A Wave of Sexual-Assault Cases Kindles Anger on Baylor’s Campus

One by one, women stepped up to a chalkboard at the back of a Baylor University chapel and erased one of the lies they’d been told about rape: that if they’d been drinking, they had it coming; that the guy had a right to expect sex; that if they’d forgotten some details, their account couldn’t be true.

Afterward, a male student got up from his seat and scrawled on the empty board: “It’s not your fault.”

The silent conversation took place in one of four prayer services that graduate students and seminary graduates organized recently to protest how the university has responded to a handful of sexual-assault complaints.

The past several months have been a time of soul-searching for the world’s largest Baptist university, which has been accused of doing too little to investigate claims of sexual violence and showing too little compassion for alleged victims.

The university, the women contend, has been more intent on protecting its clean image and its powerhouse football team than in creating a safe environment for students.

Baylor has responded with a flurry of statements and actions, including allocating $5 million for more counselors and investigators, enhanced campus security, and more sexual-violence-prevention training for students, faculty, and staff.

In September the university also announced that it had hired a Philadelphia-based law firm, Pepper Hamilton LLP, to investigate how Baylor handles rape allegations.

In many ways Baylor is no different from hundreds of other colleges that are scrambling to respond to accusations that they aren’t doing enough to punish offenders or protect victims of sexual assault. Title IX, the federal gender-equity law, requires colleges to thoroughly investigate complaints of sexual harassment or violence, and colleges that fail to do so can face penalties, including the loss of all federal funds.

But conversations about sexual assault sometimes play out differently at a conservative Christian university where the code of conduct bans premarital sex. Many here are uncomfortable acknowledging that sex, let alone rape, is happening.

“There’s a sense that Baylor is a good place with good students and that this kind of thing doesn’t happen here,” says Laura E. Seay, a Baylor graduate and an assistant professor of government at Colby College. “The tendency has been to engage in victim blaming, suggesting that sexual-assault survivors must have done something to cause their assault. But it’s evident that assaults have been happening on the Baylor campus just as they have happened on most other campuses, and we can’t bury our heads in the sand any longer.”

Protests at Baylor take the form of candlelight vigils and prayer services, but in the aftermath of highly publicized rape accusations, they’ve been laced with an undercurrent of anger.

“We are angry that justice can seem so far away and that healing can be so elusive,” one of the prayers written by the protest organizers read. “When you are silent, when hope is lost, when truth is buried, we are angry.”

‘Gross Mishandling’

The current wave began with allegations that Baylor had failed to crack down when two standout football players were accused of rape.

Last year Sam Ukwuachu, whom the university’s in-house investigators had cleared of responsibility for an alleged sexual assault in 2013, was convicted by a county jury. He was sentenced to serve six months in county jail and 10 years’ probation. The victim, who said she felt traumatized seeing her attacker on the campus, ended up leaving Baylor while the case was pending, but her attacker graduated.

Last month an ESPN report featured five women who said that another football player, Tevin Elliott, had either raped or otherwise assaulted them between 2009 and 2012. The three from Baylor said that the university had failed to support them. Mr. Elliott has been convicted of sexual assault and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.

The day after the ESPN report came out, Baylor’s president, Ken Starr, released a statement outlining the steps the university was taking to comply with Title IX.

“Acts of sexual violence contradict every value Baylor University upholds as a caring Christian community,” wrote Mr. Starr, who is perhaps best known as the prosecutor who investigated President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Mr. Starr has declined interview requests and has said that federal privacy laws prevent him from discussing cases, even when the accusers have given him permission to do so. Instead, he has posted messages on his website assuring students that he hears them and that more changes are coming.

The day after he wrote about Baylor’s caring community, a graduate, Stefanie Mundhenk, posted an entry on her public blog questioning that characterization. She accused the university, and Mr. Starr, of failing to live up to its stated values after she reported being raped by a fellow member of her mock-trial team.

Her case was dismissed for lack of evidence. The alleged rapist, after he graduated, was allowed to work in an office housing her academic program, where she had to see him on a regular basis, she said.

Ms. Mundhenk said she went public with her story after the football rapes became national news.

“I read the ESPN article, and there were all of these comments about sports, and I was thinking, They’re missing the point,” she said in an interview. “I have friends who have been raped, and not one of them was by an athlete. People don’t realize the problem is bigger than Baylor sports.”

Baylor, she said, is no more dangerous than other campuses. The difference is that “other campuses will say ‘Not on my campus’ and crack down on it. Baylor says ‘Not on my campus’ and denies that it’s happening.”

Her situation, she said, was the kind of assault that often goes unreported, in part because victims fear no one will believe them.

“I wasn’t at a party. I wasn’t drinking. I hadn’t been drugged,” she wrote. “I wasn’t kidnapped in the dark. I fully admit that I willingly went over to his house that night. But it wasn’t to have sex — it was to do homework. When I resisted his sexual advances, he resisted taking ‘No’ for an answer.”

A few days after publishing her blog post, which attracted hundreds of comments, she and her supporters organized a candlelight vigil outside the president’s home that drew some 200 people. The president, as it happened, was out of town, but faculty and staff members were among those who attended.

Meanwhile, Ms. Seay, the Colby professor and Baylor graduate, had written an open letter that accused Baylor of “gross mishandling and poor management” of sexual-assault cases. The letter has been signed by more than 1,700 students, graduates, faculty and staff members, and others.

Ms. Seay called the changes Baylor announced last month “a great start,” but added that “some students are still not getting the message about consent.”

Campus Environment

A case in point: On March 3, just weeks after the scathing headlines, campus vigils, and public statements about the need to combat sexual violence, the president of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, Jacob W. Anderson, was charged with sexually assaulting a female student outside a fraternity party in late February. The accuser told the police that he had handed her a drink and then assaulted her after she became disoriented. The university and the national fraternity both suspended the Baylor chapter.

Despite those incidents, Baylor is not among the 173 campuses being investigated for Title IX compliance, a spokesman for the Education Department confirmed.

Baylor didn’t appoint its first Title IX coordinator, Patty Crawford, until 2014, three years after the Department of Education issued guidelines that urged colleges to do so. From 2011 to 2014, Baylor assigned those duties to other senior administrators.

During the three-year period before that, the university, with 16,000 students, reported no sexual assaults. During that same time, Texas Christian University, with about 10,000 students, reported 13, and Southern Methodist University, with about 11,000 students, reported 15, the Associated Press has reported.

“Anytime a zero is reported for sexual assaults, it raises a red flag,” said Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center. “You have to wonder how welcoming the campus environment is in terms of reporting and whether there are clear, fair procedures in place so students will feel confident coming forward.”

Interviewed outside the campus recreation center, next to a statue of the Baylor bear mascot, Lynne Yoder, a freshman, said her impression of the assault-prevention lessons she had received was that they were “mostly about telling girls what not to do.”

During orientation, she said, “they had that ‘don’t drink the punch’ kind of thing.” She turned to her friend. “How ’bout, ‘Guys — don’t put anything in the punch.’”

Asked about comments that Baylor had beefed up its Title IX response only to quash negative publicity it had been receiving, Ms. Crawford said Baylor welcomes the conversation, and the fact that more students are comfortable voicing complaints.

“When we get reports, we try to respond to those alleged victims within a business day. I might get a text message from someone at 3 a.m., and I’m responding by 6:45 a.m.,” she said.

“I’m proud of the students like Stefanie who have spoken out,” she continued. “I hope it’s supporting their healing and giving them a sense of empowerment. The more the media covers these conversations and the more students vocalize what they need, the better we’ll be able to serve them.”

Meanwhile, the group of women who have been organizing the prayer services met this month at the home of Natalie Webb, a doctoral student in religion. They flipped through leather-bound Bibles searching for lessons to illustrate their final service, which will be held on Tuesday and will focus on hope. Ms. Webb jiggled her 10-month-old son on her lap as she described how the women had concluded that prayer was one way they could support sexual-assault victims at a time when Baylor officials were citing privacy rules and the pending outside investigation as reasons they couldn’t comment on any of the cases.

“We felt there was a need for some kind of response from Baylor,” she said. “We can at least give them some place where they’ll be believed.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.