Kenneth W. Starr’s legacy as president of Baylor University could be defined by a pair of lawyers in a law firm in Philadelphia.
The university’s Board of Regents hired the firm, Pepper Hamilton LLC, in September to investigate complaints that the institution had not properly responded to alleged sexual assaults on its campus.
The results of that inquiry, led by two well-known experts in federal gender-equity compliance, Gina M. Smith and Leslie M. Gomez, could shed light on whether Mr. Starr contributed to Baylor’s response to the alleged assaults. And the board will almost certainly use the report as a basis for determining the president’s future employment at the university.
The board has not made the results of the investigation public, but unofficial reports on Tuesday have fueled speculation that Mr. Starr, a former federal judge, will be fired as president.
This would not be the first time that such an investigation has led to big changes at a college. In recent years, governing boards have frequently turned to outside legal firms for a view of what the institution is getting wrong, or right, handling the tough issues of Title IX.
While colleges are often thought of as progressive institutions, they can be resistant to change and need an outside perspective, said James Sears Bryant, a lawyer with the law firm Spencer Fane.
“The key to the deal is to be completely frank and honest and get to the truth,” said Mr. Bryant, who has led several similar investigations at colleges across the country.
“You can try to say it as graciously as you can, be civil and dignified, but you have to tell people what they did and didn’t do right,” he said.
Independence Is Key
The details of responsibility and the scope of investigation vary by college, said C. Peter Goplerud III, an executive at InfiLaw, a company that owns several for-profit law schools.
Generally, governing boards and colleges want to know the facts of what happened, whether the existing policies and procedures were followed, and if those policies and procedures were adequate, Mr. Goplerud said.
What the investigators want is unfettered entrée to information and to the people who need to be interviewed, said Mr. Goplerud. “You want to have assurances that you will have full access to people, documents, and communications so that you can leave no stone unturned,” he said.
Mr. Goplerud and Mr. Bryant were two of the lawyers hired for the 2008 investigation into the handling of a sexual assault of a University of Iowa student. Their findings led to the firing of the institution’s general counsel and vice president for student services.
In that case, Mr. Goplerud said, the regents gave the group no instructions on the process. “I know I and others would be reluctant to have too much of the process determined by the client because that removes some of the independence,” he said.
Governing bodies, too, are often trying to avoid the errors of insularity, said Andrew Lester, a former chairman of the Board of Regents for the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical Colleges.
Mr. Lester said the investigation by the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director Louis J. Freeh into allegations of child sexual abuse by a football coach at Pennsylvania State University led Mr. Lester to order a review of policies at his own institutions.
Mr. Freeh’s report was extremely critical of Penn State’s governing board “for basically putting its head in the sand,” said Mr. Lester, now a lawyer who, like Mr. Bryant, is with the firm Spencer Fane. “I didn’t want that to happen to us,” Mr. Lester said.
At roughly the same time, Oklahoma State University was under scrutiny for how it handled several cases of male students’ being assaulted by another male student. The situation got much more media attention when a student reporter discovered that the university had not reported the incidents to the police.
An investigation by Mr. Bryant, then working for a different law firm, determined that the university had misapplied the federal law requiring the protection of student records — the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
As a result, said Mr. Lester, the regents not only changed their policy about reporting such incidents to the police. They also hired an independent ombudsman to monitor complaints of sexual assault and consolidated the legal offices for the system’s campuses.
“The most important things from an institutional level are, you want to know the truth and you’ve got to follow through,” he said.
Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.
