By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
There must be some old figure of speech — or maybe an Aesop’s fable — that expresses the idea that certain truths go unrecognized because people fear that mentioning them will result in retaliation from powerful forces in society. But I can’t think of it at the moment. The Hans Christian Andersen story about the emperor’s new clothes comes close, but does not cover all the bases, such as what happened recently at Baylor University.
Baylor is a school affiliated with the Southern Baptist Church, with an openly stated commitment to Christian beliefs. It is also a football powerhouse. Nothing inherently incompatible about that. Catholics like to think that the University of Notre Dame can be described the same way.
But it turned out that Baylor looked the other way about its Christian identity in pursuit of athletic success. The school’s president, Ken Starr, best known for his role as leader of the three-judge panel that conducted the investigation of Bill Clinton’s lies about his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, was fired by the university. So was the school’s football coach. They were charged by the university with not responding appropriately to sexual assault claims made against several of Baylor’s football players, thereby “failing to comply with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013.”
The Pepper Hamilton law firm was retained by Baylor’s Board of Regents to conduct a comprehensive review on the university’s response to the accusations.
It charged the school with failing “to take appropriate action to respond to reports of sexual assault and dating violence reportedly committed by football players” and failing “to identify and maintain controls over known risks.”
The university’s website states that “Baylor’s Board of Regents acted upon the findings of the Pepper Hamilton investigation into the school’s handling of cases of sexual violence. The Board announced significant changes in personnel and took additional actions for Baylor to improve its processes, establish accountability, and support the safety and welfare of former, current, and future students.”
Admirable. But one cannot help but wonder why Baylor permitted in the first place large numbers of young men who behaved this way to represent the school as varsity athletes.
It is not a novel idea that college football players may not be serious scholars. The old movies would routinely depict beefy young men with a crew cut and a varsity sweater scratching their heads in confusion over a lecture in physics or Renaissance literature. But that is a far cry from the young men accused of sexual assault at Baylor. In dress and mannerisms they are indistinguishable from members of street gangs, preferring the leathers and bling of hip-hop artists over lettermen sweaters.
College coaches and administrators can see that. Moral character was not one of the benchmarks used in the recruiting process at Baylor. Shockingly high percentages of the university’s football players fail to graduate. The coaches and athletic directors knew that would happen. More than a few colleges have been charged with looking the other way when athletic boosters arranged sexual liaisons for athletes being recruited by their alma maters. Syracuse University has been in the news recently for this dereliction of duty, but it is not alone in that regard. I have not heard this specific accusation made against Baylor’s boosters, but it is hard to imagine that it was not part of the scenario we are witnessing.
But it is not just the athletic department that is to blame. It was people higher up on the academic totem pole who set up the co-ed dorms and established the student “privacy rights” that provided the setting for the sexual promiscuity that led to the sexual assaults by Baylor’s football players. It does not lessen the shame of these football players to observe that they did not drag unsuspecting coeds into the bushes to assault them. They forced themselves on these young women at campus parties fueled by alcohol and drugs — and the absence of campus authorities actively seeking to put a stop to what was going on.
Syndicated columnist William Murchison taught at Baylor for five years. He tells us he “loved the place. Loved the people.” He knows what happened to the school: “The moral structure on which society once generally relied for the maintenance of civility and decency in male-female relationships is now kaput at Baylor, a distinguished Southern Baptist University committed to Christian belief.”
He charges the school authorities with “drinking in the attitudes the culture teaches, either deliberately or through osmosis. It wasn’t so very long ago that parents, pastors, priests, teachers, coaches, and authority figures of all sorts defined the attitudes and decencies expected in male-female relationships.” This meant that our colleges maintained separate dorms for male and female students. “There were curfews. Drunken orgies were a wee bit less numerous than now. Universities acted in loco parentis — applying rules and standards consonant with parental expectations regarding how their children should live while away at college.”
This societal consensus fell to the assault on traditional values carried out by the counterculture radicals of the 1960s and 1970s, when academic authorities who should have known better retreated from the responsibility to, in Murchison’s words, “shape character and kindness and a sense of moral obligation” in the young people placed in their charge.
Murchison ended his column by expressing some sympathy for Ken Starr. He calls him a “smart and honorable man — struggling to grapple with a sexual ethic hard to imagine at a Baptist university. It might be fair to call him a victim of the times,” a “relic of a cleaner, better America.”
It strikes me that Murchison is on the mark. Starr was naive. But sometimes it is not a character fault to be naive. It can imply a sense of decency that causes an individual not to assume a debased character in the people he or she meets. It appears that was Starr’s mistake. He could not imagine that members of Baylor’s student body would take advantage of the personal freedoms given to them by the school to behave like street thugs. It seems as if he was not aware of the kind of “student-athlete” favored by a good number of modern coaches and athletic administrators.
It calls to mind an earlier time in Starr’s life. One suspects that Starr was caught comparably off-guard when he found Democratic Party operatives sent by the Clinton war room to picket his house and chant accusations that he was a “sexual pervert” because of his investigations into what Bill Clinton was doing with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. It is easy to imagine a shocked Starr saying to himself that “decent people do not seek to influence a federal investigation in such a cutthroat manner.”
Just as with the Baylor football players, he did not know whom he was dealing with.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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