Demagogue

Many colleges would be thrilled to have an alumnus as loyal as Tim Smith.

He graduated from Baylor University in 1983, with a degree in accounting, worked his way up in the business world, picking up a Harvard MBA, working with a venture capital firm, and running a technology company.

In the last decade, he has personally given about $65,000 in gifts to Baylor, and he raised another $60,000 to endow a fund in honor of a business colleague and the colleague’s wife — the couple had met at Baylor.

For the last nine years, Smith has given an annual talk in an entrepreneurship class, and for the last five, he has served on the advisory committee for the business school.

But this fall, he received an unexpected call from the business dean telling him he would need to leave the advisory committee because he is gay.

“It makes me very, very sad. Here is a university that I love and that has done a lot of very good things for me. So it’s sad, being rejected like that,” Smith said. “Also I feel very angry. My money was good enough for them and my time was good enough for them. I haven’t changed, but they find out I’m gay and that disqualifies me. That’s just wrong.”