Baylor fires back against allegations of racism and coverups
The city of Waco, Texas is known primarily for two things: David Koresh, a movie-of-the-week cult leader whose run-in with the Clinton administration in April of 1993 indirectly caused the Oklahoma City bombing two years later, and Baylor, a university with a reputation for looking the other way while members of its football program did untold things to female students.
And while Koresh isn’t around to defend his honor, Baylor University is hitting back hard in an effort to save itself.
Last week, former Baylor athletic director Ian McCaw alleged the school used the football program in general, and black players in particular, as scapegoats to cover up the complete loss of institutional control in the protection of young women attending school.
Baylor, in a statement, called such accusations bizarre and “blatantly false.”
Thursday, the school formally responded to the allegations in court, where it is a defendant in a lawsuit stemming from the rampant sexual assaults allegedly committed by Baylor football players between 2012-2016.
“This lawsuit has become a never-ending fishing expedition based on outlandish conspiracy theories, rumors and speculation as part of a crusade to turn up any possible reason to attack Baylor,” university officials wrote. “The question in this lawsuit is whether any of the 10 plaintiffs were subjected to a sexually harassing education environment at Baylor in violation of Title IX.”
So the school is doubling down hard on the nothing-to-see-here angle, a tack that worked so well for Michigan State.
McCaw, for his part, testified in a deposition on June 19, and described himself as “disgusted” by the racism, even going so far as to accuse the university of generating a “phony” investigation in which the powers that be decided, in essence, “We examined ourselves and found that we are innocent and in no way is this because we refuse to let independent counsel have a go at the evidence.”
McCaw even said his resignation was because he didn’t want to be caught in the blast radius of — and these were his exact words –“a cover-up scheme.”
In other words, he was the first rat off the sinking ship.
McCaw landed at Liberty University in Virginia, where he is athletic director.
Baylor claims all of McCaw’s allegations are “rank speculation” and that he had no personal knowledge of the goings-on at the higher administrative levels of the university.
But there’s an old saying in politics.
The louder someone denies something, and the more curiously specific the denial, the more likely it is that someone’s guilty and conveniently shining a spotlight for you on exactly what it is they did.
It’s the old “I never said it was a knife” pulp detective fiction trope.
And Baylor University is about to find itself in the kind of trouble that will make the administrators in East Lansing glad they’re not in the news anymore.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
