installment of an annual accumulating project–please visit again for future installments.