Ken Starr... fired!

[BayGBM]

After besmirching the Clintons, Starr became Dean of Pepperdine University law school; then he became president of Baylor University.  Now, it appears his career there may be coming to a close.  I guess he will soon be spending more time with his family.  

Karma is a bitch, and she slaps hard.



Questions Swirl Amid Reports of Baylor President’s Firing
By Eric Kelderman

Baylor University is not confirming reports that emerged on Tuesday that Kenneth W. Starr had been fired as president. But the furor and speculation that swirled around Mr. Starr’s status are the latest signs that the university’s problems with handling sexual assaults go far beyond concerns about the conduct of athletes who have been accused of rape.

Since 2013, the university has been mired in controversy as a growing number of students have come out alleging that they were raped and that Baylor did little to respond to those incidents or punish their assailants. Some of the incidents involved charges of rape against two football players who were eventually found guilty in criminal proceedings.

As the list of sexual-assault cases at Baylor has grown, students and others have questioned whether the university did enough to respond to the allegations. This month, The Dallas Morning News published an article focused on the "silence" of Mr. Starr, who became Baylor’s president in 2010 and may be known best for his investigation of President Bill Clinton.

Mr. Starr’s alleged dismissal by the Board of Regents was first reported on Tuesday morning by Horns Digest, a website that focuses on the University of Texas Longhorns. Other news sites later said that they had confirmed the information.

In a statement sent by email, Baylor said the board would not "respond to rumors, speculation or reports based on unnamed sources." It went on to say that the university would provide more information when "official news is available." It added: "We expect an announcement by June 3."

A Baylor alumna who is leading an effort to make the university more accountable said Mr. Starr’s departure would be an important first step. But the breadth of the problem goes far beyond the president’s office and the football program, said Laura E. Seay, a 2000 Baylor graduate who is now an assistant professor of government at Colby College.

Stefanie Mundhenk, a 2015 graduate of Baylor who has written about being raped at Baylor and how the university responded to her complaint, said the current uproar over Mr. Starr’s status is a "lose-lose" for the university. If he didn’t deserve to be fired, she said, then the regents are just making him the scapegoat. And if he did deserve to be fired, "it means that the allegations were so egregious and Ken Starr had a heavy hand in covering up sexual-assault allegations."

Since putting her name at the top of an open letter to the university, Ms. Seay said she had heard about 100 incidents of rape at Baylor, but only about 15 involving football players.

While the allegations involving athletes are a fraction of those incidents, the news-media attention they drew was important because it sparked a reaction among other survivors, said Ms. Seay. Several other women have now come forward alleging that the university mishandled their complaints of sexual assault.

It is not yet clear whether the university’s athletics director, Ian McCaw, or football coach, Art Briles, will also be ushered out.

Mr. Starr has issued several public statements meant to reassure students and the public that the university is taking the issue seriously. And Baylor has already taken several steps to shore up its response to reports of sexual violence, though some of its past efforts seemed to lag behind the expectations of federal regulations.

In November 2014, the university hired its first Title IX coordinator — three and a half years after the U.S. Department of Education instructed colleges to put someone in that role.

This past September, Baylor hired the law firm Pepper Hamilton LLC to assess how the university was responding to cases of alleged sexual violence. And in March, the university announced a $5-million plan to increase the number of staff members dedicated to preventing and responding to sexual assaults.

Earlier this month, the university said that its board had received "a comprehensive briefing" from Pepper Hamilton and would determine over the coming weeks "how to decisively act" on the law firm’s findings and recommendations. Those findings have not yet been made public.

Only time will tell if the measures will be effective, said Ms. Mundhenk. But so far, she said, she has heard from other rape survivors that the university’s response is still inadequate. "Baylor has a tendency to do one thing and pretend it fixes everything," she said.

Ms. Seay said she would like the regents to release the law firm’s findings or at least a summary in order to show how poor the university’s handling of sexual-misconduct allegations has been.

There would probably be anger from alumni and even some people on the campus about Mr. Starr’s firing, Ms. Seay said. He was beloved and even called "Uncle Ken" by some.

"It’s only through transparency and building trust," she said, "that the regents can fix this situation."

[BayGBM]

Baylor says Ken Starr remains president and chancellor
by Sue Ambrose

A Baylor University spokeswoman says that Ken Starr remains president and chancellor of the university. Earlier this afternoon, the school released this statement in response to reports that Starr had been removed from his post:

The Baylor Board of Regents continues its work to review the findings of the Pepper Hamilton investigation and we anticipate further communication will come after the Board completes its deliberations. We will not respond to rumors, speculation or reports based on unnamed sources, but when official news is available, the University will provide it. We expect an announcement by June 3.

Earlier today, Chip Brown reported on HornsDigest.com post that Starr had been fired as president, but that report had not been independently confirmed.  Brown cited anonymous sources saying that regents are targeting Starr rather than head football coach Art Briles for failed leadership in handling a string of sex assault allegations against Baylor football players, two of whom have been convicted.

[BayGBM]

Kenneth Starr, Who Tried to Bury Bill Clinton, Now Only Praises Him
By AMY CHOCK

An unlikely voice recently bemoaned the decline of civility in presidential politics, warned that “deep anger” was fueling an “almost radical populism” and sang the praises of former President Bill Clinton — particularly his “redemptive” years of philanthropic work since leaving the White House.

The voice was that of Kenneth W. Starr, the former Whitewater independent counsel, whose Javert-like pursuit of Mr. Clinton in the 1990s helped bring a new intensity to partisan warfare and led to the impeachment of a president for only the second time in the nation’s history.

The presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, increasingly seems to be trying to relitigate the scandals that Mr. Starr investigated, dredging up allegations of sexual transgressions by Mr. Clinton to accuse Hillary Clinton — the likely Democratic nominee — of having aided and enabled her husband at the expense of Mr. Clinton’s female accusers.

But Mr. Starr expressed regret last week that so much of Mr. Clinton’s legacy remains viewed through the lens of what Mr. Starr demurely termed “the unpleasantness.”

His remarks seemed almost to absolve Mr. Clinton, if not to exonerate him.

“There are certain tragic dimensions which we all lament,” Mr. Starr said in a panel discussion on the presidency at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

“That having been said, the idea of this redemptive process afterwards, we have certainly seen that powerfully” in Mr. Clinton’s post-presidency, he continued, adding, “President Carter set a very high standard, which President Clinton clearly continues to follow.”

He called Mr. Clinton “the most gifted politician of the baby boomer generation.”

“His genuine empathy for human beings is absolutely clear,” Mr. Starr said. “It is powerful, it is palpable and the folks of Arkansas really understood that about him — that he genuinely cared. The ‘I feel your pain’ is absolutely genuine.”

For some time, Mr. Starr, a Christian who is now the president and chancellor of Baylor University, a private Baptist school in Waco, Tex., has sought to put his years as a political combatant behind him. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, some of his associates expressed regret that so much of the Clinton administration’s efforts had been spent fighting those battles rather than addressing the growing threat posed by Osama bin Laden. And in 2010, Mr. Starr told Fox News that he regretted that his investigation of Mr. Clinton had taken so long and that it “brought great pain to a lot of people.”

The panel discussion in Philadelphia was occasioned by the release of “The Presidents and the Constitution: A Living History,” to which Mr. Starr contributed a chapter on Ronald Reagan. The book’s editor, who wrote the chapter on Mr. Clinton, is Ken Gormley, who also wrote the 2010 book “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr.”

“It’s sad that the chapter is so rooted in the unpleasantness, as I used to call it, the recent unpleasantness,” Mr. Starr said.

He did not mention any of the current presidential candidates by name in last week’s discussion. But Mr. Starr, 69, alluded to Mr. Trump, saying he was concerned about “the transnational emergence of almost radical populism, deep anger, a sense of dislocation.”

He also seemed to echo Mr. Trump, however, saying, “Our children are not going to do as well as we did or as our parents’ generation,” and pointing to demographic shifts as a source of “considerable instability.”

Then again, Mr. Starr also alluded to the danger posed by income inequality, a central theme of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign. “We simply have not adjusted as a society to what seems to be the 1 percent and the 99 percent,” Mr. Starr said.

But it was Mr. Starr’s keening over the coarsening and polarization of American politics that seemed most noteworthy. He did not volunteer any responsibility for it — though Mr. Clinton, who in 2006 accused Mr. Starr of “indicting innocent people because they wouldn’t lie,” might well lay considerable blame at his feet.

A federal judge in the Reagan administration and the solicitor general under President George Bush, Mr. Starr was named independent counsel in 1994, taking over the investigation of the Whitewater real estate venture and the suicide of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a deputy White House counsel. He expanded the investigation to include the Paula Jones lawsuit and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Mr. Starr’s conclusion that Mr. Clinton had committed perjury in sworn testimony denying having had “sexual relations” with Ms. Lewinsky eventually led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment.

“Whether it’s Whitewater or whether it’s Vince or whether it’s Benghazi. It’s always a mess with Hillary,” Mr. Trump recently told The Washington Post.

Mr. Starr now is contending with criticism of his own leadership over Baylor’s handling of sexual assault charges leveled against several of its football players.

In the panel discussion last week, he reached back to an earlier presidency — that of Lyndon B. Johnson. Saying today’s divisiveness “deeply concerns me,” he recalled Johnson’s appealing for comity before a joint session of Congress.

“I remember this so vividly — he said, ‘Come, let us reason together.’ Can we talk with one another?” Mr. Starr said. “The utter decline and erosion of civility and discourse has, I think, very troubling implications.”

He quoted E. Gordon Gee, the president of West Virginia University, as saying, “The world has become a shouting match.”

“There are always places for shouts and strong feelings, but the genius of American democracy and of presidential leadership,” Mr. Starr continued, “is to bring unity out of our diversity. E pluribus unum — out of many, one. And we don’t seem to hear too many voices saying, ‘Let us find common ground.’ ”

[BayGBM]

Ken Starr to Step Down
by Jake New

Sitting in his office last November, surrounded by football regalia and ornaments featuring Bible passages, Kenneth Starr, the president of Baylor University, defended his institution’s handling of sexual assault and domestic violence.

“If you look at the way we approach the issue of interpersonal violence,” Starr said, “I believe a fair-minded judge would say, ‘You’re doing everything that you can.’”

Baylor’s Board of Regents seemingly would disagree. After months of allegations that the world’s largest Baptist university has continuously mishandled -- and sought to suppress public discourse about -- sexual assaults committed by its football players, the board reportedly was moving this week to fire Starr, and his resignation is now expected.

According to sources close to the situation, the university’s athletic director, Ian McCaw, and its head football coach, Art Briles, are “also on the chopping block,” but their fate remains less clear. Starr has not been fired, though an announcement about his job status is expected sometime near the end of this month. Starr could have the option to remain on campus as part of the faculty. Starr currently has dual positions of president and chancellor, the latter job largely focused on external relations. One possibility is that he will remain on as chancellor but not president.

Earlier this month, Pepper Hamilton, a law firm the university hired to investigate how it has handled allegations of sexual assault, presented a lengthy oral report to the board summarizing its findings. The report places ultimate blame for the mishandling of several sexual assault cases squarely on Starr.

“The Baylor Board of Regents continues its work to review the findings of the Pepper Hamilton investigation, and we anticipate further communication will come after the board completes its deliberations,” the university said Tuesday in a written statement. “We will not respond to rumors, speculation or reports based on unnamed sources, but when official news is available, the university will provide it.”

The Pepper Hamilton report, according to the sources, found that Starr encouraged a culture of second chances, while providing little oversight to the athletic department and the football team, and failed “to provide consistent and meaningful engagement with Title IX,” the federal antidiscrimination law that dictates how colleges should investigate and adjudicate cases of campus sexual assault.

Baylor hired its first full-time Title IX coordinator in November 2014 and recently updated many of its sexual assault policies.

Starr is a renowned judge and lawyer, having argued nearly 40 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and served as independent counsel during the investigation that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He became president of Baylor in 2010. When Starr first took the job, he said last year, he visited Fred Cameron, a prominent lawyer and former member of the university’s board, and asked him for advice.

“Win some football games,” Cameron replied.

Starr took the advice to heart and made an immediate splash as president by threatening legal action against the Southeastern Conference and Texas A&M University when that university decided to leave the Big 12 Conference, a move that many at the university feared would break up the league and leave Baylor without a big-time conference home. Texas A&M ultimately bolted for the wealthier SEC, but Starr’s threats are credited with helping give other waffling Big 12 teams enough pause that they decided to remain with the league.

The rise in stature of Baylor’s football program under Starr is frequently described as “meteoric,” though it also has concerned some on campus, who worry that a university so focused on football could lose sight of its Baptist mission.

In 2010, the head coach, Art Briles -- who had already begun laying the groundwork for the program’s revival two years earlier -- led the team to the Texas Bowl, finishing off the Bears’ first winning season in 15 years. A stream of successes followed, culminating in the construction of a new $266 million stadium to house the team.

The success and higher profile of the football program have, university officials assert, helped Baylor raise $400 million since 2012 to support a flurry of construction and other projects around campus, including a new building to house the business school and a $100 million scholarship initiative.

“As we would say in Christendom, it’s like an early rapture,” a member of Baylor board said in 2012. “We spent 40 years wandering the wilderness. I hope this is our exit.”

Later that year, a Baylor linebacker was arrested and later convicted of sexual assault. At the player’s trial, four other witnesses said he had raped them as well.

In 2013, Samuel Ukwuachu -- then a freshman all-American at Boise State University -- was dismissed from that university’s football team for “violating team rules” after a drunken dispute with his then girlfriend ended with the player putting his fist through a window. The woman later alleged that Ukwuachu hit and choked her. Just weeks after he was dismissed, Ukwuachu transferred to Baylor to play football there.

That October, Waco police received a call saying that Ukwuachu had sexually assaulted a fellow student. The victim, a soccer player at Baylor, testified that she screamed “no” as Ukwuachu raped her in his apartment after homecoming.

In June 2014, Ukwuachu -- who still had not played a game at Baylor -- was indicted by a grand jury on two counts of sexually assaulting the female student. Even then, the football team’s defensive coordinator said he expected Ukwuachu to play that fall. Ukwuachu was found guilty of sexual assault last August. He was sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years on probation.

Sexual assault is a famously underprosecuted crime, yet not only did local law enforcement officials move forward with the case, they successfully charged and convicted Ukwuachu. Meanwhile, according to a Baylor official who testified during the trial, the university never held a campus hearing because there was not enough evidence to move forward. In August 2015, Texas Monthly published an article raising questions about whether Baylor officials knew of Ukwuachu’s previous violent behavior.

Over the next several months, ESPN published a series of reports detailing a number of other sexual and physical assaults seemingly kept quiet by the university and committed mostly by football players. In one case a female student said she was twice physically assaulted by a Baylor football player. In another, a woman told police a football player threw her against a wall.

In a 2011 assault case involving two football players, according to ESPN, local police pulled the case “from a computer system so that only persons who had a reason to inquire about the report” would be able to find it. In all, at least five football players have been accused of assault since Starr became president.

Earlier this month, the Waco Tribune-Herald reported that a Baylor tennis player is also under investigation for sexual assault and that a Baylor fraternity president was indicted on four counts of sexual assault after an incident in February.

“Sexual assault education and prevention are vitally important to our university,” Starr said in a statement earlier this month. “Throughout Baylor’s storied 171 years of operation, the hallmark of a Baylor education has been our unwavering Christian faith. Our faith binds us together and calls us to love one another as Christ Jesus loves us. By God’s grace, our distinct Christian mission will continue to provide a guiding light for Baylor nation.”

[Dos Equis]

Karma?  The man has probably made enough to retire several times over. 

[BayGBM]

Is Kenneth Starr, Historic Sleazeball, At Last Getting His Just Deserts?
by Michael Tomasky

A good Christian’s incredible hypocrisy may finally be catching up to him.

Sometimes, when I’m reading a news story about some particularly risible act by a public person, I find myself wondering how the first paragraph of their New York Times obituary will read when the inevitable day arrives. It’s the job of the newspaper of record to heed Shakespeare’s words and “take him for all in all.” How bad does it have to get for that very first paragraph to accentuate the negative?

Ken Starr isn’t exactly in Bill Cosby territory, but with the revelation that he’s apparently being canned from the presidency of Baylor University for ignoring charges of sexual misconduct by football players, he has made himself into one of the most exquisite hypocrites of our age. (I should note that the university, responding to reports Tuesday of Starr’s impending dismissal, refused to confirm the news, although it didn’t deny it either.)

Here is morality according to Starr, who by the way is (of course) a great Christian. It’s appropriate to expose sexual misconduct (wrong, but consensual) when it gives you a shot at bringing down a president you loathe and creating a constitutional crisis over a few blow jobs. But when sexual misconduct risks messing with the football team, well by God, you brush it under the rug! You’re in Texas, boy.

A lot of you reading this may be too young to remember what I’m even talking about, and many of you who were around forget the appalling details. You may have seen the other day that Starr had some kind words for Bill Clinton, to which we’ll return. But don’t be deceived, and whatever you do, don’t go soft on Starr. He’s one of the monumental sleazeballs of our era.

Some innuendo-rich reporting in the Times and elsewhere during the 1992 campaign suggested that both Clintons may have behaved inappropriately with regard to a land investment known as Whitewater. They did not, as time would prove, but the right pushed the story hard, and the mainstream press sensed that surely something happened, because this was how things had to have worked in a hayseed state. By 1994, President Clinton, succumbing to external and some internal pressure, agreed to appoint a special prosecutor to delve into the facts.

Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a Republican named Robert Fiske. Fiske was finding no evidence of wrongdoing and was about to say so. Then, a twist of fate: It so happened that the special prosecutor law was coming up for renewal. Clinton considered it bad law (as did Antonin Scalia) and didn’t want to sign, but he knew it would look suspicious, so he signed. His renewal of the law had a crucial consequence: It transferred oversight of the special prosecutor from the Justice Department to the D.C. Court of Appeals, and specifically to a three-judge panel thereof. This panel consisted of two arch conservatives. Immediately, the panel fired Fiske on flimsy, trumped-up conflict-of-interest grounds, and appointed Starr.

Starr at that point enjoyed a grand reputation in Washington. He’d been a judge and Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, and he and his wife glided through the social circuit with apparent grace. But he had well concealed the partisan knife that he now began to unsheathe.

To make a really long story really short, he turned up nothing on Whitewater. He spent three years subpoenaing everyone he could think of, squeezing witnesses; he jailed a woman, Susan McDougal, for nearly two years, trying to get her to lie about Clinton, keeping her for a time in solitary confinement, even in a PlexiGlas cell, on display like an animal. The ACLU of Southern California called her treatment “barbaric.” But he had nothing. He even quit the gig in 1997, because he knew he had nothing, but The Wall Street Journal editorial page and Times columnist and GOP propagandist Bill Safire hounded him back into the job.

Meanwhile in 1997, Monica Lewinsky met Linda Tripp, who, at the suggestion of conservative provocateur Lucianne Goldberg, started secretly taping Lewinsky’s discussions of her and Bill’s liaisons. Also, Paula Jones, who had a sexual harassment suit going against Clinton, fired her regular lawyers and hired very political, right-wing counsel. Goldberg got word to these lawyers that she had information that might be useful to them, so they connected, and in short order, in late 1997, a connection was made to Starr’s office.

Jackpot! He had nothing on Whitewater, but now here was evidence of a presidential affair. And, in his fevered dreams, maybe obstruction of justice to boot, he hinted to the Justice Department (with no hard evidence). And so the Lewinsky story broke in January 1998, and Starr possessed the power to bring down a president.

Clinton’s behavior, both the act and the lying about it, was of course indefensible. But funny thing—the public was far more repulsed by Javert than Valjean. In March 1998, just two months after the scandal broke, Clinton’s approval ratings were pushing 70, while Starr was at 11 percent. That September, Starr released his famous report, a 445-page doorstopper that went into completely unnecessary detail—the word “sex” or a variant thereof was used 581 times, the word “Whitewater” just four times.

His conduct was reprehensible. He put dozens of totally innocent aides through legal hell. His office illegally leaked grand jury material left and right to friendly reporters. He lied repeatedly and publicly about Madison Guaranty, Susan McDougal and her ex-husband’s bank. And he wrapped himself in a cloak of self-righteousness the entire time, and the media, which had turned into a mob, was almost wholly on his side.

And now he comes to praise Clinton? Please. No thanks, says longtime Clinton aide Betsey Wright:

I have been crying ever since I read the article in today’s New York Times which carried Kenneth Starr’s words of praise for Bill Clinton. Those words brought back memories of the Clinton years in the White House that were all a very dark period for me, not because of anything the Clintons did, but because of Mr. Starr’s witch hunt. They should have been celebratory years for me, but they were pure misery. I spent them receiving subpoenas… being fingerprinted by the FBI… testifying before the grand jury and a Senate investigation committee…being forced to be custodian of hundreds of boxes of Clinton papers…being deposed endlessly…even receiving ‘spinoff’ subpoenas from lawyers for Gennifer Flowers and Paula Jones…being treated as a pariah by top White House aides, even some fellow Arkansans, e.g. Bruce Lindsey and Mack McLarty, who refused to return my phone calls…being prohibited from communicating about anything with the President because I might be accused of obstructing justice…racking up several hundred thousand dollars in legal and travel bills which were not eligible for reimbursement because I was not a federal government employee…being quoted for years and years in dozens of books by hateful authors I never talked to, and who made up things attributed to me…all while I was struggling to overcome clinical depression. There was no acknowledgement by Mr. Starr of the countless numbers of us who were Starr’s collateral damage. (At least I didn’t have to serve time in prison like Susan McDougal did.) Mr. Starr’s words in the NYT article today smashed into me with horrible memories of the years he ruined.

Which brings us to Baylor. Here’shttp://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/big12/2016/05/18/baylor-football-sex-assault-violence-allegations-espn-otl-report/84547094/ a little summary of the series of allegations of sexual and other types of misconduct against Baylor football players. They are serious, and they were completely ignored by the football program and by Starr.

Remember, this is Texas. Football is a second religion. These kinds of things tend to be ignored, especially when the team’s been a winner, as Baylor has been. So you can imagine how bad things must be when even in Texas they start saying hey, this is getting a little embarrassing. Here’s a recent comment by a Baylor alum named Matt Mosley, who’s a sports-radio host in Dallas:

We obviously didn’t do right by these victims of sexual assault. The findings of this law firm from Philly need to be made public. You certainly protect the identity of victims mentioned, but folks need to known about the failures. Then Baylor needs to let everyone know what the plan is moving forward. Ken Starr is one of the most articulate men I’ve ever encountered. His relative silence on such important issues has been disturbing to a lot of us who love the university. He either needs to step up or step aside. The Regents need to be decisive in their actions. This is no time to be bullied by Judge Starr. Our university has taken a huge hit.

What’s going to happen? It appears that Starr is pushing to keep his job, but he has already revealed who he is. He has now defiled both the republic and the academy. Quite a life’s work. It is very much to be hoped, to return to Shakespeare, that we shall not see his like again.

[BayGBM]

With Ken Starr’s Future in Doubt, Baylor Alumni Come to His Defense
By Katherine Mangan

Reports that Baylor University’s president, Kenneth W. Starr, is being forced to resign for failing to respond adequately to a string of sexual assaults on his campus prompted more than a thousand people on Wednesday to rally to his defense online.

"We as Baylor constituents love and support our president, Judge Ken Starr," reads the petition, which had attracted more than 1,500 signatures by Wednesday evening. "Over the past six years, Judge Starr has ushered in a new era of success. We believe he will continue to do so going forward in his current role."

The petition was started by a 2009 Baylor graduate who believes the Board of Regents is using the president as a scapegoat as it seeks to contain a controversy that has tarnished the reputation of the world’s largest Baptist university.

Two football players have been convicted of a handful of rapes. Meanwhile, a blogger’s moving account of her rape by a fellow student and what she saw as the administration’s failure to support her prompted several other women to come forward with similar reports.

The petition comes at a time when Mr. Starr’s status is uncertain.

A former Faculty Senate president asserted that "very reliable sources" have said the board will ask Mr. Starr to step down as president but remain in the more ceremonial role of chancellor.

"It is obvious that the Baylor faculty holds Judge Starr in very high regard," Jim H. Patton, a professor of neuroscience, psychology, and biomedical studies, wrote in an email.

Two years ago, he said, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution thanking Mr. Starr for his "effective leadership and his value of shared governance."

The president, who has obtained legal counsel, is also said to be under consideration for a position in Baylor’s law school, where he holds a tenured faculty position.

Too Little Information
But feelings about the president are mixed. Laura E. Seay, a 2000 graduate of Baylor who wrote an open letter criticizing Baylor’s response to sexual-assault complaints, called the petition "misguided."

"It misses the fact that we do not have full information about how sexual-assault cases were handled or mishandled under Starr’s leadership, that we have numerous accounts of serious and widespread errors made by multiple administrators under his supervision and on his watch, and that the sexual-assault problem at Baylor goes far beyond the well-publicized cases allegedly involving football players," Ms. Seay, who is now an assistant professor of government at Colby College, wrote in an email.

"It is well within the realm of possibility that Starr bears responsibility for these errors, for exposing Baylor to lawsuits, and, most importantly, for failing so many survivors as they sought help and justice," she wrote. "I would not advise anyone to sign this petition until we have the facts."

Baylor officials have refused to confirm reports that circulated this week saying the regents had already fired the president. They said the regents are continuing to review the findings of a Philadelphia law firm, Pepper Hamilton LLC, that investigated Baylor’s handling of sexual-assault complaints and recently briefed the regents on its findings.

The petition, which supporters were circulating on Twitter using the hashtag #keepken, cited reports that said Mr. Starr hadn’t been permitted to review the Pepper Hamilton findings. A campus spokeswoman did not respond to an email requesting confirmation.

‘Rumor and Innuendo’
Vincent Harris, the Baylor graduate who started the petition, said that if in fact the board moves ahead with reported plans to fire the president or force his resignation, it would be blaming Mr. Starr for things that were outside his control.

"Why are we firing a man when there’s no shred of evidence that he looked the other way?" Mr. Harris asked in an interview on Wednesday. "All we have is rumor and innuendo."

Mr. Harris founded and runs a media group that has worked on the campaigns of a number of Republican politicians, including the former Texas governor Rick Perry, the former U.S. House speaker Newt Gingrich, and U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, who recently dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. He said he has deep family ties to Baylor and once taught a political-science class there as a visiting faculty member.

When Mr. Starr took office, in 2010, "there was a lot of discord among faculty and alumni, and President Starr has quietly and meticulously calmed the seas," Mr. Harris said.

Meanwhile, the fate of the university’s football coach, Art Briles, and its athletics director, Ian McCaw, remained unclear on Wednesday, with some alumni and students questioning whether firing the president, but not those closest to the players found guilty of raping students, would send the wrong message about the university’s priorities.

[BayGBM]

Ken Starr officially out as Baylor President, University Releases Findings of Fact
By Mark Seymour

Board of Regents apologizes to Baylor Nation; Dr. David Garland named interim University President; Ken Starr transitions to role of Chancellor and remains professor at Baylor University Law School; Head Football Coach Art Briles suspended with intent to terminate; Athletic Director Ian McCaw sanctioned and placed on probation; University self-reports to NCAA; Task Force responsible for implementing recommendations formed and operative; Findings of Fact and Recommendations made available

The Findings of Fact link above is the first real substantive report we have from the Pepper Hamilton report, but it was also created by Baylor for dissemination, so keep that in mind.  A few of the most important pieces of the Baylor release:

• The University's student conduct processes were wholly inadequate to consistently provide a prompt and equitable response under Title IX; Baylor failed to consistently support complainants through the provision of interim measures; and in some cases, the University failed to take action to identify and eliminate a potential hostile environment, prevent its recurrence or address its effects.

• Actions by University administrators directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes and in one instance constituted retaliation against a complainant for reporting sexual assault.

• In addition to broader University failings, Pepper found specific failings within both the football program and Athletics department leadership, including a failure to identify and respond to a pattern of sexual violence by a football player and to a report of dating violence.

• There are significant concerns about the tone and culture within Baylor's football program as it relates to accountability for all forms of student athlete misconduct.

• Over the course of their review, Pepper investigated the University's response to reports of a sexual assault involving multiple football players. The football program and Athletics department leadership failed to take appropriate action in response to these reports.

If you're wondering why Briles was fired, look no further than the "specific failings within both the football program and Athletics department leadership."  Those failings must be pretty serious, and it sounds like they were, to justify the response.

The release is quite long and definitely worthy of a read.  By my count, four named individuals have been disciplined and/or terminated, and several others not named specifically will be disciplined, as well.  Importantly, the release concludes:

   While no written report has been prepared, the Findings of Fact reflect the thorough briefings provided by Pepper and fully communicates the need for immediate action to remedy past harms, to provide accountability for University administrators and to make significant changes that can no longer wait.

We'll keep you updated as things move forward.

[BayGBM]

Baylor Fires Football Coach Art Briles and Demotes President Ken Starr
By MARC TRACY

Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who delivered a report that served as the basis for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, was removed as president of Baylor University on Thursday after an internal investigation found “fundamental failure” by the university in its handling of accusations of sexual assault against football players.

The university also fired the football coach, Art Briles, whose ascendant program in recent years brought in millions of dollars in revenue but was troubled by accusations of sexual assault against athletes.

Critics claimed that Baylor had sacrificed moral considerations — and the safety of other students — for the sake of its winning football team. The internal report confirmed as much, describing a culture that flouted federal statutes, including Title IX and the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013.

“Actions by University administrators directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes and in one instance constituted retaliation against a complainant for reporting sexual assault,” the report said.

Starr was stripped of his title as university president but will remain Baylor’s chancellor. His demotion delivered a twist to the biography of a man whose reputation was built on what was widely considered an overzealous pursuit of allegations of sexual transgressions by Clinton. Now he is being punished for leading an administration that, according to the report, looked the other way when Baylor football players were accused of sex crimes, and sometimes convicted of them.

“We were horrified by the extent of these acts of sexual violence on our campus,” Richard Willis, chairman of Baylor’s board of regents, said in a statement. “This investigation revealed the University’s mishandling of reports in what should have been a supportive, responsive and caring environment for students.”

Starr, who previously served as solicitor general and a federal judge before taking on the Clinton case, has been credited with raising hundreds of millions of dollars for Baylor, the country’s largest Baptist university, in part by yoking its fortunes to football. Specifically, much fund-raising was centered on building a gleaming new on-campus field, McLane Stadium, which opened in 2014, the same year that Starr added the title of chancellor to his role as president.

But over the past several years, several Baylor football players have been implicated in off-field issues.

The scandal took on a new dimension nearly a year ago, when a former football player, Sam Ukwuachu, was convicted of sexually assaulting another Baylor athlete and sentenced to six months in jail. During the trial, a former girlfriend of Ukwuachu testified that he had assaulted her several years earlier, when he had been a football player at Boise State. Baylor denied that it had been apprised of Ukwuachu’s history; Boise State disputed that denial.

The Ukwuachu case came a year after Tevin Elliott, a former Baylor player, was convicted of sexually assaulting a Baylor freshman. Two other Baylor students testified that Elliott also had sexually assaulted them. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

After Ukwuachu’s conviction, Starr chose Baylor’s faculty athletics representative, a former federal prosecutor, to lead an inquiry into the university’s handling of Ukwuachu. A week later, based on that investigation, Starr recommended that Baylor’s board hire outside lawyers to conduct another investigation.

Soon, Baylor announced that the university’s board of regents had retained two lawyers from Pepper Hamilton to conduct a “thorough and independent and external investigation.”

Subsequent news reports have found several other accusations of sexual assault by Baylor athletes, including one against two players that Baylor did not investigate for more than two years.

The Baylor scandal has deepened amid a climate of national debate and sensitivity to violence against women on college campuses. One subplot of that debate, which has played out at colleges across the country, has been whether athletes in big-time sports like football and basketball are afforded favorable treatment when accused of sexual misconduct by universities and communities that come together to support and protect successful and popular teams.


In a February letter to the Baylor community, Starr wrote: “Our hearts break for those whose lives are impacted by execrable acts of sexual violence. No one should have to endure the trauma of these terrible acts of wrongdoing. We must never lose sight of the long-term, deeply personal effects such contemptible conduct has on the lives of survivors.

“Let me be clear: Sexual violence emphatically has no place whatsoever at Baylor University.”

[tonymctones]

Last I heard he was just demoted but I'm not sure, he needs to go. I'm sure things like this happen at most of the big football schools and that shit needs to be stopped.

[BayGBM]

Kenneth Starr resigns as chancellor at Baylor University
The former Whitewater investigator was demoted last week from his position as school president in the wake of a report on sexual assault cases involving football players and others. Starr told ESPN today that he was resigning.
By Nick Anderson

Kenneth Starr, demoted last week from his position as president of Baylor University, also will step down as chancellor of the Christian school in Texas, ESPN reported Wednesday.

The revelation about Starr comes amid a leadership shakeup as Baylor confronts the fallout from a scathing report on its handling of sexual assault cases involving football players and others.

Starr told ESPN’s Joe Schad that he was resigning as chancellor effective immediately “as a matter of conscience.” Starr, in an excerpt from an on-camera interview posted on ESPN’s website, called for transparency at Baylor, saying that “as each day goes by that need becomes more and more pressing.”

“We need to put this horrible experience behind us,” ESPN quoted Starr as saying. “We need to be honest.”

Starr and Baylor officials did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday. A law professor at Baylor, Starr told ESPN he plans to remain in that position.

Starr had led Baylor as president since 2010 and had held the title of chancellor since 2013. Last week, the university’s Board of Regents fired Baylor’s football coach, Art Briles, and stripped Starr of the title of president in response to a law firm’s investigative report that found the school treated sexual assault accusations against football players with alarming indifference.

Starr, 69, a former federal appellate judge, is best known as the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern. He issued a report on that probe that paved the way for the historic House vote in 1998 to impeach Clinton. The Senate later acquitted Clinton of charges of obstruction of justice and perjury.

In his six-year tenure at Baylor’s helm, Starr oversaw the continuing development of the world’s largest Baptist university as a prominent research institution. Baylor, with about 16,000 students, ranks 72nd on the U.S. News and World Report list of national universities, tied with Rutgers and American University.

But controversy has dogged the university in Waco during the past year following the convictions of two former football players on sexual assault charges. Allegations emerged that Baylor failed to heed or adequately support students who report sexual violence. Federal campus safety data show there were four reports of rape at Baylor in 2014 and one report of fondling without consent. Experts say such crimes are often underrerported. Many campuses across the country had far more rape and sexual assault reports in 2014 than Baylor.

Starr last year recommended to the school’s regents that Baylor hire the law firm Pepper Hamilton to review the university’s record on the issue.

The resulting report, given to the board in May, was damning. It found a “fundamental failure” by the university to implement measures required under federal laws that prohibit sex discrimination and violence against women. University administrators directly discouraged some possible victims from lodging complaints or participating in student disciplinary proceedings, the board said, and in one case their actions amounted to retaliation against a student who reported a sexual assault.

When the board moved to fire Briles on May 26, it also forced Starr to relinquish the presidency. But the board said at the time there was an agreement in principle that Starr could stay on as chancellor. That is a more ceremonial position, focusing on fund-raising and external relations.

The agreement proved short-lived. On Wednesday, ESPN reported that Starr said he “willingly accepted responsibility” for Baylor’s missteps on sexual assault even though he did not know about them as they were occurring.

“The captain goes down with the ship,” Starr told ESPN.

[Straw Man]

Good riddance

Starr last year recommended to the school’s regents that Baylor hire the law firm Pepper Hamilton to review the university’s record on the issue.

The resulting report, given to the board in May, was damning. It found a “fundamental failure” by the university to implement measures required under federal laws that prohibit sex discrimination and violence against women. University administrators directly discouraged some possible victims from lodging complaints or participating in student disciplinary proceedings, the board said, and in one case their actions amounted to retaliation against a student who reported a sexual assault.

[Dos Equis]

He must be devastated by all this karma. 

"Starr will remain a tenured professor at Baylor’s law school."

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2016/may/ken-starr-fired-baylor-football-sex-scandal-investigation.html

[Coach is Back!]

Very 240esh of Bay to not provide links to any of these articles. Anyway, Thanks Dos Equis for clearing this up with an actual link while others here seem to want to demonize Starr for exposing a serial rapist.

[240 is Back]

Very 240esh of Bay to not provide links to any of these articles. Anyway, Thanks Dos Equis for clearing this up with an actual link while others here seem to want to demonize Starr for exposing a serial rapist.

again you bring up my name in a thread where i'm not even posting.   and you call me a stalker.

I'm ready to forgive your 92 clinton lie and stop ragging on you for it.  I didn't call you on cocaine quotes after you made that meth comment last night.

why come at me, bro?   I think you like the trolling, cause every time I leave getbig for a day, I return and you've trolled me in a thread or three. 

[BayGBM]

Very 240esh of Bay to not provide links to any of these articles. Anyway, Thanks Dos Equis for clearing this up with an actual link while others here seem to want to demonize Starr for exposing a serial rapist.

I believe you have made this claim before.  Stop making a fool of yourself; anyone who wants to do so can find virtually any article if they google the headline.  Or was that too complicated for you to figure out?

Longstanding national newspapers from coast to coast and higher education publications have covered this story over the last week.  As we all know, Ken Starr's investigation had nothing to do with allegations of rape. And virtually all the recent news coverage has observed the irony of Ken Starr's public firing because he failed to notice, or act on, the surfeit of sexual abuse happening on his own campus.

[Straw Man]

I believe you have made this claim before.  Stop making a fool of yourself; anyone who wants to do so can find virtually any article if they google the headline.  Or was too complicated for you to figure out?

Longstanding national newspapers from coast to coast and higher education publications have covered this story over the last week.  As we all know, Ken Starr's investigation had nothing to do with allegations of rape. And virtually all the recent news coverage has observed the irony of Ken Starr's public firing because he failed to notice, or act on, the surfeit of sexual abuse happening on his own campus.

our retarded phony coach doesn't know how to embed a YouTube link so I'm  sure using "the google" is well beyond his skill set

His mental capacity is limited to tire flipping ...as long  as you don't ask him to count how many times it was flipped.

[Coach is Back!]

our retarded phony coach doesn't know how to embed a YouTube link so I'm  sure using "the google" is well beyond his skill set

His mental capacity is limited to tire flipping ...as long  as you don't ask him to count how many times it was flipped.

This is all you have? lol

[BayGBM]

Ken Starr’s Squalid Second Act
by Mimi Swartz

Houston — EDWIN EDWARDS, the colorful former governor of Louisiana, had a favorite quote often attributed to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

I thought of this again last week as Hillary Clinton absorbed a fresh attack on her record from Donald J. Trump. Amid that, I wondered whether she’d had a chance to savor the fall of the Clintons’ nemesis, Ken Starr, and appreciate its ironies. In a political campaign as relentlessly nasty as this one, it must be hard to steal a moment of peace, much less schadenfreude.

By the time of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the dependably Republican Mr. Starr had built a prestigious career as an attorney, appellate judge and solicitor general under President George H. W. Bush. Then, in 1994, a congressional committee made Mr. Starr a special prosecutor to investigate the Clintons’ involvement in the Whitewater real estate venture and, juicier, the death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, a Clinton confidant.

Mr. Starr aspired higher and wanted to go deeper. Soon, his brief had expanded to investigating the sex life of a young woman named Monica Lewinsky. Relying on covert recordings of her confessions, Mr. Starr’s report read at times like a steamy romance novel: “She unbuttoned her jacket; either she unhooked her bra or he lifted her bra up; and he touched her breasts with his hands and mouth …”

The result? Mr. Clinton survived impeachment, but soiled his legacy. Both he and his wife seemed like deceitful equivocators. Questioned in front of a grand jury about his sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton tried to obfuscate: “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

For his part, Mr. Starr appeared like the Cotton Mather of his time: a prurient, punishing Puritan — a reputation that was hard to shake. He taught at several law schools, and worked, to his credit, to overturn some death penalty cases. Less admirably, he represented campaigners trying to roll back same-sex marriage in California in 2008.

In 2010, he returned to his home state of Texas as president of Baylor University, and was subsequently also appointed chancellor. It seemed a good match: a conservative son of a Christian minister at an august private Baptist university. With strong policies against drinking and premarital sex, Baylor has an enthusiasm for Jesus matched only by its passion for football.

The problem was that in its determination to dominate the Big 12 of college football, Baylor was willing to cover for several players dogged by accusations of sexual violence. In one particularly egregious case, a star player named Sam Ukwuachu was accused of sexually assaulting a female Baylor soccer player in 2013. But ambitious football programs apparently take a lenient view of such infractions.

A Baylor investigation didn’t even give Mr. Ukwuachu a slap on the wrist, allowing him back on campus to graduate. Only the prospect of his pending trial prevented him from taking the field. Finally, in August last year, Mr. Ukwuachu was convicted on felony counts and sentenced to six months in jail and 10 years’ probation.

The news from Baylor got worse. Another two football players and a former fraternity president were charged with some form of sexual violence. One, Tevin Elliott, is currently in prison for sexual assault. Eventually, five Baylor football players were accused of serious sexual assaults that took place between 2011 and 2015.

It was bad enough that the Waco police seemed less than interested in investigating the cases, but the university’s foot-dragging and subsequent stonewalling under Mr. Starr’s administration was stunning. Mr. Starr seemed to have trouble grasping the gravity of sexual misconduct charges — unless the accused happened to be the president of the United States. In 2013, the year Baylor’s scandal started brewing, Mr. Starr signed a letter urging community service rather than jail as punishment for a retired teacher named Christopher Kloman. Mr. Kloman had pleaded guilty to sexually molesting five female students in the 1960s and ’70s at the private school his own daughter had attended.

An independent investigation of Baylor found that the university authorities had consistently failed to protect its female students from sexual predators and neglected its Title IX responsibilities. Instead, administrators played down reports of abuse and discouraged women from bringing allegations of misconduct.

And where was President Starr? Ignoring the candlelight vigil for victims of sexual assault that Baylor students held outside his home. Ducking a media interview when the scandal broke. Issuing windy statements laced with legalese to the Baylor community about how much he cared. Refusing to comment on the situation until the external review was done. And releasing only a summary of that report, not the full document, to the public.

Finally, Mr. Starr was fired as president and later resigned as chancellor — “the captain goes down with the ship,” he told the sports channel ESPN earlier this month. But the university tossed him a pretty good lifesaver: He will continue as a professor at the law school.

As for Baylor’s pattern of protecting star athletes who abused women at the university, Mr. Starr claimed he “didn’t know what was happening.” Maybe it depends on what the meaning of the word “was” was.

[Soul Crusher]

Who the F cares?  You post about this but not Hillary's crimes?

GMAFB 

[chadstallion]

karma takes a while but she does alright.

[BayGBM]

Ken Starr Resigns Faculty Position at Baylor

Kenneth W. Starr is leaving Baylor University, the university announced Friday in a news release.

The former president gave up his faculty position at Baylor’s law school after a semester of turmoil at the university.

In May, after an investigation determined that the university had mishandled sexual assaults to protect the college’s football team, Baylor’s Board of Regents fired the head football coach, Art Briles, placed the athletic director, Ian McCaw, on probation, and demoted Mr. Starr to chancellor.

Within a week, Mr. Starr — who joined the university in 2010 — announced that he would step down from that post as well, but retain his faculty role. Now that, too, has come to an end.

“Effective today, Judge Ken Starr will be leaving his faculty status and tenure at Baylor University’s Law School,” the new statement from the university reads.

[Coach is Back!]

Not quite sure what the point of this thread is.

[BayGBM]

Starr: Baylor wanted him out as law professor
By PHILLIP ERICKSEN

Ken Starr has decided to leave his last remaining post at Baylor University, saying university officials wanted him out.

“Frankly, the university determined that it wanted a break in the employment relationship, so I’ve accepted that decision and will, of course, honor the decision,” Starr said in an interview late Friday afternoon. “Nothing changes my love and respect for Baylor.”

He remained at Baylor as a law professor after being fired as president May 26 and resigning as chancellor days later. His firing came after an independent investigation found “a lack of institutional support and engagement by senior leadership” to implement Title IX, according to Baylor’s board of regents.

Starr said he and his wife, Alice, will remain in Waco, and he plans to contribute to local education efforts. He said he has met with McLennan Community College President Johnette McKown and Waco Independent School District Superintendent Bonny Cain.

Starr also plans to give at least one guest lecture in a Baylor business school class this semester, at the request of a professor, he said. Starr will also work on religious liberty issues, both domestic and foreign, and has scheduled speaking engagements around the United States, he said.

After he was removed from the presidency, Starr said he would remain the Louise L. Morrison Chair of Constitutional Law and a professor. He taught seminars on constitutional issues.

Regents have been generally tight-lipped on the decision to remove Starr and head football coach Art Briles, but board chairman Ron Murff has cited the weight of the information he heard from Pepper Hamilton LLP.

“It was just a combination of all of that, given that procedures weren’t followed, policies weren’t followed,” Murff said last month. “Things weren’t done when they should have been done on a timely basis as far as making sure we had Title IX properly implemented and all the things that we disclosed about where we failed and where we were slow and what we were not doing correctly. So it was that combination, the weight of all those issues, that got us to that point.”

Brad Toben, dean of the law school, did not reply to a request for comment Friday.

Starr arrived at Baylor in 2010 as the university president and was given the role of chancellor in 2013, along with a contract extension to 2015. He is a former federal judge, U.S. solicitor general and special prosecutor in the Whitewater investigation involving President Bill Clinton.

“My advice to a college president is to have the very best possible people around you who are completely committed to student welfare and to continue to ask all the hard questions,” Starr said. “ ‘Are we serving our students well? Are we caring for them as completely and fully as we can, including in the all-important area of prevention?’ ”

Starr and the university issued a statement together Friday announcing he would leave his post in the law school.

“The mutually agreed separation comes with the greatest respect and love Judge Starr has for Baylor and with Baylor’s recognition and appreciation for Judge Starr’s many contributions to Baylor,” the statement reads.

“Baylor wishes Judge Ken Starr well in his future endeavors. Judge Starr expresses his thanks to the Baylor family for the opportunity to serve as president and chancellor and is grateful for his time with the exceptional students of Baylor University who will lead and serve around the world.”

Starr said he misses the people at Baylor.

“I love Baylor, the faculty, the staff and the students,” he said. “I already miss them.”