Few institutions have been as sharply criticized for their handling of sexual-assault cases as Baylor University.
Media coverage of the football program’s apparent inaction on accusations of sexual assault came to a head in May, when independent investigators ripped Baylor’s response to the charges, and the university removed its president, Kenneth W. Starr, and fired its football coach, Art Briles.
The months of disturbing allegations raised an important question: Why was Baylor not among the more than 200 colleges under Title IX investigation by the federal government for its handling of sexual violence?
The U.S. Education Department’s deliberations on the issue are notoriously opaque. But in an attempt to answer that question, The Chronicle made an open-records request for the following materials: copies of any emails containing the word “Baylor” that, during a nine-month period ending in late May, were sent to, received by, or copied to 16 members of the Dallas branch of the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights staff and one member of the department’s main office’s staff. The start date of the request coincided with the publication of a Texas Monthly investigation that raised questions about the university’s handling of a sexual-assault case involving a football player.
The department responded on Tuesday, turning over 2,203 pages of emails. But they are almost entirely redacted, repeatedly citing the same exemption to the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act — that any material that “could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings” is protected from public disclosure.
That’s a hazy rationale, considering that the department releases the names of institutions shortly after they are placed under investigation, and has not done so with Baylor. Could the department claim said exemption on emails about any university, under the rationale that said university might one day be the subject of a Title IX probe?
An official in the Dallas office, prefacing the release of the documents, wrote in an email to The Chronicle that “a large number of the emails and related documents that include the word ‘Baylor’ are related to internal reports that cannot be released.”
The vast majority of the pages returned by the department look like this:
An initial review of the thousands of pages appears to turn up only one unredacted, genuine exchange. In that email chain, department officials appear to gripe about problems with their technology: