It took 151 years, but they finally cut a rug last week at Baylor University.
On Thursday night, for the first time in the Southern Baptist school’s history, dancing was allowed on campus.
At a few minutes past 8 p.m., Baylor President Robert Sloan Jr., clad in a tuxedo, and his wife, Sue, wearing a sequined evening gown, clasped hands, stepped into the middle of the street in front of the student center and danced to Beethoven’s “Minuet in G.”
The Haskett-Burleson Big Band then abruptly broke into Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” The Sloans shifted gears into a jitterbug to approving howls and hoots from the crowd, an estimated 7,000 students and alumni.
Other bands performed country, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues.
Sloan decided in February to lift the ban on dancing, still pooh-poohed by stringent Baptists as possibly morally harmful. But he warned students against being “obscene or provocative”: No pelvic gyrations; no excessive closeness; no “dirty dancing.”
No problems were evident as music floated across the tree-lined campus of the 12,000-student school founded by Baptists in 1845, when Texas was still an independent republic.
The first dance came during the annual spring campus festival called Diadeloso (“Day of the Bear,” after the school mascot) during which campus elections usually are the focus.
Baylor won’t go overboard with school dances, Sloan added–maybe two or three a year.
“The main objection to dancing has been its connection with other activities, such as drinking,” said Sloan, 47, a former pitcher for Baylor’s baseball team who became president last year.
A poll last fall showed that 94 percent of Baylor students approved lifting the campus dancing ban.
Besides, Sloan said, dancing is morally correct compared to a plan announced by Playboy magazine last week to find several female students willing to pose for a pictorial.
One of the first students to hit the dance floor Thursday night was 18-year-old Amber Barsness.
“I think this is awesome,” she said. “We need some gyrating music, though.”
Sophomore Randy Nelson was among the 6 percent opposed.
“There’s nothing in the Bible that prohibits dancing, but it’s not an essential function in a university education,” Nelson said.
Other conservative Baptists criticized the decision, saying it is another example that Baylor is going down the “slippery slope” of secularism.
“I don’t feel dancing is something God can be glorified in,” said Rev. Miles Seaborn of Ft. Worth, president of the Southern Baptists of Texas, a conservative group. “I’m not saying it’s all bad. I just think it’s another step toward yielding to the pressures of the world.”
