Baylor’s Athletics Director Resigns, Citing Need to Promote Healing

Four days after Baylor University demoted its president, fired its football coach, and announced other changes to deal with what an outside review characterized as a “fundamental failure” in its handling of sexual-assault allegations, the Baptist institution issued a statement on Monday saying that its athletics director, Ian McCaw, was also departing.

Baylor’s Board of Regents said on Thursday that Mr. McCaw had been placed on probation and was facing sanctions. It did not elaborate on what those sanctions were. In an email message on Monday, the Texas university said Mr. McCaw had resigned. The message included a brief statement from Mr. McCaw, who said he had “decided that a change in athletics-department leadership is in Baylor University’s best interest in order to promote the unity, healing, and restoration that must occur in order to move forward.”

The sweeping changes announced by the board last week — which included the removal of Kenneth W. Starr as president and the firing of the head football coach, Art Briles — came as the regents released findings from an investigation by the law firm Pepper Hamilton LLC into how the university had responded to reports of sexual assault over three academic years, including several incidents involving football players. The law firm’s investigators concluded that the university’s processes for dealing with such complaints were “wholly inadequate” and that high-level administrators and athletics-staff members had “directly discouraged” students from reporting assaults and, in one case, retaliated against a student who reported an incident.

Earlier Monday, the university announced that Jim Grobe, a former coach at Wake Forest University, has been named as Baylor’s acting head football coach, effective immediately.