Kenneth W. Starr, recently demoted from the presidency of Baylor University, said on Wednesday that he would also resign as chancellor there. In a video interview with ESPN’s Outside the Lines, Mr. Starr said the decision was “a matter of conscience.”
Also in that interview, Mr. Starr offered his thoughts on a summary of an independent report that precipitated the leadership shake-up on the Texas campus. The report, which has not been released in its entirety, was conducted by the law firm Pepper Hamilton LLC.
Here are four excerpts from the interview that stood out, as told through reporters’ tweets, followed by bits of context:
It would be difficult to accept the veracity of Pepper Hamilton’s findings while also denying that there was a systematic failure. In Baylor’s summary of the findings, investigators found that administrators were ill equipped to enforce Title IX rules and that the university did not train students and employees properly under Title IX policies until the 2014-15 academic year.
The report also said that from 2012 to 2015, only a small number of sexual-assault cases ended with a finding or a serious sanction.
Such a favorable comparison contradicts the portrait painted by the investigators — one of Mr. Briles’s program run amok, with a perception that football operated “above the rules.” According to the investigation, Baylor’s internal steps sometimes “gave the illusion of responsiveness to complainants but failed to provide a meaningful institutional response” under Title IX.
The athletics department handled misconduct reports internally, the findings said, and did not disclose reports to other university administrators. Because athletics officials kept reports to themselves, Baylor did not take disciplinary action. The cases were never investigated as criminal or student-conduct processes, so the accused students stayed on the campus.
According to the summary, when the university evaluated a potential transfer student from Boise State University, Sam Ukwuachu, Baylor failed to ask for more criminal or student-conduct background information on him. Court records stated that Mr. Ukwuachu had beaten and choked a former girlfriend on multiple occasions, ESPN reported. The Pepper Hamilton investigators found that when Baylor’s football program cut players for unspecified team violations, football staff members would later help the athletes transfer to other colleges.
Several past studies — including one from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Security — have found that most campus sexual assaults occur in dormitories. In the one study, only about 9 percent of students who reported sexual assaults said the incidents had taken place in a house or apartment.
One ESPN reporter cited Baylor’s data to challenge Mr. Starr’s account:
And while research has shown that at least half of students involved in sexual assaults were under the influence of alcohol, many cases concerned sober perpetrators and victims. Victims’ advocates have long pushed back against a focus on alcohol consumption in sexual assault, saying it shifts the blame from perpetrators to their victims.
