|
The silence of Ken Starr
By Sue Ambrose And David Tarrant
[with pdf] Praying, singing and carrying candles, hundreds of students gathered in front of the president’s house at Baylor University on a chilly night in February. Their goals: to vent anger over the Baptist school’s handling of a string of sexual assaults and to demand the attention of its leader, Ken Starr. But Starr wasn’t there to hear them. He did not attend the vigil. He has said little in public about the problem. And as the sex-assault scandal has grown to encompass at least eight alleged attacks involving football players, two of whom have been convicted in criminal court here, his oddly timed written statements have grown more legalistic. Even at this conservative and sports-mad college, students say they are frustrated by the muted response of the Baylor administration, which the 69-year-old Starr has led for the past six years. “They should be stepping up more,” said Audrey Hamlin, 20, a sophomore from outside Austin who recently joined a student group on campus sexual violence. “They should completely back up the victims, and that should be evident in their actions.” If Starr wanted to set an example of the Christian values the school professes to follow, she said, “he’d be saying a lot more than he is.” Defining moment? The scandal unfolding at Baylor represents a surprising and perhaps defining moment in the career of the man best known for investigating Bill Clinton’s sexual relationship with a White House intern. And it throws a harsh light on Starr’s tenure at Baylor, much of which appears to have been devoted to helping turn the school into a football powerhouse. As the scandal has grown, Starr has issued a series of statements to the Baylor community. “Let me be clear: Sexual violence emphatically has no place whatsoever at Baylor University,” he wrote in February. But late last month, Starr abruptly canceled an interview he had agreed to with The Dallas Morning News about his achievements at Baylor as well as the current turmoil. In a written statement, he said that he could not discuss “issues related to our institutional response to incidents of interpersonal violence” until Baylor receives the results of an assessment that has been going on since September by an outside law firm, Pepper Hamilton LLC. Baylor has not said if the report will be completed before graduation ceremonies May 13 and 14. Nor has it promised to make the document public. Similar investigations by the same firm for schools including the University of Colorado at Boulder and Occidental College haven’t been scathing rebukes but rather policy recommendations about how to meet the requirements of Title IX, the civil rights law that bars discrimination in education. The News contacted more than two dozen of the school’s 34 regents for comment; not one called back. Starr’s record at Baylor on investigating sexual assault contrasts sharply to the aggressive reputation he earned investigating Clinton. Then, Starr pursued the truth relentlessly. “He investigated for the purpose of truth and detail,” said Benjamin Wittes, a legal scholar who wrote a book about the Clinton probe. Now, those who know Starr say, he may feel buffeted by the competing demands of different Baylor constituencies — students, alumni and the board of regents. “He really wants truth to come out,” said Michael Lindsay, a Baylor alum, sociologist and president of Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. “Yet at the same time, he is a staunch advocate for the institution.” Before Starr Founded in 1845, Baylor is the oldest university in Texas and has grown to more than 14,000 undergraduate students, 58 percent of them women. The world’s largest Baptist university, Baylor is affiliated with the Baptist General Convention of Texas. At least 75 percent of Baylor’s board of regents must be Baptists, and the university expects its students and faculty to support its Christian mission. Baylor has had a history of resisting Title IX, the 1972 law which barred sex discrimination on campuses that receive federal money. In 1974, when Baylor women couldn’t wear pants on campus, the school’s president called the law “the grossest grab for power in federal history.” In the 1990s and again in 2009, the federal government cited Baylor for not providing enough athletic opportunities for women. Baylor vowed to improve, but is still out of compliance as the government continues to monitor its progress. Before Starr arrived, Baylor was recovering from one of the biggest scandals in collegiate sports history, involving the 2003 murder of a basketball player and ensuing revelations about NCAA infractions and cover-ups. Its football team was floundering. In 2010, Baylor turned to Starr, a fifth-generation Texan and conservative Christian who in 1998, along with Clinton, was Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.” One of the nation’s top appellate lawyers, Starr had argued three dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. His prosecution of Clinton led to the president’s 1998 impeachment, making Starr one of the most polarizing figures of the time. His mandate at Baylor, according to his school biography, called for “increasing Baylor’s influence in the nation and around the world.” One way to achieve that: football prowess. The new president Just days after Starr’s appointment, he was introduced by football coach Art Briles to a standing ovation from the home crowd at a Baylor men’s basketball game. The new president became an enthusiastic fan at football and basketball games, often surprising players with hugs. But it wasn’t all fun and games. On Starr’s first day on the job, rumors swirled that the Big 12 athletic conference was on the verge of collapse. Its biggest teams — Texas, Oklahoma and Texas A&M — threatened to bolt to other conferences for more television revenue. If the Big 12 failed, Baylor could have lost millions of dollars. Over a marathon 16-day period, Starr teamed with Ian McCaw, Baylor’s athletic director, to help save the Big 12. Title IX notice In the spring of 2011, nine months after Starr took office, the U.S. Department of Education wrote to colleges and universities about their duties under Title IX. At least one employee had to be in charge of trying to prevent sexual assaults and helping victims – though at Baylor that did not happen for several years. That year, Starr was again pulled into the Big 12 wars, prompted by Texas A&M’s threat to bolt for the Southeastern Conference. “When I assumed the presidency of Baylor University 14 months ago, I would never have guessed that one of the most significant challenges we would face as an institution would be the future health and unity of the Big 12 athletic conference,” Starr wrote in the Waco Tribune-Herald. By the end of the year, things were looking up for Baylor. Despite the loss of A&M, the conference held together. Quarterback Robert Griffin III became Baylor’s first player to win the Heisman Trophy as the most outstanding college football player. “During this seminal moment in Baylor’s athletic history,” Starr wrote in a letter, “by God’s grace, we have prevailed.” Starr and the Baylor regents were already imagining a new football stadium. A fundraising campaign would later raise $345 million, almost half of which went to Baylor athletics — including the football team’s new $260 million McLane Stadium. Rape allegation Almost a year to the day after the federal government’s letter putting colleges on notice about sexual-assault policies, a Baylor student accused a football player of raping her outside a party near campus. The school suspended Tevin Elliott, a defensive end for Baylor, two weeks later. Although Elliott’s arrest made headlines, Starr made no public comment. The woman would later file a lawsuit claiming that Briles, the football coach, and McCaw, the athletic director, knew Elliott had previously assaulted another woman. In her suit, the woman said when she told school officials about the rape, Baylor didn’t investigate, offer counseling or any academic help as she struggled after the trauma. Baylor and officials named in the lawsuit did not respond to requests for interviews. But in a statement, the school detailed its measures to help students and said it would respond to the suit after it reviews the complaint. More troubles Accusations that football players had assaulted Baylor women continued, though they wouldn’t surface publicly for several years. Early in 2013, a woman told Waco police that Baylor defensive end Shawn Oakman had shoved her into a brick wall. She declined to press charges. Oakman has not responded to requests for comment. A Baylor spokeswoman, citing federal privacy laws, said the “university cannot address any specifics of any individual case.” A few months later, according to Waco police reports recently obtained by ESPN, another woman said two other football players sexually assaulted her at an off-campus party. She also declined to press charges. Baylor later expelled one of the students, but he denied any wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Baylor was recruiting a troubled young man to its football team. Sam Ukwuachu had played defense for Boise State University, but was dismissed in May 2013 for an unspecified violation of team rules. Records made public later showed that police were called when Ukwuachu got drunk, became violent and broke a window. Baylor officials said they knew only that Ukwuachu had a rocky relationship with a girlfriend and had been depressed before the school signed him. That fall, Ukwuachu met a female freshman at Baylor. On homecoming weekend in October, she would later testify, she went to his apartment and he raped her. Ukwuachu said the sex was consensual. A few days after the incident, trial records show, a Baylor dean — Starr’s chief judicial officer — began an investigation that was confidential under Title IX. It was one of 13 sexual-assault investigations the dean did that year, she would later testify. She contacted Boise State, and interviewed Ukwuachu, his roommate, the freshman accuser, and one of the accuser’s friends. As Baylor was investigating Ukwuachu and prosecutors were preparing to take Elliott to trial in Waco, Baylor’s regents gave Starr and Briles votes of confidence. The regents extended Starr’s contract as president and named him chancellor, a title that charged him with building Baylor’s reputation abroad. They also voted to extend Briles’ contract for 10 years. Today, Briles is one of the nation’s highest-paid college football coaches, with annual compensation of almost $6 million, according to Baylor’s latest tax records. Starr is paid more than $1 million. Increased success and publicity in sports led to a boost in enrollment as Baylor welcomed its largest freshman class in the fall of 2013. Off the field and on Early in 2014, a jury found Tevin Elliott guilty of sexual assault. During his trial, four women testified that Elliott had sexually assaulted them, and prosecutors told jurors another woman had reported a similar attack. Elliott, 24, is serving a 20-year prison sentence. He has maintained his innocence. In June, a grand jury indicted Ukwuachu on sexual-assault charges. By fall, Baylor was headed for one of its best football seasons ever, playing its first football game in brand-new McLane Stadium. That November, Baylor hired its first full-time Title IX coordinator — three years after the federal government urged universities to appoint one. On Dec. 6, Baylor beat Kansas State at home to win its second Big 12 football championship in a row. Two days later, Starr gushed with pride in a letter to the “Baylor Nation”: “From those who set an attendance record of nearly 48,000 to the hundreds of thousands of green-and-gold-clad alumni and friends of Baylor watching around the world, resounding voices near and far rose up to form a collective song of exuberance on a magical night.” ‘An ongoing situation’ The public didn’t learn about the accusations against Ukwuachu until the day before the football team started preseason training in 2015, when the Waco Tribune-Herald reported it. But Briles apparently knew. “That’s been an ongoing situation for I don’t know, a year-and-a-half probably,” the coach told reporters. “I like the way we’ve handled it as a university, an athletic department and a football program.” Two weeks later, the woman who accused Ukwuachu testified in court that Baylor didn’t make accommodations for her after the rape. She — not Ukwuachu — had to rearrange her class schedule to avoid seeing him. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, she lost her scholarship and transferred to another school. During the trial, the dean who had investigated the incident for Baylor testified she had cleared Ukwuachu — allowing him to remain on campus and earn his Baylor diploma. But prosecutors slammed Baylor’s internal investigation — saying it was cursory and unprofessional — and the judge decided the jury shouldn’t hear it. At the end of the four-day trial, the jury found Ukwuachu guilty. He was sentenced to jail and probation; his appeal is pending. A media uproar quickly followed: How could Baylor have cleared Ukwuachu when the jury found him guilty? Was Baylor doing all it could to ensure the safety of its students? Suddenly, all eyes were on Starr. Two weeks after the trial, on the eve of the football team’s season opener, Starr sought to explain in a letter to Baylor Nation. “Some have concluded that we could have done more,” he wrote. “It is also important to acknowledge why we may not have known more.” He claimed his judicial officer didn’t have the same authority as a prosecutor because she couldn’t put people under oath. But the law doesn’t require his judicial officer to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt — only to conclude it’s more likely than not that the victim was telling the truth. Starr also maintained that “under governing law, universities typically must complete their investigations in 60 calendar days.” The reality is less stringent. “There’s no violation of the law if a reasonable investigation takes longer,” said Samuel Bagenstos, a law professor at the University of Michigan and former civil rights attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice. “In fact, the failure to conduct a reasonable investigation just because it might take longer than 60 days would itself be a violation.” Since that letter, Starr hasn’t offered much more detail about the case. Faculty members say they are waiting for the report, which they hope will be made public. “I would like to think that yes, the report would be released and that we know what happened,” said engineering professor Byron Newberry. He said Starr’s concern seemed genuine. Difficult year This year, things have gotten worse for Baylor. In February, ESPN aired interviews with several women who said Elliott had raped them. A few days later, a student unhappy with how Baylor handled her rape complaint in early 2015 organized the vigil. Starr issued statements — one just hours before the Super Bowl — expressing sympathy for survivors of sexual violence and reiterating that he wanted to refrain from commenting about Baylor practices until the review was complete. In March, a fraternity president was arrested and accused of sexual assault. Oakman was arrested on a sexual-assault charge in early April; reports that he beat his former girlfriend in 2013 surfaced just weeks later. Meanwhile, it’s still unclear how prevalent sexual assault is at Baylor. The News asked Baylor’s police department for sexual-assault reports, under a state law that makes private-school law enforcement records public. The university, citing federal student privacy rules, asked the Texas attorney general for an opinion on whether it can withhold the reports. A decision is pending. The school’s Title IX official says more women are reporting incidents but would not provide statistics. The university has boosted its counseling services and ordered training on what constitutes sexual violence. But students think much more needs to be done. Baylor’s first priority needs to be the victims of sexual assaults, said Dakota Bellow, a sophomore from Houston: “Their traumas, at the end of the day, are far more important than the university’s reputation.”
|
||||||||||||||
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.